Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, by Thomas M. King, S.J., makes the case that there are in the Gospels two Christian baptisms, one of water and one of fire. The latter is also a baptism into the Holy Spirit, as distinct from the Word of God (see my earlier post Enchantments and Disenchantments for more on this).King points to Christ's passion and resurrection — his "glory" — as turning a corner away from the exclusively verbal teaching of Jesus's earlier ministry. Jesus had originally been preaching to a "'closed circle' of listeners, those who [because they were Jewish, like Jesus] shared a common book." But then, "hearing of the interest of the Gentiles [i.e., Greeks who reportedly wanted to see him] he knew that the time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence" (p. 143).
"I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself," Jesus accordingly said at John 12:23. "His [Jesus's] glory would be manifest on the cross," amplifies King, "where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated" (p. 144).
That is, the cross of Christ might be seen as akin to, in another cultural setting, Zen Buddhist koans: "paradoxes which [are intended to] take the disciples beyond words" (p. 144). In effect, finally leaving Jewish words, texts, and meanings behind, Jesus surely knew that now "the phenomena itself would be the revelation. ... By meditating on such a koan, even the Gentiles would be drawn to him."
Yet Christianity, in the earliest centuries following the resurrection, began an organized resistance to any form of spirituality which did not center around "a word that would deliver [us] out of the world" (p. 145). That resistance is carried forward today by Christian fundamentalists who insist absolutely on a literal reading of the Bible. But in the early church, it was the province of "various gnostic and docetist claims." These theologies "included a strong strain of Orphism" (p. 144).
The Gnostics and Docetists, right in line with the traditional Greek (pagan) followers of Orpheus,
... emphasized the saving power of divine truth and generally despised the present world as the work or an "evil creator" who used it to keep humanity in ignorance; the revealed word was from God, but the physical world was from Satan. ... [T]hey believed that divine Truth was calling them apart from their body-tomb and into a world of pure form. (p. 144)
But, King contends, Christ
... did not come to draw his listeners out of their body-tombs. By the events of his Glory (passion and resurrection), the body itself would rise: his own body and the bodies of all who share in it by eating his flesh. ...
And here is the key thing:
The resurrection of the body would prove a stumbling block to all who are seeking a pure teaching, a word that would deliver them out of this world. But the followers of Jesus would not be delivered from history, as the Gnostics, Docetists, and Orphics had claimed, but through history. The world itself would come to deliverance. God had created matter by his word, and in matter the divine storyteller is saying something. If one were to meditate on the koan Jesus offered humanity (the crucifixion), one would be baffled into setting aside the accretions of meaning [found in holy scripture and other verbal texts]. Then perhaps one could have eyes that see and ears that hear; then one might become aware that God is speaking to us apart from the sacred text; he is speaking in the absurdity of history. And that means that the absurdity of our own history is the basis of our response. (p. 145)
The strongest possible refutation of "conservative" or "fundamentalist" Christian views, I would call the passage above. Let me try to say why.
First of all, let me refer to my earlier posts, Is Self-Love OK for Catholics? and More on Self-Acceptance, in which I laid out my own personal experience as being "stunted" and "immature" in my psychosexual development, and in which I suggested that (though I am not myself gay) my situation parallels that of men who, under recent Vatican rules, can no longer be admitted to Catholic seminaries to train for the priesthood, simply because they "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies."
In other words, I find my own "history," particularly as it bears upon my personal psychosexual development, to be "absurd." Little wonder that I likewise imagine the situation of gayness to be a fine absurdity, whatever else it may be practically, personally, morally, or religiously.
For one thing, there is something extra-rational about any sexual attraction, in the sense that it simply happens or it doesn't. At least, though, heterosexual leanings can be rationalized post facto; they ensure the propagation of the species, after all. Homosexual leanings admit of no such rationale.
I don't claim to be an authority on gay culture, but I see gays depicted in movies and on TV as having a sharp sense of the absurd. It is as if the basis of their response to life is already a keen awareness of "the absurdity of their own history." Extending that thought, I'd say gays may even have a leg up into the very type of spirituality Thomas King associates with the second Christian baptism, that of fire and Spirit.
True, their orientation violates the "pure teaching," the holy "word which would deliver them out of this world." The word of God in the Holy Bible, as everybody knows, calls gay sex an abomination.
But baptism — christening by water — remains sacramentally effective for gays. There is nothing about being gay (or being similarly psychosexually twisted) that blocks it from joining the individual soul to the Body of Christ.
So, I would argue, there is nothing about being gay per se — nothing about "presenting deep-seated homosexual tendencies" — which deserves the animus that conservative and fundamentalist Christians have attached to it.
Exhibit "B" in my case that Father King hits the nail squarely on the head, in differentiating second-baptism Christian spirituality from fundamentalism, is that there is no notion more "absurd," from the fundamentalist point of view, than that our species arose out of the blind forces of Darwinian evolution. King's idea that God speaks to us "in the absurdity of history," and not "from the sacred text" — i.e., not just from the Book of Genesis — is as delightful to theological liberals as it is anathema to religious fundamentalists.
Evolution à la Darwin is indeed a modern context in which "the physical world had to manifest some meaning of its own" — where "the revealed word and the phenomenal world [do] not seem to fit" (pp. 139-140). If, as so confounded the Pharisees in Jesus's day, "the visible world could no longer be dismissed as outer Darkness, [since] it too contained a message from God," — specifically, the Word made Flesh in Jesus — then that same perplexity can be said to go doubly for fundamentalists in our day.
"[W]hat if what God says in events does not ... readily coincide with what God says in his Word?" asks King, at one point. "Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent ... difference." Or, alternatively, one can simply say, with today's fundamentalists, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." As Christians we have two spiritualities from which to choose. One is based on the first baptism, the other on the second.
Despite how liberal I may sound above, I personally struggle with my own second-baptism spirituality. For me, hell is getting stuck in the puritanism of the first-baptism mindset. It is a mindset to which, sadly, I find my way at regular intervals.
Something in me desperately wants my life to be without surprise or absurdity, without spontaneity and uncertainty.
Something in me wants to take each ane every verbal formula for goodness and happiness which inveigles me at any givenmoment and slap it onto all of the rest of my life, forever and aye.
Not just my life, either. Everyone else's life, too.
So when I read and am enchanted by a book such as Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution (see my earlier posts, culminating in Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way), I want to impose its charming ideas on my (and everyone else's) world.
But at some point, such dutiful, faithful adherence unfailingly starts to make me feel "thin and stretched," as Tolkien said of his character, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo was locked in thrall to the One Ring, which remained corrosively in his possession.
At that point in my own personal quest, the only possible antidote is to rejoin "the absurdity of [my] own history" — to stop living by a supposedly "pure teaching" and to recognize (yet again) the limits of all verbal formulas, no matter how enchanting, or holy, or sacred.
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