Desert Spirituality: An Incarnational Anthropology

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BOOK DISCUSSION & REFLECTION
David G.R. Keller, Oasis of Wisdom: The Worlds of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005); Walter Bruggemann, Out of Babylon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010); and Kathleen M. OConnor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World (Maryknowll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002).
We belong neither to darkness nor to light. Therefore let us not be asleep like the rest, but awake and be sober (1 Thess 5:6, NRSV) 1 The desert waits, ready for those who come, who come obedient to the Spirits leading; or who are driven, because they will not come any other way. The desert always waits, ready to let us know who we arethe place of self-discovery. And whilst we fear, and rightly, the loneliness and emptiness and harshness, we forget the angels, whom we cannot see for our blindness, but who come when God decides that we need their help; when we are ready for what they give us. - Ruth Burgess
A TRANS FOR MATI ON OF THE HE A RT

In both ancient and contemporary settings, the interface between empire
and divine purpose is carried by poetic, prophetic voices that arise from and are nurtured by local tradition of faith. As in the ancient world, the contemporary abrasion between imperial ideology and poetic alternative is a contentious one, with the poetic alternative being fragile and mostly unauthorized and unrecognized.2 The New Testament message of Jesus reiterates
The admonition is to awake and realize that you may have forgotten what is important. See Walter Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 29.
1 2
Walter Bruggemann, Out of Babylon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 18.

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LYLE A. BRECHT DRAFT 1.5 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH --- Wednesday, August 31, 2011
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Gods values of hesed (steadfast love)3, mispat (justice), and sedaqah (righteousness) through parables and example that the ideology of scarcity has been broken, overwhelmed by the divine gift of abundance.4 But of what kind of abundance? Could the call be to awaken to the abundance of not only Gods unearned and unmerited grace, but of voice? To gain a voice means to come into the truth of ones history corporately and individually, to recover ones life, to acquire moral agency by naming ones world. The voice brings from the depth of silence the creative power, energy, and wholeness of a person or a people in the midst of its world.5 If all empires are self-indulgent, arrogant, and abusive,6 then maybe the purpose of voice is merely to cry loudly for all to hear something like Jeremiahs truth-telling lament: They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. (Jeremiah 6:14) 7
Hesed (the goodness and favor that God reserves for his faithful) was a particularly useful word for speaking of Gods relationship to his people because it held together in a single expression an emphasis on divine freedom on the one hand and divine commitment on the other, an emphasis on human need and weakness on the one hand and human responsibility to trust in God alone on the other. By a stretching of the secular usage for delivering and protective action and concern to embrace even forgiveness, the term came to express the uniqueness of gods hesed as the basis for a relationship stronger than any human bond. See Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry, HMS 17 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978), 149-50 quoted in Joseph Jensen, O.S.B., Ethical Dimensions of the Prophets (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 97-8.
3
In contrast to Solomons values of wealth, might, and wisdom, exemplifying the highest aspects of secular humankind. See Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good, 2010, 34, 60, 62.
4
Kathleen M. OConnor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World (Maryknowll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 83.
5
See Postscript for information about the empire and imperial ideology during the time of Jesus and St. Pauls response to this ideology given the message and life of Jesus.
6 7
Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 20, 33.
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Could it be that denial is the real original sin?8 A primal human rejection of the truth.9 That the called-for voice is that one which refuses denial, practices truth-telling, and reverses amnesia. It invites listeners into pain, chaos, and brutality, both human and divine. It conveys effects of trauma, loss grief beyond tears.10 Such a voice enables individuals and communities to break with the past without forgetting it.11 By urging truth-telling before the powerful, and providing language, form, and practice of deance, [ones voice] encourages resistance and promotes human agency. 12 Such voices are demanding, not only because they hold before our eyes sorrow and collapse that we may prefer to deny, but because they create an ethical imperative; they command us to live as compassionate witnesses to suffering, our own and that of others.13 Empires characteristically do not notice loss because they are able to engage in reality-denying ideology that covers over
This denial has happened before. And will happen again. Even 2,600 years ago during Jeremiahs time. It was also a time of competing truth claims. Deniers were plentiful. They claimed to be the voice of conventional wisdom. Wisdom that assaulted and contradicted Jeremiahs message to the people. So Jeremiah raised his speech to cries of anguish. His cries rang out against the drumbeat of the deniers conventional wisdom: Conventional forms of strategy and policy have failed. All leadership has failed. Our entire future is now under assault. This history-making change is not a secret matter. All this is happening in our midst, in public. All we need is eyes to see and ears to listen. Our leaders are adamant to maintain the status quo. They are immune to the notion that their denial will result in the death of our community, our world. The leaders even claimed Jeremiah, the carrier of this discordant message, an enemy of the state. Jeremiah summarized his view of these deniers: Therefore their way shall be to them like slippery paths in the darkness, into which they shall be driven and fall; For I will bring disaster upon them in the year of their punishment, says YHWH. (Jeremiah 23:12, NRSV)
8 9
See Gen 3:11-13, NRSV (OConnor, 87). OConnor, 94.
10 11
Denise Ackerman, On Hearing and Lamenting: Faith and Truth-telling in To Remember and to Heal, edited by H.R. Botman and R.M. Petersen (Capetown: Human & Rousseau, 1996), 55 quoted in OConnor, 94.
12 13
OConnor, 131. OConnor, 137.
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everything in the splendor of power, victory, and stability. Empires do not acknowledge that such claims are highly contested, and beyond contestation are frequently exhibited as false. But empires are undeterred by inconvenient truth, and rush on to persuasive certitude. 14 TA K I NG LEAV E OF E MP I RE A ND I TS V OI CE S OF D E NI A L The departure from empire is liturgical, that is, it is a symbolic, bodily performance of what leaving is like.... The liturgy invites participants to recognize that we do not belong to empire and need not obey empire.15 This act of leaving empire for the kingdom of God and the embracement of Gods values of hesed (steadfast love), mispat (justice), and sedaqah (righteousness) is enacted at each Eucharist. We, drawn into communion, into participation with God through the mutual giving of Jesus and his Father have become part of a fellowship initiated and sustained by gift, and to abide in this fellowship is to learn how we can give, to each other and to God. That we can give at all rests on what we have been given.If we can even begin to give in this way, it is only because of the depth of the assurance implied in the gift given us on Calvary. 16 But, the reiterated practice of liturgical departure [from empire] has at its intent a psychological transformation.17 Ones Christianity goes disastrously and dangerously wrong when Jesus is worshipped but not followed. To follow the way of the cross is to enter into a relationship of tremendous power and strength of action. the good news proclaimed by Jesus was about liberation, and this good news was to be embodied in a new community, the Kingdom of God, a new age of relationships. It was good news of transformation, of reversal of fortunes, a message not about a priBrueggemann, Out of Babylon, 35-6. The ekklesia was a direct response to the cross that exposed the structure of arbitrary sovereign power in its ultimate exceptional yet typical instance. Instead of the Law imposed by the empire of Rome, the ekklesia was to operate according to the principles of justice and hospitality. See John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (New York: Routledge, 2003), 93 quoted in Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, 188-9; Jennings, 20.
14 15 16
Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 106.
See Rowan Williams, Eucharistic Sacrice The Roots of a Metaphor (Liturgical Study #31; Nottingham: Grove Books, 1982), 29.
17
Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 106.
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vate salvation of soul, but about corporate righteousness. To be a Christian is to be part of this new community a community which is committed to the pursuit of righteousness. 18 When the liturgical performance and the practice of self recognition in the narrative of [Scripture] take hold, one can imagine that the departure from the empire is fundamentally an economic one, a refusal to participate corporately in the pursuit of growth at all costs and individually in the practice of indiscriminate and conspicuous consumption.19 This is the ancient wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers who voluntarily renounced the values of empire of their day to live prayerful, simple lives in the desert. The objective of these early desert adventurers for God was no less transformation of the heat through mindfulness - attention to every detail of their lives as they believed that how a person lls his or her life inuences what he or she is becoming; that giving attention to unnecessary distractions or desires can blind a person to Gods presence; and that being awake and watching for the movement of God is the only way to learn to live with the slow and deliberate pace of being transformed. 20 Thus, stillness, prayer, self-denial, lack of attachment, and meditation are all means to open the heart of the seeker to a sense of wonder and nearness to God.21 The desert fathers and mothers were clear that the whole being of the person, all their actions, thoughts and desires, were involved in the path to transformation and were ultimately a sacred gift involved in his or her path to holiness. This is both a sacramental and incarnational understanding of the bodys place in the path toward transformation and ultimately sanctication (union with God).22 However, to the desert fathers and mothers, God was not the theist god of pagans who were expecting a babysitter to make all things right with the world nor the merely transcendent god of the big Other that predetermines all human and natural events, but a God that is both transcen-
See Kenneth Leech, We Preach Christ Crucied (Cambridge: Cowley, 1994), 53, 54, 57.
18 19 20 21 22
Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 107. David Keller, 102. David Keller, 84. David Keller, 85.
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dently in process where all is not already predestined and xed and imminent in His intent to be alongside the journeyer as History unfolds.23 L A M ENTI NG E COCI D E A ND THE V OI CE S OF D E NI A L24 What the best and most current scientic, economic, and cultural evidence humankind presently possesses indicates that:25
At an accelerating rate we are destroying natural, existing habitats the forests, grasslands, wetlands, and deserts or converting them to man-made habitats (cities, villages, farmlands, pastures, roads, golf courses).26 For example, through unsustainable land practices, burning, logging, and acid rain from industrial activities we are destroying many of the earths old-growth forests. These forests are necessary to produce the oxygen and purify the air we breathe - they are essentially the lungs of the earth;
the future is open, alarmingly or promisingly. The way is not laid out in advance. Creation itself is process See Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 9.
23
As used here, ecocide means the inattention to environmental issues that can singly or when combined cause collapse of natural and/or man-made systems that humans depend upon to sustain life and culture. Some of these environmental issues include: (1) deforestation and habitat destruction; (2) soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility); (3) water management problems; (4) over-hunting; (5) over-shing; (6) the effects of introduced species on native species; (7) human population growth; and (8) the increased per capita impact of human activity on their local environment. See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), 6.
24
Adapted from Elizabeth A. Johnson, Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit: 1993 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), 507. A solid appraisal of the global environmental situation relative to the earths current carrying capacity is Stuart L. Pimm, The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001).
25
Diamond, 487. Has mankind become an embodiment of The Destroyer and the earth a new Abaddon? In the Hebrew Bible and LXX, the agency of The Destroyer was usually reserved for God or Gods avenging angel(s) (Exod. 12:23) but was also used to designate a human agent of destruction (e.g. an individual, group, or nation; Job 15:21; Isa 21:2; 49:17; Jer 48:8, 15, 18; Rev 11:18). Abaddon was used as a poetic synonym for the abode of the dead (the bottomless pit) or place of destruction (ABD).
26
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While two billion of todays population currently depend on the worlds sheries for protein, the majority of the worlds sheries have been seriously degraded or have already collapsed;27
We are rapidly decreasing a signicant fraction of wild species and populations of the worlds ora and fauna and loosing their genetic information through habitat destruction, the introduction of toxins into the environment, and unsustainable land management practices.28 Once a species is extinct, we cannot easily or inexpensively bring them back;
Through unsustainable land use practices we are causing soil erosion at rates 10 to 40 times the rates of soil formation, salinization of once productive cropland, loss of soil fertility, and soil acidication and alkalinization; 29
Diamond, 488. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations says 24 percent of the worlds sheries are overexploited, depleted or in recovery from depletion. More than 50 percent are fully exploited, or shed to their maximum capacity to replenish.The remaining 21 percent are moderately exploited and could support modest increases in shing and in harvests.
27
Best guess estimates are that species extinction as the result of human impacts on the environment are presently running approximately 1,000 10,000 times greater than the background natural rate of extinction (excluding episodic events, like the Great Extinction ~250 million years ago that saw 95% of life disappear). The problem with this situation is that presently humankind use only 7,000 kinds of plant species for food, although there are at least 75,000 edible plants in existence, many that are potentially superior to the crop plants in widest use. Also, there are other thousands of species of bacteria, yeasts and other microorganisms that carry genetic information potentially capable of producing medicines that cure human and livestock diseases, substances for soil restoration, and new materials useful to mankind. See E. O. Wilson, The Current State of Biodiversity in E. O. Wilson, editor, Biodiversity (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), 10, 11, 13, and 15.
28
Diamond, 489-90. Soil erosion constitutes the most serious continuing farm problem in the United States;...no other modern nation of the Western Hemisphere, north of the equator, is wasting its agricultural lands as rapidly as the United States.vast areas have been laid waste in China, Persia and other old countries, but those countries used their lands for thousand of years, whereas we have used the oldest of ours for only about three hundred years, the greater part for only about forty to eighty years.
29
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The worlds economies are almost entirely dependent on carbonbased fuels for energy; fuel sources which are nite and limited;30 The worlds freshwater resources are nite and rapidly shrinking as more crops need to be irrigated and world population increases;31
We are releasing toxins into the earths atmosphere that act as poisons of the earths life-support systems. Some toxins that are in the
Diamond, 490. Cheap oil, which underpins Americas economy, for example, is now becoming an even greater source of weakness: its volatile price erodes prosperity; its vulnerabilities undermine security; its emissions destabilize climate. Moreover, the quest to attain oil creates dangerous new rivalries and tarnishes Americas moral standing.surprisingly, it will cost less to displace all of the oil the United States now uses than it will cost to buy that oil. In an average year, Americans will spend more than $300 billion for retail oil. Between 1975-2003, Americans paid foreign countries $2.2 trillion for imported oil. This export of U.S. wealth in turn results in a $4-$14 billion economic cost to the U.S. economy in lost purchasing power. See Amory B. Lovins, et. al., Winning the Oil Endgame (Snowmass, CO: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2005), ix, 15, 20.
30
Diamond, 490. For example, only one-third of the water that annually runs into the sea is accessible to humans. Of this, more than half is already being appropriated and used.China, with 22 percent of the worlds population and only 6 percent of its fresh water, is [already] in serious trouble. See Marq de Villiers, Water: The Fate of our Most Precious Resource (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 2000), 24:5. By the middle of this century, at worst, 7 billion people in 60 countries will be faced with water scarcity, and, at best, 2 billion in 48 countries, depending on factors like population growth and policy-making. Climate change will account for an estimated 20 percent of this increase in global water scarcity.
31
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ecosphere cannot be recaptured.32 We are slowly making parts of the earth unt for life;33
Alien (non-native) species introduced inadvertently and sometimes deliberately by man are causing huge economic losses worldwide. For example, alien species costs the U.S. $120 billion annually in economic losses. 34
Through the chemicals we discharge into the air, we have torn a hole in the earths ozone layer that protects us from the ultraviolet radiation from the sun and caused global warming;35
Air pollution, rather than being a local problem is slowly being understood by science as a global problem; what happens in Beijing will affect Boston, what happens in Boston will affect Paris. We can no longer look at air quality as a local, or even regional concern. For example, although over 160 million tons of pollution are emitted into the air each year in the United States, and approximately 121 million people live in areas where monitored air was unhealthy because of high levels of the six principal air pollutants, this is a signicant improvement (~29% better) over the toxins released into the air by U.S. industry in 1970. However, we now know that the air over the U.S. is polluted not just by U.S.-based industry, but also by industrial activities in China that export products consumed in the U.S. and other places around the world.
32
One of the places we may be making unt for life are the wombs of women living in industrialized countries. A recent report by the Environmental Working Group based on tests of 10 samples of umbilical-cord blood taken from women in the U.S. by the American Red Cross found an average of 287 contaminants in the blood, including mercury, re retardants, pesticides and the Teon chemical PFOA. What this means is that unborn babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides (Reuters, Friday, July 15, 2005; A08).
33
"Environmental and Economic Costs Associated with Non-indigenous Species in the United States" by David Pimentel, a professor in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
34
Global warming is evolving much faster than most climate scientists would have imagined even ten years ago. Despite signicant dollars spent to convince us that (a) global warming is not happening; or (b) it is happening, but it is so inconsequential as to be negligible; or (c) global warming is good for us; or (d) global warming is too big a problem for us to do anything about; or (e) it is already too late to do anything about it; global warming is undeniably due to human activities, its existence is not controversial among the vast majority of experts and international business leaders, and the best understanding by virtually all world governments other than the U.S. is that there are responsible policies that can prevent the most serious environmental, economic, and health consequences from global warming.
35
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The per capita impact for the worlds population is continuing to rise, it is not decreasing. For example, a First World citizen presently consumes 32 times more resources than a Third World citizen and produces 32 times more waste than do Third World citizens.36
Environmental stresses are creating the conditions for outbreaks of new disease organisms and pandemics in certain areas of the world.37
Governments focus on preparation for war by stockpiling nuclear weapons and other CBRN weapons of mass destruction38 threatens the biological integrity of all natural systems that are the precondition for life on earth.39
Diamond, 495. For example, every year, 300 to 500 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes accumulate in water resources from industry. More than 80 per cent of the worlds hazardous waste is produced in the United States and other industrial countries.
36
The problems of failing states and the tremendous drain on resources in developing countries from AIDS and other pandemics, environmental stress, and corruption affect our ability to partner with allies and friends to meet humanitarian needs in the interest of promoting stability and democracy. This, in turn, poses challenges and requirementsgermane to the suppression of terrorism and limiting the spread of WMD, delivery systems, and advanced conventional weapons.
37
C = Chemical; B = biological; R = radiological; N = nuclear. Nuclear threats are categorically different and more horrendous in their potential impact on the worlds ecological integrity and human population than any of the other man-made threats under CBRN.
38
Countries pursuing their parochial self-interest are unlikely to fully account for.managing environmental spillover [externalities].Neither the costs of environmental degradation not the benets of environmental protection are typically accounted for in national income accounts and the timing separation of costs and benets creates perverse incentives to defer into the future necessary changes to economic and environmental policy. See Charles S. Pearson, Economics and the Global Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 341; Lamont C. Hempel, Climate Policy on the installment Plan in Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft, Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century, 5th Edition (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2003), 321.
39
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S AVI NG A P P E A RA NCE S I N DE S E RT S P I RI TUA L I TY: A N I N C ARNATI O NAL A NTHROP OL OG Y If so much of the appearances of human reality and history involves brokenness and suffering, how could Gods presence then only be discerned where all is good and beautiful?40 God must also be present in, not beyond, where things go terribly, horribly wrong places where we are broken and suffering.41 Can a God who cannot suffer be God? Might the cross be the preeminent place where God shows his engagement, his radical involvement and identity with human beings and their history, including our brokenness and suffering to the point of death.42 Could Gods gracious, loving solidarity and communion with the depths of human pain and suffering, of lostness and brokenness in the death of Christ, His Son, on the cross illuminate our Christian mission to also be in solidarity with others in their suffering? If Jesus, the Word of God, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself [kenosis]43, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness; and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point
In effect, the world itself is broken and it is the task of the faithful to bring light into this brokenness in the midst of their common suffering. This involves working in partnership with God in bringing good to the world. See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 191-2.
40
This view contrasts sharply from a theology of divine impassibility that posits an uninvolved God, resting in sublime self-enjoyment of the divine goodness and glory of creation.
41
This is Martin Luthers theologia cruces (theology of the cross), developed in 1518, which posits that, God displays himself visibly publicly and historically, only as the humiliated and tortured Jesus. Thus, it is useless to consider the transcendence of God, His glory and majesty, independently of the human encounter with him in the godlessness of the cross. God himselfshatters all our images [of Him] by addressing us in the cross of Jesus. See Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 1990), 157-8.
42 43
Kenosis may be the most underrated but important of all of the values attributed to Jesus and the core of what it means to be Christian in todays world. See http://www.scribd.com/doc/20763269/Ambassadors-of-Reconciliation.
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of death even death on a cross (Phil. 2:6-8):44 then, the means for us to participate in that divine mission and thereby realize the shape of Gods own economy as manifest by Jesus kenotic example is by giving that follows the same principle. That is self-sharing for the good of others. 45 For even these Others are the created versions, so to speak, of Gods own goodness. 46 Might we imagine, as Phillips Brooks did, that the Incarnation, more than just afrming Gods mercy, also serves to highlight and afrm humanitys worth to each other, as well as to God.47 Solidarity with the Other begins with accusatio sui, an alienation from Self, an emptying (kenosis) that results in metanoia, a turning away from ones
Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 83. In Jesus ministry as remembered in the Gospels, sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God. See David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 87.
44
Tanner, Economy of Grace, 85. Tanner suggests that the goods of Gods own life are already and forever ours in Christ by virtue of the fact that God has become one with humanity there. The Incarnation of Christ as one with humanity indeed is the way God has of giving to us of changing the character of our fundamental property, so to speak, that makes what we are whatever we might do, despite ourselves, even while we remain sinners (66). For through the Incarnation Christ is the way God comes, not to the righteous and the already blessed, who fully expect their privileges of moral standing and good fortune to bring with them all the further goods of life, but to sinners in the midst of their sin, to the poor crushed by burdens of pain and injustice, to all who seem to be owed nothing (64).
45
Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001, 43. This solidarity consists of being with one another in faith. Jon Sobrino, S.J., Being with One Another in Faith, in Jon Sobrino and Juan Hernandez Pico, S.J., Theology of Christian Solidarity, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 31.
46
Gillis J. Harp, Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Oxford: Rowman & Littleeld, 2003), 175.
47
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former path,48 a conversion to a new way that is seen as a taking of the cross, standing where Christ once stood. the emptying out of human wisdom and human righteousness. It is a true coming together with the Other in that it unveils the truth of our dependence on a God who reveals himself only in weakness, in our deep inter-dependence with others, and in our heartfelt common suffering.49 If God is free to act and to be present in all the diverse conditions of human life [even those times of human suffering], men and women are free to go nd him there. 50 What Jesus promises is that what we will nd is the truth. This is how Anna Rosmus speaks about her yearning for a place where truth and solidarity happen:
Metanoia is a physical movement and new engagement with the world, not just a change of attitude or intension. The thrust of the Spirit does not end with the discovery of the battered victim lying in the ditch. It drives us, to make a commitment to that victim to enter actively upon his or her pathway, to make a commitment to his or her liberation. See Roberto Oliveras Maguero, History of the Theology of Liberation, in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, eds. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY Orbis Books, 1993), 9 quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001), 177-8.
48
For example, a close reading of New Testament Scripture reveals that Jesus is not nave, he does not ask us to be passive [in the face of suffering], he does not require us to give up ghting against evil but he shows us that equivalence in evil, even in the name of justice, does not transform human society. What is required is an attitude that is not determined by what has already been done, an innovative, a creative gesture. Otherwise enclosure within a repetitive logic is inevitable, and the term of this logic is the exclusion or death of at least one of the parties. It is forgiveness that represents this innovative gesture: it creates a space in which the logic inherent in legal equivalences [i.e. counter-violence] no longer runs. See Christian Duquoc, The Forgiveness of God, Concilium 184 (1986): 39 quoted in Bell, 149. In this forgiveness of God and our fellow human, the endless cycle of violence and counter-violence as the response to human suffering is interrupted and holds out the promise of a peace [i.e. the cessation of suffering] that is more than the uneasy truce of adversaries (Bell, 150).
49
Williams 1990, 158-160, 163. William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) in his Obedience of a Christian Man builds on and extends Luthers theologia cruces by describing why the solidarity with others is a requirement of our God-given freedom. Rowan Williams summarizes Tyndales thinking: We are delivered by Christ from slavery into freedom; and that freedom is experienced and expressed as indebtedness not to God, but to each other.Gods service to us in Christ is both the model and the motive force for our relation to our neighbor (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). See Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 2003), 11-13.
50
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I would so much like to live among a people that does not fear or suppress the truth, a nation that admits its past mistakes. I would so much like to live in a nation where somebody who thinks against the stream can be an adversary but not necessarily an enemy. I would like to live among people who can take criticism, among people who will try to right their wrongs instead of trying to hide them. I would like to live in a country whose ofcial representatives help to expose dangers and ght against them rather than pretending they dont exist. I would like to live among a people who see each person as an individual, and I would like to see each human being allowed to be just that, a human being. I would like it if people could simply be here for each other. That is the country I would like to live in.51 What Rosmus describes is a practiced desert theology, a praxis where Humanity is at one with the divine in Jesus on the cross as everywhere else in Jesus life and that is what is saving about it.52 This presence of Jesus as model of relationality with Self, with God, with neighbor, and with creation then provides a realistic model for all of us living in community to begin to learn and to express Christian practices whereby taken from the cross we are returned to our original owner God, to Gods kingdom of unconditional giving, snatched out of a world of deprivation and injustice from which we suffer because of our poverty, our inability to pay what others demand of us. 53 Thus, our acts are perfected only as we incorporate what is Gods very own within ourselves; our actions are perfected only as we act along with and under the direction of God.we are ourselves only as we incorporate what is Gods very own within ourselves.we are ourselves and act
Anna Elizabeth Rosmus, Against the Stream: Growing Up Where Hitler Used To Live, Imagen von Tannenberg, trans. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2002), 3-7 quoted in Christopher Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, The Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63.
51
Kathryn, Tanner, Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrice: A Feminist-Inspired Reappraisal, in Anglican Theological Review 86/1 (Winter 2004), 43.
52
Kathryn Tanner, Economies of Grace in William Schweiker and Charles Mathewes, Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 374.
53
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according to our human nature only as we thereby act along with and under the direction of God.54 From the cross the Self is now dened with particularity and contingency, with plurality and ambiguity in this newly created space were humans act along with and under the direction of God. 55 What that means in practice is that as a member of the community of the faithful we become dedicated to what Jesus was dedicated to in his relations with other people as the primary form of relationality. Thus, this form of grace-full being-in-the-world becomes the practice for living in Christian community and models for the surrounding, non-confessing community what Christian solidarity with the Other actually looks like on-the-ground. 56 This alternative, desert-approach-to-living-in-the-world might be considered an incarnational atonement praxis that attempts to recover a God who works unswervingly for our good, who puts no value in death and suffering, and no ultimate value on self-sacrice for the good, a God-gift-giving abundance struggling against the forces of sin and death in the greatest possible solidarity with us that of incarnation.57 Thus, Jesus is obedient to the mission of God, and that is a good thing, but that obedience is itself the result of the same saving force of incarnation that accounts for what is saving about the cross. 58 Essentially, The whole of Jesus life before, as after his death is such a life-giving sacrice given by God for us to feed on, for our nourishment.59 Paradoxically, the cross of Christ does not signify Gods or the worlds destruction of Jesus, rather it is a concrete manifestation of salvation. 60
54 55
Tanner, Economies of Grace, 379-380.
David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 61. Kathryn Tanner, Trinity in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 331.
56 57 58 59 60
Tanner, Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrice, 47. Tanner, Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrice, 47. Tanner, Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrice, 56.
Stephen E. Fowl, Philippians (The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 69.
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With this incarnational mode-of-desert living, the question then becomes the question of theodicy posed by the Book Of Job: Can human beings have a disinterested faith in God that is, can they believe in God without looking for rewards and fearing punishments? Even more specically: Are human beings capable, in the midst of unjust suffering, of continuing to assert their faith in God and speak of God without expecting a return? 61 Might the Gospel be describing human History (Life) as a soul-making journey towards justice and compassion a feeling-along-with the suffering of others through a framework of love. 62 The model for what this stance towards justice and compassion looks like is Gods hesed (faithfulness/persevering love) that God has for humanity. The question is whether humankind can reect this hesed to each other and to God even in the face of destructive suffering, when there is no prospect for redemption or hope for the victim to recover from the suffering that they endure. 63 Thus, the answer to this cry from the psalmist:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but nd no rest. (Ps. 22:1-2, NRSV)
In this Psalm is the human Other answering: I am here, with you, in your pain, in your suffering. And the primary grammar of this speech that ensues en t nyn kairo (in the time of the now) is that of pastoral listening and presence.64 Our task as missioners of the Word becomes to interpret the suffering presented to us and to arrive at a provisional and conditional descrip-
Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. by Matthew J. OConnell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 1.
61
Michael Stoeber, Reclaiming Theodicy: Reections on Suffering, Compassion, and Spiritual Transformation (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005), 11, 29.
62 63 64
Stoeber, 60.
This time is essentially messianic time. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Patricia Dailey, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 53, 67-8.
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tion of truth as best as we are able;65 to add an important element to the process of being with the person and our community in solidarity.66 To become a good interpreter of suffering, what we need is a stance of compassionate engagement in the interpretive conversation that is open to the richness of the situation.67 The importance of this stance of engaged compassion and hospitality is to hold the truth that emerges from the dialogic of this particular situation lightly, praying: Train us, Lord, to ing ourselves upon the impossible, for behind the impossible is your grace and your presence; we cannot fall into emptiness. The future is an enigma, our road is covered by midst, but we want to go on giving ourselves, because you continue hoping amid the night and weeping tears through a thousand human eyes. Luis Espinal, a priest murdered in Bolivia for his Christian ministry to the poor 68 As seekers of the Word, each of us are called to strive to make good the evils of suffering, to transform the experienced pain positively, to move from empathy (a feeling-along-with-others) to a stance of compassion (a feeling-along-with-others through a framework of love). 69 Maybe all this entails is the speech of witness of Gods presence that confronts the powers that remain silent and unengaged in the face of the sea of suffering and misery prevailing in the world - to give voice to truth.70 And might it be that we are speaking thusly about God, not because we are desert spirituality
Truth for Paul is never anything but faith working through love (Gal. 5:6). See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Ray Brassier, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 92.
65
L. William Countryman, Interpreting the Truth: Changing the Paradigm of Biblical Studies (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 232.
66 67 68 69 70
Countryman, 231. Quoted in Gutierrez, 91-2. Stoeber, 45.
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (NY: 1963), 140-1 quoted in Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barths Theology, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 10.
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seekers, but we are seekers because we must speak thusly about our God.71 This is our gift to the world, a grace-lled gift through which God speaks His Word into a transformed world of freedom to walk with Christ, even through the trials of suffering and evil.72 And this gracelled gift of compassion comes from a love that is not a feeling of goodwill toward the neighbor [the Other], but the active search for that word given voice so that we can hear what God has to say to me and give to me through the neighbor, and also so that we can speak to what is real in the neighbor, not what suits or interests us and our agenda.73 For what the cross of Christ has revealed to us is that the route to authentic selfhood remains the radical discipleship of an imitatio Christi.74 It is the reality of the gift-giving God of love decisively revealed in the event of the cross of Jesus Christ that provides the answer to our willingness to speak the Word here and now in our desert home, even in the face of unending and unspeakable suffering and evil that confronts our world today in the here and now.75 P OSTSCRI P T: THE E MP I RE A ND I MP E RI A L I D E OL OG Y DURI NG THE TI ME OF J E S US , A ND PA UL S RE S P ONS E The empire that Paul formed ekklesia as a counter to was the Roman Empire: Pax Romana (peace and security) was the ofcial theology and propaganda motto of the Roman world after the establishment of the Principate, that is, after Augustus miraculous termination of the civil war and his
Based on thoughts of Karl Barth in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London and Philadelphia: 1976), 61 quoted in Busch, 7.
71 72 73
David Tracy 1987, 75.
Rowan Williams, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another (Boston: New Seeds Press, 2005), 83. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 435.
74 75
Tracy 1981, 435.
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establishment of universal peace and economy supported, to a large extent, by the slave labor of conquered peoples. The Principate was a political theology that assumed that the Roman empire contained the chosen people of God and was the divine vehicle to defeat the forces of chaos in the world and to restore heavenly order in the form of a return to the garden of the former Republic.76 In this theopolitical realm, the emperor was the paterfamilias of all the people (called Father), deied and became the sole ruler of a universe where taxis (order) was the primary aim of social and political structures achieved through a culture of meritocracy based on paideia (concept of heroic engagement and sacrice for the good of the state), competition, and nomos (the law) imposed through coercion and force. Justice (iustitia) was rst and foremost dened as that which was benecial to Rome and its citizens. All this is documented in the Acts of Augustus written in Greek on the walls of the numerous temples to Augustus, recounting the salvic power of the gospel of Caesar. This was a gospel that singled out the elite individual set apart by success--allegedly for the benet of the whole society. For example, Following the violent death of Claudius, the senate decreed his consecratio i.e. not only his life after death but also his assumption and apotheosis (the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god). The most penetrating political commentary on this system of empire occurs in the letters of Saint Paul. Paul challenges the soteria (salvation from the forces of chaos) represented by Caesar and his empire by claiming that pistis (Gods loyalty/faithfulness) is universal and democratic, that it applies to all people regardless of their class, race, gender, wealth or accomplishments and status in the world and this is expressed in Gods dikaiosyne (solidarity and justice) with the entire human race, not just the elite. Paul describes how those who claim to be superior or privileged, instead of making the world better, just cause more chaos and bring on catastrophe [echoes of the snake in Gen 2-3 that offers superior wisdom that leads only to disaster].
On the Recovery of Eden myth, see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden (New York & London: Routledge, 2004).
76
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Instead, Paul offers Jesus as the exemplar of an archetypal human/divine being who, through his faith of God, signies what real peace and security looks like - not a hegemony or authority of domination and oppression, but the prototype of a community pledged to life. Paul goes on to describe this community pledged to life, the ekklesia, an exemplary community of those who are set free from the false precepts of empiric power where, instead, identity is shaped by a radical democracy of justice, difference, freedom, equality, and solidarity that set the ethical conditions; where the critical events for the fate of the universe does not come to pass in heaven with God or among the gods. It does not involve force or violence or even the Law. It takes place within and through a community held together by faith, love, and hope. 77 For Paul, The kingdom of heaven [God] was a standard religious code phrase meaning an inbreaking of the divine realm into the realm of Caesar, Herod Antipas, Pilate, etc. - olam-ha-bah (the world to come). This vision relies on the view that the world we live in can be repaired (tikkun olam); that a better world is possible through action. Thus, the kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, a piece of real estate for the single saved soul; it is a communal vision of what could be and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debt are forgiven, when we stop judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve, but also hold them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our strength. It is the good news that the Torah can be discussed and debated, when the Sabbath is truly honored and kept holy, when love of enemies replaces the tendency toward striking back. 78
See Dieter Georgi, Theocracy: In Pauls Praxis and Theology, trans., David E. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 28, 34, 45, 59, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 86, 97, 99 from Lyle Brecht, The God Who Sacrices His Desire and Gives Hope to all Creation: An Exegesis of Genesis 2:4b-3:24 (March 2008) available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/10062312/
77
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 51-2.
78
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Desert Spirituality: An Incarnational Anthropology

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D E S E R T

BOOK DISCUSSION & REFLECTION

A TRANS FOR MATI ON OF THE HE A RT

Walter Bruggemann, Out of Babylon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 18.

Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 20, 33.

See Gen 3:11-13, NRSV (OConnor, 87). OConnor, 94.

OConnor, 131. OConnor, 137.

Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 106.

Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 106.

Tanner, Economies of Grace, 379-380.

Countryman, 231. Quoted in Gutierrez, 91-2. Stoeber, 45.

David Tracy 1987, 75.

Tracy 1981, 435.

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