Violence 3: We, The Violent

So far, in these meditations on violence, I’ve not actually defined the word.  We probably imagine a violent act to be one done intentionally, likely by a person with power who willfully injures or destroys one with less power.  How much more specific can we be?  Consider whether violence can ever be just.  Is a destructive act against another technically violent if done in self-defense or at the command of a military superior?  We Christians have our own histories to contend with when it comes to understanding the place of violence within our story: I recently heard a theologian differentiate between the terrible-seeming acts commanded by God in the Old Testament and actual violence; the latter, asserted the theologian, is something God never participates in.  (Whether or not he’s correct isn’t the point.  I mean simply to acknowledge the difficulty of this word, a difficulty that isn’t easily simplified by Christianity.)

Coretta Scott King during the Poor People’s Campaign. (Jack Rottier Collection.)

I wonder if the slipperiness of the word makes my earlier point that violence is less a moment in time and more the ground on which we walk.  On June 19, 1968 Coretta Scott King addressed the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington DC and described the pervasiveness of violence.

Poverty can produce a most deadly kind of violence. In this society violence against poor people and minority groups is routine. I remind you that starving a child is violence; suppressing a culture is violence; neglecting schoolchildren is violence; discrimination against a working man is violence; ghetto housing is violence; ignoring medical needs is violence; contempt for equality is violence; even a lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.

Context always matters, no more so than in the case of Mrs. King’s remarks.  Less than three months earlier her husband, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis.  His was an especially violent death, captured in images and eye-witnesses accounts that still register in our national consciousness.  Yet, when describing the toll of violence, Mrs. King pointed not to her husband’s spectacular and undeniably violent death but to the millions of accepted and overlooked acts that take place every day.

Making the shift toward Mrs. King’s view of violence leaves us with a dilemma far more significant than a murky definition: such a view implicates not a few violent actors but most of us, most of the time.

Is God A Platitude?

I experienced the last chapter of Aleksandar Hemom’s memoir like a punch to the gut.  Or, more accurately, like preparing in slow motion for a fist that finally and devastatingly makes contact.  I finished the book and walked around the living room shaking my head, sighing loudly, trying unsuccessfully to find my breath.  The Book of My Lives is a wonderful book; the chapters function as essays documenting Hemon’s previous life in Sarajevo and his current one in Chicago.  But that last chapter…

“The Aquarium” was originally published as an essay in The New Yorker and in it Hemon tells how his very young daughter contracted a rare and deadly form of cancer.  The reader need not be a parent to imagine the terror experienced by the author and his wife, though images of my own son’s three frightening trips to the hospital flickered across my memory as I read Hemon’s precise descriptions of hospital beds, medications,  and, of course, the fear.

And then, in a paragraph halfway through the chapter, the author writes about the annoying platitudes offered by acquaintances who weren’t sure what to say in the presence of such suffering.  I read these sentences sympathetically; though I’ve not known pain anywhere near what this family experienced, I share their distaste for words and sentences that explain tritely the unexplainable.  But then I came to these two sentences and had to set the book down:

And we stayed away from anyone who, we feared, might offer us the solace of that supreme platitude, God.  The hospital chaplain was prohibited from coming anywhere near us.

A good friend of ours has been working as a hospital chaplain this year and the thought of her offering God to anyone as a platitude is too much to believe.  But that’s not really the point, is it?  For Hemon, whose religious antagonism surfaces only occasionally throughout the book, God is a platitude: a meaningless bunch of words dressed up to sound spiritually relevant.  We don’t get to know why he and his wife feel this way, though I’m not sure it matters; they are not alone in their distaste for God-talk, especially when applied like a cheap bandaid to a gaping wound.

The thing is, I share a bit of the author’s antipathy.  Over the past three years I’ve spent time in the emergency room three times with members of our family.  During those uncertain moments I’ve been glad to know (and be reminded) that friends and family have been praying for us.  But that’s about all I’ve wanted to hear.  I don’t need an explanation for these too-frequent emergency room trips and any such explanation, no matter how theologically nuanced, would have been supremely annoying.

Why is it that people like Hemon have experienced God as “that supreme platitude”?  In part it must be that we who claim to know God have represented him as such.  In moments of suffering – in hospital rooms or in the aftermaths of bombings and tornadoes – Christians often say too much.  We offer explanations that may have some Biblical heft but are tone-deaf to the experience of profound suffering.  When our mouths should be shut we instead fill the disquieting air with thin platitudes.

The sad irony is that Christians have access to more humane ways of encountering tragedy, whether our own or another’s. Throughout the Bible we observe God’s people lament during their moments of suffering. In place of quick explanations or claims to speak on God’s behalf, they grieve, mourn, and question. Job’s friends are the first to offer platitudes disguised as spiritual wisdom and they are eventually silenced by the God whose actions will not be neatly explained.  On the other hand, the Psalms, the textbook for prayer, are filled with lament and silence.  In the Bible, the one who interrogates God about suffering comes off looking far better than those who try to explain God to the suffering.

Of course none of this may change even a little Hemon’s assumption that God is nothing but the supreme platitude. But his belief and, I infer, the experiences behind it, remind that God is best represented in moments of suffering not through any spiritual platitude but through our lament, sometimes spoken and often not.

“The will to power and of possession has become limitless.”

The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. We have begun a throw away culture. This tendency is seen on the level of individuals and whole societies; and it is being promoted! In circumstances like these, solidarity, which is the treasure of the poor, is often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and the economy. While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules. Moreover, indebtedness and credit distance countries from their real economy and citizens from their real buying power. Added to this, as if it were needed, is widespread corruption and selfish fiscal evasion which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The will to power and of possession has become limitless.

-Pope Francis speaking to ambassadors to the Vatican, May 16.

“…Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism…”

Don’t expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire’s Christian divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most obsequious deference to the Plutocracy, providing imprimaturs and singing hallelujahs for the civil religion of Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America’s most enduring covenant theology. It’s the core of “American exceptionalism,” the sanctimonious and blood-spattered myth of providential anointment for global dominion. In the Chrapitalist gospel, the rich young man goes away richer, for God and Mammon have pooled their capital, formed a bi-theistic investment group, and laundered the money in baptismal fonts before parking it in offshore accounts. Chrapitalism has been America’s distinctive and gilded contribution to religion and theology, a delusion that beloved community can be built on the foundations of capitalist property. As the American Empire wanes, so will its established religion; the erosion of Chrapitalism will generate a moral and spiritual maelstrom.

What will American Christians do as their fraudulent Mandate from Heaven expires? They might break with the imperial cult so completely that it would feel like atheism and treason. With a little help from anarchists, they might be monotheists, even Christians again. Who better to instruct them in blasphemy than sworn enemies of both God and the state? Christians might discover that unbelievers can be the most incisive and demanding theologians.

-Eugene McCarraher, “Love is Stronger than Debt” in Books and Culture.

Another example of why Books and Culture continues to be my most anticipated mail. You’re a subscriber, right?

“…dismantling whiteness and following the Jewish Jesus…”

The task of prophetic theology today includes dismantling whiteness and following the Jewish Jesus who is leading an intercultural movement of love and justice.  While the colonial imagination viewed white Europeans as God’s elect in the New World, the Scriptures repudiate this hierarchical racial logic and ground Christian identity in the election of the Jews.  Israel, understood as the covenant people of God, offers the roper horizon of Christian self-understanding because it roots identify in the God of Abraham, instead of the modern state apparatus that was forged through the flourishing of the white masculine ideal.  God’s covenantal history with the Jews offers a robust theological alternative to modernity’s narrative of progress.

-Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation.

I’m just a chapter into the book and already considering who I’ll recommend it to.  Heltzel is drawing here from Cater’s Race, a book I worked hard to understand, though a large percentage of it surely went right over my head.