I was just thinking to myself the day I gave my name to give this Sermonette or rather my reflection for this Christmas. Browsing through the bookshelf in the Library, I came across a book called What would Jesus Deconstruct and found it very interesting and fascinating. And perhaps my thoughts will surface from this particular book – authored by John Caputo. What would you and I deconstruct this Christmas? This Christmas novena? Or rather what would you and I deconstruct as being a religious, a Salesian. But wait!!! (pause) Actually speaking you and I cannot deconstruct what would it be like…simply because GOD IS…Well, may be what would you and I deconstruct if given a thought to this perhaps we could make an attempt to deconstruct our lives by living a new self with Jesus and in Jesus beginning this Christmas.
I may sound like the empty vessel or the air filled in the balloon or a web that is created in the corner of the wall which may create an irritating sound from the vessel or words that disappear like the air or a cob-web to be cleared form the wall. But all the same give a thinking thought to this thought reality. The Church doesn’t need someone in order to be deconstructed, because it got Jesus! The deconstruction of the Church happens from the inside. Deconstruction is a work of love, and it happens because it is animated by a vision for something different. Just as the law is deconstructed with a view to the advent of justice, so the church is deconstructed with a view to the advent of the kingdom.
It should be no surprise that the domesticated Jesus is directed most specifically against the distinctly domestication of Jesus associated today with the Religious. The title thus really asking, What Would Caputo Deconstruct? Or What Would You and I Deconstruct? But that’s not the question I am asking. nothing less than to confront ourselves with a Jesus who resist all our domestications. And so I invite you and me to ask: What would Jesus deconstruct if he was sitting here or rather giving us this sermon? Or what would he deconstruct if He was moving about or walking on the corridors and sitting in our in study places or in the offices? Or what would he deconstruct if He came with us for our walks? Or what would he deconstruct if He would have been sleeping where we normally sleep, be it in our dormitory or rooms? Or what would He deconstruct if He showed up during our moments of Prayer? or for U wherever you are..... It is a sign of vitality that I leave you with such questions at the beginning of what haunted me when I was thinking about this revealing question or rather an existential or postmodern question. But it is best to serve and love Jesus’ by never ceasing to ask these questions in our lives, lest they’ll leave you haunted.
What would Jesus Deconstruct? Winsomely articulates why so many people are nervous about orthodoxy – radical or not, and suggests that Catholics or rather we religious need to think more seriously about being postmodern. Here we have a lens and a lexicon to see the phenomena in a new light. Deconstruction happens it is not something that you and I do. But it is an event that sets off unforeseeable and disruptive consequences. In a scene of deconstruction, our lives, our beliefs, and our practices are not destroyed but forced to reform and reconfigure-which is risky!!!
Over the ages the spiritual masters have described spiritual life as a journey. Indeed, we might even venture the thought that to be “religious” in its deepest sense is to be a searcher, living in search of something. When Bobby Kennedy used to say, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why…I dream of things that never were and ask why not?” he was speaking with a religious heart. Religious people are the people of the “why not?” the people of the promise, of the hope against hope. We restlessly search for something, for a certain sort of “transcendence”, which means to be on the go, making a crossing, attempting to get somewhere else. That is what I mean by giving the spiritual journey some postmodern teeth. I agree this is a little unnerving, to what I just called “hyper-realism.”
On the 3rd of December we commemorated with solemnity the feast of St Francis Zavier, the day also of celebration for the Mumbai Province. As I was walking pass by the Rectors Office, my eyes happened to read the notice board which read, In His Steps, on this quotation I began to ponder and wonder, following “in his steps”, that would mean following someone different, following a very different way, but all with the same heartfelt conviction and deep faith of the “here”.
The reason we are on a journey is precisely the contingency and givenness of the world in which we find ourselves and the desire we have for a guide - companion. The spiritual journey on which we are embarked is, we say, a journey of faith. So we ought to undertake the project posed by (1 Peter 2:21) - the task of following ‘in his steps’. Jesus is not the way unless you are lost, even as Jesus is not the answer unless you have a question. In the postmodern situation, the very idea of a spiritual journey seems to presumes that we are all a bit lost. It is thus not surprising that when we frame such a question as to “What would Jesus do?” therefore a journey we never complete, where that incompleteness is not an imperfection but testimony. To give a very concrete example of what I mean, when we profess, you and I say, “I do” but whatever we become, is unknown and unforeseen. That is a risk, what Levinas called a beautiful risk. But the risk is constitutive of the vow or the commitment. It is the faith, the willingness to go forward, even though the way is not certain, that leads us to describe it as beautiful. If it were a sure thing, it would be about as beautiful as a conversation with our loved ones.
Think about faith, hope, and charity singled out by St Paul when is faith really faith? Not when it is looking more and more like we are right, but when the situation is beginning to look impossible, in the darkest night of the soul. The faith that is said to move mountains. So, too, hope is hope not when we have every reason to except a favorable outcome, which is nothing. It is beginning to look hopeless, when we are called on to hope against hope. This is above all true of love, where loving those who are lovable or those who love you make perfect sense. But when is love really love? When we love those who are not lovable or who do not love us. In other words, we are really on the way of faith and hope and love when the way is blocked; when the way seems impossible, where this impossible makes the way possible. It is precisely not this that makes the path kick into high gear. But a paradox of Love and by a common appreciation of the path, not a well-paved, well-marked superhighway but as an obstructed path, a step. The real challenge is to walk with courage, in his steps. Real journeys are full of unexpected turns and twists, requiring a faith that can move mountains and a hope against hope, where one does not see what one was attempting to do until the journey is completed, which postmodernists call the absolute future. It is not a matter of becoming who you already are but of becoming something new, a new creation, which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor the heart felt neither the mind imagined, an openness to the coming of the other, which we don’t already possess. We must instead allow it to happen (arrive) to us. Jesus’ own path of thought or ‘journey’ His whole life was a journey, an adventure. Deconstruction is adventure, a risky business, as is life. Each step I take on that is full of apprehension, excitement, and discovery.
Thinking about the Christmas gift, the gift is created out of love, and love, as Meister Eckhart said, is without why. Love is its own why; love is for its own sake. It does not demand a further or external reason. When I do something for love of my parents or guardian or siblings or friends or neighbour or when a lover is with his/her loved one, a mother breastfeeding her child this is an expenditure made without expectation of return, even tough we understand that in fact the circle of return is always there. The fore of deconstruction in this context is to preserve the madness of the gift giving. There is, there ought to be, something that we do in life that is not for a return but just because what we are doing is life itself, something a little mad. That is the gift. Deconstruction is the affirmation, the affirmation of the impossible, of the coming of the event, the hyper-real, which participates in the structure of the step. Love means to surrender to the impossible, to render oneself over to, and give oneself back to the impossible.
St Paul called this the weakness of God which is perhaps the ultimate madness of the kingdom of God. In Jesus there is the divinity that lies in the emptying of divinity. There is an ancient Christian tradition of being fools for God. Let us be fools for Christ. My thinking is that when time to time we meet people in whom the figure of Jesus is imaged like the religious, we might find ourselves ridiculing them as weak or mad or foolish, as indeed they are I mean YES we are – in a very precise sense.
All this in order to get down to about what Jesus would deconstruct. We have just proposed what is distinctive about Jesus in this question, analyzed the deconstruct and pointed out the hermeneutic force of the would. Now it is time to ask just what Jesus would deconstruct, to say more exactly what is what. That is why we require hermeneutics. It is our responsibility to breathe with the spirit of Jesus, to implement, to invent, to convert it into the praxis, which means to make the order resonate with the radicality of the vision. When Jesus said do you think I have come to bring peace, no I bring the sword (Mt, 10:34), when he said that he comes to bring fire and division (Lk, 12: 49-53), he did not mean a physical sword and arson. He did mean that we must be prepared to endure the harshest difficulties in the pursuit of peace and justice, even to hating our father and mother, which was his idea of family values in the kingdom. He meant that we should be prepared to die for what is... His word is hard and who can bear it? His most characteristic sayings are a scandal to the world of Roman power (here I mean is the present world politics in the secular as well as the religious world), deeply paradoxical contradictions of the ways – like offering a set of beatitudes that make a virtue out of meekness, mercy, humility, and poverty, everything the Roman world mocked and despised. The replica that Jesus set is impossible. It requires loving and forgiving what it is impossible.
Here I would like to highlight the point of giving witness as Jesus, you and I, living in this charism of Don Bosco – Daha Mihi Animas Cetera Tolle. What is you and I doing for this Institution of Christ, the Church and Don Bosco, the youngsters?
Strategically, diplomatically, socially, politically, morally, economically, diplomatically, evangically, spiritually, religiously and in every possible way, that can be thought of, Jesus was a witness - yesterday, Jesus is a witness – today and Jesus will be a witnesses – forever. As religious, we too are witness let you and me live to this here and there, to this gift, to this love, to this deconstruction from this Christmas.
Hey yoUth what are you upto this CHRISTMAS???
No comments:
Post a Comment