Theology of Desire

Wood Hath Hope like every church group is a theological community. It works to express the meaning of Jesus in the world. What often stands for us at the head of the page is violence made more and more an issue by the redemptive nonviolence of the Crucified. But behind violence is desire, something that has come up frequently in the blogs. Here is an edited collection of the key points of those blogs, notes on an emerging theology. The name of the blog from which the excerpt comes is given after the relevant paragraphs.


Mutations of Desire

Jesus said things like, “If God so clothes the grass of the field...will he not much more provide for you...?" He is suggesting that the things of this earth are both beautiful and available to all under the Father’s care. Oscar Wilde said Jesus was the first romantic because he made the ugly beautiful. The intense blessing communicated to this world by the Galilean is continually underestimated in the production of Western desire. Genesis already said everything in the world was “good:” Jesus proved it absolutely by healing human brokenness, feeding the hungry with multiplied bread, and forgiving human sin and alienation. Looked at over the long run this could not help produce a concrete culture where the material world becomes more and more secured in value, its objects of desire affirmed and multiplied, and our personal relation to them essentially celebrated and assured. Hence both capitalism and romanticism.

It is absurd to think that the vigor of Western democracy, capitalism and romanticism has nothing to do with the spiritual universe at the core of its culture. To say this is, on the one hand, a way for certain intellectuals and writers to claim they invented human progress out of their divine little heads, and on the other for the dark side of all this (which is increasingly dark) to hide itself from the radicalism of love that could make it all actually work. For of course—and this is where I’ve been driving—the release of freedom and desire in the world left to its own devices has nowhere to go except the destruction of resources and redoubled violence toward the other. Freedom and desire without service and love are a cultural mutation out of a gospel environment which is driving us a hundred miles an hour down a dead-end street. It is the paradox of Christianized freedom and desire—left to themselves they become relentless war.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the crisis continues to swell in the cancerous forms of freedom and desire the authentic gospel solution remains at its source and becomes itself steadily more apparent. The welcome of all to his single table is one of the most assured facts of Jesus’ historical ministry and its concrete human effect was a transformation of a mindset of sin into one of life and love. (This is the point of the wedding garment parable.) Then, at the term of his ministry, the sign of Jesus’ cross and resurrection becomes the transcendent anthropological instrument which challenges for all time the effects of violence with life-filled peace and peace-filled life. This radical solution is now culturally more and more apparent, standing behind Christianity’s historical mutation like a ghost of Christmas present seeking to replace the ghost of Christmas past. And if a mutated Christianity cannot see it then unprejudiced human minds can, demonstrating that the gospel of Jesus produces a cultural shift in and of itself. (Jesus=Humanity Otherwise Than War)


Two Christianities

There are in fact two very different Christianities. I have the courage to say this because these two are already separating themselves out before our eyes. There is the formal-doctrinal, most-often-preached variety with its default metaphysics of a heavenly hereafter, and there is the subliminal, infectious, historical and anthropological variety. The latter is the apparently unintended but true consequence of the gospel. It’s as if the gospel is a form of radioactivity, used formally for one set of purposes—we might say it’s locked up in the nuclear reactors of the churches for the sake of its power—but in the meantime it continues to render everything around it luminous and alive with positive desire, nonviolence, and compassion for the victim.

It all comes down finally to desire, to its highly fluid or volatile character. And I have briefly to state this to make everything plain. We all know desire can be destructive and violent whoever and wherever you are. There is conflictive desire in the rainforest just as much as in the salons of Paris or the streets of New York. Desire is conflictive because it is mediated, because it springs from a relationship to the object in which a third party models for me that relationship.

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that even monkeys become very highly interested in an object when it is grasped or held by another monkey or by a human. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that the person who models to me the value of an object is going to become my rival, my enemy. I want precisely what he wants. In this light religion and spirituality can be broadly characterized as a means to control desire through sanctions and threats of punishment (religion) and as a creative mediation of a positive or nonconflictive relationship to the object (spirituality). But Christ is the only figure of mediation who seeks proactively to overcome all human violence in relationship, through forgiveness and love, and therefore ultimately to turn all religion into spirituality. The love and forgiveness demonstrated by Jesus renders religion redundant and makes the whole of life potentially constituted by intense spirituality. Here then finally is the secret of the truly enormous liberating effect of the Christian message. In Christ, at least in principle, all desire becomes good because all violence is transformed into love. In a world shaped by Jesus the world is literally everyone’s oyster!

This, as I say, is the final root of the enormous dynamic of Western culture. It is the root of the contextual, infectious radioactivity of the gospel, proclaiming first that all earthly objects are good, and then, more radically, inviting compassion for the victim and demonstrating through any number of ways, including movies, the path of nonviolence. What Christians have yet to do is catch up with their own dynamic spirituality. For, in this light, it is possible to understand historical Christian religion as an unhealthy hybrid of violence, metaphysics and Jesus, but today that hybrid is separating out progressively into its component parts. In Christ it is possible to have a mediation that gives us a relationship to every object filled with love, and this makes religion redundant and “the way” of Jesus truly everything.

The past Christian relationship with the earth has been an unhappy marriage of positive desire and restless alienation, leading to the typical smash and grab capitalism which is wrecking the planet, while promoting an other-worldly spirituality which says essentially “what the heck, we’re going to heaven anyway!” But now in the radioactive light of a new emerging Christianity I would say that in every berry on every tree there is God because of Christ. In every bird and every stream. And not just in the natural world. In every glass of Pinot Noir or Glenlivet or lemonade, in every fresh loaf of bread, in every chocolate ganache, in every pizza and dish of pasta, in every quesadilla and rich taco. And not just at the gastronomic level. In every shirt in the store, in every sweater and pair of pants, in every tube of toothpaste, in every perfume by Christian Dior, in every Toyota and Ford, in every Apple computer, in every Ipod, Christ is waiting to be seen. This is because true desire for them is authentically mediated by Christ. In Christ, and only in him, I can want all these things not for myself but truly for you—and by implication also for myself, as another you loved by Christ! I can truly desire them, for the sake of the great “You” of love which he announced in the world. So long as I begin to relate to a Christ-irradiated universe this kind of talk is not cheap grace. It means that the concrete human space is really filled with the endless nonviolence of Jesus. This is what makes it possible--that Jesus “did not spear back" and I know this in the depth of my soul. Because of Jesus everything is liberated for love. My brother, Enomenga, you, like the rest of us, are already half-Christianized, by radioactive Christianity. I hope you, and all of us, will live to see and know a full and deep Christianity by the progression of this astonishing radioactivity throughout our human community. (Radioactive Christianity)



The means by which new Jesus-style desire is communicated is the sign…

So, what might be this shift in meaning that (official) Christianity needs to catch up with? In a nutshell it’s a shift from the thing to the sign. Jesus, we might remember, dealt a lot in signs. But in his time there was almost no media—apart from the head on a coin or a statue (which good Jews would have avoided anyway) there were no visual stimuli beyond nature itself. Today what we call nature is crowded out by a blizzard of images, movies, TV, internet, print, hoardings, cellular phones, screens in offices, in public spaces, etc. etc. This means that our visual or virtual world is progressively more real than the real world. But what is communicated, what is the meaning of all this virtuality? So much of it is frenzy, desire and violence. But Jesus is in there too. Jesus was already a semiotic revolution in his day, leaving signs scattered around like the whole world was his artist’s studio. (Think a piece of bread, and “Here is my body…”) The shift in meaning for Christianity is to pay more attention to the signs of Jesus than to the way we try to fit him into a world of things: viz. ”Is it really his body? Is he really God? Of one substance with God? Is there really a place called heaven, or a place called hell?” Rather, in a world teeming with signs, the signs of Jesus take on their full value. They are an intended transformation of the way we see everything and, therefore, of the way we fundamentally relate to each other. Simple as that.

The dominant signs around us—for example, money, glamour, nation, president, gun—are gradually being eroded and edged out by the sign of the Son of Man, meaning forgiveness, peace, giving, nonretaliation, love, life. It comes down to a contest of signs, and Christian faith is on the frontline of changing the signs by which we live. In the following passage from Colossians it’s as if Jesus overwhelms the system of signs, including its most powerful form, the legal document. And he continues to do so in a vast public act of re-education or counter-meaning. “He forgave us…erasing the record [literally handwriting] that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them [literally “exposed them with openness”], triumphing over them in it [i.e. in the public demonstration of counter-meaning].

A public demonstration of counter-meaning. Ah, that sounds like a systematic theology worth googling! (From Thing To Sign)


And the cinematic Jesus…

There’s no doubt that many people who go to church connect to the cinematic Jesus. And they show up in the place that seems to know about this guy. But so much of the church tradition is to do with a negotiation with God for the sake of benefits, earthly or heavenly. The figure of Jesus gets sucked into a business deal with God, and the real/reel Jesus gets shut down in favor of a board meeting with the Almighty. I think the cinematic Jesus is really an unplugged Jesus, unplugged from the mainframe of the churches, perhaps showing up occasionally at coffee break or the local feeding program, but basically out of there. He’s out of there, playing and moving in the world where he can and does really change things.

I have come to think that we know nothing of God until we meet the cinematic Jesus, who is also the poor Jesus, the abandoned Jesus, the crucified Jesus, the changing-the-imagination Jesus. Everything else is religion and alienation. So what then is “church,” the ekklesia or “calling together” of the New Testament? Well, that’s just what it is, the calling together anywhere, anytime of some bit-part players of the Jesus movie who want to share a few of their favorite clips and celebrate. I really can’t think of a more fun thing to do! (Jesus Unplugged)





 To See With A True Eye! 

To see the truth we must stop looking by the light of the sun. We have to split the light from the trees, unzip the radiance from the grass, peel the glamour from the world. Because our eyes do not show us what is real. Desire is what gives things their real and present shape, and only love has the light to show this and bring everything into true reality.

I’m not saying there’s a different physical reality in things. If you look at a tree it really is sixty feet tall, it really has green leaves, it really has brown bark. Nevertheless, to see these things does not mean you’re really, truly seeing the tree. Why? Because human beings cannot see a tree without also seeing the signs that make up a tree, i.e. “tall,” “green,” “brown,” “on this land,” “good for timber” etc., and all these signs are permeated by desire. Try separating your vision from your active (signifying/desiring) mind. It just can’t be done. Michael Hardin teaches something he calls a “fox walk” and “wide angle vision” as you walk across a field, for example. You tread very deliberately, heel and toe, and you refuse to focus on one thing but let everything around you impact you directly. This is as close an approximation to being totally “in nature” as possible. But your active mind is still there, proven by the fact it can switch on and focus in an instant. And because of that everything is still experienced as sign: i.e. the back of your mind is saying “yes this is what I’m doing, the ‘fox walk’ and ‘wide angle vision.’”

The same goes for Buddhists. A long-practiced monk may reach enlightenment but there is a whole panoply of signs to put him there, the robe, the bell, the master, the scriptures etc. etc. And there is a sign for the state itself, i.e. “enlightenment” or “Nirvana” which must somehow always be there playing in the back of the mind, as are the signs for the rest of the world. If not the monk could never say to himself I need to stop meditating right now and go get my dinner: i.e. the world of objects and the signs that communicate them is never dissolved.

Meanwhile our actual Western commodified world is exploding with signs of desire, signs filled with desire. It’s the engine which makes everything work and nothing can stand in its way. Hey, you’re Islamic and you like your Shariah law. Out of the way for these signs of ours filled with desire! Hey, you’re an indigenous person, living in your rain forest, and you like your traditional way of life. Out of the way for these signs mediating desire! Hey, you’re a Christian and believe in Jesus, well heaven is the greatest of all signs of desire, the last payoff of a prosperity gospel. Get right on board with your very own Christian signs mediating desire!

Heaven as the absolute reward (infinite flying miles earned) is a recent twist on the Christian tradition which always said that the world we see is not the real world, but did so by framing it within a Platonic division of heaven and earth. To get between the sun and the earth was a first move of Plato’s philosophy, telling us that there was an ideal world up there and what’s down here is a poor inferior copy. Meanwhile the ideal world can be accessed by the intellectual self which is the immortal soul. It was far too tempting for Christian consciousness, following Plato, to switch the false world of desire to the world of the material senses as such, and then transfer the real world to one above, not to an earth transformed by love.

Heaven as an object of desire makes it today part of the present order where our signs, are based in desire and the violence of desire. The character of signs based in violence is a critical argument from Girardan anthropology, something that has been mentioned frequently in these blogs and is necessarily supposed here. The Buddhist attempt to get away from signs of desire into enlightenment or emptiness is indirect proof of this problem—they know something is very wrong. (Their technical doctrine is called “dependent co-arising” and illustrated in Indra’s net where you realize “everything is everything” and so you become free of any individual sign.) They are entirely right in their instinct. But as I suggest they just can’t get rid of the sign and so the actual world remains rooted everywhere in desire and violence.

But what if another sign should arise in the world, one entirely without violence and capable of changing every sign into its own nonviolence? In the New Testament this absolutely new, trans-originating sign, the Alpha and Omega, is the cross and resurrection. This sign goes to the very ground-zero of meaning and signification and begins it over. And it can do so because it works not at the level of sight or intellect but of our whole nervous system in its blindest and most unconscious mode of operation which is to build up a world out of desire and murder. The sign of the cross and resurrection constantly works at this level to reprogram our most primordial gesture of meaning—which could be summarized as “you’re out and we’re in,” into something wonderfully different—“you’re out and I’m out there with you.” Here is the good news, a sign that means the world, a new world, a new creation. When you truly meet the sign of the cross and resurrection your deepest neural self is reprogrammed to love.

So true “seeing” comes with the transformation of desire not sight. To loosely paraphrase Paul we change from the body of death to the body of love. And this overcomes every sign rooted in violence, slowly, amazingly changing every significance into the new significance of love. How beautiful to see everything around us with the eyes of love! Not the eyes of anger or power, not the eyes of indifference or boredom, and, yes, neither the eyes of ignorance and blindness. To see with true eyes. Or as Jesus puts it, the single eye, the eye not divided by violent desire, but gazing out with total love. True eye! (True Eye)