(Ir)religiosity

I wrote this for one of my classes.  It is (very) loosely inspired by the last several verses of Genesis 32.   I felt that my relationship to hope right now was such that I couldn’t write it an any other way.  I haven’t written something like this in a long, long time.  It was cathartic.  Maybe I should do it more often.

Like Jacob and his nameless adversary,
in the veiled shadows at the edge of chaos;
Together we wrestle with the world, with ourselves,
with an abyss so enveloping it must be divine.

As the darkness grows darker still,
The specters of the nameless forgotten surround us,
Bodies:
Crushed.
Broken.
Burned.
Lacerated.
From everywhere and nowhere I hear their cry of dereliction,
Of resistance against our omnipotent projections.
It penetrates my very marrow:
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
It echoes into eternity and beyond.

As the disquieting night wears on
The tears come; tears and tears.
Tears on our anguished faces,
Tears within the fabric of this world we claim as home.

Yet, in an instant, in an evanescent moment of maddening surprise,
I feel it begin to rise up inside me;
It comes from I know not where,
Calling me outside myself,
And like an ellipsis,
That mark of (un)punctuation,
Meaning and the answers I crave like a palliative narcotic are suspended.
Belief is eclipsed.

I feel myself begin to whisper,
“I don’t believe in hope.”
Yet, somehow, hope happens anyway.

I lift my tired eyes toward the abyss,
To see that hope, if there is such a thing,
Is located here:
In the darkness, in our wrestling;
In the tension and the antagonism;
In the ellipsis,
Suspending expectation,
Forfeiting certainty and confidence.

As the darkness breaks into dawn,
We limp forward together, scarred by the past be/com/ing future.
The nameless, elliptical angel remains, awaiting our return.
I know of no other name to call her than that of hope.
That wounding, agonizing, haunting “thing.”
I do not know that it exists,
Only that it sometimes occurs,
Mostly in the infinitesimally mundane:
The face of a friend,
The eyes of a perfect stranger.
I know not why, nor how, nor when;
Only that despite my despair,
Despite abjection and lamentation,
Despite the weight of the world;
Something (sometimes) happens;
Something I unceasingly pray will irrupt in every instant.

Outside there is a sidewalk.
One day even the permanence of its concrete sedimentation,
Will be displaced by the enduring soil underneath.

An instance of ellipsis?
Of interruption?
Of hope?
Perhaps. . .

Thanks to a new post at The Image of Fish and Tripp Fuller’s suggestion of throwing in some Eberhard Jüngel with my Deleuze, I have been thinking more about the possibility of a theology of inexistence — or better a theopoetics of the hyperreal — and the relationship of the ‘new’ with the ‘old.’ Doing some unrelated work, I ran across a quote from one of the most important passages of Paul Ricoeur‘s The Symbolism of Evil that I think speaks to the importance of beginning at the level of the theological imaginary. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a comment yesterday on Callid Keefe-Perry’s latest vlog over at The Image of Fish that I think bears further reflection.  It relates to some of my latest thinking on some of the reading I’ve been doing in preparation for my thesis next year.  It’s a nascent idea and not at all developed, but I thought I would float it and see what sort of feedback it might get.

Callid is commenting in large part on some of the responses to Jason Derr’s excellent piece over at HuffPo Religion on the role of poetry in the religious imagination.  The aim of Derr’s article is to argue that theology ought not be couched primarily as a scientific enterprise (in the modern sense) mainly interested in cold hard facts and what can clearly be empirically observed in the world.  Instead, theology after modernity might look more like a mythopoetic enterprise, a discourse more akin to work of the poet in her exploration of the contours of human experience — our passions and desires — than the misguided quest for objectivity of epistemological certainty.  As Derr writes, “Poetry and metaphor are important as ways of doing theology. In a world so divided by absolute claims, using metaphor and poetry allows us to have room for flex.”  He even picks up on a metaphor I used in my last post in describing theology as a type of seeing-as which is not so much concerned about complete descriptions of reality as it is communicating reality through imagery and symbol, of exploring what is going on in reality phenomenologically.  For Derr (and others) this is the work of theopoetics.

Like I mentioned, Callid’s post is primarily a thoughtful response to some of the more negative, one might even say uncharitable, feedback Derr’s piece has received.  This seems to be part of a larger trend I’ve notice on some more popular sites like HuffPo that now have an active religion section.  I don’t have the time or the desire to wade through all the comments that posts like this illicit (frankly, most of them aren’t worth it), but I do try to gauge the overall response from time to time.  And usually the response tends to sway in favor of a sort of antagonistic, positivistic outlook toward religion, the likes of which the so-called “new” atheists are now infamous for advancing.

One of the points Callid takes up in the video is the age-old modern criticism that, in the final instance, religion isn’t really about reality it all, that ultimately the existence of a deity cannot be proved, that when you get right down to it “there is nothing there there.” One commenter on Derr’s piece cites a Thomas Paine quote which I think serves as a good, succint summation of this sort of criticism.  See the quote after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’ve been living under a rock.

I have no idea why I waited until now to start reading Kurt Vonnegut.  I really think my thought life and my overall intellectual disposition would be much more robust and rich had I introduced myself to his vivid imagery and masterful storytelling.  For me, what Howard Zinn has done in terms of decentralizing the dominant narrative of American history, Vonnegut does with literature and fiction beckoning us to own our past while looking to the future with hope that we can retain, however small or insignificant, the better qualities of our human nature.  

I started Galapagos a few days ago along with a few of his essays I was able to find online — they’re rocking my world.  As soon as I can I plan to plow through Slaughterhouse Five and Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.    

I love this quote from his Bennington College Address in 1970:

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine.  Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

Here is an interview he gave a while ago reflecting on his experience as a POW in WWII.  It gets really good at the end (the last three minute or so) when he talks about war and cycles of revenge.  

Kurt Vonnegut Interview

So do yourself a favor if you haven’t already:  go get a Vonnegut book and start reading it immediately.  I think you will find it to be very enriching.

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