God & Mammon Revisted

Peace, friends. As Lent approaches, I'm attempting to pick up the practice of theologically/theopoetically reflecting out loud on the internet again. No promise about the frequency of posts. A couple of paragraphs here and there. Things are busy. But I'm hoping the practice will keep me engaged and rooted in the hermeneutical circle(s) with which our liberation theology ancestors gifted us. I hope it might maybe be helpful for some of you, too. Especially as we all discern the path of living faith active in love in these twisted, weird, and often terrifying times. The following is a variation on a theme I've been engaging since I accidentally picked up a piece on "the Idols of Death" by Hugo Assmann in the JKM library many years ago. The frame is still helpful. 

Peace, love, and liberation, all. Stay close to one another. God is love. And those who live in love live in God. And God lives in them. 

[ Christ of the Breadlines, Fritz Eichenberg, 1951, Image Source ]

It’s one thing to assert that a Liberator God has chosen an oppressed people to become free; to assert that the Desire of beating hearts (the Spirit) burns within bodies struggling toward survival and joy; to assert that God–flesh, blood, body, tangible–is touching, salivating, anticipating, in all who stretch, in every gesture toward a sun, a home, a Not Yet, a Beyond, negating and transgressing the Right Now, the As-It-Is, structures that strangle and enslave.

It’s wholly another thing for a dominant culture or people to claim special status (as did many who colonized continents and continue to attack human rights), oppressing, enslaving, torturing bodies in the name of “at least we’ve civilized ‘these least of these.’ At least we have “saved ‘their’ souls.” Never mind their bodies. Baptizing. In blood, in dogs, by water clouded. Word. Firehose. Into “submission.” “Civilization.” “Domestication.” “Saved” here becomes code for “enslaved.” Incorporation into a system whose God and goal is gold, Mammon, that idol of death that rains down blessings, honor, glory, riches, and might, demanding only, in exchange, human sacrifice.

[ Bartolomé de las Casas, “Brief relation of the destruction of the Indies,” Regionum Indicarum per Hispanos. (Heidelbergar: typis Guilielmi VValteri acad, 1664). New-York Historical Society Library. image source ]