Having Eyes, Do You Not See?

"The latest newsletter by an Inland Republican women's group depicts Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama surrounded by a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken, prompting outrage in political circles."

...

"I absolutely apologize to anyone who was offended. That clearly wasn't my attempt."

The PE



Clearly.

I love these apologies. "If I offended anyone..."

Of course the "attempt" wasn't to offend. It was to solidify, insulate, demark, unify, assure, cohere, and defend.

I believe her. I believe she had no "intention" of offending. I think she was intending to create a sense of us, to mark off the people who get it, to create a type of boundary for her community. Within that community, for that sense of the world, these would not be offensive images or ideas. How could they be? (She just miscalculated who her audience was).

Think the images are awful. Understand why you think so. Say there is no place for them in democratic discourse. But don't mistake your ability to say so (if you say so) as a universal sense of decency or good that would allow anyone to say so.

If we assume there is some general sense of decency or good (and in sending this email/mailer she knew she was violating that) we are assuming our way of seeing the world is THE WAY to see the world. We tend to do that. It seems we want to do that.

If one is a Christian, though, or more to the point, if one is confronted by the offensively transcendent (that's silly), one ought to see that as a subtle trap. It's a trap in that it lures us with a hope for certainty and security but it's the security of a prison- sometimes thoughtfully crafted, but a prison all the same.

What we do and who we are is understood in communities wherein what we do and who we are makes sense. That's as it can only be. Abstract concepts take on real meaning as we live them. Love, justice, freedom, salvation, etc. are meaningless, or worse are ideological, when we simply relate to them as a concept or ideal- or when we pretend that the concept or ideal is real. For good and ill, we show what we understand love to mean when we show what we understand love to mean. The same for any other concept: justice, freedom, salvation, sin, etc... What does it mean to show justice right now given our present conditions? Free to be what? Salvation, from, to and for what? Sin against what, in what way, why? All of that is done within some cultural boundary, maybe permeable, but still bound.

That's what we do, what we are doing. It's a human thing to do, a human work, if you will. And as such, it, as far as some Christian narrative may be concerned, is a bit deadly (as if death comes in bits), except of course, in so far as it allows us to be some type of reflection of divine love. So you know, that's something.

But in creating this world of meaning and understanding, we are creating a world of meaning and understanding (duh). And we are no less prone than anyone else to making it a prison just because we think what we have to say is very special. Perhaps we are at even greater risk because we think what we have to say is so stinkin' special. Maybe we pretend our stink is somehow unique from everyone else's stink. Maybe we are convinced that our stink comes from God rather than us. That's fine, but we need know, even if we receive divine stink, we have to speak it from our own stinking holes.

The point is, we build so we can make these ideas known as more than ideas. We make sense of the world so we can make sense of the world, but we easily fix these expressions in stone. We fix a safe and secure world where it is clear what we mean by "we" that never means to offend, in which we cannot even know if it would offend, but also in turn wherein we lock out what is offensive. Our prisons secure us from everything, but worst of all, isolate us from what is ultimately scandalizing and offensive about the Word of God (for any idolators out there, I don't mean The Bible).

I would say it is a part of our being made holy to be better and better able to catch this, to be made brave enough to be drawn out of that prison, but it's possible, actually it's quite likely, that Sunday after Sunday, Bible study after Bible study, whatever it is we do necessarily as Christians, we craft the culture to build the walls of our Christianity higher and thicker. We solidify the boundaries of who we are. We confuse being made holy, sanctified, set apart from the world, with being more and more enmeshed with and adapted to a particular sense of the world.

"If I offended anyone..." is the other side of "Well, I never..." Both could be a promising starting point, but we try to avoid them or seldom mean them as we should.