Idol worship is not something that looks evil. Under different guises in every culture, especially our own, it passes as good and sacred and holy. Lent is a call to leave idols, to get past fake goodness and discover our heart in the heart of God.
1. So, who is James Alison? What aspects of your life do you consider most central to your identity? What should people who are curious about you know?
James Alison is English, and therefore ontologically incapable of answering a question of this sort about himself….I was brought up in a hard line Evangelical Anglican family – the sort of ambience that would be familiar to US readers as “The Religious Right. For those to whom such names mean something, I was baptised as an infant by John Stott, while family friends included Billy Graham, Chuck Colson and Doug Coe. I wrote about what drew me into the Catholic faith in my most recent book, Broken Hearts & New Creations
James joined the Playing for Keeps radio show to explore how The Hunger Games and chapter 7 of the Old Testament book of Joshua have something very important in common: a lottery in which the winners get to die for the sake of the community
When we worship an idol, our love, which is in principle a good thing, is trapped into grasping onto something made in our own image. This “something”, which we of course do not perceive as an idol, then becomes the repository for all the security and certainty which we idolaters need in order to survive in the world. We are unaware that the tighter we grasp it, the more insecure and uncertain we in fact become, and the more we empty the object which we idolize of any potential for truth and meaning. And of course because love is in principle a good thing, for us to get untangled from its distorted form is very painful. Nevertheless, against any tendency we might have to blame the idol for being an idol, it is really the pattern of desire in us, the grasping, that is the problem, not the object. For just as the Bible is not an act of communication that we can lay hold of, but the written monuments to an act of communication that takes hold of us, so the Church is not an object that we can grasp, but a sign of our being grasped and held; not something that any of us owns, but the first hints, difficult to perceive, of Another’s ownership of us.
All of this has been to bring us to the place where I would like to highlight how Girard can help us. Let us take the phrase: “God is for us”. It seems to me that where traditionally the negative approach to God has hinted at a sense of God who is not in rivalry with anything that is, and thus saved us from the danger of worshiping a god within the order of things that are, it has done so by problematizing the word “is”. It doesn’t offer much help in problematizing either the “for” or the “us” – which are inseparably bound together. It seems to me that Girard’s insight into the mimetic nature of desire, which some people accuse of being far too negative, actually gives us a chance to problematize the “for” and the “us” in very helpful ways. Or to put it into nutshell: when we say that “God is not in rivalry with anything that is” the phrase “not in rivalry” might be a very useful starting place for working towards a sense of a “for” that is not part of our cultural framework, and yet which has a positive incidence in it. So I’d like here to set out some hints of what I might call the Girardian analogy – the via negative of rivalistic desire.
It is a very great honour to have been asked by you to share some thoughts about conversion in your midst. You have invited me to develop hints of the way that the understanding of Christianity which I have been pursuing in the light of the thought of René Girard, can open up insights for us. Insights into the role of participation and conversion in religious knowing; into the place of contemplation and the spiritual disciplines in developing ‘post-conversion eyes’; and into how belonging to the Eucharistic community of disciples, with all the attendant difficulties to do with processing conflict, plays its part. Given that this is a modest little question, requiring no more than three or four months worth of lectures, but that I have only a single shot at it, I thought I would at least try open the matter up by means of reading the parable of the Good Samaritan with you, since I think that it plunges us directly in medias res.
This children’s game, as you all know, is the image which Jesus used [1] in order to say something about his contemporaries and about how Wisdom was working in their midst. The context of that teaching is far richer than we are accustomed to hearing, so I’d like to fill it in for you, in the hopes that we can find how we fit into the narrative. This is one of those places in the New Testament where, if we scratch the surface of the text, we can get a glimpse of an extraordinary teacher giving a scriptural masterclass in the midst of a group of his contemporaries.
I first fell in love I think when I was nine; it’s a terrifying experience and it was when I first realised I was gay, realised that. Some people realise it way before puberty, and of course at the time, living in an entirely fully evangelical Protestant world, had no real notion; actually one of the very few books we were allowed to read of course, was the bible, so I found myself reading bits of the bible at that age, and realising that it was all to do with love, and having a strong sense, even at that time, that if Christianity is true, then it can’t be true in the way that I was perceiving it, because of the element of love. It was talking about love, and here was this love, so Christianity must be different from what it seemed.
You see, in the city in which I live, a city of eighteen million or so people, and one where the annual Gay Pride parade features a minimum of three million people – and that’s the police estimate – there is no Catholic LGBTQ pastoral. In a city named after the apostle Paul which is also the largest city in the country with the largest Catholic population in the world, our Church is entirely absent from any realistic involvement in the life of the segment of society which in Brazil goes by the name of “GLS” – Gays, lésbicas e simpatizantes – Gays, Lesbians and those with similar affinities. And here we are back to a different sort of impossibility. For of course, our Church is dependent on the same teaching in Brazil as it is everywhere else. The current teaching of the Roman Congregations, which has as its premise that all humans are intrinsically heterosexual, and that gay people are objectively disordered. Defective heterosexuals if you like.
