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Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In

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Reading James Alison's books is learning to see our world with Easter eyes:
All becomes clearer and what once baffled us is resolved into a profound simplicity.
Stanley Hauerwas characterizes them as 'almost frighteningly profound.'

And that this fresh and faithful voice is that of a gay man--who is also a Catholic priest--is indeed a case of divine justice.

A primary hinge upon which this fresh turning turns is the meaning of atonement.
Here I take the liberty of quoting extensively from his chapter, An Atonement Update:

"If you are undergoing atonement it means that you are constantly in the process of being approached by someone who is forgiving you...

"The difficult thing for us is to sit in the process of being approach by someone.
Because we are used to theory we want someone to say, 'This is what it is. Get the theory right. Now put it into practice.'
This imagines that we are part of a stable universe that we can control.
But if the real centre of the our universe is an 'I AM' coming towards us as our victim who is forgiving us
then we are NOT in a stable place. We are in that place of being destabilized,
because we are being approached by someone who is entirely outside our structures of vengeance and order....

"What forgiveness looks like in the life of the person is 'breaking of heart';
and the purpose of being forgiven--the reason why the forgiving victim has emerged from the Holy of Holies offering himself
as a substitute for all our ways of pushing away being forgiven, trying to keep order--
the reason he has done that is because we are too small; we live a snarled-up version of creation,
and hold on to that snarled-up version of creation because we are frightened of death.

"What Jesus was doing was opening up the Creator's vision, which knows not death, so that we can live as though death were not.
In other words, we're being given a bigger heart. That is what being forgiven is all about.
It's not, 'I need to sort out this moral problem you have.' It's, 'Unless I come towards you, and enable you to undergo a breaking of heart,
you're going to live in too small a universe, you're not going to enjoy yourselves and be free.
How the hell do I get through to you? Well, the only way is by coming against you as your victim.
That's the only place in which you can be undone. That is the place you're so frightened of being that you'll do anything to get away from it.
So if I can occupy that space, and return to you and say,
"Yes, you did this thing to me. But don't worry! I'm not here to accuse you. I'm here to play with you!
To make a bigger space for you. And for you to take part in making that bigger space with me." '
And of course the way Jesus acted this out before his death was setting up the last supper,
in which he would give himself to us so that we would become him.

"... This is the risky project of God saying, 'We don't know how this is going to end.
But I want you to be co-participants with me on the inside of this creative project.
And that means I'm running a risk of this going places I haven't thought of
because I want to become one of you as you, so that you can become me as me.'
We get this in John's Gospel: 'You will do even greater things.' And we think, 'Oh Jesus is just being modest about his miracles.'
No, he is being perfectly anthropologically.
To the degree in which, by receiving this sacrifice, we learn to step out of a world which sacrifices,
try to run things protectively over and against 'them',
to that extent we will find ourselves doing greater things than he could even begin to imagine.
That's what the opening up of creation does."

I recently had the opportunity to attend a five day retreat given by James Alison and I have read his book, Undergoing God. Jame is an author who is well worth getting to know and I hghly recommend his website (www.jamesalison.com/uk) which contains many of his writings as well as some video of his lectures and sermons. James is a gay Catholic priest and some of his writings reflect those leanings. Beyond this however, he is an intellectual whose talks and writings are primarily focused on the examination of passages from the Old and New Testament. The aricles in this book as well as his earlier works, reflect the strong influence of the French born, Stanford University professor, Rene Girard. James uses many of the concepts initially developed by Girard, such as desire, the scapegoat mechanism and mimetic theory to explore the messages to be found in holy scripture. James has a writing and speaking style that helps the layman to come to a deeper understanding of these messages.
James is only 47 years of age and he is in his prime. I anticipate that in the coming years, we can expect many more valuable thoughts and insights to emante from his talks and writings.

Because of his extraordinary ability to interpret Scriptures, one might miss Alison's constant appeal to reason. [Given recent papal remarks on this gift of God vis-a-vis world religions, reason may be a common ground between Benedict XVI and James Alison--one can dream!] This book is a collection of Alison's addresses, edited to be sure but deeply personal and witty. He challeges Vatican pronoucements but is fair as well as logical. His treatment of homosexuals being regarded in the church as defective straights in worth the price of the book.

I have read all the three books that form the "gay trilogy" of J.Alison(that is to say, the books that deal explicitly with their author being gay). To me, this last one is by far the best one. Before James Alison had already showed a solid theological preparation combined with simplicity, humor and honesty as he related his thought to his own life. But here he has reached an astonishing depth and maturity and makes prayer flow from the reading of his writings. Two ideas appear in this book: in the first place, a theology of Redemption which renews the idea of atonement and which makes see that a Christian is invited to live in a basic confidence that "the battle is already won", that the new world of the Kingdom is already here, that a fully new of living, free from the need to affirm oneself against the other in an endless fight is already there, made possible and attainable for us; the main place where this new order is being revealed is the Sacrifice of the Lamb as the "forgiving victim", who undoes the necessity of more sacrifices. The second idea is that gayness can be a place where Redemption can be recreated and lived; gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people can overcome the pain suffered and live themselves as forgiving victims who live in a new order and show this to the world. Other topics are also dealt with, like his (too optimistic?) idea that the Catholic Church is in a process of discovering of the simple fact that some people are just gay, and not imperfect heterosexuals.

And despite the depth of his thought, he achieves at explaining it with a delicious touch of humor and even camp, another way of claiming the place of gay people (yes, even campy ones) in the Church. Don't miss the beginning of "Reconciliation in the wink of a hippo"...

Alison makes you work hard (i.e., think!). If you stick with him, the book will revolutionize your religion.