Searching for God # 109

 Luke 6:39-42:

He also told them that parable: Can the blind lead the blind? Will they both not fall into the pit? The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Central to each of our lives is the unscratable itch to correct and to accuse and to find fault and to demean another. Gallons of ink have been spilled attempting to find the ‘original culprit’ to blame in the Garden of Eden story of The Fall. And the template of that story, whose theme is a fall of some kind from grace, paradise and a utopic garden, is central to the West’s both psychology and theology, irrespective of sectarian or denominational identity. Disobedience and judgement lie at the heart of the myth. And, human fault, responsibility and sin lie at the heart of that dynamic….as millions have been taught and inculcated into believing in Sunday School, as children.

James Alison, in his provocative work, The Joy of Being Wrong, writes:

There is no shortage of ways of talking about Adam and Eve or the serpent that are ways of finding whom to blame for how things are.  To follow the pattern of search for an origin would be to try to understand sin within the framework of blaming someone for the present state of affairs and would be in contradiction with the approach I have been trying to set out, which is that original sin is to be understood only from the coming into being of forgiveness, as that which is being forgiven.

So, instead of this approach to causality, can mimetic theory throw light on the business of searching for an origin? I rather  think it can…….

Luke 6:39-42 teaches about the blind leading the blind, the disciple not being more than the master, and the impossibility of removing the mote in the brother’s eye while having a beam in one’s own. It entirely proposes a mimetic understanding of psychology. That is to say, all our knowledge of each other is projective and relational: our knowledge of someone else is inseparable from our relationality to that other person, and what we know of them depends on a real similarity between the other person and ourselves such that we can properly project from our own experience and begin to understand the other. There is no question here of any possible neutral, objective vantage point onto the other. Relational, projective knowledge of the other is taken for granted by Jesus. The question which Jesus raises is as to the mode of projection. With the teaching concerning the more and the beam, Jesus indicates that there are two ways of approaching a problem in someone else: the first is from the position of someone who is not aware of or maybe in denial of his own similarity to the other, in which case the result is an accusatory highlighting of the other’s problem. It is obvious where this approach leads: the one challenged reacts by not accepting the accusation, will not be led by the one proffering such ‘objective’ criticism, and will proffer criticism in return, and the two will enter into a process of mutual antagonism, which is the same as the two blind men falling into a pit: they have become a skandalon to the other.

The second mode of projection, which is the one which Jesus is recommending in insisting that the one proffering criticism first remove the beam from nis own eye, starts from the acceptance of similarity. It is when one recognizes that he is the same sort of beast as the person he wishes to correct and that he is driven by the same forces to do things which are at least analogous, when they are not identical, that he will be able to approach the other from a position of constructive complicity. That is to say the whole direction of his approach to the other springs from the creation of a relation between the two that is a spreading of forgiveness. The modes of projection are always relational; the question is whether they are accusatory or forgiving; there is no other approach, or ‘third way,’ to the problem of another human being. (Alison, op. cit. p. 241-242)

A little later, Alison elaborates:

The question is not so much how ‘Adam’s’ sin affects us, as how Christ’s forgiveness (which we are charged to make real) affects Adam. To put this another way: there is no properly theological approach to ‘our first parents’ that is not a discourse of love concerning the first people to need the sort of constructive forgiveness that we first discovered ourselves to need. There is no independent anthropological starting point in the approach to original sin. (Ibid, p. 243)

How revolutionary is this shift from ‘ accusatory causality’ to mimetic, relational complicity? Are two thousand years of history, pedagogy and theological theory and praxis able to accommodate such a dramatic and arresting interpretation? Are we, each of us, even willing to contemplate, open up to considering such a proposition? And what would it mean if we were?

To surrender the self-righteous, superior, frankly hubristic stance of ‘being right’ in the face of the other’s ‘wrong’ would seem, at first glance to be a surrender of one’s convictions, one’s character and one’s strength…It takes considerable ‘spine’ and courage to tell another about the speck in his eye, and clearly focuses attention away from the plank in my own. There may even be a substantial amount of ‘objective’ evidence that the ‘critique’ holds water, and the recipient may even come to be grateful, while humbled, in the process of being ‘corrected, accused, embarrassed and exposed.’

One of the hidden ironies about Alison’s approach and theory is that those very things that, like a magnet, attract the critical eye of the accuser, are those same things that are unacknowledged in and by the accuser. Whatever I find so intolerable, objectionable and irritating in the other, ironically and paradoxically, are the very same things that I do not accept or tolerate in myself. Identifying a similar complicity, prior to opening my mouth in judgement, however, is a piece of ‘self-talk’ and ‘self-critical-examination’ for which many of us are either ill-prepared or are simply unwilling to entertain.

Also ironically, the ‘feeling’ of administering a sound, evidence-based critical judgement of another is so ‘self-satisfying’ and fulfilling as to be its own internal motivator. The critique and the critic both, in Western society and culture, have an acknowledged level of both credibility and maturity, stature and enviability, that endears it to others and generates considerable income as well as social and political status. Sins of both omission and commission are so readily and easily observable that many become almost intoxicated in and by their magnetism. Forgiveness, on the other hand, seems restricted, constricted to the ‘confessional’ and to those private, confidential moments between intimate partners, when, after there is no other conceivable path to avoid, to deny, to lie to masquerade, or to wiggle one’s way out of some deeply shameful entanglement of ‘bad judgement’ or…..or…..??

In popular parlance, forgiveness, among many, is considered analogous to the snow-flake image of spineless, wimpish, character-less and justified dismissability. Identification, too, with the ‘sin’ of the other, even before one might consider something akin to forgiveness, is conventionally so ‘absurd’ as to be out of the question for most of us.

The accumulated and even solidified cultural blindness, each to our own Shadow, evokes an image of a giant blob of atmospheric blind unconsciousness in which each of us is enshrouded, as if in a cloud of our own making, only ‘making’ not by design and overt agency, but more through unconscious and unwilling and uncomfortable avoidance and/or denial. Few, if any, would be eager or perhaps even willing to acknowledge an active, conscious, willing and determined motivation to blindness however pressed we might find ourselves.

Alison extends his appreciation for forgiveness and our obligation to extend it in and through his quite sensitive, imaginative and provocative iteration of the Cross and Crucifixion itself. Jesus, in his view, surrenders himself willingly to the unjust, illegal, unwarranted  violence of the mob, as a way of exemplifying opposition to violence and a strong conviction to relationality.

Whether either or both protestants and catholics are open to and willing to begin to re-think both the beam-plank parable, and the Alison memetic, surrender to relationality, remains an open question. Both positions exemplify a creative, imaginative and, from the perspective of this scribe, a serious, challenging and sustainable Christian expectation.

The church’s and the ordinary people’s imitation of the accusatory model of amending immorality, amorality, along with what the church calls sins of both omission and commission, for thousands of years seems to have been an exercise in both futility and dismissal, with both immunity and impunity for the church . It seems more than high time for the church to open to a welcome embrace of some new and different, life-giving, and life-saving relationship-based and relationship-fostering applications and interpretations of the Christian story. It is more complicated, if still true, as POGO reminds us, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!

As in quantum physics, which is beginning to demonstrate how everything, everything, is connected, and humans have been ‘blind,’ while continuing to discern both how that proposition is actually true. Previous blindness is merely a testament to our own determination to rend the shades from our collective eyes, both from our conscious and from our unconscious.

And as Robert Funk espouses, new and creative interpretations of the Christian myth and theology will continue to emerge and provoke us to re-examine what we once held as ‘sacred truth’ that has never really been ‘fixed’ or fossilized, and permanent as many would have, and still do, prefer. Today, we are grateful to James Alison and his rigorous pursuit of his faith.