Janet recently requested more writing on blessed Theresa of Calcutta, hopefully soon to be sainted, and it was a topic that came up last night in Bible Study as well, in the context of the healing stories in Luke. The question came up that if Jesus did so much healing when he walked the earth, what kind of bodily healing should we expect our prayers to effect? Should healing be part of our walk? You might think this a strange topic for an Anglo-Catholic crew to be discussing, but it caused me to see an important distinction in what Jesus does when he’s alive and the legacy he gives us in his death. What is this legacy but death? This is our starting point. What Jesus gives us is perhaps a healing, but one that comes to us from the far side of death, from the wound that opens out to us from a resurrected body, from a spiritual body that is incorruptible. Our entrance to this wound, our celestial gate, is death in the form of baptism. It is a drowning of the blind kitten of sin. Jesus first comes to us as grim reaper, which is consistent with the opening of the New Testament, Matthew’s sermon on the mount, which is no walk in the park, but the imposition of a law more stringent than that of Moses. It should not be a shock, then, when we learn that Theresa’s life was dominated by the absence of God, an absence which she felt as pain to her very bones. Notwithstanding that this absence is also communicated in her published writings which have been available for years, this epiphany should serve to deepen the mystery of her life. Why? Because out of this absence she acts. She acts out the commandment given on the mount as well as in John, to love because you have been loved. That is it, quite simply. We are not guaranteed physical well-being, or spiritual comfort, but we are told that because we have been drowned in the blood of Christ’s love, we will have the gift to perservere in loving actions.
Author Archive for A.D.
I am struggling with the sheer positivity of Bulgakov’s vision. He is inspiring to me but I have to admit I feel like I’m an Englishman in deep Russian water. And I’m not even English! but I adore clotted cream. . . . it occurred to me reading today that there is no greater pride than to imagine that our sin could keep us from God, or God from us (”Breath returning to its birth”). (The image is from the tower in Herbert’s Prayer I, see Janet’s comment on the previous post). But the question is: how can we safeguard hell and freedom from the smashing positivity of God’s love? I also remember that in Lacan anxiety is a rememoration of being too close to the real. I almost said being loved too much, but that’s not it, but maybe the difference between those two would help. Love definitely is ringed in with the real, but it does not defend itself from it. Or perhaps it’s silly, un-sophialogical, to think that because our embrace with God is written in the Book of Embraces that this removes our freedom. Perhaps our freedom is more like God’s, insofar as God is never free to not love. This is all wretchedly written. . . .
The Russian Orthodox thinker Sergius Bulgakov is interesting to me for a couple reasons. First he articulates a vision of Sophia that challenges the quaternity of Jung which I am currently dissertating about. Second, Bulgakov was very active in promoting dialogue between the Russian Orthodox and Anglican churches, and so it is fitting for me to introduce Bulgakov by looking at George Herbert’s poem, Prayer I, which I reproduce here:
PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
So many of Herbert’s themes are here in such a compact, concise form. One of the first things I notice with this poem is that prayer has its dark and light sides. We start by characterizing it quite positively as God’s breath but then it immediately becomes sinner’s tower. This tendency for a good thing to be ruined by a bad man is a theme of Herbert’s, the way a priest abuses the priesthood in Affliction I or the way the poet perverts his own gift in Jordan II, but it is even more stunning here because what the sinner is perverting is God himself as Breath (I am reminded here of Barth’s trinity in which the Father speaks, the Son is spoken, and the Spirit is the response within us). Such a sin must be punished in Herbert’s world. Such a sin demands suffering and agonizing, and we know that Herbert does not lack the knack to express this. Yet that is what is so conspicuously missing in Prayer I, for the dark turns to light again with no explanation or expiation: “softness, and peace. . . . . ” but how? What of Christ’s blood? What of the sinner’s stubborness? There is a strong sense in this poem that it is God who is writing, God who is praying, and even man’s best effort to pervert the work of that God, even his “Christ-side-piercing spear” comes out to no more than “a kind of tune which all things hear and fear.” A mere tune? What is this tune? What is it if not the idea of creation itself, the heavenly archetype which informs all made things and which demands to cleave to its author and God? But Bulgakov, in describing (divine) Sophia, wants to go beyond a simply conceptual relationship between God and the world and so Sophia becomes, in Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb, a kenosis of the “Trinity in unity.” In another place he says that Sophia is the “nature” of the Holy Trinity (without it being a separate hypostasis; in fact the hypostasis of Sophia comes from the human personality) (I have to admit that I am not always completely sure where Bulgakov is conceptually, so if I seem to be off the mark, please don’t hesitate to correct!) What I’m getting from this is that the divine Sophia (to which the earthly Sophia corresponds and strives) is part of the dynamism of the Trinity itself (Bulgakov denies the position that God might not have created, even though he affirms God’s satisfaction apart from creation). This would explain Bulgakov’s position of universal salvation, or something very close to it: “Evil loses the very foundation of being after the separation of good and evil. Evil is not eternalized as a result of this separation but, on the contrary, is ontologically annulled in the parousia,” and “Heaven does not exist in its fullness as long as and insofar as hell exists.”
This sense of man’s destiny for God and of unstoppable divine love is perhaps consistent with Orthodox thought, and I would question my readers whether it is not also evident in the Anglican tradition. And although I don’t think one sees it always in Herbert, in Prayer I we definitely get very close to it. Are not the atomic images somewhat like archeytpes in the mind of God, in their lack of syntax in the midst of precise order? Is not the turn from man’s sin to God’s “softness,” in that there is no explanation given, redolent of God’s illogical love of sinners? Is not the final phrase, of “something understood,” redolent of Wisdom herself? And is there not a confidence here in human Wisdom (erring as it is), such that Sophia is not a divine hypostasis but finds her hypostasis in us, in humanity, in the pinnacle of Creation? And what is this hypo-stasis, or this sub-stance, except something thats stands under?
The Old Testament reading for today was powerful, and I’d like to start by quoting it in full:
Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem! Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; when the overwheliming scourge passes through it will not come to us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter”; therfore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation; ‘He who believes will not be in haste.’ And I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; and hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter.” Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes through you will be beaten down by it. As often as it passes through it will take you; for morning by morning it will pass through, by day and by night; and it will be sheer terror to understand the message. For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it, and the covering too narrow to wrap oneself in it. For the LORD will rise up as on Mount Pera’zim, he will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon; to do his deed–strange is his deed! and to work his work–alien is his work! Now therefore do not scoff, lest your bonds be made strong; for I have heard a decree of destruction from the Lord GOD of hosts upon the whole land.
Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 3–Renouncing Eternal Life’
I hope to answer some of the questions in the comments about exactly how we should understand Word as Virus (I’m not terribly interested in what Burrough actually meant by it, though he did explicitly state that written language came first. Derrida too, right Janet?), but I’m going to start from a faraway place, Ignatius of Antioch, taken from Rowan Williams’ great book, The Wound of Knowledge:
‘My labor pains have begun’ (Romans VI). So Ignatius advances to the torture and humiliation of his death in the confidence that there in the arena his true life, his humanity, his reality, begin. The truth has appeared in human flesh and suffered human death and thereby created afresh for all humanity the possibility of ‘truth in its flesh and its death, of a real and stable (’incorruptible,’ in Ignatius’s languge) life constituted by what the world seees as meaningless–silence, failure, death.” Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 2–The Body of Life’
I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about the relationship of the Harry Potter books to Christianity. When I started talking to my Mom about this, she said I should write something that she could give to a friend of hers who is interested in this subject, so here is the first of, I hope, a number of posts addressing some of the most interesting connections in that regard. So, first of all, Hi Mom, and second of all, howdy to William Burroughs who, though deceased, speaks through his words, one of which was that the word is a virus. Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 1–The Word is a Virus’
Is Harry Potter a Christian? Well, lets start this conversation off with the basics, and I should note that my jumping off point is the two Bible quotations which appear on two noteworthy tombs in book 7 of J.K. Rowlings masterful series (By the way, this post has spoilers galore, but if you haven’t read book 7 by now you’ve got bigger problems anyway, and I would suggest professional help) So, to the quotations. Where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also, and, The Last Enemy that shall be Destroyed is Death. Love and Death, then, are the themes which dominate these books, but as I always tell my students when we’re examining the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ most extended answer to the question of what Christian love is, Jesus gives a brand new look at love, going beyond even what the prophets had envisaged, present in his teachings, the full glory of which is seen in his death and resurrection. The message of HP is this: Love, fearing not the specter of the power of death, works a greater magic in this world than any deeds of muggles or wizards. Harry is clearly not as powerful as Voldemort, or even, as the latest movie makes splendidly clear, his legions of death-eaters (Helena!), but as Dumbledore unceasingly drones, Harry has a power of which the glorious V-cake knows not. Clearly, the entrance into victory over this serpentine monster is Harry’s baptism courtesy of his mother, that is, his love of love over any of the fruits of this world (Faux psychoanalysts take note—he loves love more than he loves his mother). His life is forfeit in the way that St. Paul’s was, not a stoical suicide his, but rather the uncontainable energy released by the breaking of these rusted bonds. What effect? He gives up his life for his friends, and he does die. And his soul goes to the place where souls go (Lord forgive Joanna for saying that “it’s all in our heads”), and then he simply returns, as simply as Christ rising from the tomb with a sternly confused look on his face as in Piero della Francesca’s rendering of it, Roman soldiers slumping in earthly defeat.
Next up: We’re hoping for a masterful post by Dr. Ramey of Rowan Univ. fame on John Milbank and the surnaturel, and I’m already asking myself how one can live in a world created by and for love, in which love is stronger than death, though no stranger to it, without the storyteller himself. Even if to simply put the idea “all in our heads”. . . . .
Just went to see Sicko a couple nights ago, and like all of Moore’s films, the images stick pretty well. First of all, I thought it was an excellent movie–compelling, funny, irritating, and earnest. All of the criticisms that one can make of Moore are probably true but ultimately not very interesting. The bottom line is he just makes good movies about important topics. This one especially I thought had a sense of improvisation, lightness and self-deprecating humor that really made it a joy to watch. He has a measured sense of his own image and weaves it deftly into the substance of his film. I suggest people watch this in the theaters too, because the reaction of the audience is a big part of the show. When Moore shows the creation of HMO’s via a white house tape of Nixon and Ehrlichmann people got genuinely angry (and foul-mouthed), and not in the pansy ass liberal way. More like that LA street riot way. And when we broke into applause at the words of a British statesman, it wasn’t a self-righteous nod to someone who is affirming our own presuppositions, but acknowledgment of how surprising the truth can be, what a good idea democracy is, and the huge potential that Americans, perhaps alone among the peoples of this earth, have to mark this world with a genuine form of it.
I guess I should have just posted my proposal! But don’t ask me for more (that is, until the proposal gets accepted and I actually have to write the paper)
Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.
The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.
I just finished writing up a proposal for this book on Lacan and Children’s Literature in which I argue that one of the powerful things about the Harry Potter books is the way in which the Imaginary order is always cut by the Real, by Death. Harry’s biggest fantasies concern the care that his parents, or Sirius, or Dumbledore might provide him, and as the books progress these supports get taken away from him, one by one. I also argue that the structure is that of a mobius strip, such that the opposition between the Imaginary and the Real is intrinsic to the structure of the fantasies of the characters. Rowling herself said the books are about death, which, in my opinion, the (pure) genre of fantasy has always completely obviated. Rowling, though, sets out like she’s going to give the traditional weight to the imaginary elements (the overblown powers, the ridiculous dualisms) but then always manages to be very surprising in the way these fantasies run into their very own Real limits. The books are theologically right on, as well, for the very simple fact that Harry loves because he is not afraid to die.
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