Emergent Village
Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber complains of the compulsive thinking that he is forced to endure, a process of “having to think continually,” in opposition to “man’s natural right of mental relaxation, of temporary rest from mental activity through thinking nothing.” Never a moment in which not to think and feel. Machines within me, engines in hyperdrive, factories in constant overproduction. Bataille argues that nature and capitalism alike are driven not by scarcity, but by excess, a superabundance that we are unable to discharge: “The sun dispenses energy–wealth–without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving.” My own body is suffused with such surplus. But it is impossible to emulate the sun, impossible for me ever to spend or squander enough. No wonder I find it difficult to get enough sleep. Schreber, suffering under the weight of this irreversible generosity, unable to suspend his exquisite soul-voluptuousness and pay off his debt, screams that the sun is a whore, and identifies it with God.
What is God if not a notion of a continuously self-giving God who never requires a return. In some Christian circles, there is this idea that we get everything and God keeps giving. But does not God get tired and exhausted, frustrated and depleted by this excess? The question of excess [as in God gives without receiving] is a God who is repeatedly driven by his/her neurosis to make creation happy. God in his dedication to the cosmos has created many things in excess. The weather being one of them, the excess of knowledge about the universe [as in we cannot know all of the universe]. Reality is driven by this elusive excess. It is God attempting to please man in the hope that creation would find happiness in what is being created. This happiness is then that which drives God to create the world in excess. God is attempting to fill a void. The anxiety of God is that God is driven by such an aggressive excess because he/she does not recognize his/her own individual value of self thereby negating himself through Jesus. In a very simple sense. Jesus is the social superego of God. He keeps God in check, hence why he claims: I and God are one. We read it as a subjective relationship, however, it is that they are equals who sublimate each other.
And what of us? What of our need to fulfill God’s addiction to us? Going to Church. Reading the Bible. Feeding the Poor. Fighting against the Bourgeois. Incessant Conversions. Guilt-laden requests of penance. Loving our neighbour. Loving our enemy. Writing Books. Drinking the Body and Blood. Fighting against Satan. Having ecstatic moments of awe. Tasting and Seeing that the Lord is Good. And that’s all in one day. This is what drives us. This is what drives God. It is a reflexive addiction.
Another social example would be the nature of capitalism, which hides itself in our over-commitment to it. It feeds on our exhaustion. It feeds on our inability to resist its addictive ploys and anti-revolutionary cries: “Produce! Produce! Produce!”. It being a machine can only do one thing, create more machines. More producers. And here is the perversity of it all, its all spiritualized. There is something holy in keeping the machine alive. In fighting for our individuality and false sense of fulfillment and happiness. We reify the object of our desire to the point that gods emerge out of God. We create more idols out of idolatry. We fight for the products that produce us. It is not that we go to church to make ourselves better christians, it is that the machine of the institution makes better copies of itself and we over-spiritualize the reification of such a process by deeming it Christian.
Our understandings of God are mere reflections of that which we think we have a choice to define us, and yet, those choices define for us what we should/should not believe. If God is about freedom [which Jesus seems to think S/He is] then freedom is what should drive us into more freedom, not into things, objects or addictions that drive us deeper into some cosmic slavery with God. We need less of God’s generosity and more of God’s identity, on her/his/its own terms.
In a very practical sense, think of a relationship in an employment setting. One cannot be an employee without an employer. There are certain tasks set out for the employee to do, and they tend to be assessed based on their ability to perform said tasks [usually within a given time-frame]. So what we have here is something we all have become used to and are not aware, two things: Ideology & Identity. Most think they can separate themselves from their work, the bad thing is this, they can’t. Once you accept a contract [commandments?] you then now are responsible to fulfill that identity, whether you agree with it or not. {Hence, why God loses his patience, and at times, vice versa]. But in a relationship such as this, we can only refer to the relationship as a sexual one. I dont mean sexual in the traditional sense, but rather, one of extreme erotic over-compensation where one takes on the role of dominant partner [i.e., the employer], and the other as the submissive partner [i.e., the employee]. It is one defined by its dysfunction, excess and perversion of power. Which seem to me to be things that a large part of liberation theology, process theology and the like disavow and turn away from. Is not the parable of the Lost Son about G-d losing himself without us and finding himself, and dont we share in this story?
God must remove himself from the stories made about him. We must remove ourselves from the stories we think about ourselves. It is not an end to The Story, but rather, a decentering of that which we have come to deify. It is not a perpetual end to all identity, but rather an emptying of self. We have centered ourselves around exhaustive procedures that we think will either fulfill us or fulfill God, and unfortunately, it seems both of us [us and G-d] have come to believe the lies. So, how do prostitutes move out of such a profession? They leave their current context. We must do the same to come to experience the freedom spoken about by Jesus of Nazareth.
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