to be possessed

If the Gerasene demoniac [Mark 5] was able to come into his right mind, if, as I sense to be the case, we gay people are, despite all the odds, on the threshold of being able to talk among friends, at home, in our right minds, this is because the demoniac has indeed, and at last genuinely, been possessed. Possessed by the Spirit that was within the man who walked up the shore of Gerasa. What had been outside the demoniac as one who talked to him is now within him as the heart of the Creator who longs with a passionate and visceral longing for us to be free, and rejoices in nothing so much as our quiet, gentle contamination of each other with the first hints of that longing, translated into the first stutters of a right mind.

James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, New York: Crossroad, 2001. 143

war & prayer

In times of war, our leaders always speak of their prayers. They wish us to know that they say prayers because they wish us to believe that they are deeply worried and that they take their responsibilities seriously. Perhaps they believe or hope that prayer will help. But within the circumstances of war, prayer becomes a word as befuddled in meaning as liberate or order or victory or peace. These prayers are usually understood to be Christian prayers. But Christian prayers are made to or in the name of Jesus, who loved, prayed for, and forgave his enemies and who instructed his followers to do likewise. A Christian supplicant, therefore, who has resolved to kill those whom he is enjoined to love, to bless, to do good to, to pray for, and to forgive as he hopes to be forgiven is not conceivably in a situation in which he can be at peace with himself. Anyone who has tried to apply this doctrine to a merely personal enmity will be aware of the enormous anguish that it could cause a national leader in wartime. No wonder that national leaders have ignored it for nearly two thousand years.

Wendell Berry. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, "Peaceableness Toward Enemies," 84-85. (text rediscovered via Thinking About It All ... thanks!)

enabled

And it is only if our love of Christ and our following of him is part of our discovery not of being 'right', or being successful, or being relevant, or able to attract funds, or votes, or bring about democracy, or liberal values, but of being loved into being with all the others whom we might be tempted to think of as our inferiors, being assured that we are liked as we let go of the things we think make us likeable, being assured of a peace which enables us to let go of our addiction to the power of this world and the relevance to which we must cling, it is only these which will enable us, over time, to bear witness to Christ as God. Not the token messenger of a 'he' which shores us up, but the quiet depth of the 'I Am' who shakes us into life.

James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in. New York: Continuum, 2006. 32.

learning to pray

Our learning to pray means our being taught how to receive long-lasting, up-building desires, over time, in imitation of the desire of someone who likes us, not the short-term, malleable desires of someone for whom we are a means to an end. It is because we don't know what we desire, and don't have strong enough desire, that we are ordered to pray without ceasing, so that we can have our desire strengthened and made simple rather than contradictory and belittling. In other words, we are being given the sort of desire that will enable us not to be moved by the social other but instead empower us as creators of a quite different social other.

James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in. New York: Continuum, 2006. 38.

bacon and change

"The magus wasn't teaching us about action as in work, it was action as in change. That's why we learned Confucius first—everything having to do with the order of our fathers, the law, manners. Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won't break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon. That's what Balthasar was trying to teach me."

"I've said it before, Josh—and you know how I love bacon-but I don't think bacon is enough for the Messiah to bring."

"Change," Joshua said. "A Messiah has to bring change. Change comes through action. Balthasar once said to me, 'there's no such thing as a conservative hero.' He was wise, that old man."

Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Harper, 2002. 202.

becoming a pacifist

“But wait!” cries out the inevitable voice of rational dissent. “What about war that is necessary to prevent greater evil? What about the need to stop Hitler sixty years ago, and wasn’t it good for NATO to intervene to stop the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at the hands of Christian Serbia? Shouldn’t someone have sent troops to stand between the Hutus and the Tutsis and between innocent Sudanese civilians and the Janjaweed?”

It is a good and reasonable question, and my embrace of pacifism is not naive. Sometimes war seems unavoidable. I know this, but it doesn’t mean I have to like the violence of war or to proclaim allegiance to a system of thought that is anything but profoundly opposed to war. Historically, it seems that starvation is just as inevitable as warfare. That doesn’t mean I should be “pro-famine” or try to work out a theologically-and philosophically-sound “just-hunger” theory.

When human disagreements deteriorate into bloodshed, it is a failure of human imagination to find peaceable solutions to conflict. It is a demonstration of our inability, as a species, to set aside greed and prejudice, anger and bloodlust. I want no part of that inability. I think we can do better. As a Christian I believe we are created in the image of a God who at times is known as the Prince of Peace, a God who had called us blessed who work for peace. The time has come for me to serve that God as a pacifist.

Ben Daniel, "Why I Am a Pacifist." http://bendaniel.org/?p=222

the city

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folk would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. 153-154.