faith and aporia...

Aporia in Gethsemane...

Why our insatiable need for reasons and justifications when things don’t go our way in life?
“God allowed this to happen…so I will learn such and such a lesson (blah,blah,blah)”. Do we need such explanations to make us feel better? To console ourselves?
What if, the world is harsh, bitter, unrelentingly unjust? What if Nietzsche is right, that all of life is just the will to power, the domination of the strong over the weak? Morality is just our way of consoling ourselves, that the good guys will win in the end, that somehow our suffering would count for a greater good? What if there is no vindication at all in this world or the next? Can we not stare straight in the face of pain and suffering, and not try to explain it?
Contrary to popular belief and all the cheap slogans about ‘Jesus is the answer’, what if Christ is the troubling question, the One who provokes, the one who stirs up a controversy, who confronts our complacency and heartlessness in a tragic world?
Jesus is no simple answer, a nice finishing tag-line to all man’s troubles and problems… He unsettles our way of living and doing things… He did not explain and give easy answers to the problems of humanity… He got involved… He become one with the oppressed and hopeless… His was a most magnificent defeat… The death of an insignificant rebel in the backwater of the Roman Empire… His story is meant to be forgotten. The victim or loser has no voice. Rome and Jerusalem of the priests are those meant to write history… Still his story got out…under the very noses of powerful enemies…
Why this proclamation that a helpless, poor carpenter from Nazareth, a death-row prisoner killed for treason, that he is really the King and Lord of The World, and not Caesar? Isn’t that strange? A prisoner, judged and killed as a terrorist, is the TRUE King over every nation on this earth?
His was a tragic end… Vindication came as a surprise… Resurrection was not some pre-programmed victorious end we just take for granted, as if it was inevitable… It was an absolute surprise… To be a Christian, to be fully human, we need to linger and experience the depth of that tragedy, that sense of meaninglessness, that dark Saturday, just after the tragedy of Good Friday, not knowing that Easter Sunday might come…
Why do we live as if everything is nice and tidy, refusing to come to terms with our messy existence and intransigent vulnerability? Some things can never be undone, the scars and wounds are permanent... No amount of prayer would change that… Even the Son of Man did not get his prayers answered near the end of his life. We savor the crown without the cross, the victory without the darkness… We want Easter Sunday, without Good Friday and the unsung Saturday, when Christ lies dead in the tomb and the disciples despondent in their defeat…
We did not learn lament, how to mourn or weep… only positive thinking, steps to become successful Christians and the so-called ‘claiming the victory of Christ’…
Why our quick diagnosis and reasoned declarations about what was “God’s righteous judgment against sin” in the Tsunami Disaster? Can we not just stand with the victims?
The Gospel, is Absolute Paradox… True power in powerlessness, joy in suffering, winning in losing, living in dying, true wealth in giving our substance away, healing in brokenness, peace as resistance, making friends of our mortal enemies…
There may still be aporias in genuine faith, moments of utter human resourcelessness, emptiness, where my reason is unraveled before the Enigma, the Unreasonable, the Paradox, that cry of anguish in the face of nihilism…
Jesus, the truly Human One… teach us by your Holy Spirit, how to live… to struggle alongside the poor, oppressed, the victimized… and then to die…

belated derrida tribute...

remembering derrida...

I never had the chance to study Derrida in university... I remember my tutor saying rather smugly when I told him I would like to read Derrida... He said, "We only do serious philosophy here at King's".

Still, like a ghost, Derrida haunts me with his scepticism towards our logocentrism(our privileging of logic/reason over the affective/emotive side of humanity), his vigilance towards any possible violence committed by our notions of ends/metanarratives). He was concerned with the inbreaking of the absolute surprise, that which comes above and beyond our programmatic inventions and scientific/reasoned progress, the future as the progression of linear time... He warns us to always be ready for the coming of The Other, that which defies our categories that seeks to homogenize real difference in the other, the stranger... His was a certain kind of messianism without claiming the moral high ground of speaking on behalf of the divine...

Perhaps, the biblical injunction to welcome strangers (where we might inadvertently had entertained angels), the Jewish expectation of the coming of Elijah, who stands at our doorstep... ultimately our Master's promise to return at a time we least expect it, hence his encouragement to us to 'Watch and pray'... Could all these be a challenge that we be open to meeting our Messiah in meeting the hungry, the poor, the dispossessed, the refugees... to give justice where it is within our power to provide... I have been made more sensitive to the Other, through Jacques' work...

God still speaks through others who are different from us... We only need to learn the patience to listen... even from Jacques Derrida...

(a nice obituary of Jacques at The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1324160,00.html)

somewhere i belong...

LINKIN PARK

I remember listening to the lyrics of "Somewhere I belong", thinking, 'Gosh...This is my generation's cry for authentic community..." The chorus goes :

"Somewhere I Belong"

Chorus:

I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real

I wanna let go of the pain I’ve held so long

(Erase all the pain till it’s gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I’m close to something real

I wanna find something I’ve wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

This is a genuine cry, beneath all the rage and screaming, a deep longing for community, intimacy and healing... I've always felt that if we seek first to connect and include, we can often see the Spirit of God hovering over the chaos of our lives... in this case, let us not judge the exteriors of hard music, or the spikey haired, tatoo-laden bodies of post-modern youth... We are all seeking a genuine place where real listening and communication happens.

I pray that the church of our Lord Jesus Christ would be a place of genuine inclusion, where belonging and believing is centred on the mercy and love of the Crucified One...

Peace...