whiteness in the dock

Men and women of faith are being challenged today, as they should, to confront their racial biases and to act for justice. In the face of obvious, continuous, systemic, and hideous human suffering, one cannot turn away. Christians who privately live coram Deo and dwell in communities under the Reformation call to ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei must hear their neighbors in humility and repent where necessary. One must ask one's heart hard questions; one must interrogate every stone of one's communities. No people in the United States carry this burden more than white Christians. And I am a white Christian man who came of age in the American South.

I think of John's vision of the great multitude in Revelation chapter seven. His is not a vision of the world finally falling in line with whiteness. Without saying as much, this was the assumption in the white hermeneutics of "the way it is." But this isn't the way it is. John's vision is a challenge to whiteness. It tells whiteness to take a seat alongside everybody else. This is the Kingdom, where the first are last and the last, first. There are no grounds for boasting. Whiteness is just a fellow participant in the multi-racial, multi-lingual fellowship of God's Shalom community of priestly worship. This is the horizontal eschatological hope. But what of the vertical?

The vertical is, of course, the triune God. He is a plurality of ecstatic and contemplative unity. And it is in his figure that we hear the call to be as he is. Not a monad of absolute likeness, such as Allah. Instead, a loving whole. The Trinity is why racism is an evil that will be overcome. The incarnation is why the racism that will be overcome will be human.

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Ian Almond, professor of world literature at Georgetown University in Qatar, being interviewed by Jane Clark of Beshara Magazine:

Jane: It seems to me that there are two aspects to this homogenisation. One is that it could be a movement toward the whole world having some sort of common cultural reference point, leading to us becoming more united and able to talk to each other. But on the other hand, as you say, it could lead to a loss of diversity. What's more, in your book you point out that the particular canon that has developed has an agenda, or at least, unspoken assumptions. It's not a neutral message that's being propagated, and so there are certain values and certain voices that are really not being expressed within it.

Ian: I think we have to ask ourselves -- what do we ultimately want? Do we want to live in a world where everyone's culture is equally accessible to us and our culture is accessible to everybody else? What would that mean for diversity? Diversity has to include the fact that some people's works are just never going to be understood by everyone. Some books we will never really enjoy, some poetry will never really touch us, because we simply cannot related to them, so we should learn to draw a line instead of wanting to experience every single viewpoint on the planet. We should learn to recognise the parameters of our own cultural finitude.

But then, as you've already suggested, we also have to ask -- what are the origins of that worldwide cultural community? If it comes about through a whole host of very different cultures contributing equally, it might be OK. But it isn't like that; our expeirnce of other people's cultures is very often mediated through a colonial lens, or the lens of first world countries. In India, for example, when Gujaratis or Tamils read Bangla literature, they read English translations of Bengali writers. In Mexico, Spanish has a similar role. There are 50 indigenous langauges in Mexico and the different peoples don't communicate directly: they use Spanish. So this kind of unity comes from a certain direction, and if it comes from a certain direction, it also has a trajectory.

No ideas but in things

From film critic Alissa Wilkinson's Vox review of Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson:

"Walking [his dog] Marvin one night on his way to the bar, Paterson hears a rapper in a laundromat practicing in front of a spinning washer. The rapper trips and stops, then mutters to himself, 'No ideas but in things, no ideas but in things.'

"That’s a quotation from Williams [Carlos Williams] and a mantra for imagism, but it also mirrors a dictum from Edmund Husserl, the 19th-century philosopher who more or less founded phenomenology, in which philosophers begin with the sensations of lived experience — the feeling of the shoes on feet or, presumably, the matches on the kitchen counter — and work their way out to the significance. Husserl’s maxim was to go 'back to the things themselves,' to encounter the world on its own terms by observing the feelings it provokes in us. In doing so, phenomenologists believe, we more fully grasp the nature of our existence, and gain the tools to live better lives."

Wilkinson nicely winds two threads for me: imagism and Husserl. Both figure into work done on this blog some years ago. Wind with these the principle of ad fontes "to the sources." Wind with these my belief that the work of the arts is to behold creation in the light of resurrection (coram Deo and thinking of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar) and to remind it thereby (working in a manner analogous to Diotema's Ladder, along the direction of the psalmist's "because," and in the hope of Paul's "but now" of Romans 3:21) of its source, the triune Creator. The arts are the vertical companion to the horizontal command to freely garden the wild earth. The arts begin in quiddity, from below, and vertically climb upward (Psalm 150), and theology is an art.