It's About Time Because April is the Cruelest Month

In his The Insistence of God, John Caputo considers both kairos and chronos, and while stipulating no essential difference in content, goes on to privilege kairos over chronos because the former is open to the event. Yet, the privilege is more illusion than reality, for the opportune moment cannot be programmed, just as events cannot be programmed. The very seasonality of kairos belies predictability, as it always sees the horizon; chronos, the mindless march of time, never sees anything coming, makes no pretension to expect a horizon: it permits the event as if it doesn't exist.

The stages of time make for good planning of harvests and cuisine, but they make bad planning for the event, which cannot be planned. Because April is indeed the cruelest month, it mocks pretensions to rebirth, and misinterprets occurrences as events. The hermeneutic that privileges kairos over chronos risks seeing events in every bud, in every fallen leaf. Kairos is to chronos as sophia is to phronesis .  I don't think Caputo ever saw that coming, nor this analogy: chronos is to phronesis as kairos is to sophia. We must think of the real, as Caputo says, as if we were dead; and we must think of time as if we lived in the season-less regions.

A Mighty Fortress is our Solitude

In his The Weakness of God, John Caputo knows of only one kind of solitude, the solitude of tragedy, the solitude of the present (pp. 245 ff). Anyone who has fished the surf at dusk or dawn, anyone who has walked alone into a meadow or wood (with or without a brush and canvas), anyone who has practiced a musical instrument, anyone who has listened to music, anyone who has read a novel, anyone such as these souls would find Caputo's solitude terribly impoverished. Perhaps my difficulty with his version of solitude has mere semantic dimensions, because despite the bleakness of such solitude, it remains open to the event of healing through the 'other.'

I maintain the distinction between solitude and loneliness, both expressions of what being 'alone' means. When one is alone with oneself in joy and comfort, one is enjoying solitude. When one is alienated from oneself, terrified by the enormity of being alone in unredeemed time and space, one suffers from loneliness. Though he never says it, I imagine Caputo would agree that the 'tragedy of solitude' resolved by the presence of the other, the healing, consoling presence of another human creature, transforms loneliness into a shared space of joyful solitude, a being alone together.

This is what heals the dehumanization of illness, the alienation from a past of health. Healing sometimes brings the past into the present, often through the touch of human consolation. Indeed, Caputo's notion of forgiveness is all tied up with the arrival of the other, of the other's presence at the bedside, which sanctifies both time and space.

Being present to suffering does not split the burden, the very mass of pain, and share it. That would be magic; yet the burden is forgiven, lightened, at least for a time, a moment, a moment shared in the time of life in extremis. Such a forgiveness of time, a giving of time with less suffering, of more time less burdened with pain, is the healing of consolation, of presence, of witness to the profoundest of all human acts, the act of dying. Alone, together, the laying on of therapeutic hands and the speaking of healing words build a fortress around the sacred space of something so profoundly human.

Wake Up and Smell the Liffey

When I was a boy, I once got caught up in how to punctuate the title of Joyce's last novel. As I recall, some witty souls of scholarly stripe made a thing of it in a few veddy respectable articles. I like the most obvious explication: that Joyce uses the title of "Finnegan's Wake" to universalize the experience of the novel's fallen hero as the experience of life and death, or, better, living and dying.

It's not about the apostrophe; it's about the unsupplied comma and exclamation point: Finnegans, Wake! Here Comes Everybody, and each one is a Finnegan who must follow the imperative, Wake, Humphrey Chimpden Eawickers all! Well you get the picture. We're all on Joycerael's letter; we're all Joycob's latter saints, and we all get to fall, and do it again and again.

Finnegans Wake is a fascinating lens through which to do some serious reading. Stephen Moore has made a living by reading scripture through this kaleidoscope. Derrida and Lacan make a few adjustments in the text and call it deconstruction and psychoanalysis, respectfully. I am probably not terribly far off to suggest that Altizer and to a palpable extent, Caputo, see the death of God in poor Tim's fall from transcendence into immanence: the spirit's the thing that annihilates and exnihilates in a dreamy theopoetics.

And that's the thing: reading after FW is always heresy, as the heresiarchs of Ulysses were trying to tell us all along.

Wake up and smell the coffee because I'm preparing for the next section in my dialogue with our heresiarch of continental philosophy, John D. Caputo.

Liturgies in the Corners of the Day

Common parlance locates 'liturgy' within the practices of religion, and further locates those within the public practices of faith communities. In Catholicism, for instance, one finds the Liturgies of the the Word, of the Eucharist, the Hours, Matrimony and of other sacraments. In this post, I would like to talk about liturgies with a lower case 'l', a small "L". I will retain the public nature of these small liturgies, but not so public as to include great crowds, but perhaps with a smaller group. I retain the public nature of these little liturgies lest I miss the mark and fall into the abyss of private rituals, wholesome or less so, accidentally witnessed. But the ritualistic component of liturgy should not be missed either. But, here, too, I speak of a lower case 'r', a small "R".


I am also speaking of the sacred, of sacred space and sacred spaces, which provide the stage on which little liturgies sanctify the corners of daily life. As a specialist in hospice and palliative medicine I have come to understand that for many patients a sense of sacrality and ritual is a source of comfort and peace. The hospice wing itself is the sacred space sanctified by the humanity of patients and families, and by their suffering. Loss is the grammar of days on a hospice unit; but no less so are re-humanization, joy, narratives of living and dying, human touch and a respectful and reverent human voice. The solemnity of human death and dying pulsates in the corners of the hospice wing, in each patient's room, and in the hearts of all. The liturgy of the nursing assistant working with the patient to achieve personal care needs censes both space and time, like music filling a room. The whole team rounding on each patient to listen, to be present to this distinctively human moment, has a rhythm and time signature. There is a joyful wisdom in such work.


Joy is a bridge from the kind of solemnity one lives on the hospice unit, to the kind of solemnity one experiences in one's own living room. Friends, family and other visitors sacralize our homes. Good cheer even after a bad day or a bad week is a liturgical gesture of welcome and hospitality. A smile, an attentive ear, a laugh provide bridges of trust and foundations of relationships. Let the day's troubles be sufficient for the day, and the time of friends, family and others becomes a celebration of humanity right in our own backyards. Let the music out from wherever music comes from, and it will sanctify every corner and moment of these days. 


How could we begin to understand the liturgies of the capital "L" if the liturgies of the small 'l' go unnoticed or undone?

The Placental Turn in the Crucifixion

In my previous post, I referred to the hypostatic union as an event within the event of  the Cross. The term itself refers to the orthodox expression of the relationship between the nature of the human and the nature of God as they exist within the single person of Jesus, the God-Man. From a contemporary Catholic perspective the appearance of Jesus in history is an evolutionary development in the history of humanity and represents the beginning of the final phase of human development. It is an irrevocable event, an event horizon--a point of no return, anthropologically speaking. For Christianity, it is a trajectory within a process of theosis. 

Hybridity is a metaphor for the union of the two natures, not its genetic actuality; for there is no fusion of the divine and human elements into a new single nature, which is the actual phenomenon of a biological hybrid.  Still, I like the metaphor because it keeps the conundrum alive and permits the outrageous assertions of monstrosity in play. The metaphor allows for the indictment of the modern turn's hatred of the hybrid and its implied miscegenation. Modernism wants purity, certainty, predictability and its mode of operation is alchemy: its worst kept secret is its desire to turn base metal into gold. The postmodern critique lays modernism's desire bare.

The placental turn I took in describing the communication of idioms, the transferability of the predicates of God and Christ, contextualizes how Caputo's insistence and existence can operate in the event of the Cross. In his first discussion of insistence and existence (I, 14ff), Caputo asserts the chiasmic relationship between these terms, and speaks of their co-dependency. It's not just an 'intertwining,' what I have called interdigitation and evagination, but he seems to be asserting something much more transgressive, more parasitic in the relationship. So, in the context of bringing something into being, a birth, an insistence landing on a fertile substrate---a positive response to the call---the placental relation to the womb is descriptive. The hybridity within the temporary relationship between the pregnant uterus and fetal placenta provides a locus for a creative parasitism operative in the hypostatic union as it comes into being in the death of God on Calvary.

While the New Testament is already grappling with the idea of the Incarnation, is does not know of anything like the hypostatic union. That is an event that must wait for another epoch; that call from the Cross must wait to be heard. The desolation of the day between the Death of God and the birth of God struggles with "Lema Sabacthani" like Jacob wrestles with God through the night until at dawn, God cries, 'uncle', hineni, and Jacob awakens as Israel.

The way Abram awakens as Abraham,  Kephas awakens as Peter,   Yeshua awakens as Yahweh, the disciples awaken as Christians, The Way awakens as church, church awakens as Catholicism, Vatican I awakens as Vatican II, the way Catholicism awakens...finally awakens. 

Hineni. 

Me Voici.

Is there a Hegelian Event in the Cross?

I am taking John D. Caputo's characterization of the event in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (henceforth, I) very seriously. Events are not merely things that occur, as the colloquial use of the term would suggest, but that which is 'going on' in what happens that is the event. Events beckon, call, insist from within the action that is happening (I have never heard Caputo say something like 'calendar of events,' but I have heard him say 'event' the way he means it here: he says it with a temporally long 'e' in the second syllable followed by a carefully articulated 't'). It is a different and inflected word, and it is always a technical term.

The Crucifixion of Jesus is a happening that perhaps proffers several events. So, I will ask: what is going on in, on, and around the Cross? And is Hegel there, too?

Caputo likes to begin in forsakeness, abandonment: Matt 27:46, so let's meet him there, say 3 o'clock:

And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [New American Bible Revised Edition].

What's happening is the death of Jesus and a shout of despair from the Cross. What's going on? The death of God. Well at least the little death of God, la petite mort. No patripassionism here, but an act of love. Eli seems unmoved. Jesus dies. What is God's response? Deaf transcendence, indifference? No, perhaps. Perhaps the response is silent presence. The hypostatic union is many things, but it is never less the than the communication of idioms. The Logos remains present to the suffering of the flesh; it interdigitates with it, evaginates human dying, bears a placental unity with the womb of the Logos-sarx, allowing for an accidental cross-over of suffering. It feels and acknowledges the dying qua dying. The soundtrack to the scene is the Song of Songs, and its sounds a little like the Liebestod whose libretto is now the Sermon on the Mount. La petite mort always refers to the transcendence in what just happened; the little death is the event in the climax. The call from the Cross, the call from this real presence, moves within death and despair, from within the loud cry that yields (And we have not even gotten to the Johannine spear that breaks into the Body of Jesus and releases the Church and its uncertain faith, oozing from the side of the man). It is as the April fool, Melito of Sardis, has said, "It was He because of whom the earth quaked. He that hung up the earth in space was Himself hanged up; He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails; He that bore up the earth was borne up on a tree; the Lord of all was subjected to ignominy in a naked body-God put to death!" Communicatio idiomatum.

If Caputo's summary (execution) is right, that "[i]n Hegel and Altizer,the death of God is God coming to life in space and time, the death of the transcendent otherworldly God and the birth of the God with us, the immanent infinite womb of divine life that sustains us," (I, 137) then what we are recognizing as an event in the occurrence on Calvary (Hegel is there in the crowd, looking over Caputo's shoulder) is what invites faith into being: the response to the death of God is Christianity. God insists (from where Caputo knows not, but for the Christian from a presence coming into being) in the event in the Cross, and the answer to that call is an action, the birth of faith already moving to and fro. This is not a Hegelian totality, some final point of the Spirit, but a beginning---an irrevocable beginning---but a beginning of a process of the unfolding of a new reality and new way of thinking. The play of (syn)thesis and antithesis is a never-ending sequence of events--we chide Hegel for being a bad Hegelian when he suggests it all ever lands on some encyclopedic 'somewhere.'

In fact, there can only be Hegel's idea of the silhouette: an outline of a 'something' that can never be contained in any given Gestalt; but rather continues the process to knowledge and insights whose visions, decisions and revisions only precariously sit within their moment (Ray Brassier retrieves Hegel for the event when he opines that the change in reality and ideation make it impossible to say everything about anything). And it is here in the ever-provisional Gestalt that Hegel meets Rahner (they are old friends): in the theological anthropology of the hypostatic union, which for Christians is a trajectory. That trajectory is itself an event, because (if an event is doing what we are saying events do, then) this trajectory-as-event engages and drives the circumincession of past, present and future. This engagement is the trace of the event in Hegel eventuated in the Hegelian event of the Cross.

Of course, we are talking of the event of God's 'little death' here, the act of love in and through the suffering known so well to the Psalmist so many years before the crucifixion. Christianity does not know of the Grand Death of God, and so a small adjustment needs to be made to Caputo's assessment of Hegel and Altizer: Christianity cannot speak of the 'death of the transcendent' but it can and does and must speak of the kenosis of that 'otherworldly God,' the self emptying of divinity into Emmanuel ('God with us' [cf Matt 1:23]). Kenosis is all over I, single kenosis, a plastic 'double kenosis', a kenosis of annihilation and a kenosis of birth, and it is there through and through the event of the Cross.

Caputo's synthesis is instructive: "The au revoir of Father and Son are superseded in a final rendezvous in the Spirit,"  which is none other than the "movement that takes place within the Absolute." The trinitarian dance (perichoresis) continues to release the event kenotically, as everything empties from the Cross: the fiat of the annunciation, of overshadowing of the Spirit and the birth of Emmanuel. The infancy narratives are inaugurated in the issue from the side of Christ, but they are at once of the Nativity and Pentecost. The out-pouring of the Spirit through the event in the Cross is the same creative gesture of Genesis. On the seventh day God rested from his labors---Saturday is lost time that howls the 22nd psalm; God is exhausted, and it takes until the first day of the week, about as long as it takes Jesus to arrive in Bethany to seek out Lazarus, for the event to run its full course in the Resurrection. God again says yes to the void, to negation, to Saturday, and sees Sunday as very good. Sunday is Saturday's child who picks up the pieces of desolation and finds a way to go on; and the child is the Resurrection: God, born again and re-presented, puts on his own lips, Hineni, and answers the question, Eli, Eli...

For Caputo and Hegel, the actant of the call is anonymous, undecidable; there is no self-communication because there is no self to communicate. For the Christian, the self-communication of the caller is decided and decisive, even if there remains some anonymity in the absolute mystery that extends a most unexpected invitation, a most generous hospitality. It's rather something like grace.

The Call from the Cross

 "Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" [1 Cor. 22-24, NIV].

Paul could have barely calculated how his words would resonate today when theology must fend off secularism with one hand and rewrite the Cross in the postmodern world with the other. If the cross is not a scandal or foolishness for today's mind, many would find it at the very least peculiar. What kind of 'call' from the cross is heard today, from such a dim and remote past? Such a 'call' would have to be transhistorical to be heard in the din of the technological world, but what would make it so? Still, positivism's death knell to religion and faith is premature, and the cross limps through the desert of the real seeking out hearers of the 'call.'

This is a very strange kind of power here. The cross is the assertion of the secular power to keep the malcontents in check, and daydreamers in fear. Rome has no need to call anyone; Rome demonstrates, marches and executes the pax Romana. The cross is the symbol of Rome's reach, and of the impotence of its subjects. This power of the cross is of a different order.

A few years ago, John Caputo could write about The Weakness Of God, and the powerlessness of the cross even as the cross makes unconditional claims on those who respond to its 'call'. Certainly Catholicism is no stranger to a God for whom nothing is impossible that is real and possible, and a God who acts in the world through secondary causes, but Caputo's thesis does not hover over the palimpsest of Catholic theology comfortably. How could Caputo's theory of God be comfortable atop a theology of a triune God and dogmatics? No, that could not be the model.

Yet, a weak God and a weak theology does indeed speak to the postmodern world and post-structuralist thought. I am not certain that Caputo has not moved the theological dialogue forward in an authentic way.

Thought of as an event, the cross is a strategem within the Christ event. It is only through the lens of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus that the cross can 'call' at all. Were it not for the resurrection, for example, what would have become of his life? Would he not be yet another failed messiah? How does hearing the call make such a man the 'power' and 'wisdom' of God?

My next post will engage Caputo's work in depth and attempt a synthesis with Catholicism. Or maybe not. Perhaps several posts, or several series of posts, will be required to engage this provocative thinker. A response to the call of the cross is what God intends by his invitation through the event. This conundrum is a struggle worth pursuing. Deconstruction calls as well, from its position at the foot of the cross. Such calls demand a response from those who hear them, from those who see a signature.

The Conscience of the King: Doing Good in the Cracks

One need not carry a diagnosis of OCD to skip over the cracks in sidewalks.  I remember the hops, skips and jumps over line, cracks and other marginalia in the Brooklyn sidewalks that grew me up. It was a great game of heroic feats and high athleticism. We all did it; sometimes we’d go back over the same strip of pavement just to do it better.

 Jumping over the cracks doesn’t always work out the way we intend; it is less heroic than we at first thought. It is missed opportunity. Nothing really happens on or in the matrix of the solid sidewalk. We often meet the monolith there, and when we meet others, we tend to find them about their business, behaving more like cyborgs than Buber’s thou . It’s where the matrix breaks, on the margins, in the cracks that we meet the other; and that’s the place where we can do some good: the crack’s the thing…

 Down in the cracks we walk dry-shod, the tentative walls of the matrix on either side; there we meet the other in meaningful purpose, and with no little sense of urgency. Safe from the gray thoughts of the boardroom, from the inane humming of people taking the wide roads, from the dull thinking of expedience at all cost, we come face to face with the other on the borders of willing the good. We are encouraged to walk a little faster.

 It is an interesting moment where conscience verges on an act of the will: liminality, on the precipice of doing good: something of a leap of faith. Walking faster  with each other to a purposeful destination clearly in sight opens us up to will the good, even if we have to grab a hand and pull a little. We do some good when we recall that will without love is coercion; will acting with insight toward the good of the other is righteousness. Fascinating things can happen on the margins, on the frontiers, in the cracks. I hope to meet many people there.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Con Mortuis in Lingua Mortua

Giordano Bruno is dead, dead as a door-nail; so is any Catholic apologetic that seeks to spin his death at the hands of the Church as anything but the result of the sinfulness and ignorance of its sons' actions.

How many Cardinals does it take to burn a heretic? Regardless, Bruno was burned at the stake for his arrogance and narcissism, and, I suppose for the heresies of apocastasis-ism, pantheism, neo-Platonism, Arianism as well. He was probably not executed for his Copernican-ism. Just a terminal case of other "-isms."

Because the Church did not send too many heretics to the secular power for execution does not really put any exonerating perspective on it beyond what might be placed on the secular authorities that carried out the sentence of the tribunal. Bruno is dead; he would have been dead by now anyway. Still, the Church holds itself to a different standard. It does not like finding itself in historical constraints. It sometimes wants to be infallible where even Pio Nono could not anticipate such infallibility. Did Bruno sin? Yes. Was the penance just? No.

I find John Paul II of happy memory to have hit the mark regarding human foibles masquerading as Catholic truths: regret and sorrow, seeking forgiveness. The sorrow and regrets are sincere, and it is highly unlikely the Church, in its human, wayfaring dimensions, is likely to perpetrate such poor judgements again.

We are sorry. Our apology is either adequate or inadequate for those whose sensibilities are offended. Our regrets and apologies are sincere, real, authentic. In hope and humility we pray they are accepted.

Nonetheless, there are cynics among the offended who, in the absence of any new critique, revert to Bruno. The charges are disingenuous, and the responses do not dissolve their venom.

I think we should call it a draw and move on.

An Abundance of Grace, Amazing Grace

So much depends on grace.

 Grace is the unmerited free gift of God to creation, to human nature; it is God’s free gift of himself, his self-communication, his overture to his seekers. Seeking is the response to the absolute mystery that is God,  the response to the moment of the experience of the abyss, where one meets God, or its opposite. Seeking is the expression of supernatural existential, which is the religious and existential space open to receive grace (cf. K. Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith). A human being can die of thirst in the cool and fresh sea of grace, if, as the hearer of the message, the reader of the signature, he is closed off---deaf to the message, blind to the sign. The human creature must drink from this abundance of grace: grace must get inside; it must be transformed, translated. The limitless abundance of sufficient grace must be (re)created into amazing, efficacious grace in the human person.

 I recently presented grace as both the signature of God and as predisposition of the human person to that signature. I also located God outside of creation and spoke of his radical absence, his ‘already been  there.” The link between this absence and vanishing presence, and the negative capability of the human person to be imprinted by God’s self-communication is sacrament. Sacramentality is the living principle of Catholicism; it is the reality that creates grace, or at least transforms, or better, translates, grace to the human agent. Because sacrament is first and foremost a sign, the concept has the potential to speak to postmodern discourse inasmuch as structural linguistics is in dialogue with the postmodern and post-structural impulse. Despite the postmodern dilemma of the unfixed sign and the problem of the instability of meaning, we can nonetheless begin in the linguistic sign. Indeed, the comprehensibility of the sign, especially of our example of sacrament, forms the crux of the discussion. First a brief definition: the sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, that is, a sensory input and its evocation, in the case of language, the sound image and its associated concept. Saussure’s famous example in his Course in General Linguistics is that of the sign, or word,  ‘tree’: the signifier is the sound ‘t-r-ee’ and the signified the mental picture/concept of the biological entity. The notion of sacrament is not much more elaborate, except, perhaps, in that it often involves more than language: physical matter, not merely the sounds of language. Still, the overall intelligibility or success of signification drives the sacramental experience.

 At this point I will side-step the 7 Sacraments of the Catholic Church properly so-called, and address my final remarks to other sacraments or sacramentals that nonetheless mediate meaning in the world and perhaps comment on the meanings that mediate the world. In a word, how can God’s ‘radical absence’ be reconciled with his ‘hidden presence’? These dialectical oppositions resolve in the synthesis of sacramental presence. God’s signature, then, is the diacritic of his self-communication, and it graces nature with his sacramental presence. That presence is certainly a real presence whose reality is mediated by grace. This grace is a ‘created’ grace, for the uncreated grace of the divine circumincession can never be contained, or trapped, in nature, in space-time.

 In the postmodern turn, signification creates the sensible world: there is no world that is not brought into practical existence by language. And as such, the world is an unstable place, created as it is by signifiers and signifieds which seem to be fleeing the signs that unite them, making meaning a thing in flux, tenuous and uncertain. Catholicism averts such instability because it admits of the Logos that brings the world into being from nothing by the fiat of the ‘word.’ It is in the word that belief meets the postmodern critique which is always looking to the sacrament through its hermeneutic of suspicion,  ultimately seeking a hermeneutic of faith, looking to slake its thirst in a sea of grace, amazing grace.