Beyond Us and Them: The Practice of Faith in a Post-Election America

Where do we find ourselves now? How do the insights of René Girard concerning desire, violence, and scapegoating help us to make sense of a moment where our illusions are being laid bare and how we are to be is suddenly put into question? Are we stuck in rivalry with easily identifiable “others” whose faults we see, while blind to our own?

All are invited. 

James Alison is a Catholic priest, theologian, and author, known for his application of the thought of René Girard to contemporary theological questions.

Duncan Morrow has worked for many years in conflict resolution and peace-making in Northern Ireland and beyond. He is currently the Director of Community Engagement at the University of Ulster.

Non Violent by Jerry Naba Sonji Nkwe

Music influenced by Rene Girard, Introducing the Non Retributive,the non-violent God and the gospel of peace and grace.

Non Violent

lyrics-by Jerry Naba Sonji Nkwe ·

Yeah

the gospel of peace

introcucing the non-violent God

introducing the non-retributive God

grace

allow me let me get in
no Armageddon
gospel of peace, see we going in
wars exist
we say let fire cease
i mean ceasefire
your god of fire
violent God no more
Jesus ain't lord of war
he is prince of peace
he is waters still
greener pastures
the love of our sons and daughters
the hope of the whole world
why are you telling our boys and girls
God will take most to the abyss
down to the grave down to Hades
burn most and fail to save most
that spells no peace
and it’s not my king

chorus
sample speech by rene girard

verse 2
religion says we cursed dudes
lemme say this on verse two
if it be that true
God is just like Zeus
and that God makes me puke
created for fire and destruction
perpetual suffering i call that ISIS
my lord is totally different
loving us all all about us
when religion doubt us
God believes in us
and he lives in us
we exist through him
all we do in him
works for all us mankind
he loved us proven by the cross
inclusive love, the treasure he sought for
humanity his heart beat
what kind of love is this
so great and strong taking all of us in
no outcasts nor orphans of God
the god of peace he is not god of war
he is non violent

Getting to the Truth - beyond the corpses - learning to read scandal

This short scene in the movie, LINCOLN is a glimpse into scandal. A new book on scandal, Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses Reading Scandalous Texts by Jeremiah L. Alberg defines scandal: "as those events, scenes, and representations to which we are attracted at the same moment that we are repelled. The scandalous is that which excites without satisfying, seduces without delivering, and promises without fulfilling. In one word it summarizes René Girard's analysis of mimetic desire as the doomed-to-be-frustrated reaching for the skanalon, the object of scandal." (Link here to an excerpt from René Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.)

Alberg notes that we are confronted with a stark choice: "either turn away from scandal completely or become enthralled and thus trapped by it." 

When watching the movie I thought this scene cuts to the truth of scandal and thus do we turn away from the corpses or get enthralled and trapped in the tragic. Or, as Alberg says, do we allow scandal to open us up to journey beyond the tragic and death to a deeper truth?

[Lincoln rides slowly on the frontline outside of Petersburg, Virginia, saddened by the sight of all the dead and wounded soldiers; later he meets Grant at his headquarters in in Petersburg; they sit outside on the porch]

Abraham Lincoln: Once he surrenders, send his boys back to their homes, their farms, their shops.

Ulysses S. Grant: Yes sir, as we discussed.

Abraham Lincoln: Liberality all around, not punishment, I don't want that. And the leaders, Jeff and the rest of 'em, if they escape, leave the country while my back's turned, that wouldn't upset me none. When peace comes it mustn't just be hangings.

Ulysses S. Grant: By outward appearance, you're ten years older than you were a year ago.

[Lincoln, looking very tired, nods his head]

Abraham Lincoln: Some weariness has bit at my bones.

[he pauses for a moment, thinking]

Abraham Lincoln: I never seen the like of it before. What I seen today. Never seen the like of it before.

Ulysses S. Grant: You always knew that, what this was going to be. Intimate, and ugly. You must've needed to see it close when you decided to come down here.

[Lincoln stands, puts his hat on and shakes Grant's hand]

Abraham Lincoln: We've made it possible for one another to do terrible things.

Ulysses S. Grant: We have won the war. Now you have to lead us out of it.

Inter-dividual - a colony of others

"Inter-dividual" rather than individual best describes us as beings and it points to a term that we may relate to better and that is interconnectedness. Maybe using the aspen tree as an example we can get a glimpse into our own make-up of a person. The leaves of an aspen have an unusual ability to twist and bend to protect the trees from severe winds. Their twisting motion helps the tree to dissipate the energy more uniformly throughout the canopy - to reduce the stress on the tree. Additionally, the quaking movement is thought to aid in the tree’s growth, because the constant movement increases the intake of air by the leaves. Lastly, moving the leaves increases the ability for sunlight to shine on the lower leaves, thereby improving the rate of photosynthesis for the trees.

Or perhaps we should say TREE.

Aspens are unique in that a forest of trees can be actually one tree. Aspens grow in large colonies derived from a single seedling and spread the roots to create new trees. The new saplings may appear as far as 30-40 meters from the parent tree, yet they are a part of the same system. The individual trees may live 40-150 years above the ground but the roots can live for thousands of years. There is one colony in Utah that is believed to be over 80,000 years old! Aspen colonies can even survive forest fires because their roots are so well protected.

And because the colony is actually one system, they are quite generous to what could appear to be” another tree”. If a tree on one side of the forest is thirsty, the trees will work in unison to pass water through the root system to the ailing tree from one that is in an area where water is more abundant. If another needs nutrients or minerals, again it will be passed through the root system from one tree to the one in need. 

One of the most famous of quaking aspens' vast underground root systems is a network called Pando (Latin for "I spread", and also known as the Trembling Giant). It is estimated to cover about 107 acres, weighs about 6,600 tons and dates back 80,000 years - making it a contender to be one of the Earth's oldest and heaviest organisms. Trees within the root system grow and die, but these are replaced with fresh growth. The entire colonial organism, which is said to be derived from a single male plant, contains about 47,000 stems.

Inter-dividual is a term coined by René Girard and it means, in general that we desire according to the desire of the other and which is often referred to as “mimetic”. There has always been some other who precedes us and which surrounds us, and which moves us to desire, to want and to act. We may acknowledge this when we see it illustrated in the way the entertainment industry creates celebrities, or the advertising profession manages to make particular objects or brands desirable. Just spend a few hours observing yourself with others in the mob of consumers on Black Friday. 

What becomes challenging for us is the claim that in fact it is not some of our desires that are highly mimetic, but the whole way in which we humans are structured by desire.

Girard has pointed out, much like the interconnectedness of the Aspen tree, that humans are those animals in which even basic biological instincts (which of course exist, and are not the same thing as desire) are ever-bond to the other. In fact, our capacity to receive and deal with our instincts is derived from a hugely developed capacity for imitation which sets our species apart from our nearest primate relatives.

As a result, gesture, language and memory are not only things which “we” learn, as though there were an “I” that was doing the learning. Rather it is the case that, through this body being imitatively drawn into the life of all those before us, gesture, language and memory form an “I” that is in fact one of the indications of the "social" other. Thus being highly malleable, it is not the “I” that has desires, it is desire that forms and sustains the “I”. The “I” is something like a snapshot, in time, of all the many relationships which preexist it and which it is a mirror image.

The image laid out here, of the person mimetic, is always reaching outward and inevitably getting caught in entanglements - physically, psychologically and every which way. As we twist and turn in our attempts to free ourselves from another, these very movements become highly contagious for others who often enjoin the swirling of estrangement until escalating into violence. The issue for restoring community is how do we break the spiraling cycle of violent contagion - bringing calm after the chaos?

Not wanting to leave a post dangling, check out this link to an audio presentation The Scapegoat: René Girard's Anthropology of Violence and Religion.  And here is one last intriguing thought-image from Girard: "Humanity is the child of religion. In a way religion is like the placenta which protects the newborn." 

Battling to the End - A book review

Nothing from René Girard is ease and so we plow through the material countless times picking up treasures of something we know, or rather, it is more accurate to say that we find ourselves being known by and through the material, and by this sense we know it is very real and very powerful.  What has been helpful in this process of "induction" into something bigger, that of what Girard writes on, is seeking out other Girardians and commentators.

The following review of Girard's latest book, Battling to the End (Studies in Violence, Mimesis and Culture), describes some of the main points in a 'user-friendly' manner.

Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture) by Rene Girard

Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven
San Francisco Chronicle

In Laurel and Hardy's Big Business, two door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen fight a bad-tempered homeowner. The manic tit-for-tat escalates from head banging to a demolished house and an exploded car. The three become more and more alike as their wiggy violence spirals without aim or purpose.

It's funny because we know that that's the way we are, from the cradle. You hit your brother; he hits back; you hit again, only harder. Aggressor and aggrieved become interchangeable, indistinguishable, and parents know there is little point in trying to figure out "who started it."

As the Stanford scholar Rene Girard observes in the book-length interview Battling to the End, "The aggressor has always already been attacked" and so feels justified. Look at the Middle East.

But what if violence goes unchecked? "This is an apocalyptic book," Girard states at the outset. The more probable such an endgame becomes, "the less we talk about it."

The world-renowned author, a member of the Academie Francaise, should cut a bigger figure on the American intellectual landscape: He has, after all, lived in the Bay Area for decades. This Eurocentric book is unlikely to do the trick: Readers to whom the names Peguy or Adenauer are obscure, and who are unfamiliar with Girard's prior work, will be left in the dust somewhere between the Battle of Jena and Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.

C'est dommage. Battling to the End is elegant, profound, wide-ranging and frequently punchy. The introduction and epilogue are persuasive, prophetic tours de force.

Battling to the End created an intellectual buzz in 2007 when it was published in France as Achever Clausewitz. The book focuses on Prussian general and military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the Napoleon-obsessed author of On War. According to Girard, "The apocalypse appropriate for our time is perhaps no longer Saint John at Patmos, but a Prussian general riding with his friends along the roads of Russia and Europe."

Clausewitz speculated about total war, but funked it midway through On War, claiming it was only a theoretical possibility. Man's natural tendency to hedge his bets, postponing commitment, causes his opponent to scale back. This process inevitably short-circuits infinite escalation. Or rather, it used to.

"If we had been told 30 years ago that Islamism would replace the Cold War, we would have laughed...or that the apocalypse began at Verdun, people would have taken us for Jehovah's Witnesses," writes the Avignon-born octogenarian.

Fundamentalists, preoccupied with apocalypse, nevertheless grab the wrong end of the stick: "They cannot do without a cruel God. Strangely, they do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the process of amassing and that is looming over our own heads is entirely sufficient to trigger the worst. They have no sense of humor."

Girard insists that our desires are mimetic; envy and admiration fuel imitation and resentment -- and eventually violence. We become our foes. In one of the sweeping, epigrammatic statements that pepper the book, Girard claims, "Individualism is a formidable lie."

Decades ago, Girard formulated his controversial contention that scapegoating is the time-honored way societies control violence and restore peace -- "sacrifice prevents vengeance."

However, Judeo-Christian history, beginning with Cain and Abel and culminating on Calvary two millennia ago, revealed the scapegoat's innocence -- thus irrevocably undermining the mechanism. We no longer have bloody hands and clean consciences: Over 2,000 years, war itself has been breaking down under the burden of the truth. Yet violence is unchecked: "We are thus more at war than ever, at a time when war itself no longer exists."

Now, with the advent of global terrorism, one man can unilaterally wage war -- witness the Fort Hood massacre. Globalization and technology have only accelerated "the worldwide empire of violence."

Girard claims the only answer is to "abstain completely from retaliation, and renounce the escalation to extremes." He advocates "the imitation of Christ in order to avoid the imitation of men."

A Christian accused of bypassing orthodox Christian mysticism (notwithstanding echoes of Thomas A. Kempis), Girard is inspired by the image of the otherworldly Friedrich Holderlin, in the poet's final years of seclusion. Girard asserts that "salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father....To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it."

In these passages and elsewhere, Girard seems to be gripping a torch passed from Blaise Pascal, through Simone Weil, detouring the existentialists and their latter-day heirs. (Girard slyly chides our intellectual fashions: "Think about the inadequacy of our recent avant-gardes that preached the non-existence of the real.")

Big Business ends with Laurel and Hardy running away, half a block ahead of a cop. That's the formula for comedy. But we're not cast in comedy. Girard writes hauntingly, "More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying."

Cynthia L. Haven has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Times,Washington Post and San Francisco Magazine. Her An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz will be published next year. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.

Hunger Games - Through the help of René Girard

To really get to the heart - the beating, pulsating heart of Hunger Games the movie we have to read René Girard. View this clip from Father Barron and then begin your journey of faith through the Pascal Drama revealing Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

See this link Battling to the End to begin. 

"Christ took away humanity's sacrificial crutches and left us before a terrible choice: either believe in violence, or not; Christianity is non-belief." - René Girard

An Interview of René Girard - Mimesis and Science

RG: All communities have crises, and I believe the mimetic crisis of the type I have described is a special human feature. Humans are an animal of crisis. The real problem with our social sciences is that they've never learned that. The social sciences confuse the science of humanity with what human beings say about the order of their community. If you're a sociologist, you study that order according to what people say about their own culture. If you're a psychologist, you talk about the self, according to what the self is telling you. But the question is: when a society gets into a serious crisis, who is in charge? If you listen to the government, of course you're listening to their propaganda, but very often the government is no longer in charge. None of the standard rules apply. What is a crisis? The social sciences have not been able to define it. There is a great political scientist who first said that. His name is Carl Schmitt. He said a social science should first be the science of crisis. It's very easy to define who the government is, but in most societies the government is not the most important authority. You have to study a crisis in order to see who is in charge there. Who is fighting whom? What's really going on? Now in a way, the Mimetic Theory would like to do that, because humanity necessarily starts with a crisis. It's true that it's not enough to talk about biological changes. You have to talk about cultural changes, because we know that the last stages of the evolution of humanity are both cultural and physical.
...

My tendency (of thought) is to see scapegoating violence, particularly the kind that must have involved the entire community, as creative of human culture. I'm not an expert in the actual cognitive science of human origins. I read avidly what I find, but it doesn't go beyond that. And my work has brought me to the conclusion that mimesis and violence are essential to account for human origins. So it is remarkable to me that these contemporary theories do not take this into account.
What is amazing is when there is no violence in a particular culture, not the fact that there is violence. Conflict should be permanent, constantly there, since we imitate each other and are prone to mimetic rivalry. What is  interesting is to explain how a society manages those conflicts. If a scapegoat phenomenon puts an end to these hostilities, it will be repeated artificially. This is the definition of sacrifice, which for me is the beginning of human culture.

QUESTION: How is scapegoating the foundation that sets us on the trajectory toward our higher cognitive abilities, including language and rational reflective thought?

RG: One should say, scapegoat unanimity is the beginning of rationality. It is false rationality, but why is the scapegoat chosen unanimously? Because the community spontaneously discovered and subsequently believed in the majority principle. They have become democrats right there. They say, "If we are all unanimous, how could we be wrong?" They are wrong, but they are more right than other animals that cannot have unanimity. Of course this is not a matter of conscious reflective thought initially, but of mimetic repetition. The self-conscious unanimity of scapegoating is the beginning of humanity. It's the beginning of rationality. It's still irrationality, no doubt, but it's a beginning. You have to go through that phase in order to reach rationality.

QUESTION: So the tendency is to ignore violence in archaic culture and to view it as a late-developing phenomenon. We prefer to view the beginning of humanity as fundamentally peaceful and then blame our violence on more contemporary religious or cultural beliefs.

RG: We are in a privileged position to be able to talk about the essence of human community as positive - and to be sure there are many positive aspects, but there is always some kind of violence lurking in the background, which we would prefer to keep hidden and not mention in the same breath.

QUESTION: I would like to connect this discussion on the presumed innocence of early humans to our previous discussion on the presumed innocence of the early parent-infant relationship. I believe the vast majority of crimes where children, especially younger children and infants, are abused, harmed or murdered occur within the family. An the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac is a parent attempting to sacrifice their child. A parent is about to murder their chid because God asks him to, and he's willing to do so. And that is what leads to the covenant. So in almost the same way that the sacrifice of Jesus has been viewed as the founding of Christianity, the near-sacrifice of Isaac is related to the founding of Judaism. And we know that the ritual of sacrificing the firstborn predates both of these traditions.

RG: You're right to bring this up. The sacrifice of the firstborn is found in many places. It's almost a universal custom at some point. And I think the Passover story is a good example.

QUESTION: For the ancient Hebrews, once the angel stops Abraham form killing Isaac, a ram appears magically. And that's the beginning of the thousand-year tradition of the sacrifice of animals, and that's the substitute for human sacrifice. But Jesus's sacrifice, that's the end of all sacrifices, including animals. That's the last sacrifice. And then for the rest of the time, you remember it so as not to repeat it.

RG: Correct. But the shift to an animal comes before and has tremendous importance from a human point of view, from an evolutionary perspective. The near-sacrifice of Isaac is the only text we have about the shift from the sacrifice of the firstborn to the sacrifice of an animal, which probably, in the evolution of humanity, is an immense thing. I'm surprised that there is no interpretation of this. It's so obvious, the shift from human to animal sacrifice. And the Bible shows you steps of less and less sacrifice, of less and less precious victims being killed. Every step is a descending staircase towards no sacrifice in the archaic sense.

I think in a way the course of history is a constant revelation of scapegoating, and today this revelation is fruitful in the sense that it shows you really, with many exceptions of course, where the violence lies, where the victim is. It can be misused, distorted, and so on, but there is a historical trend toward the revelation of scapegoating.

QUESTION: You believe that this trend is linked to our modern concern for victims.

RG: Yes, what is important is the emotional leap in our attitude towards victims.

Being Scene- the Self and the Sound of Two Hands Clapping

Link HERE to view the 2 videos from Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology April 2011.

Coming Home - John Adams

Robert Hammerton-Kelly wrote, "Revolutionary democracy imports the fiction of rationality to obscure its sacrificial structure," and yet the Gospels continue to break in on us, shedding more and more light on "the stone that the builders rejected," that is the founding violence our world is built upon.

The Scapegoat explained by Father Barron

Understanding Our Epistemological Tools Have Been Bequest to Us by the Enlightenment

The following is my transcribing a talk in 2002 by Gil Bailie on René Girard's influence to modern thought.


In the Preface to his book, "Insight," Bernard Lonergan writes of the ideal detective story in which the reader is presented with all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal.

He may advert to each clue as it arises. He needs no further clues to solve the mystery. Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, nor the mere memory of all them, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine they bunked down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

Watson replied, “I see millions upon millions of stars.”

“So what does that tell you?” asked Sherlock.

Watson pondered for a minute. “Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Hierologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?”

Holmes was silent for a minute and then spoke. “It tells me someone has stolen our tent!” (Author unknown)


We live in a world where we employ the epistemological tools that have been bequest to us by the Enlightenment where they require us to think about the world in terms of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, etc. These tools do provide a certain amount of information but there are things going on right now which cannot be accounted for in those terms.

What René Girard has done is help us to understand how we came to know what we know and that there is something underneath these interpretive tools we have that has given rise to them and that thing is the biblical tradition.

There is a parallel between the tent in Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson joke and the veil of the temple that was rent from top to bottom at the death of Jesus on the cross. It is at “that” moment when something changes and forms of illumination are available and the human race begins to move into new territory of knowing.


On one level we can describe this as the “aha” moment for an individual, but on another level the human race begins to move into this cumulative “AHA” experience where a “quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective” has become available.

One more joke, this is a pulpit joke:

There is a story of a pastor in a small, rural congregation. For some years, the physical plant of the church had been deteriorating and he did not have in his budget nearly enough to paint the church. He remembered that one of the members of the congregation was a professional house painter, so he paid him a little visit. In the course of the chat the topic of the need of the church came up and a little while later this man agreed to paint the church for his cost when he had time. So that was agreed upon. Of course, he came in the middle of the week when nobody was there. He came and started to paint the church. He painted around the bottom and then he built the scaffolds up and then he thought to himself, I could reduce my cost if I watered the paint down a little bit and it would go on faster. This would allow him to get done faster and get to more paying jobs sooner. So as he went up the church he kept thinking that logic and higher he got he thought, now who is going to be able to tell this high, so he thinned the paint down more and more. He got up to the bell tower and he thins it down even more and it is going on very nicely and he gets close to the top when he looks for in the horizon and sees this huge dark thundercloud coming this way. He thinks I had better get this job done before it starts to rain. So he thins the paint down even more. But the storm comes quicker than he thought and suddenly there is lightning and rolling thunder coming out of these dark clouds. He gets very anxious, and suddenly the storm is right on top of him and he notices that he is at the highest point in town. He panics and he grabs the scaffolding and prays, God please don’t let me be struck by this lightning. Suddenly the storm calms and there is this voice from heaven that says, “Repaint and thin no more.”


There is a point to this as we are always repainting the church. We Christians are always trying to understand this thing that has happened to us (whether on the road to Emmaus or Damascus). We are constantly trying to get to the bottom of it. It is a journey and so we need to realize that we are always representing Christianity in the historical context of our age and the challenge that each age presents to us calls us to draw out of that inexhaustible reservoir of Truth, new things that we didn’t know or could not have known without of that challenge. That is why we should never complain about the fact that the world rejects Christianity, that’s what it is paid to do! Our job is simply to respond to that rejection in a way that embraces the ‘no’ that the world has uttered and bring it into the affirmation. And so we are constantly re-painting and we should stop thinning. The re-painting that has been going on in the modern world in recent decades has been a thin, thin, thin version. There is no need for that. One of the things that René’s work does is that it gives us a robust and ‘thickly’ theological understanding premised on and in many ways assimilated with an anthropological understanding of the cross and the Christian mystery.

Christians stubbornly clung to their language even when it could be said they really didn’t understand it. (And the sad thing is that, now when we are about to acquire the intellectual means for understanding the terminology, a failure of nerve has set in and many Christians are abandoning the terminology.) - John W. Dixon, Jr.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it.

René is neither impractical nor absent-minded, but we have had airplanes smashing that have smashed not for mechanical reasons but because of human calculations. That is all the more reason the need to have someone to help us understand the nature of human conflict – violence.

MYTH & memory

Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie: Chapter 2 starting on page 33.

MYTH

When the chorus in Agamemnon says, “The rest I did not see, nor do I speak of it,” it virtually defines myth. The root of the Greek word for myth, muthos, is mu, which means to close or keep secret. Muo means to close one’s eyes or mouth, to mute the voice or to remain mute. Myth remembers discretely and selectively. Myth closes its eyes to certain events and closes its mouth. The agencies for the muting and transmuting of the remembered past are the Muses, and the term muse is derived from the same root as the word myth. In Greek mythology the Muses are the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne). The Muses make it possible to remember the past fondly or heroically, but they do so with fog filters. (The Latin verb mutare means to change.) The Muses bring into being music and museums, but not, in the first instance, for purely aesthetic or merely archival purposes. The cultural archive and anthems that the Muses preserve represent the mythological remembrance of things past. The poet Hesiod says of the Muses that “they are all of one mind.” As widely varying as the Muses’ artistic interests may be, beneath this variety, and behind it, lies something about which they are “all of one mind.” The Muses inspire poetry, epic, sacred music, tragedy, comedy, erotic verse, and history, but all these are permutations of the past events which, if Hesiod is to be trusted, they memorialize with one purpose. That purpose is buried in the etymology of their name. The Muses make culture possible by providing it with its myth — an enchanting story of its founding violence. But most myths contain at least faint traces of the violence they otherwise mask. By paying more careful attention to these traces, things mythologically remembered can be recollected with greater clarity.
In the New Testament, mythos is juxtaposed both to Logos — the revelation of that about which myth refuses to speak — and to aletheia — the Greek word for truth. Aletheia comes from the root, letho, which is the verb “to forget.” The prefix a is the negative. The literal meaning, then, of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is “to stop forgetting.” It is etymologically the opposite of myth. The gospels tell of a perfectly typical story of victimization with astonishing insight into the role religious zeal and mob psychology played in it. Most importantly, and contrary to all myth, the story is told from the point of view of the victim and not that of the righteous community of persecutors. Thus the passion story breaks decisively with the silence and circumspection of the mythological thought. The Gospel truth gradually makes it impossible for us to keep forgetting what myth exists to help us forget. It thereby sets up a struggle between the impulse to sacralize, justify, or romanticize the violence that generates and regenerates conventional culture and the impulse to reveal that violence and strip away its mythic justifications. Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and Gospel. Literature, as it has developed in Western culture, is neither myth (muthos) nor truth (aletheia), it is the textual arena in which the two struggle for the upper hand. What myth conceals, what literature alternately conceals and reveals, and what the Gospel decisively reveals are the social dynamics that produce what Girard calls “the essential complicity between violence and human culture.”
...
Myth — and the primitive religious cosmology it narrates — mutes the victim’s voice. It fills the eyes and nose with incense, and the ears with incantations. When the myth is firmly in place, even those closest to the victims, the ones most likely to resist the myth’s intoxications, concur in the ritual. While the myth holds sway, those under its spell are unwilling or unable to recognize what they are doing. “The rest I did not see,” they say, “nor do I speak of it.” In return for making conventional culture possible, myth silences the victim’s voice and veils the victim’s face. In his book on crowd behavior, for example, Gustave Le Bon says this of the Jacobin ideologues of the French Revolution:
Dogmatic and logical to a man, and their brains full of vague generalities, they busied themselves with the application of fixed principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them, with reason, that they went through the Revolution without witnessing it.

This is what myth and the associated structures of what Girard calls the primitive sacred do. They make it possible to participate in, observe, or recollect certain violent events without having to actually witness them in any morally significant sense.

Entering the Biblical Story -- Gil Baile

Entering the Biblical Story at the Eucharistic Table - by Gil Bailie
(My edited transcript of  the presentation: "Violence Unveiled: The Gospel at Work in Our World" Date Unknown)

We should ask more fundamental questions then we ask, and one of the fundamental questions that we should ask is, ‘why are we here?’

Starry sky over Grand Canyon from Mather Point.

Photo by: Tyler Nordgren, University of Redlands.

Why are we here?
The question itself is like looking at the “The Starry Night” or looking into the Grand Canyon. Why are we here? Even if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, and I think we Christians have some answers, but if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, we can’t let go of that question and we must ask it explicitly, because that question will be answered. The world will provide an answer for it and the answer that the world provides will be a silly shallow one. And we will not even notice how silly and shallow it is, because we will not have even noticed that it is the answer to THAT question, because we won’t have heard the question.

The stock answer to that question that the world provides is that we are here to be as comfortable as we can be for as long as we can live. And that is the white-collar nihilism – that is to say it is a world-view that is not even as lively and entertaining as, eat, drink and be merry. It is a kind of terrible grim, make-the-best-of-it-till-you-die world-view. But we don’t even notice how terrible and grim and nihilistic it is because we did not ask the question explicitly and therefore the answer that we operate with is one that has never been brought to our attention, it is just the operating system.

Why are we here?
I have been talking in these presentations about ‘the story’ - reclaiming the story, as we are always forgetting the story and rediscovering it at new levels. Perhaps one of the impressive instances of this occurs in Luke’s Gospel after the crucifixion and resurrection, it is the ‘Road to Emmaus’ story. It is a marvelous story of disciples who had their messianic expectations shattered by the cross – it has all failed and what they see is failure and disillusionment, and for them their story has ended. There was a lot of hope, but the hope has died, the story is over. They are leaving Jerusalem because Jerusalem has become a hostile place. Jerusalem is where the drama of the story took place, and they have given up on it and they are going away. Jesus meets them on this journey. He begins talking with them and they say, ‘haven’t you heard about these things?’ Jesus says, ‘what things,’ to get them to talk. So they go on about what happened and how their hopes had been dashed by the cross. Then it says in Luke, he explained to them how all the scriptures had prophesied all these events.

There is a wonderful poem by William Stafford and it goes like this,

When God watches you walk, you are/
neither straight nor crooked. The journey stretches out, and all of its reasons/ beat like a heart. Coming back, no triumph, no regret, you fold into the curves,/
left, right, and arrive. You touch the door. The road straightens behind you./
It is now. It has all come true.

Our lives meander all over taking different turns, running into dead ends and reverses and suddenly, with God’s grace we arrive at where we are going. We touch the door and the path straightens out behind us. I have a friend who says that if I met myself back when I was 20, he would not recognize me, but I would recognize him. Well, the door for us is the Cross and the scriptures straighten behind us. When we touch that, then we go back and read it again. We read it for the second time and we see its destination, we see its final full revelation about God and about us and both of them are shocking. It is shocking what we do and it is shocking how merciful and all loving God is. Jesus explains this on the road to Emmaus in one verse and then they sit down in the village of Emmaus and break bread. When they break bread they recognize him. They don’t recognize him up to that moment.

Here now the story and the breaking of the bread come together. The disciples on the road to Emmaus are lost and they don’t have a story and Jesus intercepts them and with a few depth-strokes of his brush paints them the picture, tells them the story, which includes the cross, and therefore the story not only can go on, but now has a center. They returned to Jerusalem, which is the place of the promise and it is from Jerusalem that the mission must proceed out to the ends of the world. So they come back and become part of the story and they become part of Luke’s story in Acts, which is the story of the church going out to preach the Gospel to the world.

It brings together the story and the Eucharist in such a powerful way. I have a principle that is that the Biblical text should not be interpreted more than more than 30 feet from the Eucharistic table, or they should only be interpreted on the way to the Eucharistic table, keeping in-line with the Emmaus story. Can we take these texts out and bring them over and plop them on a seminar table at the university and get it? I don’t think so. Good work is done there, but the real understanding – the real truth of these inspired texts takes place in proximity of the Eucharistic table.

I want to talk about the Last Supper and then I want to talk about the Eucharist.

The disciples, as you know, are slow, no slower than we are. We look a little better than they do because we had the Gospel for 2000 years, but they are pretty slow. Another friend of mine refers to the disciples as being ‘25 watts and dimming’.  They never get it. Most of all they never get it when He talks about the cross. Before the cross, the reason why they don’t get it is because the cross destroys the blockage that keeps them from understanding. They are still living inside the world which the cross is going to explode. Jesus at some point realizes that they cannot get it until sometime after the cross. And at that point he begins to say things like this, ‘I am going to say these words, you are not going to get it, just remember them.’  Just remember them and at some point the nickel will drop. The only time they get it was when they once say to him, teach us how to pray, because at that moment they recognize that that is who he is and they want to be like that.

So Jesus has very little time. He gets to Jerusalem and it looks like the hour is approaching. There is no more time for sermons – there is no more time for explanations – there is time for very little, what is he going to do? It is very important to Jesus that he leaves them capable of receiving the truth, which will be available to them after the cross. So what does he do? He has a Passover meal. And the Passover meal is about getting out of Egypt. Some of what I am going to do below will be in a campy/Monty Python way…, but I think that there is something incredible here that we have not come to grips with.

I am going to reverse the order – let us start with the cup. He takes the cup and He says, “This is the cup of my blood which will be shed so that sin may be forgiven.” He is interpreting the cross. This is the cup of my blood, which will be shed so that sins may be forgiven. Now remember, when Jesus shows up, we humans have always had a way of taking away sins. We take away sins by putting it on the back of our scapegoat, getting rid of it and feeling righteous. Jesus is about to destroy that way by showing us the face of the innocent victim. What happens if he destroys that system and walks away and does nothing else? What happens, and in some extent is what is happening, which is, we begin to choke on our own unforgiven-ness, which is a synonym for resentment and virtually a synonym for sin. The world is filling up with unforgiven-ness. When we look out and read the morning paper and we see the 6 o’clock news we see this ignorance and sin and insensitivity and all of the rest of it. Sometimes we establish some sort of moral stance about it, but if we look at it as Christians what we see is this crying out of this massive unforgiven-ness. All the terrible things and we probably evoke Columbine High School perhaps too often at this point, but all the terrible things that are going to happen in the future are going to be committed by unforgiven people.

And Jesus has thrown everything off by destroying the system that used to take away the sins of the world on the cheap at the expense of the scapegoat. And so the unforgiven-ness festers, and festers. Jesus is now giving us another way of taking away sin. The Biblical God is not going to take away sin with a wave of the wand. Why? This has to do with the whole theodicy question, ‘why does God allow all the terrible things to happen in the world?’ God is not going to take away sins by the wave of the wand because that would rob us of our freedom and our dignity. God wants love and love has to be freely offered. And if you are going to create enough freedom so that love can be freely offered you are going to have to live in a world made perilous by what people do with that freedom. You cannot have it both ways. God has put all his bets on love, and therefore on freedom and therefore, what we do with that freedom can be a catastrophe, but God is not going to take away our sins by robbing us of our freedom because it would rob us of our covenantal love for our Creator.

How is He going to take it away then? He will take them away instantly if we ask that they be taken away. All we have to do is, first of all recognize our sinfulness, our complicity, that is to say, hear the cock crow and ask for forgiveness. The key is to ask for forgiveness. And we can’t ask for forgiveness until we recognize our sinfulness. And we can’t recognize our sinfulness until we go to the pit of that little machine that use to wash it away and we see what we have been doing. We hear the cock crow and we have that moment of conversion.

And so His blood is shed so that sins may be forgiven, not taken away on the cheap, but forgiven because we have recognized them and asked for forgiveness. And then Jesus says, “Take this and drink it. This is my blood.” He goes back to the question which Jesus asked about His own passion when people asked him, ‘who is going to sit at your right hand?’ He asks, “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” That question is asked at the end of Mark’s Gospel – at the Eucharist in Mark’s Gospel it said He gave them this cup and they all drank of it, and they all died a martyr’s death. It is that kind of implication.

In the Eucharist we are offered that cup, why? It is because we are incorporated into the forgiving mission of Christ. When Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, you have the keys to the kingdom whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven and whose sin you retain, they are retained - we should understand how significant this statement is. It seems silly to introduce a baseball metaphor at this point, but if a pitcher lets a couple guys on base and the manager decides to put in another pitcher, and somebody gets a hit and those guys come in, they are on the ERA of the pitcher who got pulled out. When Jesus says, whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven, whose sins are retained; they are retained. He is saying, I think, all the unforgiven-ness that you could have solved and didn’t is on your ERA – it’s on your record. You are in charge of all the unforgiven-ness that you could forgive and don’t. Can you drink this cup? Can you drink this cup? What does it mean to drink this cup in order that sins might be forgiven?

All this means, I think, is that we must be able to step into that place, not that we are going to become martyrs, most of us do not have the courage for it, but martyrs in another way. The word means to witness. Simply to be the kind of person who when something begins to swirl, when the melodrama gets set in motion, when accusations are made we can, at the risk of our own reputation, our own standing in the community, our own livelihood whatever it happens to be, can we step into the breach and absorb some of that animosity and break up the little knot that is forming? Not by going in as John the Baptist would do and fighting it back in the other direction. But simply by stepping into that world and absorbing that tension (like the old Rolaids commercial, absorbs 47 times its own weight in access stomach acids…). Can we be the kind of people that can move into that place, and drink the cup and be part of Christ forgiveness? The world is going to choke on its own unforgiven-ness if we don’t. That is our role in the world. This is not cheap forgiveness. The forgiven one has to hear the cock crow, and we shouldn’t go around being lily-white liberals that we are forgiving easy and never being part of the cock crowing. People have to hear the cock crow - we have to hear it. Jesus, when He forgives people, He always says, “go, and sin no more.” It is not forgiveness on the cheap. So it is a subtle process, it requires character and dignity and courage and most of all it requires an enormous moral generosity. So Jesus is inducting us into service for history in a world which is going to now increasingly be deprived of its old mechanism for taking away its own sins on the cheap. He is bringing us into this mission of taking them away in such a way that not only honors our dignity and our freedom, but also rehabilitates us.

And then, remember I am reversing the order, Jesus takes a loaf of bread and he says (now I am going to ham it up a little bit), ‘We all came here tonight to get out of Egypt - and you all want out of Egypt, we are all in some Egypt largely of our own making,’ Jesus says, ‘you want to get out of Egypt, let me tell you how to get out of Egypt.’ He takes a loaf of bread and says, “This is my life.” You have to remember we are talking about Jews here; we are not talking about philosophers. Body means life. This is a big difference between Jews and philosophers, and as I said before that with the disciples being ‘25 watts and dimming,’ it is amazing that Jesus didn’t throw up his hands half way through it all and leave them all and go the Alexandria and get some PhD’s. , but he didn’t and that’s very important…this is the faith of fishermen…this is the faith of Mary, the 15-year-old who said, ‘Let it be done unto me according to Thy Word.’ So her son having learned a good deal of this on her knee no doubt says, this is my life, you want to get out of Egypt, watch carefully. No more sermons, just this. Watch this – this is my life – you take it, give thanks for it, because it is not yours. Now take your life, receive it as a gift, give thanks because it is not yours – it’s a gift, and then you break it and give it away. And the ‘25 watts and dimming’ crowd are looking at each other asking, what did he say?

Jesus says, okay, I know you didn’t get it, I got a few more minutes here; let me go over this again. You see this? This is my life! This is what you people have been following me around for the last 3 years trying to get a piece of, now I am going to give you a piece of it. This is my life; this is what you want. If you want out of Egypt, this is how you do it. There is no other way out of Egypt. It is the most radical, the most costly, the most liberating thing there is. You receive your life as a gift – it does not belong to you – it’s on loan. And you give thanks for it. And the one who gave it to you wants it back, but he wants it back as a free gift. So you give thanks for it, then you break it, or let it be broken, and you give it away. And if you do these things you are inducted into this great mystery, we call the body of Christ. The incarnation is still happening. You and I have the privilege of being a tiny part of it. The major event of the incarnation is something we both celebrate and enter into at the Eucharist, over and over again. We receive the cup, we drink the cup that Jesus drank at his passion and we take upon ourselves this commitment to be the ones who stand into the breach so that sins might be forgiven. We learn that our life is not our own and that it can be broken and given away. In that we are set free and made happy in spite of whatever sufferings we might experience.

Flannery O’Connor was getting an award in New York one time and she had to get all gussied up from her farm in Georgia to go to this award banquet. It was all literary and religious people sitting around eating dinner, there was a conversation going on at her table about theological symbolism of the Eucharist, and Flannery O’Connor is just eating away not saying anything. After a while her silence became obvious and so one of the people who were particularly lively in the conversation turned to her and said to her, “Ms O’Connor, what do you think about the symbolism of the Eucharist?” She glared over the top of her glasses and said “If it is just a symbol, the hell with it.”

It is very important to remember Jesus didn’t say, ‘take this and figure it out.’ He said, ‘take it and eat it.’ There is a huge mystery in the Eucharist, but it is I think, the mystery of our induction into the body of Christ - into the communion of saints – into the work of Christ in history.

Altar at St Meinrad Archabbey

So Jesus says, ‘take this and eat it, this is my body. Take this and drink it, this is my blood.’ People thought that the early Christians were cannibals, but it is interesting, the first sacrifice in anthropological terms, was almost certainly cannibalistic. We don’t need to get into that at this time, but there is something amazing about the Eucharist in that it harks back, in some prime mortal way, to the most primitive human event, the founding of primitive religion in sacrifice and cannibalism. In addition, it prefigures the final culminating event of human history, which is the messianic banquet.

So we have this piece of furniture, and we don’t know quite what to call it anymore, we call it an altar and then sometimes we call it a table, what is it? It must always be both. It is a table that used to be an altar. It is an altar up until the veil of the temple is rent from top to bottom. But we must never forget that it is a sacrificial altar – that there is no alternative to sacrifice. The only question is what kind of sacrifice is it going to be? In Jesus’ re-interpretation of it all, it is the anticipation of the messianic banquet and the induction of us all into the body of Christ. So this piece of furniture and the ritual we celebrate around it is absolutely at the throbbing heart of the Christian mystery. This piece of furniture is like the wardrobe in Narnia – you Episcopalians will always know Narnia better than any other denomination – it’s the wardrobe in Narnia where you enter into the story – the real story – where the story becomes vivid.

There comes a time when we must enter into The Story

For much of my presentation so far I have talked about story, recovering the story in scriptural terms, and of course we have to do that. But there is this place where we actually enter the story. We don’t just learn the story, and say the story, but we become actors in the story; we begin to perform the story. And I don’t think we should be too self-conscious about that kind of language. Refer to the unbelievable central passage from Paul, “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.” We have to take that at face value. One has to say about that what Flannery O’Connor said about the Eucharist, if it is just a symbol, the hell with it. It is not just a symbol. Christians are here to be incorporated into the work of Christ in history.

Jesus never claimed to be operating on his own. He even says in John’s Gospel, “If I had come in my own name you would believe me, but because I have come in the name of the one who has sent me you don’t believe.” We are asked to be like that. We are asked to re-present Christ to the world. To be actors in the great drama – like von Balthasar’s ‘Theo-drama’, a magnificent orchestration of the grandeur of the Christian drama in history - and so the language of drama is appropriate – and the language of re-presenting it to the world in however way, even though we are all clay vessels, we are all clumsy, we’re all fallen and sinful, we don’t do a very good job of it, despite our clumsiness God knows how to use leftovers and misfits – in fact our clumsiness is part of it, our failures to do it are part of it.

We are called; we are incorporated; we are deputized to receive into our lives - personally and with our communion with one another - the spirit of Christ, and to step into the world and absorb all the anxieties, uncertainty and the confusion and be part of the light of Christ in the world. Having had the rug pulled out from under us as Jesus has done, without our stepping up as Christ-links, the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket. And we see that happening in many parts of the world today.

Jesus says take this cup, which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility. Mother Teresa once answered a journalist’s comment, “…but you’re not suffering.” She said, “I am not worthy.” So all of us in this room have suffered, and some of us a great deal, but those who have suffered the most are worthy of it. And those of us who have suffered less must have admiration for those, and we must try to be there so they can feel God’s present.

Created by aravir

We are called to bring forgiveness into the world, being there with people who are suffering from their own unforgiven-ness and being simply an agent in the presence of whom people can begin to feel forgiveness. Forgiveness is a great mystery; it is not some sanctimonious thing that somebody who has it gives to somebody else. It is a spirit that infects us – it always has an infecting agent. There is always somebody who brings it in and introduces it into a situation of unforgiven-ness, and it is our Eucharistic responsibility to be about that business. In order to be able to be about such business, we have to experience the kenosis (meaning: a self-emptying) of Christian discipleship. So we take our lives, and this is our supreme privilege, we must not see this as some kind of melodramatic act of renunciation, it is the source of our freedom, to take our lives, thank God for them because it is a gift to us, and break them or let them be broken and give them away. And then, Jesus says, “do THIS in memory of me.” Do what? Do this in memory of me. Not just the gesture, of course we do the gesture; of course the Real Presence, but when Jesus says, do THIS, He is talking of something much more vast then that. He means doing that which the gesture represents – being Christ in the world.

I will give you a treat; in my presentations to high school students I tell them a poem by Rumi, a 13th century Sufi. The poem goes like this:

Be like one, who when he walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it.
Be like one, who when she walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it. I usually say it 10 times because it is easy to remember if you have heard it 10 times. Then I re-translate it.
Be like one, who when he walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

I think that is what drinking the cup is all about, so that sins might be forgiven; so that the knot might be broken; so that the animosity might be absorbed or dispersed; so that the healing and forgiveness might be brought into this situation where unforgiven-ness is about to get the upper hand. Be like one, who when she walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

It is at the Eucharistic table that we receive this gift and are nourished for the journey to go back out into the world and be Eucharistic people, be Christ to the world, absorbing that unforgiven-ness and being people who are not there on their own, but rather people who are saying with Paul, I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.

Then there is a little passage of a book on Revelation by William Riley, Irish Biblical scholar who passed away a few years ago that I would like to leave you with. He has a wonderful way of helping understand our work in the church and it also comes out of our Eucharist mandate. He says that Christ often calls us to failure, not success just as He Himself was called to the Cross. “The marvelous religion teacher, the hard working bishop who manages his diocese well, the mother of a family strongly rooted in the faith have done no more works than the dedicated religion teacher whose classroom is like a drudgery, or the zealous and caring bishop whose administration is constantly criticized or the loving mother whose family, despite her efforts, have all abandoned the Church. In many ways the last three have received a higher calling.” Isn’t that amazing? We are called to move into that place of brokenness and to take up our cross. And to do it in such a way that the world hears the cock crow, and that the world feels the forgiveness of God. And that the world recognizes that we are not doing it on our own, or that we are not doing it because we are nice, or morally superior. We are doing it because Christ has laid His Hand on us.


This is the end of the talk.
The following are from the question and answer period after the talk.

Q: The difference between suffering and pain is a matter of choice. Pain is not choice; you are inflicted in some way. Suffering implies a choice. Can you elaborate on this?

Gil: Pain is something that happens to you and that suffering is a choice when you say yes to it. This is something on Christian redemptive suffering. We have so much to learn from so many people of different faiths. I was in dialogue a few months ago in Milwaukee with the Tibetan monk that taught the Dali Lama, it was a great privilege to be in this man’s presence. It was Christian – Buddhist dialogue, which is mostly an exercise in politeness, but we did have dinner together so we did get a little beyond it there. One of the things one has to realize is some of the essential differences we have. The Buddha was trying to avoid suffering by withdrawing desire by essentially, and I know this is a clumsy way to put it, by sequestering desire, by closing it down somehow. The Buddhist recognizes that the problem is desire that is very good, so do we Christians, or at least we should or we used to before we threw Augustine out. But for Christians it is not to shut down desire and it is not to avoid suffering. For Christians it is to awaken desire and turn it toward its proper object. Turn it away from all the fancy glitter things that distract us toward God. And because we humans need to see the face of God, we absolutely needed the incarnation. Jesus gives us that incarnation so that our desires, and we are not talking about the goofy kinds of raw desires, but our longing, like metal filings can be re-oriented in the right way, so that our desire is awakened. This is what Dante is all about, awakening that desires and turning it to all kinds of mediators: Beatrice, the Beloved, Sister Immaculate, John of the Cross, whoever it is, awakened by all kinds of mediators and directed back to its true source. Augustine starts the Confessions with the first paragraph he ends it with, “We are restless until we rest in Thy.” We take that restlessness which is our desire, we don’t try to shut it down, we turn it toward its proper object and we understand that suffering can be redemptive. That is really powerful. When you recognize that this can be redemptive, not just for me, because if it is for me than it goes back to this little project of me getting into heaven, elbowing my way in. But my suffering can be redemptive to somebody on the other side of the planet – to somebody in another age. And this is what prayer can do. We have to believe these things because they are true. We use to have as little Catholic children in the playground we would say prayers or we would offer up our suffering to the poor souls in purgatory, which now today everyone has a little condescending smirk, but it is absolutely true. Our suffering can be redemptive not just for us, but maybe not primarily for us, but for others. It is a great gift and once you recognize that, suddenly this pain has dignity and vocation.

Q: Can you talk about the mechanism of violence and anthropology?

Gil: When the 19th century anthropologist went out, by the way I am talking anthropology – I have a definition of anthropology that I haven’t told you yet. Anthropology is the study of cultures by people who no longer have one.  And you will notice that it was invented by the west about 200 or rather 150 years ago. Somebody once said about poetry; don’t write a poem unless you have to and you could say the same thing about anthropology. Don’t invent the science of anthropology unless you have to. We had to about 150 years ago. And the first anthropologists went out and started studying these other cultures and they came back with all sorts of data and they sorted through it and they said ah-ha! All over the place, wherever you look we have these dying and rising gods. We have these stories that are very interesting. There is a crisis; and there is a death; and there is reconciliation or a resolution or some kind of resurrection. They were all Enlightenment people so that means they didn’t know squat about religion, so they had this insight – the insight was Christianity was just another myth. And that idea was so radical at first that only the academics talked about it. That was before academics became famous and had press conferences. Then it trickled out and people started studying these things and it comes into the modern times, and I don’t want to scapegoat because I have read these people and gleaned a lot from their work, but Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and all those people for whom Christianity is just another dying and rising myth. Gradually that language seeps into the church. Only in the last 30 years have we Christians started talking that way; unbelievable that we would talk that way.

Okay, anthropologists said that Christianity is just another myth because it is exactly the same thing as what they discovered all over the world. And we Christians said, no, no, it is not the same thing - ours is different. Oh yea, the anthropologists asked, how is it different? Well,..., ah,…, ah,…, well, you see, nails hurt more or something like that. We tried to account for it in whatever way or we fled the scene. René Girard said, NO. You have to begin there. You have to say YES, you are right. If you want to recover Christianity’s universality, you don’t flee from that revelation you a firm it. Yes of course it is structurally identical to all of that. It had to be: it has it be, because all of that is a telling of the story that is false. All of that tells you the story from the point of view of the victimizing community. You get the crisis; you get the death; and you get reconciliation, but you never get the innocence of the victim, NEVER. Christianity presents something that is structurally identical and reverses the whole valence by creating a community of people who come together because they have heard the cock crow; they have seen the innocence of the victim; the scales have fallen from their eyes; they have seen the idolatry of the world and they have begun to see the face of the living God. So it has to be the same. And this is what I was trying to say earlier, when the world says no, we don’t counter that with some kind of over-against: yes, yes, yes – no, no, no like some chant in the school yard. We go deeper into the mystery until we can bring up an affirmation that brings in that negation that can affirm that negation itself, which is exactly what happened in this example of Girard saying yes, it is the same.