The Castration Of God

October 25, 2010 By George Elerick 88 Comments

Standing at the Gates of Hell

We are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment. – Zizek

Atheist philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek is talking of the inherent problems with capitalism and how it will eventually create a barren desert. I would broaden his argument to not be simply about capitalism, but the idea that lies beyond capitalism, those that help make capitalism what it is. It has helped shaped the way we see the Bible. What I also want to do is take this quote and take it a step further and say that our idealogies that we convert to Christianity are the very threats that will reduce us to abstract subjects. But I think that this is a good thing, not if we stop there, but if we see what lies beyond it. What lies beyond is: The mirage that is the Real (the Unsaid; Lacan).

Since we do not have words for it, the only way we can begin our journey towards such an unknown is beyond our trite cliches, theologies, and beliefs.

*Spoiler Alert*: Shutter Island
In the movie Shutter Island (with Leonardo Dicaprio) the main protagonist is brought into a story of his own making to deal with the trauma of his past decisions. Its his trauma that now dictates who he is. In his new life he is no longer the murderer, he is the hero. In his re-rendered narrative, the old has gone and the new has come. But the new is the old. The old is nothing new. It is this break with reality that I think we must deal with to discover that all of our beliefs can easily construct a world where the new is really the old under the guise of new. Much like the character in the movie, we can find ways to rename old habits.

Old beliefs. Old truths.

We’ve been taught for centuries that truths, absolutes and beliefs shouldn’t change or be questioned, but the initial fault in this way of thinking is that it can’t stand for long in an empirical worldview. The weather changes. Its erratic. Undetermined. And leaves us powerless to its inherent change. Its a good representation of absolutes. Because most people believe in weather. The nature of weather doesn’t assume its allegiances to any pattern. Its promise is to no one.

Ask a sailor who has experienced a storm.
Or a woodsmen who’s been struck by lightening and survived.
They have been changed.
By things out of their control.

Just because we ‘believe’ doesn’t mean we

    be

-lieve! We must move to a place beyond belief. A Night of The World (Hegel), where our full deconstitution into nothingness is actually our something-ness realized. Where sin is salvation. Where the lies we were told not to believe are true. Where as Zizek says of Jesus’ words (Hate your mother, father, mother, and etc.) Hate is the new Love. This doesnt mean that nothing is real, it means everything we think we know is beyond what we truly think we know.

The thing is when we try to control the ever-changing nature of absolutes, what we don’t realize is that they are no longer absolutes. They becomes ways for us to sustain the psychotic break with reality. If we like where we are, than why would need a change, right? And so these kind of absolutes, the ones that never change exist only in our mind. When I hear the verse in the Christian scriptures where God gets quoted as saying “”For I am the LORD, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.” I hear Jewish sarcasm. Why? Because of what God is quoted as saying afterwards.

This Jewish God then says “Ever since the time of your forefathers you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD Almighty. “But you ask, ‘How are we to return?” If we take these verses at face value, than God is nothing more than hypocrite if we measure Him against the rest of scripture. If God is ‘consistent’ as most assume Her to be by this verse than why does God seem to change Her mind all over scripture? With Moses. With Creation in Genesis. There are many other examples. But these shown here demonstrate a God who learns.

Grows. Progresses. Evolves.

If our understanding of God evolves, than should other absolutes do the same? Just because we rename absolutes and use hipper rhetoric doesn’t mean they’ve changed, we’ve just found new ways to control them. This is why we need less language that distances us from the object of our desire (Kristeva), we need less ways of trying to control absolutes and more space to discover them. Otherwise we run the risk of worshipping a God (and the absolutes that follow after) that is much more a hypocrite than we are willing to admit.

Absolutes evolve as we evolve. Truth evolves as we evolve.

Here’s the thing, these are processes we can’t control. There isn’t a rubric, we can’t find one, make one up or justify a definition. It is simply a beautiful scandalous journey we get to be a part of. The verses above show us a people who were learning about God in new ways for their time. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and many other religions are simply humanities attempts at trying to discover this one Deity. But to truly understand this Deity, we have to strip back all the things we’ve made Her/Him/It out to be. This is the process of deconstitution.

This deconstruction of God, without even trying, naturally annihilates our assumptions of this Being beyond our understanding. It’s not a comfortable place to unknow what we think we know. Because it means we have to mourn the very things we have made ourselves believe. I think a good place to start is to accept our own Castration (Lacan).

It’s the realization that our powerlessness isn’t our enemy, but that our weakness of not being in control of the evolving absolutes creates a much deeper space for self-discovery and God-discovery. If we continue down the road of never-changing absolutes than we might have to accept that we have had a big hand in the castration of God. The more we cling to our religious beliefs under the guise of belief the more we fall into the state of the old looking new. In the great reversal of finding God in the midst of the mess of what theology has become, the new has to become old.

And as we know, the old eventually dies.

This is so much deeper than kenosis, this is beyond the emptying of self, it is the rigormortis and death of ideas that have been set in us like stone. Rather than sustaining the ideological foundation from where these ideas came, its looking way beyond them to something that lies beyond our historical consciousness. This is completely distancing ourselves from the thing we think we know and being led into a deeper darkness that is light. This is why ideological absolutes keep us from discovering the Great Being that lies beyond them. We must be willing to give up our absolutes to find them.

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The Caffeinated Riots: The Reverse Perversion of Teenage Suicides

October 6, 2010 By George Elerick 46 Comments



The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between homosexuals and police officers in New York City. The first night of rioting began on Friday, June 27, 1969 not long after 1:20 a.m., when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. “Stonewall,” as the raids are often referred to, is considered a turning point for the modern gay rights movement worldwide. It was the first time any significant body of gays resisted arrest.

The StoneWall Riots were one of the first times the homosexual community defended themselves against the New York City police. They took a stand and made their mark, they no longer accepted abuse as being synoymous with being homosexual.

It was a landmark event that started a much needed change.

But, the StoneWall riots actually weren’t the first protest again gay abuse. There was a small grassroots movement that initiated a sit-in in a quaint Philadelphia coffee shop in 1965. Deweys’ was a popular hangout for young gays, lesbians and drag queens. Deweys’ employee’s refused service to anyone from the LGBT community which sparked a civil sit-in. This passive resistant move has changed the way society interacts with the gay community. But, it clearly hasn’t been enough.

We might need more sit-ins.

Over the course of one month, there has been at least six recorded suicides from gay students who have been unfairly bullied by their peers. It is true as they say, fear can kill. Ironically we live in an information age where ignorance still seems to be a prevalent characteristic within our society. It seems to be an intentional igorance, people fear what they do not understand.

But, here’s the issue, why don’t they understand?

The StoneWall riots were about a people group who were seeking equality,liberation and fair treatment against the Big Other. Ironically, the Big Other was meant to be the very thing that was meant to protect them and it failed them. The New York City police did not protect and serve. They protected themselves from getting to know another human being.

When the Big Other stands in an invisible gap and expends themselves to the point that they represent the very thing they are meant to be against, we then have to begin asking how viable is this Big Other.

We then have to begin asking what is meant to be in its place. When the Big Other represents violence and protects only some from that violence it then becomes the very symbol of everything it originally was meant to be against.

That’s when the system fails us.

I think we also have to be honest about this idea of loving our neighbour which seems to be central to many religions, yet there is a lot of violent resistance emanating more specifically from the Christian community.

In this instance, the Big Other aren’t just the New York Police, but now the Big Other is also represented by the institution of Christianity. This isn’t to say all of Christianity or all of the New York Police should be flippantly demonized, it means, we have to be incredibly careful about who and what we readily associate ourselves with. I am reminded of a letter written by an early church author where he says “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul was responding to context that endorsed all of these separations. There were Jews and Greeks and they would violently distance themselves from one another, there were different genders and one was subordinate to the other but then he re-renders who the Big Other is. He then says everyone, all people, creation as a whole are one in Christ.

All of humanity is one.

When young teenagers are driven to kill themselves, the bullies are not the only one’s at fault, we are too. And when they kill themselves, they are killing a piece of humanity. When we allow the death of innocent teenagers to take place, we support the very perversion we say we’re against. We perpetuate the reverse perversion of the Big Other.

We can’t idylly sit by and talk about loving our neighbour any longer.

It can’t matter what version of the Bible we read, or even, dare I say what religion we adhere to. Paul says that Christ is the Big Other. The new way of life we all can and are participating in. When we allow atrocious things like the death of a teenager to easily pass across our television screens and deem it as just another death, we become the very demons we are trying to run from.

Paul is saying something radical because he isn’t introducing only a new reality, but he is dreaming up a new society as a whole. He is challenging the very indoctrinated enslavement to the Big Other that is present and is telling his listeners that this new Big Other is built upon very different foundations.

A place where the labels that distance us don’t exist.

A place where those labels cloud the unity that we were created with. This new kind of society throws all of the ethics defined by the distorted Big Other and re-orients them through the new post-colonial Big Other. I think this is also an important key to realize, because it does seem that there is ideological colonialism prevalent within the very fabric of this angry argument for
ethical territory.

The Gay Issue isn’t and never should have been an issue, but much like what Martin Luther King Jr. did for civil rights, maybe all of these movements, responses and hopes for a better society can be the very saviours needed to usher in the new Jesus society.

One where love is the political foundation of reality.

One where the label gays don’t exist, it doesn’t mean that we can have diversity or be proud of that diversity, but it means we don’t see each other as a perversion of a label.That we can see each beyond our labels.

When we cling to our labels to the point where we feel justified to destroy another human being, we then have succumbed to ideological terrorism whereby we choose to violently hold to our labels and not allow to see the human that stands behind them. We need a riot of love, embrace and self-subversion that leads to a Christological tolerance.

When we do this, we deny humanity and pervert it into nothing more than something we derive an obscene pleasure from. May we come to a place where this is no gay or straight, but all people unencumbered by titles and found in the wholeness that is humanity.

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The Phallic Fetish Of Prayer

October 4, 2010 By George Elerick 161 Comments

Portrait of a Moroccan Girl

Elijah went to meet with God. You would think there might be this 3-D screen that would pop-out of the sky and God would appear to Elijah in the smoke and music of a rock concert, and all of those came believe me, but God wasn’t in any of them.

He was in the silence. In the quiet.

In the place where all things break down, God was there. Silence is the nothingness of noise. God, in this moment equated himself with the nothingness of noise to get across to Elijah that in the nothingness, in the most deconstituted place of his existence, She was there with him.

I think Elijah has a lot to tell us about prayer.

To help us better understand what has happened to prayer, I think we have to listen in to a psychoanalyst by the name of Jacques Lacan. When a child is in its predominant learning stage it looks to the mother as the sole nurturer of its reality. The role of the mother cannot be underscored here. The child believes that the mother is pulled away by outside desires, because this is an unknown element, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to this imaginary object as the Phallus. Which itself is an imaginary object.

It represents the unknown element.

During the early years the child will attempt to make itself the Phallus to attempt to become the very imagined desire that the mother is seeking. When in a moment of epiphany, the child begins to realize that they cannot fulfil the imagined desire the child then enters into castration. Which is the realization that it is powerless to fulfil this unknown desire.

When we come to pray, there is a tendency to assume that it is about us off-loading the stresses of our days, or verbalizing our Amazon Wish Lists to God or maybe even praying for world peace. In this instance we are attempting to deform prayer into something that is still about us. Think about this way: “God, I would love it if you could do something about the homeless lady down the street” or “Can you help me get into Harvard?” If you notice the first prayer, however altruistic, it still starts out with the concept of I, and ends with others.

It’s in this heartfelt prayer that we find traces of egotistical altruism.

It isn’t that the prayer itself is wrong, it’s that the underlying request lies in a spirit how it relates to us. So, in this example the prayer is indirectly about the other and directly about ourselves. We are projecting something than that isn’t true about ourselves.

I think if we also flip Lacan’s Phallus back on to prayer, we then also realize that we have imposed upon prayer something that it’s not. In that regard we are imposing our dreams, wishes and hopes on to something that is imaginary. We then anticipate that this imaginary object of our creation will materialize all of the things we are praying for. In this instance, prayer is not only perverted, but then, becomes something that itself encourages our imaginary presuppositions of prayer.

Prayer than plays into our deepest desires.

In that instance, prayer stops being prayer and is now a fetish. Where we focus all of our attention onto our imaginary understandings of prayer and begin to forget what prayer stands for. When we turn prayer into a fetish (focus on prayer itself rather than what it represents) we murder the symbolism that prayer represents. In that moment prayer becomes an idol we worship rather than discovering what is beyond the idol. We strip prayer of any real jouissance, (aka) orgasmic appeal or bliss, that comes out of not getting what you want, but rather what you need.

That’s why I think its important that Elijah didn’t discover God in the elements. Which is how the ancient world operated in their understanding of how God responded to their requests. It was in the nothingness that God responded or chose not to respond, depending on how you personally define it. The word for silence in that narrative is better explained as God’s voice was the silence itself. Elijah’s jouissance wasnt discovered in the flashes of light, but in the darkest moment of his life. His own dark night of the soul.

When he least expected it, he began to realize that even when there is nothing left to live for, God is that nothing left to live for.

And it’s not found in the responses to our prayers.

Its found in the non-responses to our prayers. In fact, God doesn’t answer at all in the typical rhetoric of how we have come to define prayers. God doesn’t answer. She doesn’t answer our prayers. Job learned this. Jesus learned this at his most tragic hour. But, this isn’t a bad thing. The idea that God interacts with every request isn’t present in the narrative arc of scripture, we see just the opposite, why? Because rather than God interacting with our prayers, she desires to interact with us. I think prayer isn’t whether we are spending 15 minutes with God, or how many times a day, or if we’re praying for lofty ideals, but rather its the realization that when we connect with another human and when we connect with the divine, we are praying. That is prayer.

The Jewish-Christian-Islamic patriarch Abraham was talking to one of his family members and he uses the word pray, in fact, a large portion of the Genesis narrative is peppered with this word usage: “And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen; for we [be] brethren.” (Genesis 3:18, KJV) Notice how prayer is used here. Not as a way to get something from God or as a Christmas stocking filled with all kinds of goodies, it’s used to encourage peace amongst one another. It’s a word that speaks of humanitarian cohesion. Not strife. Not violent disagreement.

But towards peace. It endorses familial connection. Familial repair.

To see that we are connected to one another.

In other places in Genesis it also used in the same way but as God being the one who is spoken to. Prayer is connecting to the person next to us, not for fixing a flat tire. Prayer is connection with the divine. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that those things don’t happen, I have personally experience the ecstatic nature of prayer, but there is more to it than the vending machine approach we see all too prevalent today. Prayer is the discovery and space where we encounter one another for the first time again and again. Where we encounter the Divine again and again and again. In that case, I hope we pray a whole lot more!

Read more responses on prayer this week as part of our new What Do I Really Believe? series at Patheos.

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