Atonement/Beauty/Christianity/Religion/Spirituality/Violence

My Involvement in Scapegoating

Posted on by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

When I was in grade six, there was a group of us that picked on Colin. Colin was in our class and always got better grades than everyone else. He was also ungainly and preferred sticking to himself. In short, Colin was a "natural" outcast.

I remember one day agreeing with a few of the bigger boys in our group to corner him after school and beat him up. Colin somehow smelled our plan and when the bell rang to end class he was the first one out the front doors, running as fast as he could to his house a few blocks away. But I was a fast runner. I caught and tackled him before he made it out of the school grounds. The other boys, having caught up to us, began to beat him up while I stood there watching.

The utterly detestable thing about this, besides the act itself, was that at the time, I had no remorse for Colin, only relief that it wasn’t me flailing away on the ground. I knew my action gave me a place within the group; but I remember having the vague feeling that without Colin around I might have been the target. In some twisted way I needed Colin to occupy this place.

I’ve since learned from anthropologist Rene Girard, that Colin was our "scapegoat". In some elemental way our identity was bound up by being something that Colin wasn’t. And so, while he was the "outcast" he was also the thing that unified and solidified our group. For a while at least, any conflicts in our group could be solved by a new round of bullying, or "scapegoating" Colin.

Now while we pretty much knew that abusing Colin in this way was wrong, we didn’t understand the dark dynamics of our involvement in this "scapegoating violence". We didn’t know, as Rene Girard has shown, that this "scapegoating mechanism", in all its limitless permutations, is at the bottom of all kinds of "power plays" and power structures, from schoolyard bullying to "office politics", from church splits to gang wars, and from the creation of cultures to the founding of religions.

We didn’t know because the mechanism has an uncanny ability to stay hidden when we are personally caught up in it. It’s usually only when confronted by our own deep complicity in scapegoating violence that we are able to choose another way. Mercifully, there is a story that can confront us, and begin to heal us. (Continued)

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Starbucks Log: Sleepless in Edmonton

Posted on by stephen t berg / 3 Comments

Somehow the underwater nasal strains of Bob Dylan always settle me. Dylan has the voice of a sad mystic, which is hope for me. It counters the sight of fire trucks and the sound of police sirens here on 9th street.

I like that sometimes Dylan’s muse is sick and his "horse is blind". I like it because I feel it; I know what that’s like. Sometimes words don’t come. They get stuck–jammed like logs at the throat of a river. They wait there for the river to rise. A rain perhaps. Perhaps they will wait until spring after the thaw.
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I like the man in the bright orange and yellow vest with the broom and the heavy blue bag with the long handle, that serves as dustpan. I like him because he always says hello to me. Says hello to as many people as meet his eyes. You can tell he likes saying hello. I also like him because he keeps this concrete acre clean.

Today a lady that could be his wife is working with him. What kind of life do they have? Does he say hello to his wife several times a day?
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Lately I’ve been waking up late. 6:30-7:00 AM. The reason is that I wake up early, around 3:30-4:00, and lie awake for an hour or more before falling back to sleep. What’s that about? Certainly not the sleep-of-the-dead. Which is fine with me if that’s my alternative.

The people that are writing "spots" for Hope Mission’s Radio-thon had a story of a guy wandering the streets, not sleeping for eight days. I read someplace that after eleven days you die. Thinking that the man in their story was an anecdotal-composite-man, I told the writer that we don’t see too many people who haven’t slept for eight days and asked him to adjust the story a bit. But he came back to me and said the eight days was an actual quote.

I know street guys-I talk to them-who claim to not have slept for several days; and by the zombie-signs I believe them. But eight days? What would that be like?

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Beauty/Spirituality

Greenhouse for the Soul

Posted on by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

The lady in Starbucks this morning, who asked me whether or not I could get a weather report on my laptop computer, was wearing a loud fluffy orange scarf. One of those you would have seen on a starlet in the thirties–all wispy and feathery–hiding neck, chin and shoulders, dwarfing the rest of her body even though she wasn’t exactly petite. She talked with a lisp caused by a cleft palate.

She was genuinely intrigued by the technology and was amazed that I could, if I wanted, listen to radio and watch TV and movies all on my computer. After she had enough information to walk with she put on her long brown leatherette coat, re-wrapped her scarf and left. I looked over at the young lady reading the newspaper at the next table. I couldn’t quite make out from the turn of her mouth, whether she found the scarf-lady or our conversation slightly amusing.

I’ve spent most of my life wanting to fit in somewhere. If I’m honest, fitting-in has been the hidden quest of my life. Underneath my pursuits, from recreational to intelectual to spiritual, from John Krakauer to Nietzsche to St. Benedict, there is an intense desire in me not to be found amusing, but interesting.

I was in grade nine, on a morning break, when I turned to find myself the object of laughter by a group of classmates. The boy at the centre of the scrum was imitating me, holding up an invisible hair. And I saw myself.

I had a habit of being distracted in school and that morning I became preoccupied with a very long hair I had discovered on the knee of my jeans and had picked it off for closer examination. I didn’t know that I was being carefully examined at the same time.

Dwayne hadn’t counted on my stumbling onto his pantomime of me and when I caught his eyes, for a brief moment, we were both embarrassed. He however had the crowd guffawing and sniggering and recovered quickly, and turning his back to me went on with the show. Well, I only assumed he carried on because at that moment I dropped my head and I left the area immediately. I didn’t recover so quickly. Decades later I still remember the scene with precision.

Places of acceptance are greenhouses for the soul. But true places of acceptance are expansive, inclusive, not held together through the exclusion of some group or person or idea. True places of acceptance are places where you can wean yourself of the intense desire to fit in. When you find a place like this, return to it as often as you can.

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Beauty/Spirituality

The Bible’s “Sex Issue”

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Vue Weekly’s "sex issue" which my wife and I read, ahem, discreetly, over lunch at Sherlock Holmes last Sunday got me thinking about the Bible’s "sex issue". That is, the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon. It’s the one book in the Bible we Christians have long been embarrassed by. Not too embarrassed by the mayhem in say, Judges, just the erotic poetry of the Song. And apparently there was, over the years, efforts to remove it from the Bible.

But taking the Song of Songs out of the Bible would be like plucking the cherry of the sundae, like scraping the meringue of the lemon meringue pie, like going to a comedy club where they ban all laughter and well…you get the picture… like taking sex out of marriage.

God bless our ancient Hebrew mentors who loved to live in their bodies, understood that denying our sensuality and sexuality would be denying the very thing that draws us and links us to God. Our spirituality has everything to do with our desire, our passion, our energy.

The Song, taken on its own as a celebration of sexuality already earns its place in Holy Scripture. But seen as well as imagery of God’s love for us and our potential love for God it becomes possibly one of the "holiest books" in scripture. It becomes a burning fire. That’s hot.

Yes, God’s love for us is paternal, maternal and fraternal but perhaps until we understand that his love for us, her desire for us, is ravishing, is all consuming, is penetrating, out of control to the point where we commingle, as the NT says live inside one another, we will only be able to love in a truncated way.

In the act(s) of sexual love we are most free, vulnerable, open, we give and receive in ways that go beyond concepts and thought, in ways that even halt time. In the sexual act we gain an existential understanding of love. (By the way I do believe that this kind of existential understanding of love can be gained by our celibate brothers and sisters which only serves to strengthen the notion that celibacy is a unique gift.)

The eroticism in the Song is not a fallen form of love. It is who we are, sensual, erotic, passionate.

The preaching I heard growing up made me feel guilty about desires and pleasures. And of course the Song of Songs was avoided. It was hardly ever referred to and when it was it was always spiritualized so as to sterilize it beyond recognition. This I think was a Platonist attempt to regain for it a purity it certainly didn’t need because it already was pure. It was thought, I suppose, that this way of treating the Song would keep our passions in check, keep them underground so that we would be kept safe from pleasure which equalled sin.

Sebastian Moore, a Benedictine priest turns this conventional view of sin on its ear when he says, “Sin stems from a lack of desire for pleasure.”

Before dismissing Dom Moore we need to think about what he is saying. The Song of Songs is passionate, erotic, full of life and love and desire. It not only frees us, but beckons us to become participants and partaker’s of a love life with God.

When life beckons to us like a lover do we embrace it or do we retreat? Or do we even allow life to beckon to us this way?

We fear the Song’s passion and its eroticism because we see it through the squandered sexuality of the blue screen. The Song, if read aright, is an antidote to trivialized, loveless, passionless, (essentially inhuman) sexuality. It is capable of reorienting our desire for another, therefore of God. Our desires and yes, our desire for pleasure is God’s calling card.

Jesus came so that we could have life abundantly. He came not as an ethereal presence but robed with flesh and longing.

When we see our sexuality as apart from and inferior to our spirituality, we are setting up a distinction that God doesn’t make. When we see procreation as apart from and inferior to prayer we fall into the Gnostic heresy that says the (pure) spirit needs to be freed from flesh which is the house of evil. Perhaps in this case we are still in need of emancipation from the debilitating dualism of a Greek/Western world view.

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