The benefit concert came off just fine, and was fun to do. We got a chance to reflect for a moment on our purpose for being there. Our front man and bandleader, whose wife is the one facing cancer, told us the story of the doctor visit where they found out the cancer had returned.
"I really couldn't believe it," he said. "I felt like I had missed something, like this couldn't really be happening. We got what information we could, and then drove home. She was real quiet for a long time and then said, 'You know, heaven's gonna be awesome.' I told her that was true, but she wasn't dead yet. I'm praying for a miracle."
The rest of us played our part by hearing the story, by honoring the telling. Some offered vague affirmations, or a hand on the shoulder. It would not have been out of place for someone to pray right then, but none of us was willing to take on that level of spiritual responsibility. The most likely candidate, by virtue of having some ministry experience and recognizing the moment, was me, but I wasn't up to it. We let the silence linger as an unspoken prayer and then one of us -- it might have been me -- offered a "Well..." and then articulated a need to get a bottle of water, or go to the bathroom, or visit the food booth, before it was time to play. We transitioned out of that liminal moment by invoking our groundedness in the physical.
I'm fascinated by the role that heaven plays in our friend's handling of adversity. I'm sure my own rejection of a conscious afterlife would be unthinkable to him, and not just because it flies in the face of Christian doctrine. For him, I think, it would a denial of hope that goes far beyond the jots and tittles of theological speculation. To say "heaven's gonna be awesome" or "I'm praying for a miracle" is to affirm the fundamental goodness of the universe. Women who get cancer, women with husbands and children and friends who will be left behind to sort out the aftermath, will either be miraculously healed or they will be welcomed in the pure, unadulterated joy of heaven. Nothing else would be right, or good, or true.
The closest thing I've had to a mystical experience is the time -- I think I might have been dabbling in centering prayer -- when I saw, with what seemed to be pristine clarity, that there is no conscious afterlife. Or at least I saw, with pristine clarity, that I don't believe in one. It's hard to explain. It's like the core of the universe opened up to me and I saw: this is it. I can doubt the experience but the conviction stays with me, gleaming and white like a sun-bleached bone, beautiful and stark and horrifying.
It wasn't completely a bolt from the blue, though. I'd been thinking about such things. I'd done some study that suggested most of our visions of heaven are really miscontextualized metaphors of covenant renewal. We literalize those images into a concrete expectation of heaven as a place. Maybe the ancients did, too, but I find it interesting that the early Jews had no concept of afterlife, at least not a strong one. (Actually, a Jewish friend of mine corrected me on this, explaining that afterlife teachings were passed down in a secret oral tradition so as not to distract from a proper focus on Torah, an explanation that I find understandable but historically dubious).
The image of the afterlife in the story of the rich man and Lazarus had long struck me as crudely literal, and it seemed to me that arcane information about the great beyond was not at all the point of the story. Jesus seemed altogether too "with it" to be earnestly offering wooden descriptions of Abraham's bosom. But I could see how he might be using the common understanding of such things to illustrate his point about how the poor are to be treated. Some will complain that I'm projecting my own bias onto Jesus but we all do that so it's a wash.
Then I began to wonder: what if it's all like that? What if the Bible actually gives us no reliable information about the hereafter at all? "Today you will be with me in paradise." What else do you tell a man in the throes of his own execution?
Today I have a somewhat different view of Jesus' relationship with the text. I'm more likely to interrogate the rhetorical strategies behind a given gospel writer's use of a story or saying than I am to wonder what Jesus really said or did and why. But the thought stayed with me, and probably set me up for my so-called epiphany.
Look, it's all I've got. Maybe I was scraping the bottom of the mystical barrel. Maybe it's the contemplative equivalent of a lump of coal in my stocking. Some people get the beatific vision; I get "There is no afterlife." I'm not complaining.
My musical friend doesn't need any of this. Like the thief on the cross, he doesn't need to stare directly into the eclipse I call reality. I am invigorated by the idea that this is it. It plunges me into the experience of the present moment. It speaks to the sacredness of all things, the holiness that surrounds us. It helps me to see every bush ablaze with what I can only call the glory of God, shining like shook foil. But I don't expect this to make any sense to someone who earnestly believes Jesus paid his way to heaven and his cancer-stricken beloved will get there before him. It doesn't need to.
He believes these things not because he is weak or benighted or needs a crutch any more than we all do. He believes these things because he has hope, because he wants to affirm the universe as a good place, because for him that blaze of glory needs to be backed by something Real. It's like being on the gold standard, and my own existential floating-point currency isn't worth a damn to somebody like that. So I nod, and I listen. Maybe I place my hand on his shoulder and let the moment speak.
And maybe I should have prayed.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The Teaspoon -- an Irritable Quote
"I was diverted by NPR when a disembodied male voice said that a mere teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh a billion pounds. As a literature person I at first missed the point and wondered at the preposterous strength of the teaspoon."
- Jim Harrison, The English Major
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Cage and the iPod Shuffle
I got an Mp3 player for Christmas. (It wasn't an iPod Shuffle, but the brand name makes for a better title.) I've never had one, and I wasn't expecting it. I certainly hadn't asked for one; it never occured to me that one might be useful. Despite being a musician (and a classically trained composer, which isn't as interesting as it sounds), I'm not a big consumer of music. I don't really have time to sit down and listen for the sake of listening, and I'm often in situations -- at home, or in my shared office -- where listening to music would be distracting to others. Moreover, it's often distracting to me, as I have little concept of background music.
At least I used to. There seems to be a difference between music as ambient noise and a personal soundtrack pumped directly to my ears. I can't explain it. Plus it offers a cocoon of sound that can itself be a little distracting, but can also be helpful when silence is not an option. It might be some sort of sonic ADD thing; music that is familiar and expected is less distracting than random interesting sources of noise that seduce my attention with their very novelty.
I'm also less self-conscious. On one hand, I'm not tempted to choose a playlist based on its effect on my public image, which I've been known to do. Yes, I'm that vain. But on the other hand I'm also not leery of enjoying things like Stravinsky or Berg or Arvo Pärt that others might find odd, or might set a strange mood. I have my limits -- I have no taste for Wozzeck, for instance -- but there's some stuff I like that's a little out there. My current source of self-consciousness is the fact that I'm wearing headphones and might find myself audibly interacting with an auditory landscape known only to me.
Part of that landscape is sacred music, especially the Masses of Palestrina. According to legend, Palestrina single-handedly saved polyphony (singing in parts, basically) from the cutting-room floor of ecclesiastical history. Back in the day, chant was monophonic. Everyone sang the same thing. Gradually, composers added parts, working the voices against each other, until by the 16th century things were pretty complicated. People were complaining that these compositional flights of fancy were obscuring the words, so one of the minor items of the agenda of the Council of Trent was the idea of busting everything back down to monophonic chant and being done with it.
The Tridentine council was a major apparatus in the Counter-reformation. The church was beset with scandal and losing parishioners to Lutheran upstarts, and had bigger fish to fry than trying to deal with artsy-fartsy musical types and people complaining about worship. There is nothing new under the sun. Besides, according to another legend the chants were dictated to Pope Gregory by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. That's a pretty rousing endorsement.
So anyway, the story continues with Palestrina gaining an audience with one of the cardinals and arranging for a performance of a Mass. The cardinal, upon hearing the majesty, beauty, and sublime clarity of Palestrina's work, determined that such wonderment could not be lost and persuaded the council to adopt measures that would not prohibit polyphony but restrict it to a style that roughly corresponds to that of Palestrina. To this day it is the work of Palestrina from which we derive the rules for 16-century counterpoint.
When I teach music appreciation, I proceed historically, so by the time I get to Palestrina they've heard chant, which is serene but somewhat flat, and some quaint and rather odd-sounding Renaissance dance music as well as early polyphony. Palestrina (and of course Victoria or Lassus would work just about as well) comes in like a breath of fresh air, something almost ethereal, something rapturous in its austerity.
I tell them the apocryphal story and then I play one of Palestrina's Masses and ask them to consider that even if the story is not true, it is not hard to imagine someone wanting to keep this music around. If we were to see the heavens break open and hear the angelic choirs, I tell them, they'd be singing Palestrina. Never mind that I don't believe in heaven, or angels, or the ethnocentrism of assigning the celestial chorus selections from the Western canon. The idea is that I really, really like Palestrina.
The Mass, as an artistic medium, has left an indelible imprint on Western music. The five-part construction of the Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) is almost certainly the forerunner of the classic multi-movement works such as the sonata, the concerto, or the symphony. Not only that, but the tripartate structure of the Kyrie -- kyrie eleison, christe eleison, kyrie eleison -- probably has some bearing on the more developed ABA format, called sonata-allegro form, that characterizes most first movements of such works. (My counterpoint teacher made a similar claim about the Sanctus, I think, and the minuet and trio of the classical symphony, but he never elaborated on this).
The gist of ABA form, its esoteric secret, is that the repeat of A is not the same, even if it is identical note for note to its previous iteration. It has been transfigured by B. Its context is different. It is post-B. In sonata-allegro form there is the exposition, or statement of thematic material, then the development in which this material is sliced and diced in various ways, and then the recapitulation, which re-introduced the original material, with some modifications. But the modifications only heighten the sense in which these ideas have shifted in context.
This lives on in jazz, where the classic structure is a statement of the head, or main melodic idea, then the solos which function as a kind of development section, then a final statement of the head. It is also given a nod in pop stylings, where the last few choruses emerge after contrasting material in a bridge. Country songs sometimes heighten this with narrative material in the bridge or final verse that significantly alters the context of the chorus lyrics, often making use of wordplay or double entendre.
20th century composer John Cage took this to a different level. Among his numerous experiments was to find ways to randomize the order of elements in a piece of music. Musicians would have to roll dice or consult the I Ching to determine the order of various aspects of a composition. Thus, each performance was different, not only because things were in a different order, but because the change of order meant that each section would be heard in a different context from another performance. The D section you hear last if the section are playes ABCD is not the same as the D section you hear if they're played BDAC.
So far on my Mp3 player I haven't got past "shuffle" mode. In this, there are no decisions to be made; faced with about 5G (so far) of music I like, I can fearlessly hit "play all" and let the digital fates control my sonic destiny. So far the only variation I've employed is to ocassionally limit my listening to tracks designated "classical" (and I've learned that it is important to pay attention to this designation when loading the player, lest some gem mislabeled "symphonic" or "orchestral" or "choral" get left out of the rotation).
This horrifies classical purists, who insist that one must take in all of a symphony in one fell swoop to get the full effect, or liturgists who might complain that the Agnus Dei is meaningless without the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo and Sanctus preceding it. And they're correct that it might be different, but I'm enjoying the grab bag. Brahm's Academic Festival Overture takes a different cast when it follows a cut from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. A short movement of a Phillip Glass string quartet makes a fine introduction to a wistful Natalie Merchant song. When you hear Stravinsky after Def Leppard you wonder what he might have been like as a rocker. So the purist might object.
I think John Cage would have liked it.
At least I used to. There seems to be a difference between music as ambient noise and a personal soundtrack pumped directly to my ears. I can't explain it. Plus it offers a cocoon of sound that can itself be a little distracting, but can also be helpful when silence is not an option. It might be some sort of sonic ADD thing; music that is familiar and expected is less distracting than random interesting sources of noise that seduce my attention with their very novelty.
I'm also less self-conscious. On one hand, I'm not tempted to choose a playlist based on its effect on my public image, which I've been known to do. Yes, I'm that vain. But on the other hand I'm also not leery of enjoying things like Stravinsky or Berg or Arvo Pärt that others might find odd, or might set a strange mood. I have my limits -- I have no taste for Wozzeck, for instance -- but there's some stuff I like that's a little out there. My current source of self-consciousness is the fact that I'm wearing headphones and might find myself audibly interacting with an auditory landscape known only to me.
Part of that landscape is sacred music, especially the Masses of Palestrina. According to legend, Palestrina single-handedly saved polyphony (singing in parts, basically) from the cutting-room floor of ecclesiastical history. Back in the day, chant was monophonic. Everyone sang the same thing. Gradually, composers added parts, working the voices against each other, until by the 16th century things were pretty complicated. People were complaining that these compositional flights of fancy were obscuring the words, so one of the minor items of the agenda of the Council of Trent was the idea of busting everything back down to monophonic chant and being done with it.
The Tridentine council was a major apparatus in the Counter-reformation. The church was beset with scandal and losing parishioners to Lutheran upstarts, and had bigger fish to fry than trying to deal with artsy-fartsy musical types and people complaining about worship. There is nothing new under the sun. Besides, according to another legend the chants were dictated to Pope Gregory by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. That's a pretty rousing endorsement.
So anyway, the story continues with Palestrina gaining an audience with one of the cardinals and arranging for a performance of a Mass. The cardinal, upon hearing the majesty, beauty, and sublime clarity of Palestrina's work, determined that such wonderment could not be lost and persuaded the council to adopt measures that would not prohibit polyphony but restrict it to a style that roughly corresponds to that of Palestrina. To this day it is the work of Palestrina from which we derive the rules for 16-century counterpoint.
When I teach music appreciation, I proceed historically, so by the time I get to Palestrina they've heard chant, which is serene but somewhat flat, and some quaint and rather odd-sounding Renaissance dance music as well as early polyphony. Palestrina (and of course Victoria or Lassus would work just about as well) comes in like a breath of fresh air, something almost ethereal, something rapturous in its austerity.
I tell them the apocryphal story and then I play one of Palestrina's Masses and ask them to consider that even if the story is not true, it is not hard to imagine someone wanting to keep this music around. If we were to see the heavens break open and hear the angelic choirs, I tell them, they'd be singing Palestrina. Never mind that I don't believe in heaven, or angels, or the ethnocentrism of assigning the celestial chorus selections from the Western canon. The idea is that I really, really like Palestrina.
The Mass, as an artistic medium, has left an indelible imprint on Western music. The five-part construction of the Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) is almost certainly the forerunner of the classic multi-movement works such as the sonata, the concerto, or the symphony. Not only that, but the tripartate structure of the Kyrie -- kyrie eleison, christe eleison, kyrie eleison -- probably has some bearing on the more developed ABA format, called sonata-allegro form, that characterizes most first movements of such works. (My counterpoint teacher made a similar claim about the Sanctus, I think, and the minuet and trio of the classical symphony, but he never elaborated on this).
The gist of ABA form, its esoteric secret, is that the repeat of A is not the same, even if it is identical note for note to its previous iteration. It has been transfigured by B. Its context is different. It is post-B. In sonata-allegro form there is the exposition, or statement of thematic material, then the development in which this material is sliced and diced in various ways, and then the recapitulation, which re-introduced the original material, with some modifications. But the modifications only heighten the sense in which these ideas have shifted in context.
This lives on in jazz, where the classic structure is a statement of the head, or main melodic idea, then the solos which function as a kind of development section, then a final statement of the head. It is also given a nod in pop stylings, where the last few choruses emerge after contrasting material in a bridge. Country songs sometimes heighten this with narrative material in the bridge or final verse that significantly alters the context of the chorus lyrics, often making use of wordplay or double entendre.
20th century composer John Cage took this to a different level. Among his numerous experiments was to find ways to randomize the order of elements in a piece of music. Musicians would have to roll dice or consult the I Ching to determine the order of various aspects of a composition. Thus, each performance was different, not only because things were in a different order, but because the change of order meant that each section would be heard in a different context from another performance. The D section you hear last if the section are playes ABCD is not the same as the D section you hear if they're played BDAC.
So far on my Mp3 player I haven't got past "shuffle" mode. In this, there are no decisions to be made; faced with about 5G (so far) of music I like, I can fearlessly hit "play all" and let the digital fates control my sonic destiny. So far the only variation I've employed is to ocassionally limit my listening to tracks designated "classical" (and I've learned that it is important to pay attention to this designation when loading the player, lest some gem mislabeled "symphonic" or "orchestral" or "choral" get left out of the rotation).
This horrifies classical purists, who insist that one must take in all of a symphony in one fell swoop to get the full effect, or liturgists who might complain that the Agnus Dei is meaningless without the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo and Sanctus preceding it. And they're correct that it might be different, but I'm enjoying the grab bag. Brahm's Academic Festival Overture takes a different cast when it follows a cut from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. A short movement of a Phillip Glass string quartet makes a fine introduction to a wistful Natalie Merchant song. When you hear Stravinsky after Def Leppard you wonder what he might have been like as a rocker. So the purist might object.
I think John Cage would have liked it.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Many Rooms
I'm fascinated by the historical Jesus, which is to say that I'm fascinated by the various "quests" for such a Jesus and the literature that is generated from those quests. I certainly haven't read all of it -- I haven't even read the classics like Schweitzer or Sanders. My exposure consists mostly of "new quest" types, and what I enjoy about this literature is not its ability to shed light on the historical personage of Jesus, which I consider a fool's errand, but what it can tell us about the sociohistorical context of the texts in which Jesus figures prominently.
As for the historical Jesus, there is no habeas corpus, no body in custody that we can present. The tomb is empty. All we have are texts, a literary corpus. Or, if you like, the Corpus Christi, the gathered eucharistic community, the living tradition left behind in the wake of the Christ-event, whatever that might have been. Like any project of meaning-making, the Christian tradition is suspended over an abyss, flailing about in a cloud of unknowing. We are always just this side of a semiotic event horizon.
On one end of the spectrum we might find those for whom the Jesus of the Gospels and the "historical Jesus" are coterminous. The Gospels are history to this way of thinking, a position that is naïve but understandable. While the idea that all four Gospels are historical in this way creates intractable problems of harmonization (anyone who has read a Gospel harmonization, or worse, had to create one for a class on the Gospels, knows what I mean), I suppose we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that at least one of the evangelists -- Mark seems the most likely candidate -- is pretty much giving us the straight dope.
At the other end are the biblical minimalists, who argue that the Gospels are complete fabrications. For those of us who grew up in church, this sounds utterly batty, but it's really not that absurd; however many gospel manuscripts we might have, none of them can be reliably dated early enough to point unambiguously to a real person, nor is there slam-dunk extrabiblical evidence of Jesus' life as described in those manuscripts. The light of the world is shrouded in shadows.
The value of the minimalist approach is that it places the focus entirely on the texts and why the communities out of which they sprang might have told such stories. If the charge of fabrication seems a bit strong, it can't really be ruled out, and focusing on the social context of these stories and the rhetorical purposes to which they were put seems a responsible and fruitful way of handling the texts. That a real person is somewhere behind the texts seems reasonable to me -- Jesus is more like Daniel Boone than Paul Bunyan -- but I certainly can't prove that, and wouldn't bother trying.
In between, then, we have the historical Jesus questors, those who believe there was an historical Jesus, but that he is not -- or not quite -- the Jesus of the Gospels. N.T. Wright finds a largely orthodox Jesus, one who is consistent with the Gospel accounts even if those accounts are not straight history. (Wright's reconstruction does not completely avoid the harmonization problem, but his approach to the texts at least bears an attentiveness to history that he seems to have lost by the time he gets to the wretched Surprised by Hope.)
Crossan and Borg (whom I enjoy quite a bit) look into the well and see a sapiential, or wisdom-focused Jesus, a cross between a sage and a revolutionary. In this episode, the part of Jesus is being played by Ghandi. Dale Allison sees an apocalyptic Jesus a la Schweitzer, a reluctant prophet-turned Messiah expecting a ngab gib (the opposite of a big bang) that never comes.
It's tempting to suggest that we find whatever Jesus we need, and to some extent this is true. I think it's way too cynical, however, to assert that historical Jesus scholars simply find a Jesus that looks like them. I think Crossan's Jesus makes demands on him that he's not prepared to live up to, and Allison knows full well that if he's right about Jesus, Jesus was wrong about the end of the world. Surely Wright needs his orthodox savior, but what he comes up with does not seem exclusively Anglican, and it's hard to imagine Wright's Jesus as the Bishop of Durham. Jesus is pliable, but he is not exactly a Rorschach test, and he's hardly a mirror.
To be sure, we are human, all too human, and when we stare into the abyss it stares back. When we speak into the void we hear a unique voice but it is not necessarily, not always, not simply ours. Or it is ours -- it is for us -- but it is not our own. We get the Jesus we need, but this does not mean we get the Jesus we want, which would be far too obvious. When we become too conscious of our personal mythologies they stop working for us.
Even if the historical Jesus cannot be found -- does not, in a word, exist -- the reconstructions are still helpful. They're interesting to read, some of them piss off conservatives, and their immense popularity justifies the existence and salaries of academics who like to write about religion, a project that I'm wholly in favor of. One should be able to make ludicrous amounts of money writing about religion, and one should be supplied with free coffee while doing so.
A guy can dream, can't he?
What fascinates me is the sense that we're collectively looking for some lost or hidden truth, hoping the real Jesus will please stand up not just because he's an important character in the drama of Western history but because we think he's holding out on us. We want Jesus to give up his secrets. We are wrestling with the angel, hoping for a blessing. The unspoken assumption is that if we can just figure out what Jesus really said, or who he really was, there will be some magic left in that old silk hat we found. Even people who have deep misgivings about Christianity in general sometimes feel compelled to do something with Jesus.
I think we want Jesus to mean something beyond our constructions and the slippery bastard refuses to cooperate. James Carse argues, in The Religious Case Against Belief, that it is precisely Jesus' protean and polysemic character that makes him so valuable to Christianity as a religion -- by which Carse seems to mean a living and long-standing tradition of cultural meaning -- and so troublesome to Christianity as a belief system.
Nobody gets the last word on who Jesus was, or is, or is to come. He can't be just anything, but he's certainly been a lot of things, and there's no reason to think he's going to settle down and start a family any time soon. He has no home, no place to rest his head, nothing but a borrowed tomb. Even dead he was a squatter. At least he folded the sheets.
Jesus is God in the Christian tradition because he stands in for God as the plastic signifier of something beyond ourselves. We project onto Jesus our deepest fears and most profound longings, but he is not a tabula rasa, taking anything we might dish out. Those projections would be different if they were aimed somewhere else, just as they would be different if they came from somewhere else. It is this intersection, this nexus, this liminal space, that I think defines Christianity as a tradition. We are a part of this tradition, in the broadest possible sense, as long as we insist on doing something with Jesus, whatever that might be.
There are many, many rooms.
As for the historical Jesus, there is no habeas corpus, no body in custody that we can present. The tomb is empty. All we have are texts, a literary corpus. Or, if you like, the Corpus Christi, the gathered eucharistic community, the living tradition left behind in the wake of the Christ-event, whatever that might have been. Like any project of meaning-making, the Christian tradition is suspended over an abyss, flailing about in a cloud of unknowing. We are always just this side of a semiotic event horizon.
On one end of the spectrum we might find those for whom the Jesus of the Gospels and the "historical Jesus" are coterminous. The Gospels are history to this way of thinking, a position that is naïve but understandable. While the idea that all four Gospels are historical in this way creates intractable problems of harmonization (anyone who has read a Gospel harmonization, or worse, had to create one for a class on the Gospels, knows what I mean), I suppose we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that at least one of the evangelists -- Mark seems the most likely candidate -- is pretty much giving us the straight dope.
At the other end are the biblical minimalists, who argue that the Gospels are complete fabrications. For those of us who grew up in church, this sounds utterly batty, but it's really not that absurd; however many gospel manuscripts we might have, none of them can be reliably dated early enough to point unambiguously to a real person, nor is there slam-dunk extrabiblical evidence of Jesus' life as described in those manuscripts. The light of the world is shrouded in shadows.
The value of the minimalist approach is that it places the focus entirely on the texts and why the communities out of which they sprang might have told such stories. If the charge of fabrication seems a bit strong, it can't really be ruled out, and focusing on the social context of these stories and the rhetorical purposes to which they were put seems a responsible and fruitful way of handling the texts. That a real person is somewhere behind the texts seems reasonable to me -- Jesus is more like Daniel Boone than Paul Bunyan -- but I certainly can't prove that, and wouldn't bother trying.
In between, then, we have the historical Jesus questors, those who believe there was an historical Jesus, but that he is not -- or not quite -- the Jesus of the Gospels. N.T. Wright finds a largely orthodox Jesus, one who is consistent with the Gospel accounts even if those accounts are not straight history. (Wright's reconstruction does not completely avoid the harmonization problem, but his approach to the texts at least bears an attentiveness to history that he seems to have lost by the time he gets to the wretched Surprised by Hope.)
Crossan and Borg (whom I enjoy quite a bit) look into the well and see a sapiential, or wisdom-focused Jesus, a cross between a sage and a revolutionary. In this episode, the part of Jesus is being played by Ghandi. Dale Allison sees an apocalyptic Jesus a la Schweitzer, a reluctant prophet-turned Messiah expecting a ngab gib (the opposite of a big bang) that never comes.
It's tempting to suggest that we find whatever Jesus we need, and to some extent this is true. I think it's way too cynical, however, to assert that historical Jesus scholars simply find a Jesus that looks like them. I think Crossan's Jesus makes demands on him that he's not prepared to live up to, and Allison knows full well that if he's right about Jesus, Jesus was wrong about the end of the world. Surely Wright needs his orthodox savior, but what he comes up with does not seem exclusively Anglican, and it's hard to imagine Wright's Jesus as the Bishop of Durham. Jesus is pliable, but he is not exactly a Rorschach test, and he's hardly a mirror.
To be sure, we are human, all too human, and when we stare into the abyss it stares back. When we speak into the void we hear a unique voice but it is not necessarily, not always, not simply ours. Or it is ours -- it is for us -- but it is not our own. We get the Jesus we need, but this does not mean we get the Jesus we want, which would be far too obvious. When we become too conscious of our personal mythologies they stop working for us.
Even if the historical Jesus cannot be found -- does not, in a word, exist -- the reconstructions are still helpful. They're interesting to read, some of them piss off conservatives, and their immense popularity justifies the existence and salaries of academics who like to write about religion, a project that I'm wholly in favor of. One should be able to make ludicrous amounts of money writing about religion, and one should be supplied with free coffee while doing so.
A guy can dream, can't he?
What fascinates me is the sense that we're collectively looking for some lost or hidden truth, hoping the real Jesus will please stand up not just because he's an important character in the drama of Western history but because we think he's holding out on us. We want Jesus to give up his secrets. We are wrestling with the angel, hoping for a blessing. The unspoken assumption is that if we can just figure out what Jesus really said, or who he really was, there will be some magic left in that old silk hat we found. Even people who have deep misgivings about Christianity in general sometimes feel compelled to do something with Jesus.
I think we want Jesus to mean something beyond our constructions and the slippery bastard refuses to cooperate. James Carse argues, in The Religious Case Against Belief, that it is precisely Jesus' protean and polysemic character that makes him so valuable to Christianity as a religion -- by which Carse seems to mean a living and long-standing tradition of cultural meaning -- and so troublesome to Christianity as a belief system.
Nobody gets the last word on who Jesus was, or is, or is to come. He can't be just anything, but he's certainly been a lot of things, and there's no reason to think he's going to settle down and start a family any time soon. He has no home, no place to rest his head, nothing but a borrowed tomb. Even dead he was a squatter. At least he folded the sheets.
Jesus is God in the Christian tradition because he stands in for God as the plastic signifier of something beyond ourselves. We project onto Jesus our deepest fears and most profound longings, but he is not a tabula rasa, taking anything we might dish out. Those projections would be different if they were aimed somewhere else, just as they would be different if they came from somewhere else. It is this intersection, this nexus, this liminal space, that I think defines Christianity as a tradition. We are a part of this tradition, in the broadest possible sense, as long as we insist on doing something with Jesus, whatever that might be.
There are many, many rooms.
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