Peace

Love Everything

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Many years ago I read a great book called "The Brothers Karamazov". I recall very little of it today. But I did learn something about the author.

He lived in a desperate time. He himself was desperately poor, plagued by epilepsy and mental problems. And the world he lived in was filled with starvation, syphilis, filth, waste, and pogroms.

Something stronger held him together and he wrote about it as only he could, with humour, beauty, and psychological insight. Later in life he wrote:

Love all of God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly, more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding universal love. -Fyodor Dostoevski

When the basis of our lives is love, when, as Bob Marley sings, our "religion is love" the things, the stories that are uniquely ours, and that only we can uniquely communicate, become gems of goodness that keep our world upright and work towards a completed creation. Share, publish, paint those stories.

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Atonement/Christianity/Peace/Violence

Achan and the “Logic of Violence”

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

Just to address, in part, some of the very welcome comments appearing on this blog…

The logic of violence is truly a hard thing to break through. That the Bible is replete with wrath and violence is no secret but to then extrapolate, that, "wrath is an inescapable reality of God’s person" is the "logic of violence". It is, in fact, the "divinization" of our violence.

Let me explain. You’ll remember the story of Achan who kept a bit of spoil for himself, from a previous battle, and as a result Joshua’s campaign to wipe out the Canaanites stalled. After a search they came upon Achan and after a brief interrogation he pleaded guilty for keeping a "devoted thing". And so Achan and his family are killed:

"All Israel stoned him to death; they burned them with fire, cast stones on them, and raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day. Then the LORD turned from his burning anger."

The story describes perfectly how the sacrificial mechanism works. The rising internal agitation–in this case over a lost battle–that threatens indiscriminate outbreaks of violence, finally gives way to an exclusive focus on a "culprit" (considering the size of the Israelite army we can guess that Achan wasn’t the only one to keep back some booty). Nevertheless, Achan is killed and God turns from his "burning anger". Peace is restored. Sacrificial violence triumphs.

It is easy to see how the wrath of "all Israel" in the stoning of Achan, is projected on God, as "divine wrath" precisely because "peace" breaks out. And the peace that comes at the expense of the victim is naturally translated as God’s approval.

But now, think about this is personal terms. How often have we been involved in a situation where the group we belong to, or church, or nation etc., is unified by the expulsion of a victim (scapegoat) and is justified in terms of being God’s will, or for the greater good of the people? (Remember Ciaphas?)

This sacrificial mechanism is nothing other than "the power of sin" because it keeps alive our sorting out of "us and them", violent or otherwise, while hiding from us our own involvement.

This "mechanism" is what God wants to destroy because it is destroying us. To continue seeing God as sacrificial, wrathful, is to undo what God is trying to do. It is to charge God with using the same mechanism to destroy the mechanism. It is tantamount to "Satan casting out Satan".

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Peace

Rainbows

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

rainbowJuly06I took this picture a week ago.

After the acrid smell of what I supposed was diesel exhaust wafted into the room, I got up from in front of CBC’s broadcast of "Trudeau II, Maverick in the Making"…to close the window.

I didn’t even notice it had rained. And there it was, curving over the Bell Tower.

And it was enough. Rainbows always are. And politics and pollution dropped away.

Speaking of rainbows…

Josephinerainbow

…this picture was taken at Hope Mission’s annual Street BBQ.

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Christianity/Peace/Violence

Violence and Not Learning from the Past (Part 2)

Posted on by stephen t berg / 3 Comments

I’m not saying that the mesmerizing power of mimetic (imitative, reciprocal) violence has abated. It obviously hasn’t. What I am saying is that the rising voice of the "victim" is slowly destroying any ability to coronate our violence with the mantle of divinity. But without sacred violence’s ability to curtail mimetic violence we face the reality of apocalyptic violence. We have been undone from within. And it is the fault of the gospel.

In this light it might be instructive to revisit Jesus’ statement: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." I used to wonder about this remark. But again, the fruits of a non-sacrificial reading of the gospel clarify things. Christ is making the simple and profound observation of what happens when the lie of "sacrifice" is exposed. When the mechanism of scapegoating, which is responsible for the founding of our religions and cultures, is destroyed, that is, when "Satan falls from the sky like lightening", we are in the most precarious of places.

No longer does "the peace that this world gives", hold. The spell of "redemptive violence" has been broken. But that’s dangerously good news.

For the first time, we are at a place where we can existentially "see" the gospel holding out our only hope. We are at the place where narrow fundamentalist interpretations of the gospel, that at one time allowed us to feel soul-safe while accepting an essentially fatalistic view of the world, no longer hold. No longer are we able to have heaven in our pocket while staying blind to our complicity in sacred violence.

Anthropologist, Rene Girard, has said in his book, "Violence and the Sacred", "For the first time we are faced with the perfectly straight-forward, even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and total renunciation of violence."

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. (John 14)

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