(Je me souviens) I Remember
Peacemaking in the Theology of Rene Girard and James Allison a talk on Remembrance Sunday 2013 at St Bride's by Jon Jelfs
As many of you know Helen and I have recently spent 3 weeks in North America. We spent two of those weeks in the province of Quebec. While we were there we noticed that all the car number plates had the words “Je me souviens” (I remember) on them, which turns out to be the motto of Quebec. I think its meaning is something like this: “I will remember, because what has gone before gives birth to what is new.” In this instance the birth of French Quebec, the New France in Canada.
William Busbee was a 23 year old US soldier. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly washing them under the tap. "Mom, it won't wash off," he said, “it won’t wash off”. "What are you talking about?" she replied. "The blood. It won't wash off."
On 20 March last year, the soldier's compulsive hand washing, a sign of the deep psychological trauma of war, came to an end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters looking helplessly on he shot himself in the head.
In the US and the UK more service men or veterans commit suicide than actually are killed in service. And so we remember.
Deep down perhaps we all know there is an abhorrence to trying to solve problems through violence and war. It tortures hearts and minds leading to self-hatred and hatred of others, and so the cycle of violence continues.
Last week I went to see the film Ender’s Game in the cinema (did anybody see it?). It is a sci-fi movie with a redemptive theme in which the young hero Ender is tricked into destroying an alien race just when he realised they were trying to communicate with him and there might be the possibility of peace without violence.
While in Montreal we visited the holocaust memorial centre and remembered again the almost unbelievable systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6 million Jews and also many others: people with disabilities, Roma, communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.
As Christians, remembering is part of our spiritual practice. We regularly, as we gather, remember Jesus as the archetypal Innocent One who was unjustly killed by the state and yet who in some almost unfathomable way offers peace. We love to gather to share bread and wine, to worship, to think and debate and as we do so we hope and trust that peace is being born. Our Colossians reading says “Making peace through the blood of the cross”. What on earth can this mean and how is it fulfilled? Is it really true that the event of Jesus being unjustly killed, which we remember, of being raised up on a cross is the true source of peace? Is it true that the central figure of our faith, hanging as an innocent but forgiving victim on a Roman cross, soaring like the Dali painting above human culture, slowly undoing its violent purposes?
In a progressive Christian context there is sometimes an understandable tendency to dilute the idea of the centrality of the cross and to focus more on the teaching of Jesus. Perhaps this has been partly because of the embarrassment of centuries of many Christians thinking that the events of the cross were to pacify a wrathful God. The work of Rene Girard and James Alison (and also many others) is helping to shed fresh light on this today. There is a deepening understanding of the anthropological role of Jesus in human history and how remembering his teaching, his death, his resurrection are all central to the birthing of a new humanity, a more evolved way of living beyond violence.
Rene Girard is a French anthropological philosopher whose work is growing in influence. He has explored the role of violence and religion in the formation and maintenance of human culture and the anthropological role of Jesus. This is a huge subject and I am not an expert but here is very inadequate simplistic 101 course in Girardian thinking (commonly called mimetic theory).
Five points:
We learn by imitation. As children we learn by imitating parents and others (the social other). We copy each other’s language and behaviour, we model ourselves on others.
We imitate desire as well as language and actions. Even what we desire – what we like and want – is learned from comparison with others. We see this today in celebrity culture, advertising, the market economy, and competitive activities of many sorts.
At an unconscious level this imitation easily leads to envy and rivalry and becomes the source of conflict and violence when played out in society.
Escalating violence can be calmed with a scapegoat or sacrifice. The ancient world found that transferring the guilt and hostility to one person or group and punishing them could calm the escalating rivalry causing violence and disorder. This became ritualised in religious practice through human sacrifices and later animal sacrifices where the guilt and shame of rivalrous thoughts, feelings and practices (call it sin if you will) could be offered to God and peace restored. In our own age we continue to find scapegoats and inflict pain and suffering on them to appease our own anger and violence. We might be able to think of many examples of that.
The Bible, both OT and NT progressively reveal and undermine these mechanisms including the unjust scapegoating of innocent victims. Think of all the biblical stories: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and many others that illustrate these very human mechanisms. This culminated in Jesus teaching a new way of relating and ultimately being unjustly killed, in the place of Barabbas, as an innocent scapegoat to end all sacrifice and scapegoating. It was his resurrection which confirmed that this way of loving nonviolence is the divine way and that God is always towards human beings with forgiveness and love rather than violence and wrath.
Catholic theologian James Alison’s genius is his ability to open up the scriptures to show what has always been there but often hidden because of the layers of interpretation that we have accumulated on the text. In his hands we see the unfolding revelation in the Bible of a divine presence in creation, who he calls “the other Other” (in contrast to the social other that we grow up imitating) as the one who is wholly towards all human beings with love. Those scriptures reveal progressively (in contrast to earlier pagan ways of thinking about the gods) that God not only loves us as we are but likes us as we continue to develop and evolve in this extraordinary creation, making mistakes, missing the mark but forgiven even before we do so.
James Alison describes sacrifice in the biblical text in terms of a “reverse flow” – not an offering to God to appease his wrath (as we have often thought) but rather a sacred gift from God that reveals the extent of his love and forgiveness towards us. James illustrates in his exegesis of both Old and New Testament texts how we have lost the earlier understand of reverse flow – that in the sacrificial context the movement is from God towards us with love. The only violent and wrathful presence in this sacrificial equation is us.
One of the subjects that especially interests me arising from Girard and Alison’s work is what we might call “the redemption of desire”. How is it that spirituality is formative for us as we transition to more peaceful ways of being in this world? When we choose to follow the way of Jesus, to become a Christ follower we become imitators of Christ (in contrast to imitators of the ‘social other’) – our desire and the actions that flow from it are transformed in the direction of goodness, beauty, love and peace as lived and taught by Jesus. In the context of our gathered worship, we offer up the desire that is in us that tends towards rivalry and violence allowing God to redeem it so that it becomes in us a source of healing rather than conflict.
What is the means to this transformation? I think at the heart of it are worship and spiritual practice. In worship and spiritual practice we open to the infusion of God’s Spirit and we may have insight to, and experience, God’s love in a way that changes us. Study or desire for change can only take us so far in breaking free from the cycle of violence. Removing the violent language from our liturgies can only take us so far. These things will remove the violence from the human heart. To the extent that we abandon ourselves to God in worship and allow that experience to flow into the rest of our lives, to that extent our desire and ability to love our neighbour as ourselves is formed.
Je me souviens. This is why we remember.