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Secret to Marriage (Happy 20th Deb!)

Posted on by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

"The secret to a happy and lasting marriage", my wife said to a friend yesterday, "is learning how to fight well."

I have heard her say this before. I’ve never liked the answer…it seems so negative. Everything in me wants to say something like, "Having found the right person, love simply endures."

My wife however, hearing this, would smile and humour my quixotic side, and allow me to go on tilting at windmills, ah, for a time. Not that "compatibility" is unimportant. My wife would simply say that it’s not key.

DebcabYou see, she looks deeper. There is, within her "inscape", an intuitive amative (love expressing) pragmatism. In other words, she knows the value of true communication.

Her, "learning how to fight well", is really a way of saying that in a marriage it’s critical to tenaciously keep lines of communication open. She would tell you that it’s imperative to fight for those connections and openings, to keep things flowing, even when they hurt.

Well, I’m here to tell you that with me, Debbie almost met her match. I can close down like a prodded sea anemone. That is my default position. Another phrase comes to mind…passive aggressive, which when I heard the term for the first time, oh, twenty years ago or so, had me heading for cover. But my wife would find me and shine a light under the layers. Which I know for her was excruciatingly hard work.

Of course what that is, is nothing but active love. It’s caring enough to hurt. It’s saying that you matter, and not just for the moment.

What happens to you when you know you matter to someone? You either grow or run. I’ve done both but perhaps, as twenty years may indicate, I’ve learned to run less and grow more.

I’ve even learned, I think, to occasionally seek out and shine a light under my wife’s "layers".

And all this only because someone loved me enough to "fight well" with me.

Happy Twentieth Anniversary Love…, s.

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Atonement/Christianity/Peace/Religion/Violence

Undoing the Sacrificial Matrix

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

This is in response to a comment on the Achan post. The question was:

Does your spin on the Achan story depend on the notion that there must have been other “Achans” who weren’t caught?

The way I see it is if the events in the Achan story" are interpreted literally, then obviously you can have only one Achan. Things are what they are. God commands the wiping out of nations and anything associated or "touched" by them, like Achan and his family. And so it goes, the sacrificial altar humps along, (throughout scripture) claiming its victims and restoring "meaning" and "peace", and keeping the sacrificers safe and on the right side. (And far as we’re concerned, all we need to do is make sure we stay on the right side.)

If however you question this kind of God and refuse an Arianistic split between Father and Son and believe the Son wholly reveals the Father, then things look much different. The first difference is that the interpretation of the Achan event must be seen not only theologically but also anthropologically. That is, that this culture, as those around them, lived within the cult of sacrifice. But with a difference–that the writers interpreted the events within their culture as best they could, with the "light" they had. And that "light" was God’s gradual self-revelation.

In fact the story of scripture is that this "light" grows through God’s slow but persistant self-revelation; even while God continues to work within our own sacrificial matrix as a way of finally undoing it. The light becomes successively brighter as we move through the historical books, then through the poets and especially the prophets; and finally, in Christ, we discover that the "light" is the Light of the world.

With this anthropological as well as theological understanding in mind, "my spin" on the Achan story is that it doesn’t need other Achan’s, actually, doesn’t need an Achan at all. That’s because an "Achan-like" culprit/victim will be found. That is just the intransigence of the "scapegoating mechanism".

In the same way, Christ didn’t plan his being sacrificed, it wasn’t a Father/Son sacrificial pact as the substitution atonement theory presents. What Christ did know is that his studied non-association with sacrifice and scapegoating, powerfully represented in everything from the healing of the Gerasene demoniac, a quintessential scapegoat, to the cleansing of the Temple and its sacrificial fascination, would inevitably result in his being sacrificed. As Caiaphas says from deep within the mechanism, "better to have one man die in exchange for the nation…" And so Christ is sacrificed, and predictably "peace" breaks out, Pilot and Herod become friends over the sacrificial altar.

And without the resurrection, the mechanism stays hidden, violence casts out violence claiming sacred status, the "power of sin" holds, Satan doesn’t fall like lightning. But mercifully, of course, the resurrection redefines everything.

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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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