[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] Have you written a book?

[David Dunn]

[from Jaime]

I did a training manual for USAID that was not completed, on natural  
resource management.

Been writing columns for the local newspaper - very ecclectic and  
diverse.  Two weeks ago, I did a series (6) on the House of Horus  
(Hors) and will do another next week on the FBI and the House of Horus  
in Saipan.

For Lent, here are two installments on a series of four.  Because of a  
printing glitch, Holy Spirit and Church will be printed Tuesday and  
Wednesday.

Here's God and Christ in one of our local papers.  I sent it to the  
Filipino Methodist listserv and the first response was a request to be  
taken off the list!!!  Am sending them to you to get your eye on  
quality of thinking and presentation.   Not contemplating on doing a  
book though I would not mind doing a series of 'Sang Pinoy (one  
Filipino) of varying topical and chronological narratives.

I resigned from the Public School MLK Jr. day, in protest.  Meanwhile,  
I will be farming a 10-hectar hillside for the next two years and I  
think, I might have time to write.  I use a Mac.

Jaime

OPINION
Friday, April 10, 2009

God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church


By Jaime R. Vergara
Special to the Saipan Tribune
Holy Week in Christendom is a period when the world comes to a stand  
still. The sacredness of time and the sanctity of space are enjoined  
and profoundly celebrated.

I use here the devotional language of the faithful. Familiarity with  
metaphysics and its queen discipline, theology, were once the mark of  
a scholar and a learned person. In recent times, metaphysics has  
become the currency of the squawk box along the backwoods and the  
backwaters of our sanity, and theology the pretentious handmaiden of  
the obscurantist and the antagonist of the open mind.

And yet the four words in the title are code words that clamor for  
understanding. Of late, they have become benignly and justifiably  
ignored by a world immersed in historical awareness and sociological  
wisdom, where the common mind is a liberated creature of unflinching  
science and neutral technology. Is it possible to understand them  
without falling into the circuitous appeal of biblical metaphors, or  
the self-serving allure of devotional piety?

We give it a try. After all, the honorific word 'God' used to be a  
prominent icon in serious discourse, and in the solemn recitation of  
the oath of public office. With the collapse of Wall Street before the  
bailout and the stimulus package, pundits suggested that the phrase  
“In God We Trust” be replaced by the more accurate phrase, “In Greed  
we Thrust.”

This week's series explores what sense these words might mean in  
sociological terms, and what reality they are pointing to that is  
recognizable in any clime and culture in the human realm.

G-O-D

We recall the comic incident when Time magazine printed for its cover  
in bold red-on-black the question, “Is God Dead?” The furor that  
followed saw cardinals and bishops up in arms in defense of their  
suddenly threatened theological underpinnings-as if God needed  
defending!

The word “God” is a recently coined European word that refers to a  
supreme or mighty power, appropriate in the medieval context of the  
feudal liege. It is the word used to translate the Semitic “el” as the  
primal force. YAH (YHWH) is the biblical term for the mysterious power  
that undergirds and defines all of life.

Now, before we quickly fall into the trap of abstraction, imagine a  
herder driving a camel in the desert, momentarily unmindful and  
temporarily oblivious of the immediate environment, and in receding  
into the recesses of his mind, the camel suddenly flops a cake of  
fresh do-do into his face. The primordial cry of “YAH!” naturally  
comes out as the outburst of surprise and rude awakening.

Demythologizing the word back to this kind of earthiness gives one the  
existential flavor of the experience of awe and wonder, of the  
profound mystery of the ever-present unknown.

We all run into the limits of our existence. In the '60s, the youth  
phrased a query fraught with deep meaning: What are you up-against? It  
is in this up-against-ness that the significance of the word “God”  
made sense. The God who is rightfully dead in Christian atheism is the  
grandfather figure in the sky that monitors and assesses the state of  
human moral rectitude and civil order.

The overt and quiet railing against the heavens over the demise of the  
garment industry's golden goose came as an assault on revered ideology  
for some, and the comfort of well-padded pocketbooks for others. It is  
no surprise that one had called it the judgment of God!

When the authenticity of life awakens humans to the reality of  
finitude, of limits and untrustworthy dependencies, then the utterance  
of “YAH” might be painfully but liberatingly appropriate. Everyone  
longs for truth and knowledge but “more” only leads to added confusion  
and uncertainty; everyone clamors for an eternity of peace which only  
accents our experience of an eternity of struggle; everyone senses the  
demand of conscience but we resign to the ease of expediency or the  
haze of moral ambiguity. For all our yearnings comes a terminus of  
fulfillment. We are in our experience never satisfied.

When confronted by the awesome and the awe-full, humans had been known  
to flee from the threat of the unknown into the comfort of the  
unexamined commonplaces and familiar; or humans have been known to go  
into a defensive frenzy of fear-filled rhetoric and stoic  
belligerency, inventing ogres and monsters as enemies, as well as prop- 
up someone/something to blame for our miseries.

Religious understandings that remain accountable to the assessment of  
reality and not default into the authority of a person or the legal  
dictates of calcified writings, stand the chance of making an  
authentic relational choice to that mysterious power in the midst of  
life that frustrates every vestige of our human assertions and  
aggressions.

In a sense, Jew and gentile, religious and secular, believer and  
agnostic, we stand at every moment between what is no-longer and what  
is not-yet, between memory and anticipation, and in the language of  
this week, at the borders of faith and hope.

Sometime somewhere, a group of people made a conscious choice that for  
the unknown Unknown that called every morsel of the past into being,  
the proper stance is gratitude; that for all the uncertainty of a  
future careening into our existence unannounced and in a manner like  
the bull in the proverbial china parlor, the desired response is  
hopeful anticipation; and that which sustains the bottomless pit of  
the abyss that accompanies any serious affirmation of what-just-IS,  
the gracious response is more than just to let it be! That reality in  
fact is our parent (in the cultural myopia of Mesopotamia, they called  
it “Abba,” father)!

It is then that the word “God” might begin to make any sense, not as  
something among other things that one can believe in, but as a word  
pointing to an inescapable reality one is compelled to relate to, in  
which case, one can understand that since the life that gives, and  
life that takes away is our eternal up-against-ness, then blessed,  
indeed, be its name!



God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church II

By Jaime R. Vergara
Special to the Saipan Tribune
OhMyGod.com is a website. The phrase is also a favorite expression of  
female elementary 6th graders. “G-o-d” is a term our Muslim brothers  
would not pronounce, write, or iconographicize. It has, however, been  
used to refer to one’s “ultimate concern,” with which one is bound and  
sustained, and limits and propels one into existence.

In our time, the word “Christ” has become an expletive of disgust in  
some quarters, while “Holy Spirit,” if used at all, translates into  
the taotaomona that scares the young into proper behavior. “Church,”  
of course, is the building with the archaic architecture that is open  
when the museum is closed, or the community node where people meet  
each year to be the Bud, and get silly.

The Teutonic word “Gott,” the supreme power, became “God,” the good  
almighty power to the Anglo-Saxons, which is quite a few rivers away  
from the YAH (YHWH) of the Fertile Crescent, a designation for the  
only Reality-“I am the Real; there is no other Reality but me!”-of the  
caravan herders. This Reality is no goody-goody-two-shoe, and in the  
compelling poetry of Nikos Kazantzakis in The Saviors of God, it is  
the Crimson Line that marks the evolutionary process.

Christ

Kristos is Greek for “the anointed,” which is the meaning of the  
Jewish word “messiah,” the expected King from the line of David to  
unite the separated tribes of Israel. Christ is not the last name of  
Jesus Ibn Nazareth. Yet in the life and death of the Nazarene  
carpenter, especially after the Romans razed the temple of Jerusalem  
and the messianic expectation was heightened, this Jesus would be  
mythologized not only as the Savior of Israel but later, of humankind.  
John of Patmos allegorized the satanic Roman Empire.

Yesterday was Good Friday in the Christian calendar. It is paradoxical  
that Christians named it “good” Friday when the narrative is about the  
crucifixion of Jesus, in the ignominious company of a couple of  
thieves. Jesus was, of course, a good Jew but a movement outside the  
synagogue evolved into a religion that would bear the name of the role  
he played. To be a Christian is to play the role of being the anointed  
(called) and bringing the expected deliverance of a people.

It is thus not surprising that the movement of Jesus’ followers was  
not called Jesuism. It was never about the idolatry of Jesus, although  
later devotional piety would make the whole gamut of a wimpy to  
irascible idol out of him.

This disparity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith  
would become a dividing line of religious schism throughout the ages.

The value of viewing the Jesus of history is to make sure that the  
faith carried in his name is not abstracted, that the concretion of  
the personal dimension remains. It is to the credit of Christian  
thinkers that they kept this personal dimension within the Godhead  
from which came the persona of Jesus Christ.

The Jesus of history is almost a mirage, with scholars determining  
that only about 20 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus could be  
deemed authentic. In a time when the life expectancy for the male was  
33 years old, Jesus as a single male of that age makes him one of  
ripened maturity rather than a spring chicken in the prime of his  
youth, or as a young adult as depicted in many art forms.

But it was his death in the hands of the Romans, and blamed on the  
duplicity of the Jews, that we know of the roles he played. In  
Augustus’ Pax Romana where the culture of Empire, of opulence, peace  
and abundance, this Jesus had the temerity to talk of another empire,  
of beggars and the oppressed, of orphans and destitutes, of servants  
and prostitutes. The illusion of prosperity was contradicted by the  
reality of the excluded and the marginalized. In the real, he located  
hope and the possibilities of an authentic future.

Playing the purposeful victim added the dimension of martyrdom. The  
event of the crucifixion was not senseless for it made the guardians  
of civilization cognizant of the need for order and justice, a later  
component of Roman law. In Constantine’s court, the Christ crucified  
would rise to being Christo Rei, the King.

The notion of sacrifice was ingrained in the Semitic perspective, of  
being a victim and martyr on behalf of a cause “greater than I,” the  
supreme paradigm for human existence. Add to that the Persian- 
influenced Hellenistic dichotomies of light and darkness, of truth and  
ignorance, of good and evil, and the Jesus of history became the  
transcendent Christ of faith who would preside over the affairs of the  
Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Skip the limitations of the ecclesiastical edifice, and you find a  
rather affirming stance toward life. That good and evil exist is not  
denied, but that “grace abounds much more than sin,” is preached. The  
role of the Christ is the offense of shattering calcified illusions,  
of pomposity and hubris, a pointing to the power of possibilities over  
the hampering inertia of cowered denial of limitations, celebrating  
the power of life presiding over the forces of death.

This spirited acceptance of one’s personal acceptance by the cosmic  
force makes individuals oblivious to their travails and discomforts,  
and in the leap of faith, they find their assurance in hanging over  
the bottomless abyss of ambiguity. Life is secured not in keeping it  
safe but in giving it away on behalf of the other. “No love is greater  
than this, that one gives his life for the sake of the neighbor.”

Loving one’s neighbor is a truth that reverberates across the spheres,  
and resonates in the chambers of everyone’s soul, and to borrow and  
paraphrase the favored image of World War II landing Marines who flung  
their bodies into the barbed wires of history so that humanity may  
trample on their backs, we get the imagio dei of the Christ, and  
understands it as an option open to everyone, anywhere, anytime.

That this has been true, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever  
shall, world without end, we respond: Amen.



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