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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Becoming The Things We Hate: Deconstituting The Poor

October 13, 2010 By George Elerick 6 Comments

“Status is important sociologically because it comes with a set of rights, obligations, behaviors, and duties that people occupying a certain position are expected or encouraged to perform”

Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

We are the very brands we buy. What we buy into, whether it be Gap, Gucci, Wal-Mart, Asda, or even groceries, we become the very things we buy. In fact, as we buy them they buy us. Our society is one big semiotic after the other. Our cities, our churches, our relationships are always a symbol of something else.

We find ourselves in the symbols we choose.

Who we choose to be will also tell us a lot about what symbols we attach ourselves to. Jesus seems to be dealing with this very issue when he starts one of his narratives about the rich, the poor and food. Three of our great loves as people.

It seems as if Jesus is inviting his listeners a new way to define the way we see ourselves. It’s as if we should reverse our idealism. Idealism tends to embrace an objectified perfected state based on a culturally identified locus. For example, for some Americans the ‘American Dream’ is the objectified ideological end that is meant to bring a sustained happiness. Jesus seems to be denying that, he seems to endorse a paradigm that reverse’s the whole ethica foundation of what the American Dream stands for.

Ideologically Jesus is challenging us to come to a place where we willingly deconstitute our own metaphysics. Where we come to realize that our idealized notions of perfection, heaven, shangri-la, although well-intentioned, leads us into the deepest despair. Why despair? Because in the parable if you invite others over and they know you and they respond by inviting you to come to a future house party, you have gained nothing. The poor become a social semiotic of itself, but is meant to be a mirror to our potential. We are meant to give up the very things we find ourselves hording.

There is not reciprocity.

Jesus is speaking of a reverse reciprocity where when we give up the very things we think we need to be closest to us, the ideas we know the best, we are then truly blessed or changed by the exchange.

Our meaningfulness is found in the fullness of our deconstitution. We must be willing to negate the very things that bring us status to find the meaning we seek. Our deconstitution is found in the reconstitution of our actions.

We must become the very things that are socially despised to be considered righteous.

One Rabbi defines righteousness as ‘being who you are meant to be’; when we become the symbols we are so indoctrinated not to become, we then find who we are meant to be.

How we treat one another will tell us a lot about ourselves.

We we enter into Hegel’s Night of the World or St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul we will then find all the things true about us. When we step away from the things we think we know, and are willing to question the things we think we believe we then come to a place where the who of who we are no longer cries out through our existential angst. This does mean we must intentionally deconstitute all of the all the things we think we are and have come to believe about ourselves to discover who we are meant to be.

It is in this nothingness that we find ourselves.

I am not speaking of the depressing space of nihilism. I am speaking of the things that under the guise of status strip of us the identity we long for. We need to welcome in those things that will force us into identity-poverty. All of these things have stolen who we are and who we think we should be. We look to everything around us, and out of these sights we pick and choose things we personally identify with and throw the ones we don’t like away.

This is a constitution. These are things like status and identity. We must give these things up.The poor in this culture were the very representation of nothing in terms of social status. The poor were outsiders, dirty, perverse, status-less, insignificant. Jesus says we wil find ourselves when we choose this. When we bring them into the most intimate places of our being we then can dine with the us beyond us.

Also, I think its also important to notice that Jesus is endorsing a plurality of guests. From different backgrounds, belief systems, ethics and paradigms. Later in the parable he widens the geographic space from in the town where the poor would have been and then says out of the towns where the sojourners, vagabonds, non-Jewish, Pagans, and many more dwell. They weren’t the popular one’s.

It doesn’t seem like Jesus is a big fan of fads, this is why we can’t easily agree to things that look like fads, either personally or corporately. We must be willing to challenge the very fads that come our way.

Fads aren’t cool.

I think this also demonstrates that our ontological experiences have a plurality of outcomes. In fact, if I measure my life by yours or vice versa, then I making you my Big Other. The Big Other can be the Law, Society, Truth, Religion, and even peers. We an objectify the person next to us, and it seems like this parable shows us to do so would be the most dangerous place we could find ourselves. That by inviting plurality into our lives we also invite a deeper more comprehensive view of God into our lives.

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When Rockstars Deny the Foundation of Religion

September 5, 2010 By George Elerick 3 Comments

I lift my eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from?* – King David, King of Israel

“Ancient Egyptians viewed their pharaohs as living gods they were the personification of AMUN-RA the king of gods and when they died they became true gods. Therefore these pharaohs weren’t only regarded as the kings of Egypt but as divinity.”

The king in the ancient world was the person you went to with all of your problems, the king had all the answers. In fact, on some ancient BC archaeological scrolls, something simlar to these words were found “The king is the representative of the Gods who has come down to show us how to be.” The king was God in effect. The king was a direct representative of the ontological spirit that culture looked to. People would worship the king. They would give their lives to the king. The king was the rockstar who had all the fame. The king was the one in power.

They had all the answers.

So, what happens when the king defers to someone/something else? They not only deny their power, they deny their ontological influence. They divorce themselves from being the one who has all the answers. For all intense purposes, they stop being who others think them to be. David denies his status and defers it elsewhere. This is a very self-deprecating move for a king, this is a sort of castration.

David chooses castration rather than power.

He chooses a state of non-status rather than those things that might seem to give him importance in the sight of others. What are we choosing that gives us status? Are we at least deferring them? For David, God is the ontological end. God is the true King. The ultimate monarchy doesn’t lie in what we see, but it suspends itself in the unseen. For David, it is in the unseen or in the uknown where true (post-colonial**) power resides.

We tend to look to things in our history as a church for influence on what we should do and where we should go, we tend to look to what we know rather than what we don’t? Why, because we have believed the perverse lie that somehow knowledge equals power. To David, there is power in the uknowning.

In the unraveling.
In the dismantling journey towards unbelief.
Where unbelief is true belief.

David takes it too far. By focusing outside the temple and outside of the mountain, the very foundation of the temple, David is basically condemning these things as useless.

Much like Jesus did when he spoke to the institutional representatives and told them they were dead inside. David is challenging us to see that the foundation of the institutions are the issue.

For some, I get this might be a bit outside of where you might be, and don’t want to minimize the struggle of attempting to fully divorce ourselves from the noise of structuralism into the quiet of post-structuralism. It isn’t an easy journey, I realize that, but it is one we can take together and to come to realize that the God we seek doesn’t just simply lie outside of the institution, but also resides outside of the foundations of our institution.

When David utters the words up above and looks toward the mountains, it isn’t just a declaration of nature or the natural order of things, the temple is what sat on that mountain. Centered in the ancient Eastern Levant religions was the belief that you could meet with the Divine in tents (Genesis 18), trees, and mountains to name a few spaces. They wanted to define their experience of meeting with God, so they created an institution, they created a structure.

We as people, tend to want to define or give some sort of structure to our experience, so we try to explain in it words, in language, which is itself – a structure. We have also been fed the lie that we need to instiutionalize everything that has value. David, a king, the ultimate expression of institutionalization denies the need for institution. In fact, he looks beyond it.

He looks outside of it.

He looks to what isn’t and can’t be institutionalized to express what is beyond words. David doesn’t just challenge the temple that would have been on this mountain, he challenges the mountain itself. The very foundation of the institution. David essentially says that everything of value doesn’t lie in our history, or what is laid-down before us, but is outside of what has been laid for us. It doesn’t cheapen what has been, it does encourage us to come together and dream outside of the contingencies we’ve been led to believe should be ours. The Church is in an interesting place, because for years, it has been set on a mountain, on a foundation of historical colonialism. In fact, the English language has been part of this structured ‘advance of the Kingdom’.

Structures have been the problem.

Now, we are beginning to ask important questions about the future of the de-institutionalized body of believers and what our future home will look like.

Which I think is a great question!!

I think for me, it won’t include walls, but where the walls used to be, there will be people. Where injustice used to be present in the name of God, now there will be love and renewal. Where liturgies, worship songs, and bibles used to be there will be people who are now the liturgy, the worship song and the bible. The Church has a lot of room to grow when we realize that the Church wasn’t meant for us.

* Psalm 121 is by far my favorite Psalm.

** David more like would have thought of power in a colonial sense, so I wanted to share that I am thinking of power in terms of the post-sovereign, post-colonial sense.

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