Showing posts with label jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jesus. Show all posts

22.4.20

Quotation: On Those Who Blindly Persecute Others

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Jesus, the Nazarene (Luke 23:34)
Alternative thinking:
Or should we? Why is their ignorance a condition for forgiveness? When Jesus says this line in the Gospel of Luke, it is at the moment the Roman soldiers tear off his clothing to ready his body for crucifixion. They also take his clothes and "cast lots" for who will get what of Jesus' meager possessions. It is a brutal scene, one that includes the crowd who shout "He saved others; let him save himself . . .".
The crowd represents us 
the humanity that denied Jesus. So Jesus is talking to us in this passage. On a broader note, Jesus is referring to what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." The Roman Soldiers, the crowd, Pontius Pilate, the temple priests, and those who betrayed him — were they all calculating killers, hell-bent on ridding the world of a man from Nazareth who claimed he was the son of God? Arendt's argument is that evil is ground down to its basest, most formless level. We do not know the two soldiers who tear off his clothes and who cast lots — but they are the best representatives of the banality of evil in the story of Jesus. The brutality is so harsh, so physically brutal — it lays bare the extent of evil as this persistent "thing" that can materialize in a moment. 
Jesus forgives. And I am not sure why. 
Their crime is not something to be explained. To rationalize. And perhaps Jesus knows this. And accepts it. But doesn't condone it. Freed from it. We see it. As evil. For what it is. A heinous crime. Perpetrated against another human being. The woman battered and beaten in the park. A child killed by a stray bullet. A woman who has died alone. Violence perpetrated by hatred and racism. Jesus says, "Forgive them. They know not what they do." But he did not say, forget.   
Note: The translation from Luke's Gospel is the King James Version of the New Testament
Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

5.4.14

Jesus Was A Slacker

Jesus was not considered Dean's List material in his home country of Palestine. He irked the professors of his day with his youthful sarcasm and basically failed his exam and was kicked out of the synagogue (Luke 4:28-29). He picked up the pieces and eventually became known as a great orator  giving first-rate parables only a Literature professor could love. That's courage.
image source: funny jesus

14.2.12

Reflecting On Despair According to Søren Kierkegaard (and Others)

“Infinitude’s despair, therefore, is the fantastic, the unlimited for the self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transparently in God.” — (Søren Kiekegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 30)

Must we despair in order that we don’t despair? 

     Must we suffer, so as not to suffer? We find ourselves in a paradox, stuck between finitude and infinitude, wanting to die and not wanting to die. Life can be artificial oftentimes — death has already struck us a blow, a death that is more internal and threatens the infinite more than any physical death could. Every day we face ourselves; we face our possibilities, sometimes cringing and other times barely aware that we are sad.
    Søren Kierkegaard experienced despair. The words he writes on the subject reek of subjectivity; you can almost taste-smell-touch Kierkegaard’s despair as you read a work like the Sickness Unto Death.
    Kierkegaard never claims to be someone whose been “transparent before God”; he probably never was “healthy and free” from despair — for he says all of us whether we are Christian or not, have despaired or continue to despair.
    There are probably many events in Kierkegaard’s life that disrupted his own synthesis of infinitude and infinitude.

Kierkegaard's Failed Romance with Regina Olsen
    Kierkegaard fell in love with a young woman named Regina Olsen. There is no doubt that many of the works produced by Kierkegaard were a result of the relationship he had with her.
    They were planning marriage until Kierkegaard decided to end the relationship. It seems when great happiness is evident, or the possibility of happiness is on the horizon, despair settles in deepest. In the Moviegoer Walker Percy’s character Binx Bolling makes that clear in the Moviegoer when he says, “whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise” (121).
    Kierkegaard had straddled that possibility and it made him afraid; he didn’t fall out of love with Regina Olsen (he loved her dearly — till his death). When he broke off the engagement with her he made sure she did not suffer embarrassment. In Kierkegaard's time, if a man breaks off an engagement with a woman, the woman is stigmatized. Kierkegaard prevented that stigma so he forced her to break off the engagement with him. He made sure friends and family saw him as the villain and Regina as the victim. He quit seeing her; he quit sending flowers; he quit courting her.
    Why did he do this? Obviously they would have been happy. What caused him to end such a relationship? Kierkegaard was afraid that if he married Regina Olsen, he would be unable to continue writing — he considered himself unsuited for the married life (Coppleston, Vol. 7, p. 338) — he was a man with goals and ideas and sealing a marriage, he felt, would prevent him from achieving his philosophical goals.
    He alludes to the engagement in his writings; one gets the sense that he regretted his decision — that he gave up on a beautiful thing. He writes of the relationship, pseudonymously, in a wry, novel-like section of Either/Or or also called The Seducer’s Diary.
    A few years before his engagement to Regina Olsen, he seriously considered suicide. Kierkegaard grew up in a strict, religious family. His father was a melancholic, religious man who believed that God’s wrath was imminent. The father’s dire religious overtones hung over the family like a doomsday saying. Kierkegaard's father read to his son stories from the bible from an illustrated tome that depicted graphically the violence of the crucifixion. I think the young Kierkegaard was seared by those images of a brutally beaten Christ hanging on a cross.

The Theme of Despair in the book The Sickness Unto Death
    The central story of Sickness Unto Death is an interpretation of the rising of Lazarus by Christ recounted in Chapter 11 of John's Gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and the Mary who anointed the body of Jesus with oil and dried his feet with her hair, is ill and near death. Kierkegaard reads the story as an explanation of despair. Christ says Lazarus's sickness is not unto death (John 11:4). The disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean physical death, but Jesus means spiritual death, the death caused by despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the greatest "sign" Christ performs in John's Gospel. In fact, it is the culmination event of many minor "signs" Jesus performs. Kierkegaard reads the story as an allegory on despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is meant to serve a point: that death won't kill Lazarus. To raise him from the dead only for him to die, physically later on, is to suggest that Christ has saved him from the death caused by inner despair.
On a Recent Visit to Copenhagen I Visted Kierkegaard
    I wrote on Kierkegaard as an undergraduate philosophy major. I went to Copenhagen to visit his grave, which turned out to be a great pun for in Danish graveyard is "kierkegaard" so when I asked someone where was the grave of Kierkegaard they thought I was asking where was the churchyard. It is fitting that Kierkegaard's name means graveyard.
   On my way to Copenhagen I took a ferry from Germany to Denmark in a train. The train enters the ferry via built-in tracks. It was late at night. I was sitting next to a German girl who was going to Denmark for a summer job. Since we were talking to each other, when the train boarded the ferry, we both went on deck to look out into the sea. I remember looking down into the dark wine waters and feeling vertigo and this sudden desire to plunge into the vortex.
   Perhaps what Kierkegaard was trying to say is that we can die way before our actual deaths. Feeling the vertigo made me feel alive but at the same time hearkened a baleful note to my mortality. I recognized the horrific contingency of my being, that I won't last long. Kierkegaard's point was that we succumb to death long before we physically die in a kind of covering up of our selves. Famously Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that is in relationship with its own self. Sometimes this relational structure becomes muddled, scratched over, hidden and we become lost to our self. We are unmoored from our relationship to our very self.
    The greatest form of despair is the despair that does not even know it is in despair.
    To know I am in despair is the first step to not be in despair. In other words, to know that I am born, introduced to this world without any instruction, or even with my permission, so I recognize that I am not at home in this world. To be in despair is to kid myself into thinking that I am at home in the world when really I am not.
  Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard. What Heidegger has to say about anxiety is closely mirrored to Kierkegaard's theory of the self. Dasein (Heidegger's neologism for the human being, which means literally being-there) is a being whose very being becomes an issue for it. This is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And I think it is what Walker Percy was trying to say in all of his novels: we are strangers in a strange land.
   That night on the ferry to Denmark I wanted to jump into the void for it promised an escape. Not that I had any external reason to be in despair. At that time in my life, I was feeling pretty good. But the recognition came to me that what defines the human being is despair.
The Mass of Men Leads Lives of Quiet Desperation
   I think it was Thoreau who said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he was onto something. And so was I at that moment. Since then I have forgotten. Only to find my notes on Kierkegaard in a notebook from my college days which I reconstructed to write this blog post. The me of 2000 when I was 20 is sending a message to me of 2012 at 32. I think that is how it works. There is no essential self. Just fragments. Thank god we can communicate.

25.12.10

Christmas Post: If Jesus were Albrecht Dürer

Self-Portrait of Albrecht Dürer
The twenty-fifth day of December is an odd time to commemorate an incarnation of a God? I agree with T.S. Eliot, though, "satisfactory." (the best use of that word in a poem is reprinted below).

Jesus, a rabbi from the first century (a century named after him, so to speak, in the year of our Lord) was born in Palestine, in the Northern Hemisphere, correct? So, he came into the world at the eclipse of the sun’s strength. The Winter Solstice (which by the way, this year was also marked by another eclipse, a lunar one). If he had born in Australia, however, he could have at least eschewed swaddling clothes. And there would have been more reason for sheep(or kangaroo) to be lowing.

How do the Australians celebrate seasonal Christian feasts? I suspect their Christmas's are void of hot chocolate and burning fires. More like surfing and tan lines to fête the baby Jesus.
And their Easter has to be a mess? But, that’s another story. Just suffice it to say, it’s a difficult stretch to celebrate new birth when everything around is falling into winter.

12.4.10

Alpha Christ Mural from Saint Joseph Abbey With Accompanying Poem


Artist credit: A mural by Gregory DeWit, St. Joseph Abbey Church, Saint Benedict, Louisiana

21.2.10

Prose Poem: Quote from My Moleskine

In this post, I include a prose poem fragment found in my Moleskine notebook.
A couple rides the New York City subway.
The empty tomb startles me as I know
it startled Mary

~#~

When wishing upon a star be sure to want what you really desire; for desire materializes
Location:Cohn St, New Orleans,United States

10.5.06

John Milton on Adversity

    Adversity breeds life.
An Etching of Samson, from an 1882 German Bible
An Etching of Samson, from an 1882 German Bible  source: wikimedia
 Milton liked to write about adversity because he saw it in the paradox of Christian life. Jesus died so we might have life.  “They also serve who only stand and wait” is the last line of Milton’s sonnet on blindness.  And in the Areopagitica he writes, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”  We go searching for death, and life springs up again, as usual, to quote Virginia Woolf. Actually what she really wrote was I meant to write about death only life came breaking in as usual. It is funny how one remembers quotes incorrectly.  Adversity is something I intuit in my own life; I have an intimate impulse, like Samson, but I also scheme and think too much like Satan in Paradise Regained, storing it up for later. Why, just yesterday somebody tried my patience and I just pretended to wait, not like Jesus, “The time prefixed I waited,” (PR 1.269) as if waiting for God’s prefixed time, but rather a time when I could get back at someone and use their words against them.
    No one likes to wait yet we sense and intuit that patience and waiting are good things.  I wish I could wait and serve like Samson and Jesus but Satan's jittery insistence to outwit God (again) seems awfully childish but worth the effort -- especially those times when you feel like Samson, blind and shorn.  In this paper I am going to talk about this adversarial jig-a-lig between waiting and serving and scheming insistence and how it plays itself out in both poems, “insistence” in Paradise Regained and “waiting” in Samson Agonistes.
    In Paradise Regained the Adversary (1.33) is determined to dupe God by insisting on sabotaging Jesus, God’s Messiah, the guy who waits and waits, calm and demur as a cat in the hot sun with his belly bare.  Jesus makes himself vulnerable by exposing himself to the desert.  Samson is vulnerable and is humbled by his weakness in the prison in Gaza, captured by the Philistines after Dalila, his wife, dupes him.  In Paradise Regained, Jesus’s mode of operation is just to sit there and take it.  The adversary, "roving still about the world" (1.34-35) finds Jesus in the desert and appears to him disguised as an old man, but Jesus is not convinced by this quick ploy to deceive him with wise words.  “Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust, knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?” (1.356). The archfiend now undisguised is first shorn of his appearance, revealed as superficial and a fake.  He is “dissembled, inly stung with anger and disdain,” not a Samson, shorn and blind, still believing in God.  Satan's insistence is "inly stung" (1.466). Satan gets so pissed off at his inability to fool Jesus with his cool words that he disappears as quickly as he had come by the end of Book one.  Satan tries to convince Jesus that truth is hard to achieve, Satan argues, and it is a bummer to have to wait for it.  Those atheistic priests who mumble prayers but do not believe are not any better, Satan contends.  Satan pulls out the lowly and woe is me card and pleads to Jesus as a supplicant, “Thou art placed above me, thou art Lord” (1.475) which gives Satan an excuse to dismiss God’s law because his not as equipped with God power, so, he reasons, he’ll fail.
    Unlike Satan, Samson knows his mission (although he question’s God ways), so when his father Manoah insists on ransoming him from Gaza and taking him home, Samson desists, saying it is impossible; he has been such a wretch, having succumbed to Dalila’s shears and is a disgrace to his country.  Samson’s only response is to sit idle on the feast of Daigon, waiting, seemly doing nothing.  “Here rather let me drudge and earn my bread, till vermin or the draff of servile food consume me, and oft-invocated death hasten the welcome end of all my pains” (573-576).  Samson has consigned himself to waiting, like the newly baptized in Paradise Regained who cry to God for a Messiah.  Samson is plagued with the Job-like questions of, ‘why is this happening to me’? Why did he lose his strength to a concubine and why is God doing this to him, the strongest and greatest warrior in the country?  Samson is similar to Satan in this grapple with truth but the difference is in how both deal with the adversity.
    Satan knows his insistence to deceive Jesus is unfortunate but he clings to the liberty "to round this globe of earth," although he curiously prefaces it with the word "prison," even though Samson is the real one in prison, "Life in captivity, among inhuman foes" (108-9).  As in Paradise Lost, Satan’s prison is psychological and tormented, “inly racked” (PR 3.203).  He is the classic psychotic.  Satan does not trust God, does not see in adversity salvation and creates castles in the sky, scheming to destroy God’s work.  Samson’s distrust is human distrust, while Satan is hardwired in distrust and anger that ends up confounding him in the end.  Both poems use this image of the prison, the desert, a place of exile, to tease out the struggle between waiting and action, freedom and bondage. 
    In book three, Satan directly challenges waiting, when he asks Jesus, “Why move thy feet so slow to what is best? …. Perhaps thou linger’st in deep thoughts detained” (3.224; 227).  In other words, Satan is telling Jesus, that compared to him, who is already damned to hell – I have nothing to lose – but you, who are the son of God, why don’t you just do something?  Satan mentions that Jesus’s entire life has been private, unlived, “What of perfection can in man be found?” (3.230) as he tries to convince the son of God to put away his meek life and conquer the world and all it holds.  Jesus merely replies that God has his due time and we must trust his providence.  This really gets Satan rolling with anger and the rest of the poem is a crescendo to the denouement of the fall where the title, “O patient son of God” is a curse and Satan disturbs Jesus’s with thunderbolts and rain.  Satan is the inverse of patience: a troubling wandering and stewing that mocks patience in its waiting but serves only to erupt at any moment.  Satan has watched Jesus from a far ever since he heard that this might be the Messiah, but it is not the same moral waiting imbued to Mary and John the Baptist.
    In Samson Agonistes, after Samson and his father speak, Dalila enters, the second person to tempt Samson to depart Gaza and give up on the prophecy that Samson will be great.  Dalila and Satan are structured with this same deceptive insistence to get what they want at any cost and in any rhetorical guise.  Samson yells, albeit oxymoronically, “My wife, My traitress!  Let her not come to me,” (725) she comes anyway, disrespecting boundaries.  For Dalila, her insistence to see Samson is fueled by conjugal desire which “prevailing over fear and timorous doubt, hath led me on, desirous to behold once more thy face …” (739-40).  Dalila wants to see Samson because of sexual desire but it is not because she really is afraid of rejection or anything; she is not as meek as that.  She wants fame is jealous of Samson’s fame – she is timorous of the prophecy and fears she will end up an unknown Philistine.  Like Satan, Dalila speaks in half-truths and justifies her insistence with false alloy.  She seems to seek forgiveness from Samson but Samson is loath to grant her such pleasure.  Dalila comes professing love and justification for her actions, and like Manoah, tells him, “… I may fetch thee from forth this loathsome prison-house, to abide with me …” (921-22).  Like Satan, Dalila is tempting Samson out of the desert of Gaza.  But also like Satan, Dalila will not win.  Samson dismisses her insistent flattery and says, “This jail I count the house of liberty to thine, whose doors my feet shall never enter.” (949-50).  When she approaches him to touch his hand Samson tells her to go away and find fame in her “hastened widowhood.”
    It is also interesting how others perceive Samson and Christ.  They do not respect their insistence to wait and serve God.  People wonder where Jesus has gone to for such a long time; why is he not here?  They think Jesus has deserted him, like the way Mary, his mother and Joseph felt when he was lost in the Temple, waiting on the sacred teachers in the Temple.  The crowd in Samson Agonistes is adverse to Samson too, stupid in their perception of why Samson will not act.  So it is not only an inner struggle of adversity of waiting pinned against acting, but also the social awareness and perception of the people around both Jesus and Samson and how they are complicit in the temptation to give up on God’s mandate.  Mary says of her son, “Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, little suspicious to any king.”  In other words, it seems like she is saying, how can this guy be a king – he does not have the public attitude, the active and moving force of a king.  It is like the crowds in Samson Agonistes when they say, “Can this be he, that heroic, that renowned, irresistible Samson” (124-26) who killed thousands of Philistines with the jaw of an ass?  Can this be he, who is now “in slavish habit, ill fitted weeds o’er worn and spoiled” (122-23)?  But Mary does wait for her son, “But I to wait with patience am inured” (PR 1.102) like Samson in that she does not understand God’s law, yet still she waits in patience.
    But what is the end result in the adversarial conflict in both poems?  How does waiting and action resolve itself?  Waiting and serving turn out well for Jesus.  He confounds Satan with his virtuous patience and steadfastness.  Satan is confounded.  Milton uses a long epic simile to describe Satan’s fall that is really cool.  We hear of Samson’s triumph from a messenger who tells us that Samson implodes the temple walls in on himself and is crushed to death by the pillars.  In a weird way, he becomes a hero.  But it is still sad.  Samson’s waiting is tinged with self-doubt and shame; he more than anyone in either of the poem comes closest to the struggle with good and evil, patience and waiting that Milton sought in his interpretation of Christian paradox.  In this way, Samson Agonistes is a very difficult poem but the most Miltonic of the two. Paradise Regained tidies up the problem quite nicely with Satan on his knees and Jesus triumphant.  My head hurts from all this thinking.  I think I am going to post now.