χ-mas posts

Like so many of you, I get tense around Christmas. I feel it in my body.

For my ten-year-old niece, this is going to be an unforgettable holiday season because her parents just signed divorce papers, and this weekend already she had to put a publicly-inebriated parent to bed, with the help of that parent's "lover" who precipitated the split up.  And the little girl has already delivered Merry Christmas presents to us from that parent, perhaps in anticipation of the fact that we'll not all be together this year.  My niece has told my daughters that if she ever has to run away, she wants to come live with us.  Incarnation gets a new meaning.

So I hope you'll understand some of my pathetic reflections on 3 blogposts I read this morning. I was still shivering from the cold winds when I saw them.

1

The lightest post, in all the most positive refreshing ways, is Charlotte's Holiday Lights.  She gives us various delights in and her gripes about Merry Christmas lights and all. As I find myself agreeing with her about inappropriate symbols (like "wrong time" reminders of the "traumatic crucifixion" and of the post-shroud "resurrection"), I wander into remembrances of our recent shrouded Texas history of burning crosses.  And I sense in my cinched-up neck muscles this bemusement from somewhere about the future of our planet and how awfully un-green the present blast of lights is.  To fight my cynicism, I smile to myself, at myself: "The Grinch is Green."

2

The most challenging post is James K.A. Smith's.  He's copied for us John D. Caputo's essay, "Why the Church Deserves Deconstruction: A Preface to the Chinese Translation."  This is Caputo's own preface to the Chinese edition of his book What Would Jesus Deconstruct?  The challenge isn't in the translation at all because Caputo writes the essay in English mostly.  I really really want more of us to get the bit of French he leaves us with:  Viens, oui, oui.

But we ought to at least get Caputo's play on WWJD as a rhetorical trope, which he explains. Another thing he says is . . . and hear this in Caputo's own words:

That I am writing these pages on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama, an African-American with a suspicious sounding name, as the forty-fourth president of the United States is the result of a number of convergent forces. It is due to the collapse of right wing economic greed in the United States–the effects of which are felt most severely on the poor, the least able to endure it, of course–about which the Christian Right has been scandalously silent. It is a tribute to the disillusionment with the older and reactionary leaders of the Christian Right by young Christians who desire to return to the authentic spirit of peace and justice of the gospels. But it is also a tribute to progressive political figures like Mr. Obama who gave their political vision a religious heart, who spoke in terms of faith and hope. . . . I am saying that progressive leaders should recognize the prophetic import of biblical religion. The very idea of a democracy, the risk and the hope that is embedded in this idea, is that the chords of peace and justice will be struck by giving a hearing to a polyphony of voices, of men and women, black and white, of whatever lineage, western or non-western, including both religious and secular voices. The faith of a responsible Christian in the postmodern world is that wherever there is peace and justice, there the sweet, strange and compelling words of the Sermon on the Mount are resounding.

I still hear my wife (while listening to our pastor preaching the "unto the least of these" bit from the sermon on the mount in church yesterday) whispering to my son (just back from college): "Isn't that the bit that Barack Obama quotes so much?"  I guess I'll let us ponder how Smith's post is not a "wrong time" message.

3

The third post is the most shocking, for me anyway.  It has this eye-catching title, "Christmas: The Time for Feminism."

Just when I'm settling for Caputo's "hermeneutics of deconstruction" and thinking of how Rich Rhodes accuses me, from time to time, of going postmodern on readers at BBB, I read this post, by Polycarp (a new blogger friend). Turns out, as I'm thinking at Christmas of never blogging again, Polycarp has been reading my blog for a year.  He's now confessing he's not a feminist and yet, and yet I say, he kindly asks his readers to read translation, Matthew's and mine and Miriam's.  He suggests:  "It might do us well to put ourselves in the shoes of Mary, and perhaps the other women as we read this account." 

And I smile (to myself again, at myself):  Josef didn't get to shop for Miriam at DSW Shoes, and neither one had a Zappos account.  Our neighbors, who are Jews, had our whole family over for dinner last night; it was a good time of reflecting on the holidays too, as we ate and laughed and felt tensions together.  They gave me a copy of Benyamin Cohen's My Jesus Year, and I've already gobbled down the first two chapters (laughing all the way).

  l' écriture feminine, the translation of the body, the tensions of Christmastime 

Pythias Influencing Discourse

Long before George Lakoff's "embodied mind" was Robin Tolmach Lakoff's "third wave feminist linguistics." And long before that were the Gestalt psychologists with their "put together, figure and ground." But long before that was Phythias's "woman's discourse."

Nancy Mairs in Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer reminds us:

[The dominant, objectivist, Aristotelian discourse is not] women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”

The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy. (40-42)

Here's how Aristotle struggled with a poetic riddle in the Rhetoric. (He struggles with the same in the Poetics). And here's how Pythias reads that (with a few traditional English translations -- dominant discourse translations -- following).

Incarnation

I am astonished, astounded, and amazed by French feminism, by Greek rhetoric, and by Jewish translation. So I started my Christmas readings early this year.

After its incredible, presumptuous introductory gene-a-o-logy, this initial narrative startles me:

18 τοῦ δὲ ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις οὕτως ἦν. μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ μαρίας τῶ ἰωσήφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου.
19 ἰωσὴφ δὲ ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς, δίκαιος ὢν καὶ μὴ θέλων αὐτὴν δειγματίσαι, ἐβουλήθη λάθρᾳ ἀπολῦσαι αὐτήν.
20 ταῦτα δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐνθυμηθέντος ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου κατ᾽ ὄναρ ἐφάνη αὐτῶ λέγων, ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς δαυίδ, μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν μαρίαν τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου·
21 τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν, αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν.
22 τοῦτο δὲ ὅλον γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος,
23 ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.
24 ἐγερθεὶς δὲ ὁ ἰωσὴφ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕπνου ἐποίησεν ὡς προσέταξεν αὐτῶ ὁ ἄγγελος κυρίου καὶ παρέλαβεν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ·
25 καὶ οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως οὖ ἔτεκεν υἱόν· καὶ ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν.

Do you see it?

l' écriture feminine, Et

1:20 ἐνθυμηθέντος, καὶ

7:14 ‏לָ֠כֵן יִתֵּ֨ן אֲדֹנָ֥י ה֛וּא לָכֶ֖ם א֑וֹת הִנֵּ֣ה הָעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙ וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן וְקָרָ֥את שְׁמ֖וֹ עִמָּ֥נוּ אֵֽל׃

But just so none of us (Jew nor Greek, Hellene nor barbarian, Hélène Cixous nor man logician, slave nor free, male nor female) is offended, let's listen together. Hear. Here's another Jewish translation of that one above (Matthew's Greek translation of angel language and Hebrew translated by Willis Barnstone into our English).

18 The birth of Yeshua the Mashiah happened in this way. Miryam his mother was engaged to Yosef, yet before they came together she discovered a child in her womb, placed there by the holy spirit.
19 Yosef her husband, a just man and loath to expose her, resolved to divorce her secretly.
20 But as he was making plans, look, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream an said, Yosef, son of David, do not fear to take Miryam as your wife. The child engendered in her came from the holy spirit,
21 and she will give birth, and you will name him Yeshua,for he will save his people from their wrongdoings.
22 All this was done to fulfill the word of God uttered through his prophet Yeshaya, saying,
23 "Listen. A young woman will have a child in her womb and give birth to a son, and his name will be Immanuel."
24 When Yosef rose from a dream, he did what the angel of the Lord told him, and he accepted her as his wife,
25 yet he did not know here until after she gave birth, and he called the child the name Yeshua.

Now, what if that little Greek girl were reading this to us? You know, the girl whose mother pleaded with Yeshua somehow miraculously to exorcise the deity her daughter had been given over to. (See Mark 7 or fast forward to chapter 15 in Matthew or confess a recognition of the family resemblance of this young woman to the prostituted oracles.)

Imagine that the body of this female, deflowered by proprietary pimping priests and yet unnamed in any man's history, is now freed of the demon.

Consider the possibility that she then follows after this Joshua who saves from their wrongdoings.
Suppose she's bilingual in the Hellene and the Hebrew tongues.
Suspend your disbelief that she becomes biliterate and finds her way to the libraries of Alexandria held secret from Rome in so-called dirty Egyptian mothers' cupboards.
Understand how (differently) she reads men such as Matthew translating into Greek (as above)
and men (as below) such as Isaiah and Hesiod and Homer and Aristotle.

For those who have ears to hear, overhear the sounds of her voice (as if in [y]our English):

הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה, הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן, וְקָרָאת שְׁמוֹ, עִמָּנוּ אֵל.
(see, the young woman will conceive, and bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel.)

ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ
(see, the virgin will hold in her womb a child, and will bear a son, and will call his name Emmanouel)

ἡ δὲ γυνὴ τέτορ' ἡβώοι, πέμπτῳ δὲ γαμοῖτο.
(The young woman's four years older than puberty; wed in her fifth year.)
παρθεν-ικὴν δὲ γαμεῖν, ὥς κ' ἤθεα κεδνὰ διδάξῃς,
(While virgin-istic, she's to be married, to teach her all her respectable duties.)

καὶ διὰ παρθεν-ικῆς ἁπαλόχροος οὐ διάησιν,
(And through virgin-istic smooth-skinned maidens it cannot penetrate)

ἔνθα οἱ ἀντεβόλησε θεά, γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη,
(bright-eyed goddess Athena met him)
παρθενικῇ ἐϊκυῖα νεήνιδι, κάλπιν ἐχούσῃ.
(in the virgin-istic guise of a young maiden woman holding a pitcher.)

ἡ ῥητορική ἐστιν ἀντίστροφος τῇ διαλεκτικῆ
(Speaker-ism is a turn taken different from the "-ism" of talking Truth.)
. . . ἐνθυμημάτων . . . ἐστὶ σῶμα τῆς πίστεως,
(. . . inner passions . . . embody the beliefs,)



And just to help us sympathize and empathize with the inner passions (the "rhetorical enthymemes embodied in the persuasions") of this young lady, we listen to a scene described by rhetorician George A. Kennedy in his New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism:

The truth is immediately and intuitively apprehended because it is true. Some see it, others do not, but there is no point in trying to persuade the latter. This is the most radical form of Christian rhetoric. When Jesus performs his first miracle, the witnesses are "amazed" (1:27); they recognize truth but do not comprehend it rationally. The miracle is a sign of authority, as the crowd at once admits. No effort is made to include any picture of Jesus' early teaching as seen in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain. This kind of explanation is irrelevant to Mark. When Jesus preaches in Mark it is in parables, which are directly apprehended. There are enthymemes in Mark . . . (105).

So inner passions embody beliefs, and some see it while others do not. And all too often this is the grief of the teachers and preachers and other reachers for our beliefs and our bodies. Notice how even physical bodies embody belief:

Physicist Anatol Rapoport:
Once when teaching elementary physics, I was impressed with the resistance of mature intelligent students to some fundamental facts and concepts. For example, when a man falling in a parachute has reached constant velocity, the forces action on him add up to zero. Beginners almost invariably resist this conclusion. "If there is not resultant force action on a falling body," they ask, "why does it fall?" Proof by appeal to the fundamental equation of motion is of little avail. They “believe” the equation, but they believe their preconceptions. (qtd. in Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, by Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, p. 239)

Philosopher Professor Dallas Willard:
Sometimes I will half jokingly say to [my 101 students] as they hand me their tests after an exam, “Did you believe what you wrote?” And they all smile. Because they know that the important thing is not to believe what you write but to write the right answers ("Truth: Can We Do Without It?" p. 12).

Rhetorician Professor Richard Young:
[Our co-taught advanced course in rhetorical argument] did not achieve its principal objective: That is, it did not appear to help students develop considered judgments on ethical problems. . . This was surprising since most of us, I think, would predict that the thinking [i.e., beliefs] of at least a few students would have changed to some significant degree. But, to my dismay, their pretests were the best predictors of their posttests. ("Toward an Adequate Pedagogy for Rhetorical Argumentation: A Case Study in Invention" p. 161).

Psychologist Professor Haim Ginott:
Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education. My request is:
Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
(Teacher and Child, p. 371)



Now we return to the child whose body experienced bondage beyond belief. What does she hear? What does she believe in her unbound body? What does she say?

18 τοῦ δὲ ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις οὕτως ἦν. μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ μαρίας τῶ ἰωσήφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου.
This is the birth of the Anointed, Joshua. His mother Miriam was engaged to Josef; before they came together she held in her womb a child who came by the Breath of the Special One.

19 ἰωσὴφ δὲ ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς, δίκαιος ὢν καὶ μὴ θέλων αὐτὴν δειγματίσαι, ἐβουλήθη λάθρᾳ ἀπολῦσαι αὐτήν.
Josef, her man, her husband, a just person who didn't wish to make a show of her, counseled secretly to release her from himself.

20 ταῦτα δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐνθυμηθέντος ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου κατ᾽ ὄναρ ἐφάνη αὐτῶ λέγων,
ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς δαυίδ, μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν μαρίαν τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου·
These inner passions of his were angst. See. An announcer of the Master, in a dream, appeared to him to state:
"Josef, son of David, don't be afraid to take beside you Miriam, your woman, your wife; the baby birthed in her, in fact, is by the Breath of the Special One.

21 τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν, αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν.
She will deliver a son, and you will call his name Joshua; he will, in fact, save his people from their wrongdoings."

22 τοῦτο δὲ ὅλον γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος,
These events were born out entirely so that the things spoken by the Master would be fulfilled through the Prophet who stated:

23 ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.
"See, the young virgin will hold in her womb a child, and will bear a son, and will call his name Emmanouel," which is translated "With us is God."

24 ἐγερθεὶς δὲ ὁ ἰωσὴφ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕπνου ἐποίησεν ὡς προσέταξεν αὐτῶ ὁ ἄγγελος κυρίου καὶ παρέλαβεν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ·
When Josef got up from his sleep, he did what the announcer of the Master told him, and he took beside himself his woman, his wife.

25 καὶ οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως οὖ ἔτεκεν υἱόν· καὶ ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν.
And he did not know her until after she delivered her son; and he called his name Joshua.