Saturated with Shadows: Taking Space, Making Room - Pepperdine Bible Lectureships

We never come to knowcompletelynever for sure

It appearsbut it doesn’t

The heart burnedbut grew chilly

Is it HimHe remains silentIs it YouHe disappears

There is just breadhands and a gesture

The face always differentalways a new face

The evening is drawing nearand the day bowsIt’s the time of restwater wine bread

Why didn’t you ask directlydidn’t hold His handsdidn’t tie shadow to bench

We stand thusthe discipleswho didn’t get to Emmausour arms heavywith amazement

Was it HimIt wasFor sureWhere

The night swept away the tracesLet us ever more quickly

Ashley Gay – Postmodern TheologyLecture Transcript

carry to the othersthe certainty of doubt

- Anna Kamienska, “Emmaus”1

“We stand thus/ the disciples/ who didn’t get to Emmaus/ our arms heavy/ with

amazement….The night swept away the traces/ Let us ever more quickly carry to the

others/ the certainty of doubt.” What would this mean: to simultaneously

have our arms heavied with the amazement of God’s glory, while

also proclaiming the shadows—the questions, the uncertainty, or

rather, the ‘certainty of doubt’? For a tradition that takes

seriously evangelism and scriptural knowledge, we may assert the

first image. We carry with us the glory of God into many nations,

and concordantly, we boast the assurance of our scriptural

conviction: “Jesus is Lord!” We carry the banner of a light

dawning as Love upon the world, “the people living in darkness have seen a

great light….” This hope resounds from the Book of Isaiah to its

fulfillment in Matthew’s gospel (Isaiah 9:1-2, Matthew 4:16). It

is the trace that the night cannot sweep away. In Matthew’s text,

this re-appropriated prophecy references Jesus, and the kingdom

that is near, that will come.

1 Anna Kamienska, “Emmaus,” Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska (Brewster: Paraclate Press, 2007), 58-59.

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But Matthew’s testimony to the light also follows the

account of Jesus in the desert. There the light is blinding,

scorching, and the dark chill brings the devil’s questions. We

smile, vicariously triumphant, for Christ has used his scripture

to thwart uncertainty! And yet, we notice that he is not simply

combating the devil with the word—for even the devil can quote

scripture. Rather, Jesus summons scripture in order to resist

consummation, to proclaim a radical relation to God that subverts

satisfaction, postpones certainty. This is not a God who looks to

satisfy Jesus’ every craving—whether the literal hunger for

bread, or the definitive proof regarding his identity (4:4-7).

This is not even a God who establishes a Messiah as self-

sufficient power (4:8). Jesus quotes scripture not only as a sign

of his relation to God, but also in deference to God’s plan. This

plan is not a splendorous kingdom secured by worshipping lies

(4:9-10), but neither is it a kingdom constructed by a reason

that tests or proves God.

This Jesus is a way of seeing through the darkness, not the

immediate eradication of doubt. He subjects himself to the

aridity of God’s apparent absence, while, yes, accompanied by the

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spirit. It is with this same spirit that he subverts theological

notions of sin and deserved punishment. He provides a new way of

seeing through the night without chasing away all shadow. John

affirms Jesus as this light that provides vision, the means by

which we even have vision at all. Just before healing a man blind

since birth, Jesus silences the speculations, elusively

explaining, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night

is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

…While he is in the world, he is the light? And now?

If his works of healing in John and his fulfillment of the

word in Matthew’s desert render him as ‘light of the world’—what

does that mean for us, today? How can we use scripture, not as

end to desire, but an opening toward love?—Not as a triumphant

“Q.E.D,” but as a humble call to, “Turn and see that the kingdom

of God is near. Here but not yet. In but not of.”

It is this liminal site that I evoke today: the place before

hunger is completely satiated, before truth is definitively

proven—as if a postulate to silence all doubts. I summon us to

the place of desire, the desert. Here, mystery does not require

our explanations so much as our fidelity, our embodiment. And by

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embodiment, I mean it in the richest sense: word made flesh, an

ongoing translation made possible in the spirit.

But first, I will attempt to clarify the terms. I remember

my frustration with the word mystery as it applies to faith.

Rewind three semesters of graduate school. First day at the

‘prestigious’ Harvard Divinity. I had signed up for a course on

“literature and religious education,” facilitated by a faculty

member from the Disciples of Christ tradition. I recall my

enthusiasm regarding instruction from a ‘Campbellite cousin.’ I

had heard suspicions that Harvard Divinity is unfriendly to faith

stances, or rather, too friendly to all in a sort of cheap

tolerance. Those were the rumors, but of course, peace comes at a

high cost. Surely I would not have to pay out my convictions in

silence.

However when the first class began, Professor Paulsell

suggested ‘literature and religious education’ as deeply rooted

in the preservation of mystery, ambiguity, irreducibility. I had

been warned of these words. I had been instructed by our heritage

of ‘Scottish Common Sense’ that ‘mystery’ was a sort of wild

card, cop out, or even a conversation stopper. Afraid of stepping

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on someone’s toes? Declare the mystery of faith. Afraid of

sharing your convictions? Chalk differences up to divine mystery.

But Professor Paulsell was claiming a mystery that gave birth to

conversation, to the variegated sites of texts, stories, rituals,

even my beliefs. Is it so that religion is born of out of mystery

—when I had only heard ‘mystery’ as stalemate?

I remember one class, passionate and probing, I was

particularly humbled by my confusion of terms. I asked candidly,

“Why am I considered manipulative or power-hungry if I want to

speak openly about my convictions concerning religion….or God?

Shouldn’t the seminary classroom secure such a space, should not

the church even ensure a place for this open dialogue? This

inter-confession?”2

A particularly gentle student responded, “But why are you so

insistent to speak about God? How will you know if your words are

not simply YOU WRIT LARGE? Are you wanting to bring people to God

or to your particular view of God?”

2 A year later, I found supremely helpful Professor Kearney’s work in hermeneutics and hospitality, see especially: Richard Kearney, Anatheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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I was a bit stunned, because to my understanding, Christ’s

claritas was his caritas—his light was his love. And to speak about

this love was not to compel others toward my enlightenment, but to

whisper with the healed man in John, “I was blind but now I

see!”3

I tell this story to relay one connotation of mystery: the

sort of destabilizing, de-centering ambiguity that leaves us

stunned and unable to speak. I left that class discouraged,

silenced. I conceded the futility of words, as if my voice were

no longer needed. After all, my voice would always be equated

with the privation of its view. The limitations of communication

had me coming to the same aporia every semester since: how would

I know if I was worshipping my words, my views—as if God was a

possession instead of the mystery that possessed me? This

question perhaps is doomed to failure, because from the beginning

it asks, “how will I know?” Knowledge of God is not the checklist

3 I remember the words of poet and musicologist, Vera Pavlova: “I am in love, hence free to live/ by heart, to ad-lib as I caress./ A soul is light when full,/ heavy when vacuous./ My soul is light. She is not afraid/ to dance the agony alone,/ for I was born wearing your shirt,/ will come from the dead with that shirt on.” Vera Pavlova, “42,” If There is Something to Desire: 100 Poems, trans. Steven Seymour (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 46.

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of discernment, but the ongoing conversation made possible by

love. As the great skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, reminds

…if there is no certainty, neither will there be a system of certainties, that is to say a science. From which it follows that there will be no science of life either….As we examine this view closely, it looks to usmore like a prayer than like the truth.4

I would suggest, when we speak of the certainty of love, it

more resembles prayer than a system of precepts. I say prayer as

the form of desire, receptive reaching—words wagered and

responses to come. But how to speak about God as prayer? After

all, for so many the truth of God’s love is irrelevant because

there is no God. And if there is no God, speaking as prayer may

prove an openness void of significance. We are left in the pause

of Holy Saturday, when our relativisms are freed from

relationship.

Fortunately, Christianity does not halt at the mystery of

the cross. But I will ask an honest question, born from my

experience at the cross: have you ever sensed the endless abyss

of words, as if hung between thieves? Have you found your words

about God scourged and proven less powerful than you had hoped? I4 Quoted in Martha Nussbaum. “Love’s Knowledge.” Love’s Knowledge. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 261.

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am not suggesting that to evangelize today is to be like the

thief who steals words for which he cannot pay. I am neither

suggesting that I was the Word persecuted by my peers that day in

class. Rather, I sense that in our own ways we feel the blows

against our views and the weakened capacities of words to

communicate them. This dysfunctional ambiguity, this mystery of

the cross without the hope for raised meanings—can be experienced

in every death that has us questioning our very finitude. Whether

it is the dead ends of a conversation in class, or the death of a

loved one that raises questions of theodicy…we run up against

reason’s finitudes. And this mystery can feel like instability:

attempts to walk without gravity or exist as matter without form.

Here finitudes are not the constraints that permit us traction,

mobility, but the paralysis of formlessness. We feel as if beings

hurled toward death without footholds, nevertheless consumed in

projects that postpone or promote authentic living. As Martin

Heidegger’s earlier works suggest, in this state, we experience

our humanness as boredom or anxiety. Finitude awaits or it

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terrifies us into silence; either way, in these moments, every

word might as well be no word.5

If it is still too suspect to compare the crucifixion of the

Word with the deconstruction of words and meaning, permit me to

complicate—as the cross would—exactly whose ideological

investments are under question and whose mysteries permit a

lasting space for life.

A more fitting analogy returns us to the blind man in the

book of John. Do you recall what occurred? He went to the pool of

Siloam, his healing, his homecoming…But then, the theologians

arrive. Not unlike devils in the desert, they surface with

questions about Jesus’ identity, his authority, his deficiencies.

They alternate between asserted knowledge and perhaps, genuine

questioning, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the

Sabbath…What have you to say about him? …How is it that you can

see?...Give glory to God by telling the truth…We KNOW this man is a sinner!

What did he do to you?...How did he open your eyes?”

5 Martin Heidegger. “What is Metaphysics?” Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). This is not so say that Heidegger is a nihilist—as some perversions of his work suggest. See Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,1989), 11-14. However, there are certainly some gaping questions in a Being that amounts to Nothing’s chaotic openness.

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It may be that their questions are genuine, as I generously

suggested. But by the end of the chapter, they have cornered the

blind man on multiple occasions. He responds with some irony, “I

have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to

hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?”6 I

enjoy the daring humor (perhaps naivete?) of his counter-

questions. He distills a critique that cuts both ways.

In this moment the Pharisees’ ceaseless questioning might

resemble what some characterize as deconstruction. You may have

heard this term in literary theory, but generally people assume

that it is an ethos underwriting our ‘postmodern’ society. There

are rumors that the deconstructionist’s impulse is parasitic—

poisoning the same body of ‘truths’ from which it derives its

living.7 Many consequently reason that this parasitic curiosity

deconstructs in order to vacate meaning, or empty its lifeblood

in exchange for poison. This is terribly grim, but many also

characterize deconstruction as the play of signifiers. This play

6 The above questions are extracted from the pericope of John 9:13-34.7 This is not altogether helped by Mark C. Taylor, but he is at least more nuanced than what most caricature. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984).

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is hardly play for us, perhaps, because it reveals substantial

struggles: the competing claims of power, knowledge, or libido.

So on the one hand, we have this reading of deconstruction,

of the endless probing that renders truth open-ended. But there

is a less playful side than the caricature of, “Anything goes.” I

would ask that we read, with generous attention, deconstruction’s

many claims. This deconstruction, as exercises of incredulity,

helps us reclaim the place of mystery and sacrament in faith.

After the ‘anything goes,’ these deconstruction(s) ask: what are

the casualties of what has already passed through? What traumas

surface, what traces occur in our claims of truth? A

deconstructionist in this sense is not unlike a medical

researcher or structural engineer; she knows that truths as

wounds cannot be healed with more truths. Nevertheless the wounds

and symptoms can be examined by more questions: What causes

someone to inflict that wound—to speak that truth, to confer that

reading or compel that sight? And what happens to the

irreplaceable life of the other when all we can see are his

wounds?

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The Pharisaical picture implicates us all. Before we too

readily align the Pharisees’ questions with the

deconstructionist’s work, let us remember that our faith

tradition also arises from speculative metaphysics and Lockean

skepticism. The Pharisees believed they possessed the truth, the

light by which they could discern another’s righteousness. They

believed that this Jesus must be a sinner and therefore no threat

to their authority. So they set about to interrogate others about

their beliefs to make sure that their truth brings the right glory

(orthodoxy) to God. And yet, it seems the Pharisees not only doubt

the blind man’s answers, they (secretly) doubt their own

assessment. If Jesus is a sinner, his voice is silenced before

their religious views. But if he is a prophet, there is the

matter of, ‘Where did he come from? From Moses, from our heritage

of truth?’ (John 9:28-29). Despite this unknown origin and

dubious authority, they cannot ‘write off’ Jesus because he is

healing people. His origin is a mystery that is taking form among

their present; and yet, it is not a form that is easy to hold.

Jesus’ ministry and teachings cannot be summarized into a legal

code. Because he cannot be held as an object, he can neither be

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easily disposed of nor manipulated. The cross may be the attempt

to make an object of this elusive other, to pin him down, to

“hold His hands” or “tie [his] shadow to [the judgment] bench.”8

This strange man’s truth however is a binding that frees, a

wound that heals. The Pharisee’s sense the wound without its balm,

the bind without its freedom; thus Jesus later calls them

spiritually blind. (John 9:35-41). Hence we arrive at the mutual

critique in John 9, or rather the shared mirror of the

Enlightenment and deconstruction. Both impulses can be asked, in

all seriousness: how do we go about seeking truth? Why are we

investing in the search? Whose stories are we interrogating with

our beliefs? Do we care about their responses? Where are our

blind spots?

Now some manifestations of deconstruction would claim, “Ah,

I’m not in it for truth but for playful doubting!” This

questioning carries on for its own sake until truth, like

blindness healed, asks, “Why do you care to ask these questions?

Are you wanting to know the truth, too?”

8 Kamienska, 58-59.

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Michel Foucault and his disciples might respond, ‘I am not

in it for a single thematized truth, but to expose how we

perpetuate or subjugate knowledge through totalizing structures.’

Foucault would interrogate the Pharisees as an institution of

power, exposing how they simultaneously acquire their information

from the man whom they later subjugate, “You were steeped in sin

at birth; how dare you lecture us!” (John 9:34).

As opposed to leaders who would seek support from those whom

they subjugate, Foucault attempts the reverse. He offers up

knowledge from its underside, subverting prides of place by

overturning structures. He considers the soil and genealogical

structures that serve or sever power’s roots. He is less

concerned with the traditional question of power—“how is the

discourse of truth, or quite simply philosophy…able to fix limits

to the rights of power?” This would seem the Pharisee’s question,

no less a human one concerned with survival, perhaps. But again,

Foucault would question this rhetoric: the correlation of the

word ‘human’ with concern for survival. How is it that the human

instinct is survival via ‘competition,’ instead of another

discourse—say, a ‘collaboration’? Foucault is most concerned with

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discourse in its purest sense, “what rules of right are

implemented by the relations of power in the production of the

discourses of truth?”9 If on an institutional level, preservation

of identity requires the denigration of outsiders, what

discourses secure this as true? He seeks causes from the effects

up (instead of assessing power from the top down). This reminds

us, perhaps, of a Christ who spoke of kingdoms from the

peripheries, from the borderlands of subjugated knowledge.

Institutions of suppressed powers, from the prison to the mental

ward, summon Foucault’s conversations. Arguably, these are the

same sites Christ enters. But Foucault does so with the question,

“how did we arrive here?” His genealogies function to illuminate

dissenting opinions and institutionally suppressed beliefs.

Similarly, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, accompanied

by the specters of a holocaust ask, ‘How can we even begin to

speak of truth, of a discernible God, after Auschwitz?’ If

unified truth has scarred us with the terror of oppressive

regimes, is it possible to think otherwise about truth? In

response, they share a concern for the other’s truths. In saying 9 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 93-94.

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this word, truth, I suspect it is out of place for them. Like

Foucault, they are not after truth as The One—if oneness is

construed as the whole that has no holes through which outsiders

might enter. Of utmost concern to these thinkers is the other’s

singular particularity, always in danger of being passed over in

silence or relegated as inferior. Consequently, they break open

texts and totalizing structures that have sealed themselves off

from the infinite others (or for Levinas, the infinitely Other,

the Divine).10

For Levinas, the other encounters me with a face that wounds

me and summons my ethical response. This other is considered

‘totally other,’ and as such is irreplaceable. This implies a

precariousness of the other, who then all the more holds over me

a claim for peace and vigilance.11 The claim that summons my

“Here I am!” is more significant than the structures of truth

that might inhibit my inability to regard the face. If Levinas

frees us to see the infinite in every other, it is with the

intent of showing that the in-finite is both the non-finite and

10 Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 11 Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1996).

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that which rests in the finite. In short, in the face of the

other, we bear witness to the divine as infinite: in-but-not-of

the finite, inhabiting but not reduced to its limitations (or our

synthesis that renders the other a simulacrum). The Other is

experienced as one who carries time—her own memories and life

span, for example, that is distinct from my own sense of time.

This encounter of my time and the other’s time breaks my false

syntheses—whether the temporal present (as a collapse of future

and past) or self (as self-sufficient, transcendental ego).12

In a similar way, Derrida’s textual readings witness to an

endless appearance of the more-than-one (n+1…).13 Paradoxically,

this means that the text and the person is less than total. If

there are always more readings, one can never put a period where

life puts an ellipses. There is not only more than one reading to

a text, there are multiple traces that defer this text’s meaning.

To claim that the text is autonomously One is to deny not only

its relation but its relatability. This enters into his

understanding of religion’s inherent paradox. To say that the

12 Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” The Religious, ed. John Caputo(Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).13 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51.

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sacred text is ‘set apart’ or wholly other is to deny that it

uses language. The text is not so sacred as to shirk words, or

even radically ‘secular’ individuals.

Thus, from the beginning of materiality and form, the

perceiver engages in an endless hermeneutic, or interpretation.

Our interpretations may soil or wound the text; so too our words

about or to God are a lapse from God. Our reaches exceed our

grasps; but this is not a nihilistic condemnation of reaching.

Rather, it is the hope that meaning as constant reach will open

us to engage what is foreign—what is beyond our boundaries and

conceptual reaches. Words are in perpetual gestation (or,

unending sterility). For Derrida, we will not know what meanings

will arrive—stillborn or healthy justice.14 Meanings are always

to come, but not obligated to arrive. Like Plato’s khora, they

reside in the space that is no one space: a womb irreducible to

the meanings/beings inscribed and erased in/on it.

For Derrida, religious meanings (‘messianisms’) therefore

cannot be definitively claimed or sealed. Or if they are sealed,

they are secret even to us; only the invisible God can see in us 14 Jacques Derrida, “Adieu,” Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford Unversity Press, 1997), 1-13.

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the secret. Just because we have unveiled faces, does not mean

that God is without veil (2 Corinthians 3:18). We are like

scrolls that will not be opened even to ourselves…not yet.15 If

religions or philosophies over time have claimed to break the

seal and set free definitive meaning, this would seem dubious. If

truth is tied to justice and liberation, where is this truth

hiding, from where is it waiting to emerge from secrecy?

So Derrida would suggest that pure religion is a-theistic;

religion equates God’s presence with our words or ideas about God

(which are not God). God’s presence is inextricably tied to his

absence. Every theological expression will strive to speak for

God, but in so doing, it will actually eclipse God. Thus language

about God experiences a perpetual retreat into the receding

horizon of the ‘to come.’ If you do not ‘believe’ Derrida on this

point, look at how many theological texts, devotional books,

commentaries, spiritual autobiographies and art objects

proliferate in pursuit of this God. It would seem that for

Derrida, God’s full presence would mean humanity’s silencing. If

God is fully ‘here,’ why all our words chasing him? Faith and its15 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 90-93.

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embodiment are outmoded if all is already seen. Thus, Derrida

would rather posit that presence—whether as absolute meaning or

God—is always on the way. From our view, this will be the same as

meaning always receding. This is not to put off what one can

enjoy now as freedom, so to speak. Rather it is the

acknowledgment that ‘truths’ have not historically set us free,

so we must free truth from a definitive locale in the history of

meanings.

Consequently, he advises that we save God’s name for God’s

possible arrival. We must save it from the concepts that would trap

God and therein trap others. Derrida might be wary of evangelism

as a process through which we conquer others by subsuming them

into the self. In fact, we might hear him echo Jesus’ words to

the Pharisees, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees,

you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single

convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much

a child of hell as you are” (Matthew 23:15). In the wake of

religiously justified violence, Derrida’s theory expresses a

(justified) fear that religious triumphalism will commit violence

against its outsiders.

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To counteract this peril, he suggests that the Other is not

simply appearing in one (‘common sense’) face of the formal text;

rather, endless, irreducible Others have left fingerprints on the

text’s meanings over time. These traces function as wounds. We

wound texts and truth claims with our own readings; but we also

can, ideally, let these wounds speak.16 Deconstruction attempts

to expose the infinite wounds in a text,17 in order to let once-

suppressed whispers speak.18 In this letting speak, the other is

deferred to as completely other; consequently, ossified meanings

are substituted with pliant phrasing.19 The cyclical structure

and porous layering of Derrida can often be impenetrable. There

is much irony in that, since his impenetrability seems at odds

with his endeavor to expose fault lines or gaps.20 Eventually,

all the gaps may join to create one large aporetic abyss. And

16 Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).17 I am nearly tempted to call him a doubting Thomas figure, the poking aroundin the wounds. Waiting to proclaim God until those wounds are accompanied by undoubted presence. I mean this connection in high esteem of both the Biblicalfigure and the man who, with ‘prayers and tears’ desires the justice to come.18 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).19 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass. (London & New York: Continuum, 2002), 5-6. 20 Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 139-156.

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yet, we are drawn to the often dizzying rhetoric, as one might be

to the sublime. Because his rhetoric is a slippery hold, we are

captive to its layers. They hold us in a strangle of tangles,

perhaps. But it is a web with holes, that permits every entry to

be an exit. We can dismiss his texts as nothing. For Derrida,

these options are purposefully preserved to privilege the

reader’s readings.

I apologize if my lecture has been an experience of Babel

for you. You may be wondering—to where are we building? I will

return to the foundation to which I keep alluding: faithful

confessions with room for doubt, mystery with possibilities for

meaning. In both cases, the inherent flexibility is not in favor

of diluted faith propositions but ongoing growth. And so now we

add translation: the steps that grow between the ‘I don’t know’

to ‘Now I see’ to ‘I will say’ to ‘I must love.’ This is a

circular revolution, not a linear progression. Translation as

such is ongoing, always seeking what has been lost and what can

be recovered. The former consideration—what is lost in

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translation—we consider also in the superlative sense: is the

capacity for translation a lost cause?

Often in seminary, frankly in life, this seems so. But there

are subtle moments of connection, small at first. Mustard seed

comments, then eyes lighten or widen, mouths open to say, “Yes!

Yes! That’s exactly what I meant.” Sometimes, the communication

is so ripe that its weight can only be born in the mutual

understanding of silence, or laughter, or lovemaking. Intimacy.

This is the “profound mystery” of communing that Paul alludes to

when he writes to the Ephesians, “For this reason a man will

leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the

two will become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). This serves as a

parable for the communication between Christ and the church,

between self and other, between mystery and meaning. In these

translations of intimacy, doubts that promote our questioning can

also make way for nuanced clarifications. And as in true dialogue

(or true love), there cannot be a collapse of self into other.

Then dialogue is simply an interior monologue. Conversation

resists converting the other to my image. (Only God can make

others into His image without compromising their singularities,

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their particularities). In proclaiming the “certainty of doubt,”

we are learning our words in search of the Word that perpetually

breaks and remakes us. Here but not yet, present but not

perfected, God reminds. This kingdom cannot afford to exchange

the mystery of community for the constructions of theological

towers.

If Derrida is elusive, it is not so much to be hopelessly

esoteric, as it is to allow for multiple readings and re-

readings, to speak to every other in his mind, and those not in

our midst. Derrida’s deconstruction is not for the purpose of

decimation, but rather destabilization. You might say he is like

an engineer warning of the fault-lines in proclaimed structural

integrities. His critiques may pester. Deconstruction may appear

to be a violence all its own. After all, the very word

‘deconstruct’ is not very far from ‘destroy.’ However, the –con-

here is crucial: the with, the together. To construct, from

construere, is to heap up, to build up, to come together to erect a

structure. This accumulation in order to build rightly conjures

the story of Babel’s tower. I would encourage us to hold that

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story as a parable for the deconstructionist’s maneuver. God

thwarted the tower’s planning because the people were attempting

to build a structure to heaven without having need of God, the

Wholly Other. Their structure was based on one language, one

project. Their peace was one of ease, functional so long as the

project and language was the same. But would they continue to

relate to one another, love one another, if they were radically

different, confused? If they became mysteries to one another, and

in part, to themselves?

Listen to God’s words and hear with me what is (perhaps) at

stake for Derrida, “If as one people speaking the same language

they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be

impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their

language so they will not understand each other” (Genesis 11:6-

7). One could read God’s deconstruction of speech and structure

as nuisance. One could also see it as the infliction of nuances

that keep us in constant conversation, always wrestling in love

to translate an unspeakable name. As the Babel narrative reminds,

this name can never be one we fashion for our ‘selves;’ rather,

the Name is ever for our others. If we accuse postmodernism as

26


the deconstruction of coherent selves, we cannot abscond from its

compellingly exposures of inconsistency. Deconstruction may

concern itself most with the traces of Babel; but is it my

belief, that for us, it can also provide a profound appreciation

for Pentecost. To Pentecost: we are heading there now in the

Christian liturgical calendar. And it is with Pentecost in mind

that I am pointing in terms of sacrament--our mysterious capacity

to relate to one another as wholly other, while sensing

inexplicably, a desire to commune. Here, we benefit from Rico

Sneller’s expression of Derridean différance:

…the very incapacity of language to attain definitivelyits denoted meanings or signified objects, the very impotence of language to extend a supposed non-linguistic ‘reality’ that would be its significant foundation. But at the very same time language is not wholly enclosedon itself. Were this true, then language or speech acts would not be possible at all.21

What Derrida uncovers is the testimony of spaciousness,

radically ‘preparing the way’: the exchanges between self and

other that mark distinctions, thereby making communication an

ongoing and possible effort. We are unable to claim that we fully

know God or that we fully know others (conceptually); but we are 21 Rico Sneller, “God as War: Derrida on Divine Violence,” God in France: Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 153.

27


also unable to claim that others are altogether unknowable. The

space that creates distance is the same space that enables

communion. Individuation makes possible intersection. The gaps in

knowledge (gnosis) are the same gaps we fill with the desire to

know and be known (intimacy, love in the Hebraic sense of ahav).22

The capacity to convey meaning requires drawing deeply from a

historical reserve of meaning-making, while wagering again and

again transcendence (what escapes the present moment, the

determined concept, the individual self). …Do you hear in this a

community that functions as a body—such as Paul discloses in 1

Corinthians 12?

In conversation, interpretations are not without identities’

limitations. Like a fruit that ripens to a certain size, our

words and views will decidedly press against the skin of their

own volume. They will feel the limitations of container and

necessarily so. We encounter the inchoate as an excess streaming

through finitude, and not the full-gloried face of God in which

all binding finitudes collapse or unloose. This is significant on

at least two levels. If we recognize that meaning is not fully 22 On the requisite of separation, see Paul Claudel, The Essence of the Bible (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1957), 16.

28


present in one person, or one congregation, or one

interpretation, we will listen closer to other languages: hearing

their distinct cadences, and ever endeavoring to speak

At stake in meaning-full discourse is always its mobility:

its vehicle, what it can carry, whom it serves, whom it neglects,

and what it receives. In his book on the sacramentality of the

arts, George Steiner’s concedes to deconstruction on one count,

“Derrida’s formulation is beautifully incisive [when he says]

‘the intelligible face of the sign remains turned to the word and

the face of God.’”23 Words are not simply holograms: appealing

but ultimately empty and illusory. Because the logos is half-

turned to the world, half turned to “the face of God,”

signification is a conversation between the Infinite and the

finite. Christ’s incarnation is this conversation. Our attempts

to think as prayer and live as praise testify to the same ongoing

inter-translation. It necessarily follows that sacraments are as

well. As visible forms that point to the invisible realities, or

as the infinite grace in the finite matter, the sacramental wager

is a mystery of proportion, similarity not sameness. Augustine 23 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),

119.

29


approaches this mystery when he asks God, “But what place is

there in me where my God can enter into me? ‘God made heaven an

earth.’ Where may he come to me? Lord my God, is there any room

in me which can contain you?”24

Epistemology as com-prehension renders this question as what

and how to take (prendre)? Thought becomes a net, and its

forgetting the tangled holes. But to “take” connotes a mind that

makes thoughts like objects to be handled. This is nuanced by the

Latin concept of sapientia—to taste over time, numerous meals that

never completely satisfy our hunger. In the early Middle ages,

theologians considered epistemology as an activity of developing

a taste for truth: receiving it from without, savoring within,

and discarding what does not nourish. This process repeated of

course, not unlike our daily digestion. But some may protest this

analogy of consumption and rejection; it neglects the dangers of

poisonous discoveries or unhealthy teaching.

So Hans Urs von Balthasar re-envisions sapientia in terms that

are more relational, more redolent of human interaction than mere

consumption. Our tasting requires mutual ingestion: what is 24 Augustine, Confessions I, i, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.

30


essential about the other becomes part of the self in its

internalization. Thought is not simply input-output, take-

discard; it is receiving, gleaning—feeding in order that we might

live, might give. Von Balthasar thus regards sapientia as deeply

interactive and constitutive. This implies that “God gives

himself in his self-revelation from outside (in salvation

history) and inside (in infused faith, hope and love) to

participation.”25 This participation founds worship: both

through liturgy and living as praise. John the Baptist, the adept

herald, emblematizes worshipful living, “He must become greater,

I must become less” (John 3:30). Participation in revelation is

predicated upon God making way and humans making room. But, how

will we know what (or whom) to let in?

In the Augustinian view, our ability to perceive God’s glory

lies within our ability to see the Whole within the fragment, the

image of God in creation.26 This not only requires a willingness

to remain open (so wide as to permit the possibility of a Whole),25 Von Balthasar, Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 47.26 Augustine thus defines divine beauty as “the presence of the Whole in the parts of the fragment, where each of these parts is in harmony with the others, and where together they relate to that which is other than themselves.” Bruno Forte, “Divine Beauty: Augustine,” The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 4.

31


but also an ability to become present to creation. Presence

entails reaching out while receding, a pattern we come to know in

prayer. Even Christ’s prayer for the unity of the world bespeaks

this interplay: sending and receiving, giving unto giving, God’s

reaching out and taking in, reconciling parts within a Whole.

Christ’s prayer circulates like breath and blood, purifying:

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that theworld may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:22-23)

The participation of our presence and our perception is thus

an act of love, a faithful dialogue. In this motion of revolving

integration and concomitance, we hear St. Augustine’s distinction

of Christ’s pure enactment of beauty, “We understand that there

is something so similar to the Only and the Unique, the Beginning

from which issues the unity of all that is in some way one, that

it is able to achieve this Beginning in itself and to identify us

with it.”27 For St. Augustine, our understanding of God is thus a

function of the Word, its recollection in the sensorial world,

and its hints of Unity residing within us.

27 De vera religione 36, 66 as translated by Bruno Forte (Ibid., 10).

32


Creation’s beauty is not diminished by this finitude;

neither does truth’s incompletion fully undermine its traction.

Finitudes need not give way to aporias, but bring us nearer to

our dust. We are humbled not to our own hollowness or

speechlessness, but to a place that desires movement,

conversation, breath. On the theo-logical level, existential

anxiety (the felt aporia of speechlessness) is precisely the

abyss that God can seed. And I do mean seed, not flood. The chaos

and the void need not exclude the possibilities of God’s

recreating love: a light that creates the space with our shadows.

As Von Balthasar concludes, “Just as the first creation arose

ever anew out of sheer nothingness, so, too, this second world—

still unborn, still caught up in its first rising—will have its

sole origin in this wound [of Christ], which is never to close

again. In the future, all shape must arise out of this gaping

void, all wholeness must draw its strength from the creating

wound.”28 This creating wound is God’s simultaneous absence and

presence. This is a God who creates meaning from voids, fills us

with shadow’s stand-in, until we become like wombs, shadows

28 Real Presences, 153.

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awaiting the light of love. Now we see in part, and then we will

know in full. Until then, there are translations in love. The

difficulty of love is how to communicate a deeply interior

mystery to others, who in themselves carry their own mysteries.

But deep calls to deep. And in this space of différance, the

voices become, as roaring and plenteous as a waterfall (Psalm

42:7). This perhaps can only be achieved when one’s expressions do

not eradicate those of others, but bear it in fluidity:

simplicity, humility.

We engage dialogically (diachronically), as allusions fully

present in one arena in order to credibly point to the other.29

It is not that our lives represent God’s presence perfectly and

thus replace God. Rather, our lives as sacraments can allude to

and serve God’s power in the present. To serve is to both offer to

others and defer to God.

Sacrament and service thus stem from the capacity to give

(be present) with respect to an incomplete givenness

(acknowledged absence). The word “sacrament” derives from the

29 See Thomas Merton’s critique of the cult of experience in “Theology of Creativity,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions PublishingCorporation, 1980), 360-361.

34


Latin word sacramentum—historically, the oath of allegiance or a

promise given.30 This ‘oath of allegiance’ derives from the

context of soldiers in battle. When we come to mix battle images

with sacramentality there is no doubt some confusion. How to

combine asserted force with God’s mysterious love? Tertullian

chose sacramentum in the third century to replace the original

Greek word mysterion. Mysterion referred to the “secret thoughts of

God, which transcend human reason and therefore must be revealed

to those whom God wishes these secrets to reach.”31 When Jesus

uses the word, he speaks of the mysteries of the Kingdom being

given to the disciples. The mysteries of God are a function of

God’s self-giving. Anamnestic witness is unsettled and

unsettling. Re-calling and re-constituting God’s incomplete and

ongoing presentation, believers are, by definition, faithful re-

presentatives of an inchoate promise. Grace upon grace: gift unto

gift, without end, serving until he comes....32

30 William Everett Johnson. The Politics of Worship (Cleveland: United Church Press), 63.31 James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000),181.32 Robert Cording, “Gift,” Walking with Ruskin (Fort Lee: CavanKerry Press, 2010),90-1.

35


Consequently, humility permeates Paul Claudel’s sacramental

theology. Sacramental living means serving, giving. It means

remaining close to the ground of experiences in order to credibly

point to the diversity of meanings. As a poet and playwright, the

universal experience cannot be unhinged from the concrete, the

particularities and singularities of every other. In his view,

“everything in nature is a symbol and everything that happens is

a parable.”33 Thus, the world and its history become poetic

expressions in service of Divine meaning. But this giving fills.

Forms and events empty themselves as vessels to signify what is

beyond; and yet, by doing so, they are filled with the richness

of infinite interpretations. They are not devalued by their

disproportion, nor diminished by the wide interpretations; they

are refined and renewing. Likewise, when humans offer themselves

to “give testimony concerning God,” they do so as finite forms

admitting the infinite. And this testimony, if it is to become

what it signifies, permits a space for inviting participation.

Hence why Paul Claudel says that theology “stands beside poetry

and liturgy.”34 He unites all three in their compelling call for33 Claudel, Essence, 13.34 Ibid., 15.

36


participation, for a multiplicity and motion made possible by the

spaces within porous form.

This sacrament as giving, as porous form, is perhaps best

understood as creation: God’s speech-act. And thus, for Claudel,

the ultimate sacrament is procreation—both when God “seeded the

world with His likeness” and when God grants us the capacity for

offspring.35 The mystery of procreation, of bearing fruit in

God’s likeness is a wondrous gift made possible by spatio-

temporal existence.

I spoke of the mystery that silences: the ambiguity of a

cross without sense, without orientation of belief. Talk about a

second Babel—so much for our constructs of King, so much for the

name we could make for ourselves. What kind of name can we bear

but one of shame and guilt, betrayal, if we are destined to speak

only of crosses, of meanings crossed out and cross-firing? But it

is my hope that in this tour of some ‘postmodern’ thinkers we

have transitioned to another connotation of mystery. You keep

hearing this repetition of ‘other’ or ‘otherness.’ In philosophy,

35 Ibid., 17.

37


the notion surfaces in various ways—some of the most compelling I

have just attempted to relate. The concern for the Other, the

relation to others who are recognized as ‘wholly other’ is deeply

rooted in our notions of the sacred. To be other is to be set

apart—the originating notion of holy. The Judeo-Christian God has

been training us for a concern for others, but always it would

seem through ‘chosen’ peoples.

We come upon the crux of the creedal expression, “holy

catholic church.” Holy: set part. Catholic: universal. Church:

called out. We sense it in Jacques Derrida’s double bind:

religion as religio (abstract scruple) and relegere (gathered many).36

God abstracts from experience while attracting our every

expression. We confess God as holy—wholly other, “unscathed” by

any concrete claims, concepts, or tekne of being. And yet, this

God asks the currency of belief—“fiduciary,” fidelity, credit,

trust. How can I invest (believe in) no-thing, no-being? If I

must not invest my this-worldly ideologies into some-Thing, some-

One, where might I aim my hope, my faith, in that which exceeds

ontological expression? Launch it into the desert space of khora 36 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

38


and expect that wherever it lands is yet a lapse into the

intelligible, the sensible?37

According to phenomenology, as a being in this world, all I

can attain (intend toward) are phenomenal expositions; all I can

hold are intuitions concretized with closer investigations. But

even these conceptual ‘holds’ musing moths and rust can

deconstruct. If God—to be holy and Wholly Other than beings—must

be untouched, ungraspable, elusive, then God’s identity is

transcendent from this world (absence). ‘God’ might as well be no

God, the ‘dead God’ that Nietzsche’s madman saliently critiques

(and no less seeks).38 If this ‘God’ is bankrupt, where might

one’s treasure be stored? How can one praise the fire that

disintegrates song, or pray to the air that carries away words?

How can this God be anything but a credit card on which to charge

our convictions? (God, save us from investing in ‘God!’)39

The dilemma resides in this accounting—insofar as the

‘exchange’ is one of expected reward (endowed presence) and not

37 Plato, Timaeus, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html (accessed onlineFebruary 1, 2011).38 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Madman,” From Modernism to Postmodernism, ed. Lawrence Cahoone (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 116-117.39 Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 207.

39

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html


risked love (un-calculated gift).40 Love as uncalculating,

desiring while not requiring, wagers belief even in (because of!)

God’s absence. Faith in the Judeo-Christian God baffles economies

of trust and its notions of ‘wise investment.’ Yes, the holy must

have about it a naked purity. It must be considered immune,

unscathed by human concepts, “Not requiring human hands as if God

had need of anything” (Acts 17:24-25). And yet, with every

retreat away from us (ascension), this God descends deeper (the

Spirit’s descent). This is the Holy’s movement, the claim if we

can trace (trust) it:

The world cannot accept [God], because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because Ilive, you also will live. (John 14:17-19)

God reverses economy by binding creation in a love that

exceeds the created’s blindness. God’s love (and holy deposit)

breaks accounts: both what eyes accord through lips and what minds,

40 “We should earn this possession of God by not being in possession of ourselves here on earth or of all those things that are not him. The more perfect and naked this poverty, the greater this possession. We should not intend this reward or have it in mind, nor should we direct our gaze at a possible gain or gift, but we should be motivated solely by love of virtue.” (Ibid., 48).

40


apart from this spirit, might hoard. So what is ‘this spirit’ or

deposit that posits a life to come, and sees it (somehow…) now?

After the ascension, the incarnation ushers in the

sacramental descent of a God who calls us in words (scriptural

revelation, prophecy) and inhabits material forms (theophany

through phenomena). This Holy is unafraid of the holes; its

kenosis pours a spirit in those who would receive. Christ claims

that this gift, when received, is life. But certainly not all who

are living see by this light or acknowledge this way. So we

return to a bind: we must treasure the gifted spirit, while

proclaiming its promise unfulfilled, to come. We must set free a

gift we never truly possessed as our own: it is a promise

secretly told to us, that when told by us, loses its secret. But

does the secret shared soil or suspend the promise? The spirit,

radically interior, summons us as ambassadors,41 to serve as

God’s extremities, so that others might “taste and see that the

Lord is good.”42 And yet, Christ proclaims that the world cannot

see by appearances alone. It would seem that the spirit, then, is

at the center of the story, while yet in the aporias of our 41 2nd Corinthians 5:20.42 Psalms 34:8.

41


speech. This spirit blows where it will and does not always

disclose its origins. We return to the blind man in John 9, who

when asked by his neighbors says, “I do not know [where he is]”

(John 9:12). When asked by the Pharisees, “Whether he is a sinner

or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I

see!” (John 9:25).

I would now like to share a ‘sight’ with you all. This is a

clip of Carl Sagan explaining the dimensions of space-time, more

explicitly time as the fourth dimension. Why am I bothering us

with this? If I employ it as parable, I do not wish to determine

your experience. But I will intimate what led me to this

exploration of time as the desire to speak, to see and revise.

For one, I find it interesting that the blind man

experiences several days of physical sight before ever coming to

the realization of ‘spiritual insight.’ He undergoes many

questions of his own and from others before ever articulating his

belief in Jesus. And even then, this belief is expressed to

Jesus, followed by worship. One gets the sense from his story

that sight takes time, and it takes the space to ask questions,

42


to seek, all the while adamant in spite of doubt that one has

seen. While everyone asked him, “How is it that you came to see?”

He can only reply, “I just see!” He tells his story, and is not

yet after apologetics or theological propositions. He seeks the

exercise of sight, the duration in time and over time that leads

eventually to presence before a Christ fully understood. I will

play this clip as a parable, before closing us out with one final

story, by way of translation.

<<WATCH CLIP>> http :// www.youtube.com/watch?v =UnURElCzGc0

Many summers ago I was teaching English in the Czech

Republic. Since it was a service connected to the Kristova Obec

church, my fellow teachers and I instructed by reading through

the Book of Luke. When we came to the Annunciation passage, I

remember Kamilla, like every student before her, asking, “What

does this mean…this Holy Spirit overshadows Mary?” (Luke 1:35). I

loved the way she pronounced overshadow, with softness, even

though her mouth held the last vowel so tightly. She said the

word in a way that recalled me to its strangeness.

Honestly, the word sounded like a term of ominous force, or

a euphemism for a peculiar sexual encounter. I do not presently

43

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0





remember how I explained it; perhaps because even I was not

convinced by my definition. I described the scene, and focused

mostly on Mary’s yielding, her exemplary faith, and the blessing

born of her receptivity. But this term “overshadow” has continued

to elude me. In some ways, the word effected what it expressed:

it haunted my mind with its imprecision; but its imprecision was

also its power. The term overpowered me, and I gave up wrestling

with its mystery for many years since.

Any exegete worth their learning would turn to the

commentaries. But in my years of theological study, I had

neglected the term, until recently I found myself aroused by

another word: bara. The word bara is used as a verb that only God

performs. It is mentioned in Genesis 1:27 when God creates the

first humans. I have since learned that the word bara can mean

“to fatten up, fill up.” In the case of Genesis 1:27, God is said

to fatten the human with God’s shadow (tselem).43 How peculiar.

God’s shadow is three-dimensional. Even the apparent emptiness of

God’s shadow fills to the brim created forms, giving them life.44

43 “Genesis 1:27,” Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 2.44 This could serve a theory of God as four-dimensional or rather, supra-dimensional (on the premise that three-dimensional objects cast two-

44


Therefore, when God creates (bara) in God’s likeness, She

grants humanity a strange gift: a simultaneously abundant and

evanescent presence. The shadow provides a symbol of imminence

wed to transcendence: it makes a presence known, but does not

deny the presence its différance. God does not simply pour Her

definitive presence into the reaches and recesses of humanity.

God will not let Herself be grasped.45 And yet, God is

unmistakably present and somehow given to our sensibilities.

Consider the palpability of absence: the coolness of dusk as the

sun recedes; the touch that leaves the skin longing, hungry with

remembering; the liminal sounds of music that hang like

silhouettes upon the air; the fragrance that follows a stranger

and leads us powerfully back to another time.

How extraordinary. In human memory and in our very members:

we are saturated with shadows of the divine. These shadows are

forms that take up space but leave us room somehow. We are

weighted with hints, fattened with God’s contours—that yet change

dimensional shadows). Some physicists have already explored these implications. 45 Urging us toward the humility of being, Abraham J. Heschel relates, “‘No illumination,’ remarks Joseph Conrad in The Arrow of Gold, ‘can sweep all mysteryout of the world. After the departed darkness the shadows remain.’” God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 57.

45


depending on our encounters with luminosity (revelation). Our

living is predicated upon what simultaneously occupies and

exceeds us. We are living with an awareness of a God that is

inextricably part of us, but evasively other. Perhaps Plato’s

shadowy cave was closer than imagined…so close, the cave lives in

us, is us.

If three-dimensional beings cast two-dimensional shadows,

our existence as three-dimensional shadows (if Genesis’ poetry is

taken up by physics) implies a four-dimensional presence. The

fourth-dimension is usually deemed as “time.” Perhaps then God

does not exist as a Being outside of time or in time, but is akin to

our experiences of time. Whether we wish to make this link may prove

to be imaginative play. More important to this discussion is

Jean-Francois Lyotard’s mathematical exposition of Euclidean

space within theological discourse. After the third dimension,

the cutting-off point (the finitudes) of geometrical shapes

within an unknown fourth dimension “will result in the plane

loosing its coupure-function and passing it on to volume.”

Representations that we carry now (definitions via discernment of

what form is/is not) will give way to openness, a dis-closure.

46


This is significant on two immediate points. First, when the

lower order enters into the higher order, it is said to be

“‘impregnated and preserved’ by divine plenitude.”46 Secondly,

when the higher order discloses itself within the lower, a human

being will seek for words to capture the encounter, but feel only

the shadow: the backside of God’s presence (Exodus 33:19-23). as

we reach for the hem of the garment (Zechariah 8:23), the edge of

the cloak (Luke 8:44). Thus, in our physical members, as in our

memory, God punctures with plenitude, experienced as cross-

sections in space over time. This intrusion of time in space, or

God within our very being-in-the world, is a repeated incision in

experience. As Chrétien suggests, this anamnesis:

strike[s] [us] with a wound of love that eternity itself could not close again….This annunciation of God to memory does not at all signify that we do not have to seek God, to desire God, and to tend towards God, for it is only if God manifests himself to us, precedesus, and foresees us that a desire for him is possible.47

The poetry of Genesis 1:27 reminds us that our notions of

God abound within while exceeding our inner being. As St.

46 Chris Doude van Troostwijk, “Phrasing God: Lyotard’s Hidden Philosophy of Religion,” God in France, 174.47 Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 88-89.

47


Augustine reminds: “So learn to recognize what constitutes the

most perfect harmony: do not go out of yourself, but enter into

yourself; truth lives in your inner self…”48 In our selves we

find God’s shadowy representation. This is both humbling and

heartening. Because God has impressed “eternity in [our] hearts,”

we are overwhelmed by our inability to “fathom what God has

done.” And yet, we are also able to see that God “has made

everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

The dilemma of ego is how to hold these intimations of God,

without believing ourselves to be or replace God. The habitation

of God’s shadow in human form can give way to two idolatrous

impulses to count God’s shadow as God’s fully realized presence:

1) First, in the metaphor of ancient idolatry: we can

absolutize otherwise finite forms. In our post-Enlightenment

context, we may not give objects infinite import; we

are more inclined to deny gods altogether. However,

we are not immune to constructing a humanity apart

from God, and granting objects a sort of ultimacy.

Tyranny itself manifests the capacity for a human

48 De vera religione 39, 72 as translated by Bruno Forte (Portal, 7).

48


being to exceed his or her limitation by seeking

power ‘unlimited.’

2) Second, in the step of hairesis: we can objectify the infinite49.

This is often the critique against onto-theology,

which has selectively systematized God. God becomes

‘God.’ Thus, Jean-Luc Marion defines idol as a

representation of the visible—“‘that which is seen’

and no more.”50

Thus it is not far-fetched to claim that all sin is some

shade of idolatry. Because to sin is to respond to a call that

promises the infinite—but is in actuality, a step in the

direction of finitude, death. This call is drastically contrasted

by the Annunciation. Sin is the inverse of sacrament. Where sin

would promise fullness and deliver constraint, sacrament promises

the fullness of grace as made mobile by the constraints of form.

Just as we believe sacraments to be God’s presence in

action, so too we understand our lives to be vessels of divine

49 “The idol consigns the divine to the measure of a human gaze.” Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14.50 This contrasts Marion’s sense of icon which is a representation of the invisible (Ibid., 9).

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agency, ex opere operato.51 The sacrament, as grace in the grammar of

form, is God’s assertion of excess within what is deficient. As

God created humanity through forms (shadows) that take space

while leaving room: so too the sacraments of the church (and by

degree, the sacramental quality of our lives) are intended to be

this intimation of grace. Grace, as the gift that is excessive, is

given by God through our forms in order to create spaciousness

within us. This spaciousness is an openness to love, to give. It

is the spaciousness created by an Annunciation: God’s likeness

whispering to us what our minds cannot comprehend, calling us to

the Beauty of the infinite overshadowing the finite. Our response

is to bear the fullness of God’s likeness, by our acts of love.

This love is first a womb, a self-giving created when we open

ourselves to God. It is also a wound, a self-emptying vulnus that

bleeds love.

Admittedly, our role as bearing the fullness of God’s

likeness resembles—but in no way replaces—Christ as God’s

51 That is, so long as this concept is not an excuse from responsible living, but a recognition that when we act justly, we are not seeking praise for ourselves. “God operates simply through the work being done independently of the human agent. Augustine’s great contribution is to make clear that the source of sacraments is divine agency, not human” (White, 183).

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ultimate revelation of love. In Love Alone is Credible, Hans Urs von

Balthasar holds up Mary and Christ in their ability to accept

God’s revelation of love—God’s fiat.52 This acceptance is not some

nebulous spiritual exercise. It is deeply rooted in materiality:

as real as giving birth to Christ, as walking the road of

Christ’s suffering. In another text, Von Balthasar returns to

this theme. He utilizes Scheeben’s Mariology, which also borrows

from the incarnation of Christ, and the creation of the world: a

process whereby nature is impregnated by grace, and thus bears

the fruits of the Spirit.53 This willingness to be impregnated,

to give one’s life to “transformation into the objectively good

and beautiful,” predicates itself on the consent of faith. We are

asked to be as God’s fruitful womb: canvassing the contours of

God’s presence, bearing Christ’s disarming love.

Von Balthasar, as we noted in the sacramental theology of

Paul Claudel, takes his cues on faithfulness from nature. He

writes of creation’s response to God’s fiat: “Nature’s forms

spring forth from creation, rising up and opening themselves in

52 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 126.53 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 111.

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spirit and love to the infinity of fructifying grace they thus

receive from above their ultimate form…”54 This giving of self,

asserting of form, is an opening to the spirit. It would seem

that the first Annunciation occurred when God sang, “Let there be

light.” This fiat fore-shadows Mary’s Annunciation news, “And now,

you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name

him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the

Most High” (Luke 1:31-32).

The underlying assumption of this Annunciation: it is God’s

prerogative to announce good news. It is the underlying assumption

of sacrament that God initiates grace. So, too, we must remember that

it is God’s right to reveal God’s self. This last point is the

most difficult, because we cannot know, as we might with an idol,

what God has planned. But surely the God of our ancestors is

known in some way, while yet completely free?

According to Von Balthasar, God arrives in an intentional

and self-interpreted manifestation—love fashioned in the form of

Christ. And since this form is not stagnant, God is best

understood in the dramatic revelation of Christ. After all, as Von

54 Von Batlhasar, Love, 126.

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Balthasar writes: “If God wishes to reveal the love that he

harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the

world can recognize.”55 But Von Balthasar warns that after

perceiving this love, we risk reducing it with our reasoned

schemas.56 As if to counteract the ‘reasoned schemas’ of his more

theological or philosophical works, Von Balthasar’s Heart of the

World operates in dramatic monologues. Von Balthasar’s first

section of Heart of the World (“The Kingdom”) concludes with Christ’s

inner monologue as he wrestles with and resolves upon God’s will.

God’s over-taking of Christ is not as readily praiseworthy as

Mary’s surprise.

Nevertheless, Christ resolves upon the gestation of God’s

love as he takes his place in the “law of weakness.”57 But unlike

humanity’s tending toward futile hollowness, Christ exhibits a

weakness and emptiness that creates a space for love, for

perfecting fullness. Von Balthasar’s second section (“The

Suffering”) recounts the inner monologue of a man’s response to

55 Von Balthasar, Love, 75.56 I am reminded of Von Balthasar’s phenomenological counterpart, Jean-Luc Marion, namely, his work God without Being, or his essay, “The Saturated Phenomena,” Philosophy Today 40, no. 1 (spring 1996), 103-24.57 Von Balthasar, Heart of the World. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1954), 82-84.

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the suffering of Christ. The subject is tortured by his

inadequacy, and deadened by the futile excuses that remove him

from receiving and embodying God’s love. The suffering, double-

minded man experiences a glimmer that he calls the “ghostly

hour.” This ghostly hour, a taste of Annunciation, occurs when

“strange things touch you, when something brushes by your face

like the down of a nightbird in the darkness. You shudder and are

startled. Your soul’s hair stands on end in the wake of this

unspeakable and abrupt encounter.”58 The encounter includes a

sense of being summoned by the Wholly Other in sensation before

it ever reaches communication.

The blind man, thrown out, displaced and de-centered, comes

again upon Christ’s touch. He see his face and feels a claim,

such that he trusts Jesus with the question, “Who is [the Son of

Man] sir?...Tell me so that I may believe in him” (John 9:36).

But instead of ‘telling’--launching into a theological treatise--

he simply says, “You have now seen him.” His telling shows; it is

an ostension that does not seal so much as summon ongoing belief.

Christ as poiesis, meaning made form, is like Derrida’s

58 Ibid., 93.

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explication of poems that say, “This is my body, here and now.”

He continues, “And you know what comes next: passions,

crucifixions, executions. Others would also say resurrections…”59

Yes, in fact, others would say resurrections. Even to speak

is to roll open the tomb with our tongues. It is precarious to

offer in voice what otherwise remains in shadows. My prayer is

that God’s light saturates us with shadows, with mysteries, that

take lifetimes to translate. And may we be ever listening to

others in their tongues, hearkening as if the whispers of God’s

secrets are almost too low to hear, but too loving to ignore.60

59 Derrida, Sovereignties, 169.60 “…the Scriptures contain many allusions and faint echoes to delight hearts and ears made sensitive by love.” (Claudel, Essence, 14).

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Saturated with Shadows: Taking Space, Making Room - Pepperdine Bible Lectureships

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