I just got over a humbling cold that turned into atypical pneumonia, during which I got to spend a lot of time in my head. Yes, it was a stuffy head with lots of mucus and piss-ridden thoughts. Even in moments when I attempted to pray or contemplate, I would always return to the distracted misery I was in. Despite these circumstances, I still made the choice to place my attention on my own drama.
And that's one insight I've received from reading Gil Bailie's excellent God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love — it's all drama! The question is which one do you want to identify with most: your own personal melodrama or the cosmic theo-drama that God laid out. And that's part of God's gamble, as the choice was given to us. We can take a stand as to what drama we want to participate in, and there's a risk from God's vantage point in offering this to us.
And that's one insight I've received from reading Gil Bailie's excellent God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love — it's all drama! The question is which one do you want to identify with most: your own personal melodrama or the cosmic theo-drama that God laid out. And that's part of God's gamble, as the choice was given to us. We can take a stand as to what drama we want to participate in, and there's a risk from God's vantage point in offering this to us.
From God's mind, “He who is not with me is against me”; as we can choose an unencumbered freedom, or a freedom “necessary to the fulfillment of the creature's vocation in love.”
The former is “based on a very weak understanding of freedom and its spiritual depth.” It is a freedom from so man can “eschew all affiliations or any associations that might limit his spontaneity.” It is an accumulation of experience that in the end does not add up to anything.
The latter freedom is one “freely subordinated to the responsibilities of loving service.” Or as one prime example, it is like ‘being a Christian,’ Joseph Ratzinger observed in a 1964 homily, ‘means, constantly and in the first instance, letting ourselves be torn away from the selfishness of someone who is living only for himself and entering into the great basic orientation of existing for the sake of another.’” While this doesn't appear as freedom in the modern mind, it is the only way to find ourselves out of the existential condition of a living death.
As Bailie points about the Fall being an existential death that entered the cosmos when man and woman separated from God. We died inside in some way, and in return settled for an unencumbered external freedom in another way.
This dread that we created for ourselves had to mitigated to provide a cathartic release for all our anxiety, and what a better way to do this than to find a scapegoat and sacrifice his or her arse! As Bailie says, “That is exactly what ritual sacrifice does in primitive religion, in which the only possible cure for death is death.”
Bailie pulls from his mentor René Girard this quote: “Making gods by killing victims is the human gesture par excellence and, each time that they do it, human beings widen the gap between themselves and the true God a little more, they take part in his murder.”
So we used our new found freedom “to rebel against the very order that is indispensable to the exercise of freedom.” Nice job boys! And yes, even to this day we are all complicit.
But at some point all this sacrificial drama was going to get turned on its head by Christ incarnating at an ontological center at a particular time and place. Our inexhaustable longing would find a home by the gesture of God's sacrifice. Christianity recognized “that the Incarnate Christ, in intensifying desire, restoring its metaphysical meaning, and redirecting it toward its proper object is indispensable to the true restoration of the human vocation. ... Gradually thereafter, the gravitational power of the sacrificial cult itself would need to be attenuated, and those tentatively liberated from the myths and rituals of the pagan world would need to learn to live without the ‘sacrificial protections’ by developing the capacity for self-renunciation commensurate with the loss of the cathartic power of blood sacrifice.”
Bailie notes: “as Simone Weil reminds us: ‘The false god changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.’”
At this turn, God's great gamble in giving humans freedom was seen as necessary for which the giving of love would be impossible. Rearranging freedom to our liking now would soon get supplanted with God's will as the way — at least until we lose our way again!
As Balthasar puts it: “Earthly eros as an ‘atmosphere’ blooms but briefly, and every man has the duty to compensate its withering by the force of his love, to endure it, transformed, with renewed vitality through the moral power of the heart.” So how are we doing? If you're thumbs up, then I've got some land in Florida for you. But then again, Christianity, as René Girard remarks, “is the only religion that has predicted its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse.”
Still, “At the Resurrection, ‘the power of death’ was broken, but not the fact of death.” God himself making history, allowed for us to have purpose and meaning in history: God became man so than man can become God. Our melodrama was transformed, by grace, to a cosmic-theo-drama of salvation history.
As Bailie notes: “The question biblical people face is never, ‘Who am I?’ It is: ‘By Whom am I called, and to whom am I sent?’” The Alpha and the Omega!
The Eucharist, always existing “sacramentally not pedagogically” transcends the limits of time and history where all are saved simultaneously — just by a YES! “Comparing the Yes and No, one could say that the Yes is dramatic, inasmuch and to the extent that it involves a genuine and uncoerced Yes that accepts its unforeseen ramifications. The No, on the other hand, is melodramatic, inasmuch as it involves a contest, a struggle against the model for preeminence and control. Even though the melodrama that results from the No arouses passions, it extinguishes the passion, the essence of which is self-renunciation performed for the sake of another.”
By choosing YES to God's will and drama, existential and spiritual death falls “under new management.”