the (im)perfection of christ.

In the work of Jacques Lacan, the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary are a central set of references. The imaginary is the field of the ego.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick

for the christian, the death of the ego should be the highest goal. the deconstituted self. all of desires should be led by a death. if desire is meaning, then ultimately the goal of any believer is unbelief. death in and of itself is an absence of something. this absence ruptures any notion of presence. but in this thought is also the paradox of the rupture itself being both presence and absence which is the very thing we need to incorporate the death of the ego. the moment our ego dies is the moment that the real appears.

to take up your cross is the ability to take what is present and make it absent. it is to respond to such things as idealism with the negation of such an idea. it is idealism that feeds the ego. the drive to chase the ever elusive perfect reality. much like in the matrix when morpheus shows neo what the real world looks like and refers to the black goth-like existence as the ‘desert of the real’.

in a sense idealism promotes the general idea that there is a way to measure what it is natural reality. or even worse that the natural actually exists. this is also the same with the sport of wrestling where it presents itself to be real but behind the scenes is nothing more than choreographed violence. at one point one of the gospels speaks of how the pharisees pray in the public and for public recognition.

i don’t think jesus was chastising prayer in public, but the notion that their behaviour was what was natural and/or to use their behaviour to measure reality by. in this instance, jesus is being a pluralist. he is claiming that there isn’t a right way to pray, but that there are wrong ways to pray. and to make the claim that the ‘right’/natural exists is to be hypocritical. jesus is attacking the notion that reality is to be measured by the other. in the ancient world, most wanted to be reputable and looked upto.

jesus ultimately states that this idea is an illusion.

our desire to look to the other to define what we should desire is another definition of idealism. jesus disrupts the notion that this way of living that this pursuit has any value at all. some watch people like benny hinn who claim to have healing powers, i am not here to discount this as a possibility, but a lot of people look to him and others to dictate either how they think god should work or how their circumstances should turn out. this is why the ‘healt & wealth’ gospel ultimately fails, because it sustains the very ego we are meant to eradicate.

the ego simplified is the self that is driven toward sustaining self-pleasure. things like the media, movies, conversations, magazines, bibles, ‘truth’, relationships, objects and so on somehow are meant to give us meaning. actually i would say they are meant to mediate our understanding of meaning. they are the other that attempt to dictate reality to/for us.

but if desire is meaning and we want to truly desire as autonomous beings, if we want to choose what we desire then we must ultimately be willing to let meaning and desire to die. philosopher hegel refers to this as the night of the world. “The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its
simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present.” the mystic st. john of the cross calls this experience the dark night of the soul. the moment when we begin unraveling our understanding of reality to the point of nihilsm. it’s like one of those moments when all that could go bad, does and you’re sitting in the ashes pleading: “what is this all for?”

we intrinsically search for meaning.

and we tend to find it in the other (peers, god, religion, love, politics, work and so on) and then we grow to need that very object to help us define the process of meaning-making. if we remove that object then we either become permanent nihilists or we begin learning how to desire from within on our own. and so what it comes down to is how we choose to define reality. if reality and existence are about centering our lives around an object, person or truth then our lives will only look/become that one object. in fact, that object will define our ethics, understanding and the laws to which we find ourselves committed to. the issue is not whether we need laws or whether we can live in peace without them, but rather the fact that we feel we need to objectify these things. that we need to lift them so high that we become subjects to them and that that is the only reality left to accept. which is a form of ancient idolatry. this is also the problem with such ideas as heaven and hell because ultimately they strip of us reality itself and presents us with the idea that reality is not possible so we need to create other realities that are more natural then what we currently experience.

and to objectify christ is to profess that christ wants to be objectified.

but if christ is true to the notion of taking up your cross and he is a person of integrity then we must take his offering as one that he himself is willing to accept for himself. christ seems to turn people back onto themselves. not only does he say if you want to be like me you must die to your ego, but the issue is that the ego wants to be like the other (in this case, christ) and so by christ encouraging people to take up their cross (die to their ego) he is telling them to stop objectifying him.

that he isn’t the perfect (in the sense of idealism) model; now as a rabbi, this notion might be a bit different, because as a student you wanted to be like your rabbi, and this is why its so interesting with jesus who seems to not only re-order the way of the rabbi, but also disrupt the notion of an ego that ends in idealism. he ultimately resolves lacan’s imaginary (the ego) by challenging anyone and everyone to die to their current understanding of reality. at one point he tells his friend that they will do greater things then him. what is he talking about?

legacy.

when you hear of a person legacy, you dont really hear much about the hair color they had or the deoderant they wore/or didn’t wear! but rather you hear of what they did, how they changed things. here christ looks to us, not to continue ‘his’ legacy in the natural sense but rather that our legacy will supercede his. in fact, if anything, christ is idealizing us. he once again reverses our own understanding of christianity. he decenters himself (i have come to serve) – the place we think christ should is the very place he doesn’t want to be. if perfection is defined as the evolution of an object and we keep christ at the center of our ideology, then eventually the ideology becomes christ while christ remains elsewhere. to allow christ to remain perfect we must let him evolve outside of our belief systems and rhetoric.

if reality is defined by a series of signifiers, or agreed upon meanings, dying to our very selves means we must be willing to ‘not be of this world’. it means we see things differently. it means what is generally perceived as meaning (in any context) must be challenged and eventually must experience a sort of requiem. think about this on a personal level, let’ say you move from your current home and then visit it 20 years later, the meaning for some is that it feels odd or not like home anymore but simply a place you visit, a memory. this is the same with the meaning, it continues to change overtime.