The Privilege of Loving

Friendship . . . that's what my friends told me to write about the other night. Very convenient. If you people want me to hand out public compliments you should just ask for that, but I think I can relate some of the things I've read as of late to the topic.

. . . And, what better place to begin the discussion of friendship than the recent theories of a French psychoanalyst?? Yeah, I couldn't think of anywhere better either.

There's a guy named Jacques Lacan. He's the postmodern equivalent to Freud. I must admit all I know of him is what I've read in this 'intro to postmodernism' book, so don't take what I'm about to say as any authoritative interpretation of the guy. Yet, based on the 10 pages of overview I've read on him, I think he's pretty amazing. Here's the gist: Freud attributed all human behavior to innate drives for sex and occasionally other things. . . but generally just sex. Lacan doesn't refute this outright, but instead he says that 'sex' isn't just sex. Freud was just catching on to the nature of human existence. The one thing that Lacan sees uniting all human existence is the condition of incompletion. From infancy we are presented with the condition lack in our being. Hunger and sex are just superficial examples of this which goes much further to the depths of our being. This basically serves as the constant innate drive of all human activity. We spend our whole lives in the futile quest to become whole.

But, let's rewind the historical-philosophical clock a bit to my old friend Martin Buber. Recall Buber's 'I & Thou' concept. In this we are in a constant cycle of living in the relational world of presence, or the materialized world of objects. We are, moment by moment, presented with a choice between living relationally to the present-ness of our experience or to reduce it to a formula of limited objects controlled by causality. So, in the instance of other people, we must choose to treat them as an unlimited person who lives in the free realm of possibility or as a 'man' or 'woman' confined by the adjectives that we would use like mathematic formula which if used with precision could recreate this same being. The problem with the reductive attitude is that there is nothing that prevents it from eventually applying to us. In as far as we reduce others, we will all too soon find ourselves reduced. This brings us back to Lacan.

Lacan sees most if not all human drives as attempts at finding Wholeness, but our means of finding wholeness are essentially destructive. Consider girls who get depressed at a break-up and go eat a pint of ice-cream. This can be interpreted as an experience where a lack of wholeness (relationally) drives them to seek wholeness through consumption. The problem is that as the body digests the ice-cream the condition of wholeness doesn't last. Lacan points out that this is the same in relationships. In our drive to find wholeness we too often reduce the other person to "be our missing piece". They no longer exist as an unlimited being, but only as a cog to fill our own emptiness. Whether friend or spouse, this is the ugly tendency from which we all suffer.

And, let's make this a little more complicated. Lacan points out that part of our condition of 'lack' is that we are incapable of fully experiencing ourselves. Our knowledge of ourself is incomplete. We sense that we are lacking in areas and complete in other areas, but we can never fully perceive our own self to know our own condition fully. Lacan claims that in the interaction of people we are in the process of knowing and being known. We are interpreting the other person and subtly receiving from them the interpretation of ourself. In all conversation we look to the other person as a mirror by which to understand ourself.

Why do we fear so much being misunderstood? Why can a bad look from another person so thoroughly effect us? Why do we care so often about the vague first impressions of strangers and loose aquaintances?

The answer can be seen in the fact that the other person has a say in our own self-understanding. The stranger who doesn't like me, tell me that there are things about myself that are not likable, or even worse that my self IS in essence not likable. Their interpretation of me can change my interpretation of myself. In Buber's terms, the person who reduces me to a mere object, even more to a worthless object, forces me into the risk of understanding myself that way. On the other end, like we said before, we can reduce everyone we come across to a mirror by which to build our own self up. We can keep around us only the mirrors that show us flattering reflections of ourselves. In fact this what we all have a tendency to do. Yet, in doing so we are not challenged, and ultimately fail to know the other. Ultimately, in this we don't even know ourself, only the flattering characature we have constructed. In Buber's line of thought we objectify others into mirrors, and in the long run end up objectifying ourself as well.

And, shifting gears into Christian thinking, love is the action of God. I realized the other day that I long reduced love to a sort of positive affirmation of other people. Love (in this sense) was a tool, a treat, by which to manipulate other people. Yet, how much more is love, than flattery? Love is not just providing the other with a positive reflection, which by what I've said so far is little more than a positive-objectification of them. Who cares if they feel good about themselves yet walk away less human, less alive than before? Love is not a potential action at my disposal. It is much more than that. It is a privilege.

Love is, as Buber would point toward, a full existing in the presence of another. It is not an attempt to airbrush their reflection, whether that be to bring out the good or the bad. Love is honest. It portrays the other as they are, not better and not worse. Yet love is more than a matter of portrayal. Love exists in that regardless of portrayal love remains with the other. Love stays present with the other, not letting them believe they are something they are not, and not abandoning them for what they are. This is the greatest understanding I have known of love.

In my parents and in my friends alone have I ever felt the reality of love. I can't count the times or ways in which I have been guilty of reduction, trying to make them into mirrors by which to flatter myself, and all the time knowing how false the image I have seen in this truly is. Human love is always fleeting. This is our condition: we are all seeking to be whole, and even in our greatest seasons only manage to live in loves fullness briefly. Yet, in the moments where I have awoken from my delusions of 'being a pretty good guy' and seen myself as I am, I occasionally see my friends for what they are as well. These are the times where I realize that none of us can make each other whole, BUT that we will never be whole without each other's presence. All of us gathering together imperfected, and crying out with needs that none of the others present ever fully understand. Yet, we stay there together, waiting for the terror of the other's honest reflection of ourself to subside as they don't abandon us for what they see . . . even when we would abandon ourselves if not for their better example of how to love. Their love teaches me to love myself, and I've found that this self-love is perhaps the hardest lesson we all have to learn.

I'm convinced that true love is beyond mere lies to comfort the other who has painted their own image as something loveable. It is honest, though biased, reflection always followed by the unnatural action of remaining. It is something that only comes from God who IS Wholeness. YHWH alone is the precedent for this action, and in this we find the greatest privilege of being human: acting as God. Acting out in the same actions as the one who is always aware of our lack and the pathetic and horrible actions that this leads to, yet he always faithfully and graciously remains present to us.

Admit It

So, I'm reading this book on the history of Judaism, and I've made my way up to the Holocaust and the aftermath of it. The book is written by a Roman Catholic scholar and one of the world's leading theologians. The Holocaust is one of the greatest marks of shame for both Protestantism and Catholicism. Consider Pope Pius XII who came to power right as the Holocaust was beginning. Pius came at a time not long after the Pope had been declared infallible. He could do no wrong. Also, as Pope, he was the perfect representative of God on earth. He was covered in the annointing that decended strait from Christ himself.

This is the same Pope who never spoke on the Holocaust up to his death in 1958. Never once did he question the Nazi's. His actions may have saved a few thousand Jews in Rome from commuting to Auschwitz, but his inaction allowed the extermination of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Jews. This was a Pope trained in anti-Jewish, medieval Catholic dogmas. His concern was for the institutional Catholic church, and that alone. Sacred humanity could, and did, go to hell. So long as those faithful Catholics maintained their position of privilage, he had done his job.

Excuses of interpretation were made up for these lapses in Christian character. The dogma of the Immaculate conception was employed to prove Jesus was not a Jew. Therefore as a non-Jew killed by Jews, Catholics were justified to maintain an ambivalent attitude toward Jews. Signs point to the fact that Pius XII might have been better informed about the Holocaust than any other religious figure. He was also informed of the tens of thousands of Orthodox Serbs who were killed by Catholic extremists in Croatia. He did not publicly acknowledge this either. He sought only the benefit of his church, those faithful to him. He played politics to benefit himself and his group. He didn't care in the least for the millions dying around him: those who fell outside of his group, and therefore didn't quite count as 'Human'.

Yet, let's consider the hundreds of thousands of people that died in the latter half of the 20th century in Latin America. U.S. supported troops trained militia's to maintain the violence of the Latin world while we extorted their economies to benefit the rich aristocrats heading up American corporations. This is still going on. We only hear of it when "evil dictators" such as Venezuela's president speak out in favor of their own country. Go read any human rights organization's website and you will come to the sickening conclusion that few if any U.S. corporations do not employ some form of slave labor to supply our country with our needs. Our favorite clothes cost 15 cents to make and 2 cents to ship to our stores, and are sold at 150% profit. The vast majority of this income is ciphoned into the bank accounts of the corporations top executives. A small portion (increasingly smaller if one pays attention to the American economic situation) is given to corporate employees. A miniscule portion is given to nameless foreign slaves, most of whom are under the age of 15 and rarely live past 35. This is the nature of wealth. One man can live comfortably only as far as he has stolen comfort from 20 other men. . . at least if we are speaking of "American comfort".

Now naturally anyone who is aware of this cannot help but be sickened by it. So as Noam Chomsky points out, Americans are brainwashed by government/corporate propaganda so that we don't see this reality, and foreigners who speak out are killed, generally by extremists in their own country . . . one's which are trained and supplied by "American" aristocrats with vested interests in maintaining the chaos.

Our president is a Methodist, or at least that's how he's presented by our 'spin-free' media. He keeps America's most influential spiritual leaders at his side. Yet, our spiritual leaders don't seem to speak much on behalf of those outside our own "spiritual demographic".

Consider for instance, as Shane Claiborne does in his book, the fortune of Iraqi Christians . . oops have a spoken an oxymoron?? Yes, they exist. Actually it appears that quite a few exist, or at least existed. Yet, how many stories on Iraqi Christians and their plight have you seen on MSNBC or Fox News? Have their voices been considered in the progressive discussions on the war for Iraqi Freedom?? I assure you, they are dying in this war. Yet do we even ask if they think this war is justified?

Since the beginning of "Iraqi Freedom" 700,000+ Iraqis have died. Sure they've been rid of Sadaam's reign of terror where it appears that at most 20,000 were dying at his hand yearly . . . at most. Chomsky does a good job of pointing out that the U.S. would have struggled to pick a more pathetic target to wage war on. One wonders why Iran and North Korea have been allowed to continue on harboring terrorists and producing nuclear weapons along with their chemical and biological ones. Perhaps, as Chomsky points out, it is because they would actually be able to fight back . . . notice I did not say win, only fight. Iraq though, deflated by years of heavy sanctions, was armed with the latest in pathetically outdated military technology: compare laser guided missles to AK-47's, molitove cocktails, and . . . rocks. We picked on the easist target we could, well, after Afghanistan that is. Notice also that viable governments have not been easily produced in either country. Notice that our government doesn't seems to care that much. Really all that is necessary is to maintain chaos indefinitely while U.S. based conglomerates extort natural resources from these countries.

Our president seems emphatic that we stay the course, which it seems in plain terms is the course to make the rich richer and the poor . . . dead or close to it. Our Christian president ladies and gentlemen.

So, at the end of this long chain of disgust, what do we do:

1. Take a cue from Catholic history and admit it. Do like Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz and find venues to admit guilt and repent. The first part of restoring Eden is to make the entire world our confessional in order to cover over a multitude of sins. (James in case you didn't catch that)

2. Remember that discipleship has no privilages, and that the joy of following Jesus continues only as far as we follow him. The Kingdom of God extends to ALL, and Jesus is merely our elder brother teaching us how to serve the King. He never assumed the kingly position and finds himself in it, only as far as God places him there. All that to say, there is no heirarchy in God's Kingdom, only service.

3. Realize that anything that cheapens the value of human dignity is anti-God. This is the realization and proof of the only Law that matters: Love the Lord you God (and the humanity he made: self and other) with everything.

4. Read The Irresistable Revolution by Shane Claiborne. My impression of the book is that he says nothing original in it, yet amazingly conveys that he and his friends are living out what so many theologians and myself have been saying. This is actually the most original thing he could do. (heck take a cue from Batman Begins - "It's what I do that defines me")

5. One theologian I like points out that plenty of people who have resolutely rejected church are still using Jesus as the main reference point in their lives. They won't confess that "he's the Son of God who died for their sins to give them eternal life", but they will follow him to serve the poor and learn how to love their fellow human beings. Other's know nothing of Jesus but live similarly to these 'Christians in action' by serving those whom God loves. People dedicate their time to fighting for basic human rights world wide, or fighting for equality of domestic law for those among us. Chomsky points out the obvious reasons that so little changes in America:
_ a. We are isolated by busy schedules and neutralized by a media that feeds us a passive benign lifestyle that, like Seinfeld, means nothing. Our lives are about nothing.
_ b. We think we are alone in the rare act of thinking, and isolation is the greatest way to neutralize a threat, any one who's ever taken a karate lesson knows that much.
_ c. We have been conditioned by simple consumer psychology to expect quick, easy results. We want to go to a protest and end the war tomorrow, but if anything's sure it's that the changes you want the most, will most likely only be enjoyed by your grandchilderen. Any WW2 veteran could explain that to you.