If Spirit & Flesh Shall Live: A Reflection for July 12, 2026 | Matthew 13:1-9

Peace, all. Here’s a sermon from July 12, 2026, shared (along with various tangents) at the Community Church of Fontana, UCC. It was a lovely morning. Hope you dig it. 

 

[ photo credit: mine ]

MULTIPLYING LOAVES`

It's 2020. We've just had a kid. Hannah. She's incredible.

As well as very small. Like, normal small - but you know: she’s a newborn.  

And after having served a couple of ministries in Chicago, proper, we've now moved two whole blocks west of the city, into "the Bungalow Belt" 

in Cicero, Illinois.

I've just received a Call at Gethsemane Lutheran Church, a historic congregation in that historic town.

Our first Sunday together was Transfiguration Sunday. A good one. 

We burned our palms, and we buried our Alleluias. 

And then, with Ash Wednesday, Lent arrived.

And so we reminded each of our mortality by smearing the ash from the palms on one another’s heads. 

And then, of course. 

Transfiguration…

Ash Wednesday

Lent

And then it was … 

It was 

[no! Not Easter!]

No. It was… 

the pandemic.

A difficult time in the history of the world.

And if I am being honest, certainly not my best years, either.

That was February and March of 2020. 

~~

To open the east door into the building there, you'd insert your key [like this] and then you’d turn it, and then you’d pull the door outward before stepping up the concrete step and onto the landing inside.

The stairs there go up to the church in one direction

and down into what, through the 1950s or 1960s, was known as the "smoking room," where congregants would share a smoke with the pastor and talk about Jesus. 

This room is now known as the library as well as the deep freezer room. And it smelled like both. Old dust. And books. And that weird freon smell that's always somehow amplified by the reverberation of the compressor, and the buzz of fluorescent lights.

A few more steps down and you're in the sort-of exposed basement. Beautiful golden, dandelion stained glass surrounds you in every direction, making the room appear warm and inviting and mystical. 

Folding chairs. And folding tables. Piles of old milk crates. 

It’s still 2020. And February. 

And every week, the same volunteers would gather here. 

Tough, scrappy baby-boomers (that didn't look too different from many of you), many of whom founded this particular ministry back in the 1980s, when their churches came together across Cicero, Berwyn, and Stickney to assess 

and eventually meet 

a need in the community.

That’s when the CBS Anti-Hunger Task Force formed, which would eventually give birth to the CBS food pantry, which had, by this point, had made a home in the downstairs of Gethsemane. 

Rain or shine, pandemic or not, there they were. 

Some from the neighborhood who walked over. 

Some driving back each week to the “old neighborhood” where they had grown up, reminiscing about what the storefronts used to be.

Characters. All of them. 

~~~

And… I’m being honest… 

the thing I remember the most vividly, the thing I remember the most about all of it, is: 

when you rounded the corner into that basement: 

not a darn one of them was wearing a mask.

[Footnote: that’s not entirely true, some certainly did!] 

[PAUSE]

Now:

I had certain categories for people like that.

 My phone and my friends had helped me to form and to reinforce them.

And I suppose we could say that the words used to describe that category of people were, at the time, something other than kind.

Certainly, to use Jesus’ words, “rocky soil,” in comparison, would’ve been more of a compliment. Amen? 

But I held my tongue. And I hesitated. 

After all, this was their ministry. And I was the new guy. 

And honestly, this was all sort of uncharted terrain for all of us. 

MOVING MOUNTAINS

Flashback about a decade. It’s January of 2011.

Our super-ripped, super-tall, always-sleeveless-shirt-wearing, bald-shaved-head neighbor Pipe-fitter Pete, who is called that because he's a pipe-fitter, 

and our [same] neighbor who also happens to have an incredible grape-crushing and wine-making operation in his back yard...

On this particular day in January of 2011, 

Pipe-fitter Pete has just finished carefully placing a clearly-stolen-from-public-works giant orange cone, all wrapped around with reflector tape, 

and a couple of folding chairs 

in front of his house.

You see, it's winter. 

And as you probably know: 

there's a system in Chicago. 

[And I’mnot talking about the plows]. 

And there's a system especially in our neighborhood of Bridgeport. 

If it snows 

and you shovel out a parking spot on the public street (amen?)...

if you shovel it out, then, well, 

then that spot is yours. 

Amen? 

It’s yours. 

But: you gotta mark it. 

Or else: you lose it. 

And folks like Pipe-fitter Pete get pretty creative about how to do so.

A system, as you know, that is affectionately referred to as “dibs.” 

~~

Dibs ensures that your work does not get stolen by another neighbor after you shovel out from a big storm. And it helps you prepare if you know a storm is coming. We did it too, my roomates and I–everybody did. And if you didn't, you'd be driving in circles all night looking a mile away in the snow for a place 

from which to walk home.

~~

But then. January 31. February 1. February 2. It arrived. In full force. For three days it arrived. 

And it arrived heavy. And wet. And strong. 

Cars immobilized and buried on Lake Shore Drive. 

Power outages. Y’all know a little something about that. Amen? 

Folks unable to get out to go anywhere. 

The city frozen, both in temperature and in mobility. Stuck. No business as usual. Everything. Just. Stopped. 

“Snowmageddon” they called it. 

And they weren't too far off in that assessment.

[Remember the word apocalypse which we often translate as “revelation” means to un-cover, to un-veil, to re-veal something that was once, perhaps, obscured.] 

And despite all of that thick cover, I think something really was revealed.

OR: MOVED BY MOUNTAINS

You see, you might think that after an event like Snowmageddon, or really in the midst of it, especially in moments like that, you might think that our individual impulses toward self-preservation might kick in.

That is: you might think that we’d all be thinking: 

“Dang! I need a bigger lawn chair. And I gotta be careful with my salt. I gotta make it last. And... what am I gonna do to make sure I can get where I need to go?”

But the thing is: at least there, and at that time, in the middle of that snow-pocalypse, that's not at all what happened.

In fact, that Snowpocalypse is when I actually, really, on a deeper level, met Pipe-fitter Pete. And when I learned his name.

And it's where I met a bunch of our other neighbors, too. Because, you see, Pete and other people like him, more seasoned by the city than I, understood something. 

On a lot of days, they knew: dibs is fine. 

It's a sufficient practice, for the sake of being fair.

Flawed, but good enough. 

But when the storms come, when the “real” weather arrives, what's fair and what’s not fair changes. 

[PAUSE]

But when the storms come, when the “real” weather arrives, what's fair and what’s not fair changes. 

And what's fair, in this case, meant everyone with a shovel was outside. In the alleys. In the street. On the sidewalks. Way before the plows. 

And what's fair during those three days meant all of us, everyone with a shovel, was in this, and in community,together. And everyone with a shovel cleared the streets, the sidewalks, and the alleyways. 

Everyone pitching in. Everyone digging everybody out. 

This included, I learned from Pete, also prioritizing and helping neighbors who could use the help and who couldn't necessarily shovel themselves out on their own. Maybe they didn’t even have shovel. 

“Fair is fair,” Pete taught us, when individual work is to be honored. 

And even more so: what is fair changes when it's not just about you or just about me, but when it’s about us, when survival and quality of life for all of us is at stake for all of us. 

Rocky soil, rich soil, thorny gardens, whatever. In situations like the Snowpacalypse:  

everyone gets a little bloom. Amen?

Not a bad way to live. 

[PAUSE]

OF TWO MINDS

There's a psychologist and educator by the name of Dr. Lisa Miller, who teaches out at Columbia University out there in New York. 

In her work, which includes psychology and spiritualities, Miller distinguishes between two modes of orientation that we tend not only to experience but also to orient ourselves through. 

The first, she calls our achieving brain: 

This mode is oriented toward goals, and benchmarks, and getting results, and increasing profits and so on. Most of us are familiar with the “achieving” brain and have certainly been encouraged to put it on at least at work. Amen? 

The other she refers to as the “spiritual brain.” This mode of thinking and perceiving and experiencing, she says, has less to do with achievements and more to do with making connections, finding meanings, identifying coincidences, and so on. 

The ability to navigate both of these “brains’ she says, is important. And good. And she says, in American society, in the world as it is, for most of us, most of the time, the default is to orient ourselves–as well as judge ourselves–from a place of achievements–or from a place of the lack thereof. Amen? 

Nonetheless, she notes. 

When disaster strikes. 

When tragedy hits. 

When a rock-bottom or two reaches up and finally pulls us the rest of the way down…

In other words:

when we meet the limits of our power

and of our ability, 

even if for 3 minutes or three days, 

to achieve… 

When we reach these kinds of limits, that’s often when we’re shaken (or perhaps quickened/stirred) enough to slip back into our “spiritual brain” and to connect with and remember things of value that we might be quick to forget in our everyday day-to-day. Amen? 

Often times when we reach the limits of what we can ‘achieve’ on our own, we return to the values and the stories and the meanings that formed us and that do something different in our hearts and in our minds… amen? 

~~~

I think that’s what happened with the snowpocalypse .

I think that’s what happened with me and my roommates and our neighbors and Pipe-fitter Pete. 

And I think that’s what allowed at least a day or two of pretty darn beautiful community (despite the circumstances) to take root and to bloom. 

And looking back, I think thats a little bit of what happened with those boomers in that Cicero basement, too. 

TAKE AND EAT 

As I think back now, 

It’s clear what, in the moment, I managed to miss. 

It wasn't that the masks didn't matter. We were freaked the heck out. And we had a baby. And our neighbors were dying from the virus. This stuff absolutely mattered.

And we didn’t want our kid or our parents or anybody to get sick or to die. Amen? 

These things mattered. A lot. 

And they’re not the only thing that mattered.

Even though, for a little while, it seemed, they were only thing of those folks that I seemed to be able to see. 

They were a thing. But they weren’t everything. Amen?

Because underneath whatever was or wasn't covering their faces, 

those volunteers were showing us all their hearts. 

And their hearts were really friggin good. 

Mask or no mask. Dibs or no dibs. 

When the sn*w hit the fan, these were the folks, [names omitted for privacy here] just like Pipe-fitter Pete, who showed up when the world was shut down because they believed that: 

rocky soil, rich soil, thorny garden, whatever: 

Everyone deserves dignity. 

And everyone should be able to eat. Amen? 

And these were the folks who showed up to make sure that they could. 

Hope in the Key of Chōra: Dissimulation as Survival Tactic

Peace, all. Sharing a bit more from the book about hope from the chapter on Westhelle. Hoping it might be helpful in the moment at hand.  Reading on your phone? Hold it horizontally, and it'll be much easier to read. Lots of love, all! ~Tom

Cats & Mice, The Book of Kells, Foli 34 Recto: Image Source

Dissimulation (or Mimicry as Dissimulation) as Survival Tactic

Etymologically, dissimulation derives meaning from the act of concealing/covering-up and mimicking/copying. “The effect of mimicry is camouflage,” says Lacan. “It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled - exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare.” Camouflage protects one against one’s aggressor. 

In the context of oppression/colonization, dissimulation takes place when and where a people or person acts in a way that the oppressor wishes in order to blend in and even not to be seen so that the oppressor does not get irritated or enraged by their difference. One does not “act out” of one’s place and one does not “get out of line” (in the sight of the oppressor) so that one is not “put back in one’s place” or “knocked back into line” by an act of discipline or punishment. Instead, one seeks to “blend in.” 

Dissimulated mimicry, then, involves one’s dress, one’s behavior, one’s speech, one’s gestures, one’s clothing, one’s laugh, one’s religious practice and symbols and so on. One covers one’s difference, as one’s un-covered existence itself may be perceived by the oppressor as a deviation or even perversion, and therefore another opportunity for punishment. Said again, dissimulation is a mask that the oppressed wear when the power dynamic would render them dead or disciplined without a mask. To dissimulate is to “show the master what he wants to see,” to hide one’s Blackness, one’s queerness, one’s ethnic expressions, one’s desire to be free. What the master would love to see is well behaved subjects, happy and ready to serve the empire, the throne, the flag, the country, the queen. 

Dissimulated existence pledges allegiance to the flag even when one secretly detests it and burns it in one’s home. “Authentic expression” or “being oneself ” is not an option if doing so would put one’s life on the line. From a dissimulated point of view, activism may be seen as an act of privilege.

Dissimulation is expressed negatively in a common phrase heard in capitalist spaces. Generally, it is utilized to speak of the physical absence of the boss: “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” The implication is that when the representative of the center of power is present, one behaves as one is expected to behave by those who hold power. “Free space,” if it exists, is relegated to the hidden spaces of the eschata, spaces which remain in the absence of the boss and beyond hegemony’s panoptical gaze, spaces where the figurative mice might yet actually play as mice, free from the cat’s tyrannical prowling.

~Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find It Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021).

She Calls For Jailbreak (remix)

Peace, my friends. This is a short excerpt from an unpublished paper I was playing with way back in March of 2016. That said, everything here is a recurring theme and certainly made its way into prayers, sermons, and devotions at the time. Sharing because in yesterday's lectionary reading in a bunch of churches (including the one we attend), we read about Paul and Silas getting busted out by the Spirit. Anyhow, that's it. Hope you dig it. Feel free to share. If you would give this blog (or tomgaulke.com) a footnote for it when you do, that'd be lovely :) Many thanks, friends. Peace. ~Tom 

[Prison at Philippi: image source]

The post-Resurrection Christian faith was founded in the work of the Spirit, breaking locked doors when the disciples were paralyzed for fear. She pushed the disciples into the public square where they spoke out, spoke prophetically, spoke in languages each could understand. She turned their fear of unjust punishment into a proclamation of desire for justice, for the Kingdom, the Reign to come. In a society where voices and dreams are repressed, this act is miraculous.

The disciples told Jesus' stories, "The Kingdom of God is like…" They gathered communities around the proclamation, hoping. "The last shall be first." "The lowly exalted." "The powerful torn down!" They proclaimed. And they became willing to die for a Kingdom, a Reign, a rule, for which they desired, longed for with their whole being—heart, soul, strength, and mind, with their whole body, as the Spirit gave them ability (Acts 2:4).

Christianity came into being as a religion of desire. In an empire, oppressive and repressive, the Christians felt in their bones, their bodies, their being, desire for something new. Their desire was affirmed by Jesus' teachings, embodied in his description of God's Reign.

The Holy Spirit—of wind, of flame, of body, of passion, desiring flesh—is the instigator of desire, the Breath that creates beauty from chaos, that creates desiring flesh from emotionless dry bones, and that creates children of God from the poor and outcast, gathering the crowds, dreaming of and naming God's Reign at hand.

The disciples experienced Her previvification, the new life that stirred in them, even as they remained in hiding, and when She moved in the whole community of hope and desire, all were able to hear, to listen, and to respond. She shook the chains of the disciples in prison (Acts 16:26), desired freedom for all enchained.

When we are in chains, She asks not for the stench of incense (Amos 5:21). Rather, She calls for desire, rebellion.

She, the Spirit, calls for jailbreak.

Who Will You Sacrifice for the Kingdom? | More on Bloch and Fascist Hoping

Peace, friends. Sharing a bit more about Bloch. Seems still appropriate in these days. If you are reading from a phone, turn it sideways. It'll be easier to read :) Peace, love, and liberation, all. ~Tom 

[ image source ]

More on Bloch's Hope, from An Unpromising Hope (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021)

Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch began his work on hope in the context of rising fascist ideologies in Germany — and therefore in the context of fascist hoping. Fascist hopes were hybrid in nature. They were born of an idealized and glamorized German past, a past understood by fascist dreamers as having been both "pure" and "true." Looking backward, toward a fantasy projected upon history, they simultaneously longed forward toward a future realization of the fantastic images that the glamorization of an idealized past evoked. That is, their desire was directed toward the fulfillment and/or completion of that which the image of the past simultaneously presented and promised. [1]

The sciences of the day helped to ensure that these hopes were well founded in scientific facts. At the time, scientists had constructed and produced a number of racial distinctions and hierarchies, taxonomies that proved to be useful to the fascist cause, confirming at once fascist values and fascist aspirations toward their realization. [2] These so-called truths and facts of Arian supremacy were further augmented by the newly accepted and quite in-vogue theory of Social Darwinism. [3]

In the service of fascism, science and religion were not necessarily conflicted. Fascist ideologies and hopes were enabled and even propagated by churches who held to the ancient understanding that "all authority is given by God," and so taught that the Christian is to faithfully obey Hitler, to pray always for him without ceasing, never resisting the SS, and so on. [4] In addition, propagandizing preyed upon the already dominant conviction among many in the church, that the Christian is the superior and true believer, and indeed the bearer of salvation. Today this attitude and belief is called "Christian supremacy." [5]

Here was a vision of an Arian nation: The Third Reich, the final kingdom. [6] It was to be for these believers something of heaven on earth meant for the chosen, the few, the pure. "The eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind," claimed church leaders in a public fashion, "It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler, and in the National Socialist state created by him. This law speaks to us from the history of our people . . . One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!" [7] The Third Reich for these Christians was the fulfillment of the promise, spoken from history, the fruition of fascist, supremacist hopes and dreams.

Of course, such hope was not exclusively for the Christian. Resourceful as they were, fascist hopes played similarly on the messianic impulses within communist dreams and socialistic anticipations: desire for power to the people, to the workers, the proletariat, the farmers, those born of sweat and blood and soil. [8]

Hearing any claims to be of the people, we must always ask, with history, "Which people?" Fascist hopes simultaneously dehumanized and were willing to sacrifice, to kill, to incarcerate, to displace those deemed non-people or lesser people, according to their own scientific or theological classifications. [9] Such as these were not heirs to fascist hopes, they claimed. They were merely sacrifices toward hope's fulfillment, here and now, on earth, as it is in the imagined fascist heaven. In Germany these became the Jews, the Roma, those who were gay, and so on. These were rounded up, detained, tortured, and killed in the name of the kingdom, the Reich, the imagined paradise conceived by idealistic minds. To these hopes, Bloch, a Jew and a refugee who was forced into flight, sought to write alternative.

Read more: Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021)

Can't afford the book? Hit me up. I'll get you an  e-copy. 

~~~

Footnotes:

[1] It will become important to our conversation later that these propagated hopes, dreamt by the Nazi party, where they resonated with many, were not born from within the hoper, but rather were received from an outside authority. This authority named both the pains and the responses to pain for the hoper, thereby robbing the hoper from genuine personal dreaming. In other words, hope was imposed, received, and not born from within. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:315–16.

[2] For "scientific racism," in Nazi Germany, see especially Günther's notorious work on the "ethnology of the German people." Günther was praised by Hitler, having been used largely as a basis for the Reich's eugenics policies. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss was also a leading contributor to this conversation, claiming distinctions between Germans, Nordics, Arians and so-called inferior groups. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes; Clauss, Race and Soul.

[3] For Bloch addressing this directly as "the europic principle," see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:58–101.

[4] As mentioned, although Protestantism remained diverse, there were concentrated attempts to erase the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew origins of Christianity by the state and by self-proclaimed German Christian movements. The Confessing Church formed in distinction to the German Christians (the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and, later, the Reich Church, who colluded more directly with the Nazis. Beyond collusion by organizational structures, church members and party members overlapped. Bergen, Twisted Cross.

[5] Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy; Heschel, "Nazifying Christian Theology."

[6] Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:509, 3:859.

[7] Remak, Nazi Years, 95–96.

[8] Of course, this movement was as much a heresy to Marxists as it was to the Confessing Christians--both schools claiming, at their best, fidelity to the crucified and the poor, to those the regime wished to exterminate.

[9] Clauss, Race and Soul; Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes.

The Enemy is Everywhere

Peace, all. Much love. I was fortunate to be in Minneapolis a couple of nights this week with some friends and family. Very briefly. Here's some brief feeling that came out. Hope they're helpful. Peace. ~Tom 

[ Photo taken at the February 7, 2026 Not On Native Land Rally and Ceremony ]

The eggshell-walking. Back or neck tight, twisted. The nights where sleep exhausts us. The dizzied timelines, memories floating and fractured. Many of us have known and felt these things, those that accompany the aftermath of explosions (or of pressure building that we wish would at last release). Abusive homes. Police violence and harassment-patrols. Neighbors throwing bullets or stones. War. A simple burglary. Or a federal invasion. These impact us. Convert us. Re-form our hearts. Even if only for a moment. 

“The enemy is everywhere.” In our bodies this sentiment becomes nothing but true. Every neighbor, a suspect. Every encounter, hairs and blood pressure stand. At attention, upright, beyond our command, our control. Lamps lit. Stayed-awake. Prepared. For foe. For flight. For Sister Death. For the glory or the terror of the coming of something Unknown. 

In something-similar, many of us have also experienced something of the sacred. In mourning: Healing, stumbling, finding her way to our door. Angered lament: an in-breaking of laughter and joy, even if only afloat or hovering, “alighted” (as the gospels proclaim the work of the Dove) onto pain and wounds: or intangible–yet casting cool shadows or warm flame–as clouds or pillars by night. An inkling of a hunch of a wondering of hope of a desire of a renunciation of what is and a dream of what might become–and one that is *not* anticipation alone. But also more. 

One that is participation and relation. A “thief in the night.” The appearance of magi beneath the stars. Of kings bowed down. Three thousand or three. Relinquishing crowns for care. Hope for the poor, the infants, the refugees in hiding, the animals “asleep on the hay.” 

The arrival of the Could Be, the Should Be, the Might Be, the presence of the Not Yet in tongue of fire and dried-up bone. 

~~

“I have spent many days downtown looking through people. But tonight I spent my time with all of you looking for them.” These are the words of my friend and colleague Rene, to which I often return. She said them maybe a decade ago–after a night out at our weekly food delivery with neighbors to neighbors who could use some food. I love these words. Because they say something beautiful and something true. And something that is difficult to say. Because saying it involves more than words. It also involves the body. Hairs and blood pressures at attention. The experience of other and other and other and One. 

“The enemy is everywhere?” Often, our body knows this as true. And so it is (in potentiality). And also, our body teaches, so is our neighbor. Our family. Our co-creatures. Our kin. (Also in potentiality). And there: in every space between every one of us (in every space within every one of us) is an opportunity, a possibility, an “opening” for justice and love and the fruition of the family of God to take place. Even if only for a moment.

 

There is nothing good about the terrorizing work of the death squads known as ICE taking place in our cities and towns. Indeed, they are a real enemy to us and to our neighbors, with guns and masks and the permission to injure and kill. Any “accomplishments” about which they may boast are not worth the cost of human life and human rights and human freedoms. Certainly some of those “agents” might be converted to love one day, but that cannot be our focus when what is pressing is defense from their racist and violent and incarcerating attacks. The enemy is everywhere. 

And so are spaces that our communities have filled with justice and love and the family of God. Listening to my friends in Chicago and Cicero at the height of their occupation (we love you all so much!) and again this week, as I got to spend a couple of days in Minneapolis, bearing witness to the incredible work of communities on the ground, connected, through schools, through churches, through love, into works of community defense, rapid response, mutual aid, prayer, protest, real solidarity. In the flesh. Hairs and heart at attention. Tense. Lamps lit. Whetted whistles. And instructions: “if ICE comes, turn off the heat in case they deploy some kind of gas or irritant.” LORD! Lord. Lord, have mercy! And Yet: looking for, looking out, looking to, but never looking through each other.  

If there is hope, it is alive here. In these spaces. Of enemies. Of potentialities. And of neighbors. Let us give thanks for those who fill them. With justice. With solidarity. With love. And may our hearts and bodies be filled with and take part in the same, as the body allows and as the Spirit moves. 

Amen. 

Of Christ and Nephilim: Westhelle's Hybridity as Choratic Matrix

Peace, all! Here's a little section titled, "Of Christ and Nephilim: Westhelle's Hybridity as Choratic Matrix," taken from An Unpromising Hope. Maybe a little weird. Maybe useful for Advent. 

So: hope you love it. 

Peace. 

Tom

[ image source ]

Of Christ and Nephilim: Westhelle's Hybridity as Choratic Matrix

For Westhelle, hybridity is also of great Christological import. Indeed, for Westhelle, Christ Christself is hybridical. So Christ is also by nature a transgression. That is, Christ transgresses simply by Christ being Christ. In the messiah, there is a crossing, a blending, an impurity according to hegemonic purity codes that legislate for differences to be separated and kept apart. For Westhelle, this is what Chalcedon holds to be at the very core of the Christian faith and salvation (Christ). Christ, in whom Christians claim the salvific, is fully human and fully divine. A hybrid! A transgression! How are we to speak of this?

Westhelle notes that according to some Talmudic traditions, rather than the stories of the first humans in Genesis, the story of the Nephilim in the same book would be better described by what the post-Augustinian West has come to refer to as the Fall. In the story, the sons of gods visit earth so as to come into (בּוֹא) the daughters of men, creating "the giants/mighty ones of old" (גִּבּוֹר) (Gen 6:4). Such transgression of worlds, argues Westhelle, according to this tradition, could result in no imagined good. And so, via the crossing (the chōra crossed between the sons of the gods and the daughters of men that lead to a hybrid or "third" kind of being), something of a curse would ensue—a flood, a reset button, after which the remaining animals and the people would re-conform to their natural and normal named and pure states. The crossing led to a certain kind of damnation (drowning) and a certain kind of salvation (starting creation anew).

It is apparent that the condemnative tradition, even where it clings to or emphasizes the salvific which is allegedly delivered by God to Noah and his family, fails to emphasize that Adam was charged with the naming in the first place (Gen 2:20). Why is this detail important? Names help us to call one another. As such, they may serve as a nonviolent way to identify and communicate with one another. Yet one possible result of naming is that the body may become imprisoned by the name. The body (and the being) becomes that which it is called. The name becomes a prison. Como se llama? "What are you called?" Tell me what you are called so that I can know who you are, so that I know where to place you in my memory and in my charts and in society.

If a name in this way becomes a restricting label (or a label becomes one's name as in the case of scientific sight), a category out of which one may not move, then the name/label acts as a holding cell, a barrier to becoming. A name is a barrier, a limit imposed on us, that may inhibit us from moving into choratic realms of metanoietic possibility. Understanding the story of the Nephilim (and subsequent flood) as a return of earth's creatures to their proper places/names/categories, misses the point. Adam imposed names (not God). In so doing, he bound himself and the other creatures to a delimited/defined/confined existence. Here is another kind of alienating Fall.

As the condemnatory/soteriological lens misses the mark, for Westhelle, hybridity and the choratic themselves become clarifying lenses with which to better view this story. This lens, coupled with an insight from Matthew and Luke, offers us a new vision. For Westhelle, where the space of the crossing/mixing was seen as a sort of Fall to Talmudic interpreters, so it is in a similar mixing/transgression of the Holy Spirit and another daughter of humans that God is born human, and at the same time a human, called by the name Mary, becomes theotokos.

Here is what we uncover with a choratic/hybridical/eschatological lens: that mixing which was imagined as leading only to the terror of a flood (condemnation and death) is seen by the gospel writers as precisely that which gives birth to human salvation by the action of God. That is, the mixing itself—the hybridical and choratic space of crossing (and its fruits)—is the matrix through which salvation and damnation both appear to lie nearby and at hand. As such, the space is apocalyptic.

And this is the apocalypse: in the crossing, in our exposure, in rising through a barrier, we might find our life's final end and oblivion. In the crossing, we might find born something of life made new. In hybridity, in the transgression of delineations and dividing lines (including those that separate our bodies, our skin) there is a possibility that something of God is revealed. There, at the eschaton, among the eschatoi in Bethlehem, God passes through the chōra, from Mary's womb into the stable's midnight light. A transgression from the start, there God is targeted by the normalizing violence of the king (Matt 2:7–12).

There, in the crossing, in the eschata, in choratic space between places, we ourselves may come upon junkyards and graveyards, and perhaps even the one we once loved deeply, our rock and our redeemer, our cornerstone, now rejected, now in prison, now thirsty, now hung violently from wooden beam.

~Thomas R Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021). 

Advent Hope (& Thank You, We Love You, Chicago)

 Peace, all. A quick reflection for y’all this AM. Incomplete. And hopefully worth a read and some musing :) Peace. ~Tom

[ image source ]

“What’s insane is not [the bird’s] painful, clumsy, efforts to fly, but rather the hand that broke its wings.” - Rubem Alves, Tomorrow’s Child (1972)

Advent (Hope Against Hope)

For liturgical Christians, the season of Advent is around the corner–a season in which we sing and speak of and (at our best) summon something of hope. Hunger pangs of the heart. These we illustrate. With the colors of the night sky. Wreaths of green. Little candles pink and purple and blue. Sparks before the warmth. Of a sunrise that, fingers crossed, might be about to come. A rebellion against the cold. As best we can. From where we are. 

Hope has been an obsession of mine for decades. Especially, I’ve been drawn to agnostic hoping. That is: hope that is not so sure and not so certain at all. “A pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will,” as Gramsci was known to say. No promises here, but to heck with so much of what is. And: here’s to the Not Yet (as Ernst Bloch would call it). 

Faith, for me, in this frame, has been something like: the discipline of stoking a desire for the Not Yet. For not settling. For not letting an abusive world domesticate or slap us into submission. 

Such faith can be nurtured in what Rubem Alves has called “aperitif communities.” Not appetizer communities. We don’t want to be full on those bread sticks when the spaghetti arrives. Rather aperitif. A forestaste before a meal. A “sup” that makes us not full but hungrier. 

Sassy Faith

I was recently in a meeting in which the group was asked about “paths of faith that have inspired us.” I did not offer an answer at the moment. But my mind went immediately to an essay by Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. One that has influenced my sense of hope and faith since it was assigned to us as reading my Dr. Linda Thomas at LSTC so many years ago. 

Dr. Copeland talks about this: 

Known commonly as the sassy tree, it is said that tea made from the bark of the West African ordeal tree was once used when putting people on trial. 

Specifically, the tea from the tree was used by people in power to “determine” whether or not a person was a witch. Meaning: whether or not someone practiced magic that was un-sanctioned by those “in charge.” 

In front of an angry and accusing mob, an accused person would be forced to drink the tea from the sassywood. If she died as a result, well then clearly (!) she must have been a witch! If not (if somehow the poison did not kill here) allegedly she was then free to go. 

The word sass arrived in the Americas and in the Caribbean, it is believed, in the 1600s. It was carried in the language and the hearts of people who were kidnapped and enslaved by the “company” and colonial powers. Here, the word took on a slightly different meaning. Folks also started using it as an adverb. 

That is: to act sassy, to be sassy, or to “sass back,” but also to “have sass” or “demonstrate sass,” on a new continent and in a new context of oppression, came also to mean “giving the master a taste of his own medicine,” or:

“Giving the oppressor a taste of his own poison.” 

According to Copeland, sassiness included acts suchs as: not taking abuse as it was offered by one’s “master;” talking back when it was not one’s right or privilege even to speak (but you did it anyhow); standing up against advances (including sexual advanaces) that, though they were ‘legal,’ were certainly not acceptable; and so on. Sassing back. Amen? 

In so doing, Copeland observes, folks like Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Old Elizabeth, Sojourner Truth, and so many others were able to do something incredibly important. 

In the real chains and bonds of a dehumanizing system in a dehumanizing society, one that would prefer to see them only as property, through sass, these women were (nonetheless) able to assert their humanity. Said again: to sass-back (to resist–even if only for a moment) was humanizing. 

Whatever aggression or manipulations were being perpetrated, sass offered an interjection. A holy “No!” when a slaveholder was used only to YES. As it did (again even if only for a moment) it disrupted the power dynamic that allowed for and facilitated abuse. Sass did not change the whole system. Dammit. But it did offer a pause, an interruption, and an interjection that disrupted the imbalance. 

For the moment, the scales tipped. The valleys were lifted. The proud brought down from their thrones. 

Incomplete. Fleeting. But a foretaste. An outburst of desire for the Not Yet that is, in itself, a renunciation of bondage and a testimony of the last-becoming-first and much-prayed-for Reign of Love.

Fleeting. But still metabolized. An aperitif. God. Does it make you hungry? 

Hope in Hopeless Times

In the worlds I tend to inhabit these days, we talk about being strategic. How will we instigate real change? What tension will lead to actual turning? These are important questions, and keep us from running in circles and running out of energy right before we might need it the most. 

And Yet, in the quote from Alves above (about the bird not being insane for trying to fly–but only the hand that broke its wing being insane), there is a reminder for us that faith is not only nurtured by the pragmatic. The pragmatic does not always stoke in us that hunger of the heart, the longing, the optimism if the will, the discipline of faith that stokes forward-facing desire and longing. 

Beyond pragmatics, there exists in acts that might be described as “sassy”–acts that provide an interruption and a re-framing, a renunciation of what is and glimpse of the lowly exalted… 

Beyond pragmatic acts, there is something of desire shot-through, of hope, of hunger, of what we have sometimes called the “prophetic,” of the Spirt and of fire for the Not Yet, in the confrontation of abusive power (whatever the outcome). 

For in that confrontation, we receive something of a delicious, hunger-inducing drink. 

Chicago

So, to return to that question from that meeting: what paths of faith have inspired/stoked/influenced [us] lately? 

My answer is this: 

I think, at least for those of us who long in similar directions for Love to Reign and the lowly to rise up, little (nearby) has been as inspiring and hunger-for-justice-inducing as witnessing our beloveds in Chicago returning day after day in defiance to the crucifying powers who govern, fund, and empower ICE. 

My friends, my siblings, I love you, we love you. This fascism rising around us can seem to be a hopeless situation. Demonstrations may seem futile, the pain not worth it. And Yet, each act of resistance we see from afar is a testimony for us: insane is the hand who inflicts abduction, imprisonment, and abuse. And delicious is the world where the powers who inflict these things are resisted, disrupted, and ultimately overcome. 

Friends, siblings in Struggle, thank you for lighting the way for the Sun. Thank you for harkening the Dawn. Your work is beautiful. It moves us. It is the path, the Way, for the arrival of justice and peace and love. 

May we all walk in hope in such ways where we are, when we are, and with whatever it is that we’ve got.