Bethlehem has some great hotels. The Intercontinental is a fantastic old place, fronted with beautiful stones and containing a bar and pool room in a cavernous, lime basement. When I stayed there last year it was living up to its name: people from all continents gathered at meal times, piling plates from the buffet with falafel, curry, cured meats and chips.

But Bethlehem didn’t used to have any hotels. Historically, around the time of Jesus’ birth, it simply didn’t need them. You can walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem in a couple of hours, and south of Bethlehem is you are getting into desert. So no traveller would need to rest there. Jerusalem had everything you would need.

Mary and Joseph went there to register for the census. It was Joseph’s family’s town. There were no hotels or inns, and anyway – he had extended family there. Surely he would stay with them? Yet in schools across the country we see towel-headed boys and cushion-stuffed girls stepping across the stage, knocking and being told by various innkeepers that there is no room, until one beckons them into his stable…

The truth appears to be more complex. Perhaps being passed from relative to relative, family to family, the disgraced young couple were eventually taken in as she went into labour. The cave upon which the Church of the Nativity is built – pretty well atested since very very early in Christian history – is typical of the place animals would be taken for protection in the night. The holy family were protected, but not welcomed. Kept at arms length, but never completely rejected.

Perhaps they still are.

The bitter old man stands
at the gates of the earth
waiting, watching,
guarding the only entrance
and exit to this citadel planet.
The babies file in
and the dead file out
and he watches them,
grimly keeping count.

He watches, he waits
he shivers to shake
tired cold from old limbs,
for he must stay awake
for the one they say
will attempt a salvation.

One eye is kept on the horizon,
on the distant reaches of the future
where-from surely his nemesis
will ride with armies
and demand entry:
the battle of the gates of the earth.

So heighten awareness
and tighten security
and all the while…
he does not notice the infant God
slipping in among the embryonic ranks
of those awaiting entry.

Become powerless
to slip the trap of the powerful.
A Trojan baby
now inside the citadel planet.
Waiting, hiding, growing,
evolving an inner salvation;
the original subversion.

© KB 2004

Originally published in The Complex Christ / Signs of Emergence

As I wrote in the previous post, one of the fascinating things about the Incarnation is that it stands as an actual interruption, a marked moment of time with a before and after. Nothing was the same before, and nothing will be the same again.

It’s been out of thinking on this rupturing of our timeline that I have been pondering a sort of theological thought experiment. I’ve blogged about it before, but it seems timely to mention again.

We imagine God, in the moments before the Incarnation. The hours, becoming minutes… leading to those last few seconds before, in the traditional sense, Mary is ruptured. What is God thinking? As God prepared this great empathetic act with ‘the others’ that he had created, what were the hopes and fears that played on his mind?

In my series on empathy I outlined two positions – represented by Levinas and Zizek – of where the fear of engaging the other lies. For Levinas, the fear is located in the enigma of the other: we are not sure if we understand the other, they are an enigma to us.

For Zizek, the fear is located in the enigma in the other: we are not sure if the other even understands themselves, and this is frightening. This is connected to Hegel’s maxim that ‘the enigma’s of the Ancient Egyptians were enigmas to the Ancient Egyptians themselves.’

In our theological thought experiment, I wonder if God meditated similarly on these profoundly free beings he had released:

were the mysteries of the humans mysteries to the humans themselves?

This is the real and genuine risk attached to the Incarnation event if we are to hold true to our own freedom: God did not know in advance if it would work. From Levinas’ perspective this is because God is not sure if God has understood the human condition adequately. From Zizek’s perspective this is because God is not sure if humanity has understood it’s own condition adequately, and thus will not understand what he is about to do.

Either way, our second Advent[ure] in Incarnation brings us to understand that all incarnational work has to be based on genuine risk. If we claim to know in advance, then we have collapsed the mystery of ‘the other’ we are going to serve.

Probably be posts every couple of days, so look out for them, spread the word etc. Looking forward to it.

Empathy [1] |  Empathy [2]

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to get to grips with the roots of empathy with the other, and the location of our fears of engaging the other. I’ve radically summarised Levinas and Zizek by saying that the former would locate our fears in the enigma of the other, and the latter in the enigma in the other.

I have been pondering a little theological thought experiment surrounding this too. Imagine in the moments just before that first Christmas, just before the incarnation event, as God pondered what he – in Jesus – was about to do. Was he afraid or nervous? Jesus certainly was on the Mount of Olives, so perhaps it’s not a ridiculous concept. The question then is what the locus of his fears were.

Levinas would locate it within God himself: a concern that he might fail, that these humans he created are more of an enigma to him than he might think. Zizek would locate the fear elsewhere, and I think this is perhaps closer to the truth: God looks down and is concerned less that humans are enigmatic, but that they are an enigma to themselves. In other words, will they even understand what God is about to do?

If this is right, then we might say that God’s empathy with us is perhaps thus not grounded in overcoming his internal fear of failure and being able to look at us from a state of fully resolved self, but grounded in accepting what he is going to look like from our perspective as conflicted and unresolved selves. As Zizek notes:

For Hegel the Incarnation is not a move by means of which God makes himself accessible/visible to humans, but a move by means of which God looks at himself from the (distorting) human perspective.

In other words, the empathy towards the other that God displays is not about seeing the other, but about seeing ourselves as the other sees us. To reflect on a practical example: a parole officer needs to empathise with the released prisoner they are dealing with, and understand their motivations and background as they overcome any fear of ex-offenders that they may have. But I don’t believe that that is enough. What Zizek is trying to get us to do is perhaps not to reject Levinas, but move one step beyond him. Levinas urges us to look into the face of the other and see the sacred there. But Zizek says we should look so intently into the eyes of the other that we see our own reflection in their eyes. In other words, we begin to see how the other sees us.

The parole officer must then not simply try to understand the ex-offender before them, but come to an understanding of the way that person is going to view him as a parole officer. It is only then that we can get beyond some of the power imbalances that so often come with our attempts at ministry to the poor, the needy, the oppressed.

[And, in the light of today's news about Jackson's death, one might reflect on how much better for him things might have been if the media, and those around him when he was young, had looked closely at how he was seeing them, rather than just at how they could commodify him. A tragic tale...]

I’m interested in this short series in trying to reflect on the best ground for our attempts to empathise with ‘the other.’ In the first post I ended by suggesting that it would be fruitful to consider where our fears of engaging the other lie. So here we go:

It seems to me that Levinas would argue that we fear connection with the other because we have unresolved fears about them within ourselves. Zizek, on the other hand, would appear to argue that we fear connection with the other because we are wary that the other has unresolved fears within themselves. I may have this wrong, but my perception is that for Levinas the problem is the ‘enigma of the other,’ whereas for Zizek the problem is the ‘enigma in the other.’

Supporting this arguement, Zizek quotes Hegel’s famous dictum (discussed by Pete Rollins here) that ‘the enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were also enigmas for the Egyptians themselves.’ From Levinas’ standpoint, we are wary of these mysterious ancients because we don’t understand them – their actions and language are strange to us. But for Zizek/Lacan/Hegel that is not enough: we should be wary of the Ancient Egyptians because their actions were strange even to themselves. In other words, if we were to engage them it would not be simply a case of overcoming our fears of their strange ways, but but reconciling ourselves to the fact that they have not overcome their own fear of their own strangeness.

This then reflects back on to us, and our consciousness of the enigmas within each of us too. As Pete has noted:

In short, if we find ourselves getting frustrated by the enigmatic actions of those we love we must remind ourselves that our own actions are just as mysterious and require just as much hard work to decipher.

An interesting theological thought-experiment around this concerns the moments just before the incarnation, that engagement with the other par excellence. And it’s to that we’ll turn in the next post.

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to explore some of the implications that the ‘new physics’ might have on our theology. It is worth emphasising that I strongly believe that the new physics must have an impact on our theology. If it, or indeed any new scientific discovery, does not then we are failing in our task as theologians. Which is why there may be an announcement forthcoming about a new venture some of us may be beginning in London to address this specifically: technology/meta/physics – we need to be working to co-evolve these disciplines.

In the previous post I shared some thoughts regarding dimensions, and the impossibility of creating an experiment in one dimensional universe to show the existence of a higher dimensional one. It is, however, possible to show what shaped universe we live in. Imagine a flat piece of paper, representing the space-time we exist in. We could fold that paper into a cylinder, and then (and this is lovely flexible paper!) connect the two ends of that cylinder together… to create a hollow donut shape, called a torus. Theoretically, two spaceships could be sent out on perpendicular paths and, if our universe was of this ‘shape’ they would not meet at any point other than the point of departure.

But, while it’s possible for us observing the animation above to consider the space outside of the torus, the space within which the torus exists, for those living within the dimensional space of the torus this is totally impossible. They cannot leave the dimensions they are in to become external observers.

Incarnation: Entering the Maze

This is fairly standard stuff, but it is the converse of this fact that I think is of interest to us theologically. Those within the torus cannot properly concieve of life outside of it, but nor can those in a higher dimension properly conceive what life is like within it.

Walking in the gardens of a large country house the other day I was struck by the parallels with solving a maze. To the external observer, looking from above, solving a maze may take time, but is essentially a trivial task: you just look for the route to the middle. But this big-picture perspective is totally unavailable to those who are in the maze on the ground. For them the only possible way to solve it is to engage with it and experience it, to walk it step by step. There can be no abstract solution.

This, I think, is a profound truth about the incarnation: it was necessary for God to enter our dimensional space, because the ‘abstract solution’ from above was insufficient. It was only by walking the maze himself that God in Christ could empathise fully with the human situation. Or, as Zizek has put it in The Monstrosity of Christ:

“Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.”

Human experience, God learns, has no abstract solution. It must be lived to be understood. So the incarnation is not simply essential for us, but, strangely, essential for God too.

What this required, put in quantum terms, was the ‘collapse of the divine wave function’ into a specific space-time. And as to what the hell that means, I’ll try an explanation in the next post.