Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Time 2021-09-02 08:23:15

Web Name: Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

WebSite: http://www.clarion-journal.com

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The Great Facade by D.L. Jones This article is dedicated to MG Harold J. Greene and LTC James J. Walton, both of whom were Killed in Action (KIA) in Afghanistan. One was my boss and mentor; the other a dear friend. August 15, 2021August 15, 2021, will be a date that no U.S. combat veteran of Afghanistan will ever forget, nor will any combat veteran of the Five Eyes Alliance, or of Germany, nor should any citizen in the West. Many are comparing the fall of Kabul (and Afghanistan) to the Taliban to the Fall of Saigon (and Vietnam). One thing is for sure: political scientists and historians in the West will be writing about Afghanistan for the next 50 years as they have about Vietnam.This article is solely the private thoughts of one combat veteran of Afghanistan. I do not speak for nor do the views expressed here represent those of the U.S. Government, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I do not pretend to be a subject matter expert on Afghanistan nor the region. I am simply writing because I must. My conscience forces me to write. If you find this article of value then retain what is true and good about it for yourself and share it with others. If you disagree with it, then ignore and discard it. Afghanistan is The Great FacadeAfghanistan is The Great Facade. The fall of Afghanistan is not the fault of President Joseph Biden. Partisan Republicans attacking the President are simply perpetuating The Great Facade or Great Lie to the American people. If fault is to be laid for our failures in Afghanistan, it should be laid at the feet of the Neoconservatives (Neocons) who created the policies of Afghanistan and sustained this House of Cards over the last 20 years. The Neocons have infested the Department of Defense and State Department. Therefore, there has been a continuity of Afghan policies across many Presidential administrations and across party lines. Every now and then a book comes into my life that puts me in a happy dilemma: I want to lend it to all my friends, but I don’t want it to leave my house. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey is a labour of love by Illich’s long-time friend and co-conspirator, David Cayley. At 552 pages, its heft reminds me of the boxes of “a good, but inexpensive wine” that Illich managed to write off as a teaching expense. This opus represents many, many evenings of intelligent, friendly, and finally life-changing dialogue that culminate in a near-symphonic quality. Cayley’s deep understanding and clear prose pull a complex, balanced harmony out of themes that to the casual reader of Illich could seem eclectic. What does medical overreach have to do with the 12th-century innovation of silent reading or the New Testament concept of the Anti-Christ or the dissolution of gender as a capitalist phenomenon, for heaven’s sake? In a confusing and troubling time, this book gave me the permission to weigh the harm done by coronavirus against the harms done in the fight against it, a model to help me accept and be grateful for some of what medicine provides, and still have the confidence to resist to the hysteric shunning of my unvaccinated friends. In the wake of the discovery of more than 1,308 unmarked graves for Indigenous children who were coerced into residential schools and never came home again, the book helps me name the totalitarian hubris of a church that thought it could “do what God cannot, namely manipulate others into their own salvation” through brute force, child abductions and mind control, and repent of such hubris through a closer walk with Christ, rather than by running away from my spiritual inheritance.One of Illich’s mottos was “I fear the Lord is passing me by.” Illich receives in Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan a radical freedom to encounter the other Other in the human other—an opening to friendship that can not be guaranteed, a surprise that cannot be institutionalized. His other motto was Corruptio Optimi Pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. Glorious innovations tend to have dark shadows. A faith in which there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free is uniquely prone to an imperialism that flattens Indigenous cultures and drives men and women out of the complementarity of gender into the competitive, unidimensional arena of sex.This last idea risks generating much more heat than light, and a book review by a white man about a biography by a white man about another white man seems unlikely to help the cause. I may just be securing my copy from being borrowed! At the risk of mansplaining, I will spill a little more ink on what may be a stumbling block for many in accessing Illich. Many of Illich’s friends advised him against publishing his thoughts on this matter, and when Gender came out in 1982 it did mark a fall from grace for Illich among the New Left.Cayley’s chapter on “Gender” takes care to first understand what Illich had to say before critiquing some of his nostalgia and gender essentialism, a courtesy that was not granted him by early reviewers. Cayley summarizes Illich’s argument as follows:Illich speaks loudly against equality as sameness. But he also speaks loudly for equality in its sense of equity, arguing that most women suffer irremediable disadvantages in a realm of universal circulation and competition. The two points are connected. Illich claims that idealizing equality may allow some women to rise to new heights of wealth and influence but that it will hurt many more—by lowering the status of every form of sustenance that occurs outside the cash nexus in which equality finds its measure, by fostering an illusory sense of opportunity, and by inviting those who fail to seize these opportunities to blame themselves. His analysis of feminism, in this respect, took the same form as his analysis of every other modern institution that he explored—it incites envy and delivers frustration. Only by reversing economic growth, unbuilding the global megalith, and restoring human scale will the majority of women regain their dignity, he says, because only then will the contribution of those who have been shunted aside in the rat race begin to matter. This is the sole sense in which he speaks against equality: equality-as-justice, he says, cannot be achieved without a firm rejection of equality-as-sameness.Illich is on the lookout everywhere in his work for one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore the bonds and bounds of our bodies, whether the social bodies of community and culture or the physical bodies of women and men. Visions of justice that require everyone to have the same kinds of jobs, visions of health that require everyone to take the same kind of medicine, visions of education that require everyone to have the same kind of standardized credentials are for Illich a liberal power fantasy with an ugly underbelly, a perversion directly inherited from a church that could envision the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven as the mass conversion of global humanity into a single catechism and a single rite under a single worldly authority with divinely underwritten supremacy. Such a universalism inherently corrodes human freedom and erodes “the soil of friendship” which is always limited and local. “As long as you think of the world as a whole,” Illich said, “the time for human beings is over.” Illich is trying to protect islands of the homegrown, the homemade, and the homespoken. I think of feminist friends who make homegrown pickles with their homeschooled children when they could easily get jobs that would pay for cheaper pickles, cheaper child care, and then some. Perhaps at the kitchen tables of these mothers, Illich’s analysis of gender has “reached the hour of its legibility,” as is hoped by Giorgio Agamben, another male commentator. Besides the voice of Illich’s colleague Barbara Duden, and a comment from Cayley’s wife, we hear little sympathetic commentary from women in this chapter. That is too bad. Illich calls this domain of the homemade “the vernacular,” reviving an old Latin adjective that could be applied to one’s mother tongue as well as to a cow raised at home instead of acquired at the market. He hopes such islands can align in an “archipelago of conviviality”—a chain of islands where life is still livable on a human scale, where we can love one another as neighbours and renounce the kind of “care” that implicitly takes the point of view of a systems administrator. It is not that Illich is against institutions and systems organized to achieve social goods, but as a loyal dissident of the Roman Catholic Church, he is acutely sensitive to the harms done in the name of good, and of the importance of limits and humility for those of us who get caught up trying to save the world, whether with sacred rites or secular ones. “Risk awareness,” Illich said to Cayley late in life, is “the most important religiously celebrated ideology of today.” That was before the Coronavirus lockdown.Illich blesses the missionary impulse at the same time as he chastens it. He understands that whether inspired by Jesus or by a medical breakthrough, people will want to share their good news. But he sees with near-clairvoyant power how the good news is accompanied by a terrible danger. Humans inspired by visions of God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven all too easily construct an artificial, man-made world from which there is no escape. As a reader of Illich via Cayley, I find myself more deeply drawn into the good news of Jesus, and more able to discern and rebuke the spirits that dress up like Jesus while perverting his good news. I find myself both grateful for a vaccine that reduces the symptoms and spread of a nasty virus, and alert to the shadows of a campaign of global vaccine compliance. When a frightened neighbour who does not attend my church recently reached out to me to ask if I could write a religious exemption for her son so that this unvaccinated young man could attend college this fall, I said yes. As I did so, I silently thanked Illich and Cayley for helping me get my head around what the hell is going on in this strange time and how in heaven’s name such a yes to my neighbour could possibly be a yes to Christ. REFLECTION ON MODES OF FUTURE THOUGHT(an invited paper for the Big History Congress, 2011)Lazar Puhalo Modes of Future Thought: Can strategic concepts move beyond ideology? Political Ideologies and “GlobalThought”: Can there be a Synthesis of Scientific Theories and Spiritual Traditions? Big History encounters a universe’s movement into greater complexity rather than its entropy. We are engaged in studying the great difficulty and limitedness with which such an apparent anomaly occurs. Our own biosphere, which, following the thought of Panov and others, includes human civilisations and technologies, is one island of this increasing complexity. Such complexity brings with it fragility and vulnerability, and this is a theme that should be of special interest to us, as our own biosphere is at the point of a singularity which must be examined in all earnestness.CLICK HERE to download REFLECTIONS ON MODESIRPJ.org hosts Felicia Murrell (with Bradley Jersak)Felicia Murrell (she/her) is the Author of Truth Encounters She is also a Copy Editor/Proofreader, The Bee Company www.yzcounsel.comFelicia and Brad discuss: * our common humanity the beauty of racial diversity * fusion vs. homogeneity (whether by assimilation or segregation) * race, racism (vs. prejudice), and systemic racism * seeing race as a construct without practicing erasure * what is Black ? color, culture, shared history * critical race theory: its history, how it s weaponized used as a distraction * learning to hold fear and anger rather than repressing, fixing, or being ruled by it. * overcoming racism with love rather than inverting power * self-giving love and power with * the legacy of Howard Thurman (Jesus and the Disinherited) RESOURCESHoward Thurman, Jesus The Disinherited (Beacon Press)Dr. Barbara Holmes, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village (CAC Publishing) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1623050553/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tpbk_p1_i0 Dr. Barbara Holmes, Race The Cosmos (CAC Publishing) Rhonda Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming our Communities through Mindfulness SAILING IN THE WINTER SUN- Journal of an old man at the end of life:There is a place deep within the heart of a person into which Satan cannot see, neither penetrate (for, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God). And there, the troubled soul can find a peace which passes all understanding; there the wounds from the arrows of the evil-one can find balm and healing, and the arrows cannot penetrate there to wound one again.Here, one does not pray with words or even with actions, but one weeps and the teardrops themselves are prayer and confession and rejoicing and hope fulfilled.Here, there is already a communication between God and the soul which is outside the realm of the laws of nature. Here, every thought is known and every movement of the heart is incense arising to the Creator.Here, one finds the Holy Spirit and understands something of the potential of the soul which longs to cooperate with God s Grace, and perceives that only its sins form a barricade to that complete cooperation which it so earnestly desires.Here, one cannot remain, no matter how one longs to - longs even to die if, by that, it could remain in this deep place in the heart, being this day in paradise with Me . And this, of course, is only a shadow of what is yet to come for those who persevere to the end. I have been accused of Marcionism because I advocate reading Old Testament passages Christo-allegorically (i.e. reading all the Old Testament passages as prefigurements of Christ and His soon coming inner kingdom of love and light).Very many heresy hunters grossly misunderstand and misapply the concept of Marcionism. It s been said that to a person whose only tool is a hammer, everything appears as a nail. The same could be said for those heresy hunters who accuse any who dare advocate a non-literal reading of the Old Testament as being Marcionites. Marcion is their hammer, and any Christological or Allegorical reading of the Old Testament resembles a nail which they feel obliged to smite into oblivion.Marcion was an early Christian who advocated eliminating the entire Old Testament as inspired Christian Scripture because the God it describes is incompatible with the New Testament nature of God revealed by Jesus. Here is the problem with accusing Christological/Allegorical readings as Marcionite heresy. And it s a huge one for the hammer-heavy heresy hunters.Allegorical reading is NOT Marcionism, not now, not ever. First, Marcion never believed the Old Testament Scriptures were to be read Christologically or Allegorically, non-literally in other words. Marcion believed that they weren t to be read at all. To Marcion, the Old Testament described a demonic demiurge, not the loving Abba of Jesus Christ. Thus, he allegedly believed that those Scriptures had no benefit. If true, then Christo-allegorical readings simply had no place in his canon.Second, the majority of the early Church Fathers read the Old Testament Christo-allegorically. To label Augustine, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ignatius, Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Clement, Valentinus, Heracleon, Saint Ambrose, Ephraem the Syrian of Edessa/Nisibis, Philoxenus of Mabbug, and scores of others as all being Marcionites is outrageous. There were six known Christian theological schools in the early church: Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, Edessa/Nisbis, Ephesus, and Rome/Carthage. The early Church s hermeneutic, except for the Antiochan school, largely held to a hermeneutic which commonly allegorized the Old Testament whenever It seemed to literally (by the dead letter) attribute evil or unworthy attributes to God. If this is Marcionism, then most all the church fathers would be called Marcionites, and THAT has never been so asserted by any competent scholar of any age. Much of modern Christianity is woefully ignorant of our Patristic theology, and that is a shame. Many who are called heretics today are in intimate alignment with what the church fathers wrote and taught, whereas many who claim the fundamental high ground couldn t be further away from the early church s views.Third, to be fair to Marcion, none of his writings still exist. All we know about him today comes from those who loathed him as a heretic. What I attributed to him above may or may not be accurate. I would hate to have my enemies describe the worth and conclusions of my theology without any of my writings being available for review and confirmation. I can t tell you how often my proposals get misstated and twisted into things I have never come close to saying. Our ability to misunderstand and misstate one another s true position is humongous. Marcion may well have believed the Old Testament needed to be excised from the Bible. And if he did, then I believe he was wrong and I disagree with him. But the lawyer in me wants to give him a chance to personally respond before we hang him up by his thumbs.We need to trade in our hard hammers for soft ears that earnestly seek after the legacy the early fathers left us. Just from a common sense angle, IF all (or even most) the ancient accounts are true that Marcion believed that the brutal God the OT describes was an actual (not fictional) demiurge and NOT the God of the New Testament, then he is necessarily reading the OT literally. That pungent conclusion can ONLY come from a strictly literal reading where the OT demiurge delights to destroy those who disobey them. Marcion is NOT reading OT Scripture with the non-literal eye of Christo-allegory, anthropomorphism, or myth. That pretty much just leaves literalism. He obviously finds much of the OT literally unconscionable to NT Christian sensibilities. Thus his reaction. Really, ONLY a literal reading could warrant such a massive excision of the OT altogether. My point is his extreme action in deleting the whole OT as canonical with one fell swoop is most consistent with the reactionary zeal which normally accompanies literal-centric hermeneutics.By most all early accounts, Marcion believed in a literal OT demiurge as literally described in the OT. Most of the early Church Fathers loved the Old Testament, as Barth also once declared, far too much to read it just literally. Non-literal readings allowed the early church to purge all the satanic elements out of the divine nature which were suggested by just a literal reading. Of course, I always keep a caveat in place where we don t have any extant writings of the person in question. For instance, I think it s unfair to hold Origen responsible for others who called themselves Origenists hundreds of years later, after Origen died, and who may or may not have distorted or misrepresented his original teachings. So, I would afford Marcion the same courtesy, at least in the form of a caveat. Marcionite churches of subsequent generations may or may not have been accurately representing his original teachings. Also, his teachings may or may not have been accurately described by his critics. But, assuming there is some early fair-minded church consensus on his teachings, then I think we can make some strong, but rebuttal, presumptions about him, one of which is that he was a literalist. The most radical position was that of Marcion, who had rejected the OT altogether and attributed it to the creator god (the demiurge), rather than to the Father of Jesus Christ. The prophetic and allegorical interpretation of OT texts already found in the NT (especially by Paul, as in Gal. 4:21-26; 1 Cor. 9:8-10; 10:1-11) rendered the position of Marcion impossible except through a radical editing and excision of NT texts, a project that Marcion himself carried out consistently. Mark Sheridan, O.S.B., Dean of the Pontifical Athenaeum of San Anselmo, in his article on the Old Testament in THE WESTMINSTER HANDBOOK TO ORIGEN (2004). Sources Cited: Dawson (1992); Heine (1997); Lienhard (2000); Torjesen (1986). Marcion stood against allegorism in any form, and resisted any attempt to connect Christian thought to the fulfillment of Old Testament or traditions. Because of this he was often an object of ridicule for later Christian writers (Irenaeus, ADVERSUS HAERESES 1:27; 4.38, 34; Tertullian, PRESCRIPTION AGAINST HERETICS 30-44, Clement of Alexandria, STROMATA 3.3-4, Origen, AGAINST CELSUS 6.53).... John Anthony McGuckin, THE WESTMINSTER HANDBOOK TO PATRISTIC THEOLOGY, MARCION ENTRY (2004).

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Clarion Journal: eds. Ron Dart (UFV), Brad Jersak (listening prayer), and Andrew Klager (UFV, TWU) explores the intersection of spirituality and justice; contemplative faith and social action.

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