Why I Like Books that Live on Bookshelves

There's something about the real presence of books that comforts. A virtual book is fine; reading on line is fine; I've nothing personal against Kindle (though I can't imagine what's being kindled there). I want to hold my book, smell its age and its stories quite beyond the written word, live with it, make its author present. This is reading.

I always try to catch myself when I am inclined to say I've 'read' a book. I don't think one could safely use the past tense of  'to read' to refer to books, certainly not the great books. I am always reading, always in the process of reading. I enjoy living with my books as well. I have a room (none dare call it a library) with many books on bookshelves. That room is their room; they live there, and I visit often. As they sit there, I am reading them. In a sense, they are reading me. Symbiosis.

I have a lot of paperbacks. I am an admitted bibliophile, so most are in pristine condition. They tell me something about myself. For one thing, happily, I enjoy reading. I never judge a book by its cover, but that doesn't stop a book-cover from judging me. In fact, my paperbacks tell me something about my age. I have measured my life with book-covers, especially the prices on them. The Confession of St. Augustine, 95 cents; Sons and Lovers, $2.95; Steppenwolf, $1.25; Deconstruction and Criticism, $8.95 (I remember thinking that a little steep).

This last book is interesting because it was one of those books that comes along from time to time that really hits you between the eyes. After negotiating the essays in that little tome, nothing really was the same again, certainly not when it came to reading, and even writing. There they were, the movers and shakers of the problem of the word. And there was Derrida right smack in the middle of it all. He wrote the book's longest essay, "Living On," and it is as long as any three of the others combined. He dwarfs Bloom, De Man, Miller, Hartman, all affectionately known as the "Yale Critics." Derrida has a good deal to say.

I bought the book hot off the presses in 1980 during my doctoral studies in the English Dept. at Stony Brook University. How nice to have all these thinkers in one little volume, I thought. Before we really knew what it was, my fellow grad students and I were deconstructing menus in Chinese restaurants, the front page of the NY Times, and even some poems.

After a once-through, I was invigorated and even more arrogant than I was before I read Deconstruction and Criticism. It was all  there, the event, theology, grammatology, transgressive reading, Viens, questioning the location of the text. Bad timing or good, I did my first official deconstruction on my written exams. In an essay on Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" I came out guns blazing, a true parasite on the conventional reading of the poem. I read as close as the bleeding in the poem: a bleeding knuckle, a belt buckle scrape, the destruction of the very center of a home: the kitchen. Falling pots and pans, a breath that could light a fire, a child clinging to life for fear of death. I took that death and waltz and read through the lens of any 3/4 movement of Mahler's symphonies.

The doctoral program director hated that essay; another reader on my committee loved it. I must have been doing something right.

There is nothing naive about the essays in the book; they are as fresh today as they were nearly 40 years ago. Reading them yields a place to stand in the world of John D. Caputo and the response to the speculative realists responding to the theological turn. The new theologians Caputo prays for are yet to come, but I wonder if their grandfathers are not in the pages of Deconstruction and Criticism. At $8.95,  the book compels me to say I feel old and young, as time has been friendly and cruel, either in its guise as kairos or chronos.

I am uncertain that Caputo's books have hit between the eyes, but the eyes certainly have it. I am in a place of unrest, perhaps haunted by these ideas haunting me for 40 years. As a Catholic, I am reminded about the centrality of the Tradition; but I read that tradition. I have been asking just how Caputo's work might sit atop this Tradition. Is this a case of possible assimilation, as a sense of the development of doctrine might have it? What would Newman say about this 40 year old set of problems that simply won't go away? Can postmodern strategies invigorate 5000 years of Judeo-Christian theological thinking?

Perhaps I am due for another visit to the books that live on bookshelves in my house.

Viens, oui, oui

You know how they're going to come at you?
                                                                             ---Tom Hagen to Michael Corleone, The Godfather

'to come,' the verb, intransitive...
                                                       ---Lenny Bruce




Power and force come from a familiar horizon, in the trappings of the expected. The power of a word or the power of an assassination attempt rides on wings of sound and fury. Yet, God does not come in thunder and earthquakes and fire, but in a sound like a whisper; he does not come with an army or pomp and circumstance, but from the substance of ordinary life, and then thin and marginal.

^"The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” " [1 Kings 19:11-13, NIV]

Theophanies are always invitations to incarnation. The theophany on Mount Sinai in Exodus came with the fury of hair-raising, blood curdling thunder, but God was in the silent writing of the law into stone brought to the people by a weary Moses. Elijah gets another crack at it at Horeb, and gets it right. He does not understand the natural wonders of the earth to be the shekinah, but hides his face to the gentle whisper, the very presence of God. The real event harbored in the name of God comes from the weak force of an apophatically derived whispering breath, not the strong force of thunder and fire from the mouth of a dragon.

"an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus." [Matt. 1:20-21, NIV]

"...she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them." [Lk 2:7, NIV]

"My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest" [Jhn. 18:36, NIV]

God does not enter the city with an army, in a parade of pageantry; he comes on the margins of the city's own excess, crystallized, as from a saturated solution,  in the saturated phenomenon of a newborn. The incarnation is the event where the chiasm of the divine and human enters time and space. In the Annunciation, God insists and Mary brings God into existence, into the plane of immanence. Hence, the incarnation is the response to a call for the impossible.

"How will this be?" [Lk 1:34, NIV].

God comes at us unconditionally and undecidable in a dream, in the voice of an angel. In the Matthean and Lucan narratives theophany is accepted as incarnation, and the Synoptic transfiguration (Mk.  9:2-8; Mt. 17:1-9; Lk. 9:28-36) is the event of resolution of past and present, Logos written, and Logos made flesh. All 3 evangelists record a dumb-founded Peter, who responds in haste, not understanding what he is experiencing. On this high place/Mt. Sinai/Horeb theophany morphs into the incarnation of the Logos ratified by a disembodied voice emanating from a nebulous somewhere. Peter should have deferred his interpretation, which he  based on experience of his senses alone. The imperative to 'listen' that haunts the 'voice' is also aligned with Moses and Elijah, whose own voices were not always heeded. The Tranfiguration validates the entire tradition received by Judaism and handed down to Jesus and his contemporaries, with an eye to the future; but any supersessionism would be a poor reading strategy here. At least Peter gets that part right: 3 booths/tabernacles for three embodied voices.

These texts give religious voice to the event(s) harbored in the name of God, to his insistence from where one knows not. This insistence, and the event released in its response, grounds the contingency of theophany. The Christ-event, which signals something new suddenly upon us, is the existent of the theophany's beckoning. It's denoument is in the faint cry of abandonment on Calvary, an apostrophe to a dying God, and resurrection in the making.

Never Met a Physics I didn't Like

Astrophysics and particle physics meet in the concept of equivalence. Astrophysicists measure distance in terms of time (light years) and particle physicists measure mass in in terms of energy (electron volts). Certainly measuring distance in terms of time is not new (it's biblical) and for the people of today, measuring mass in terms of energy is something rather ho-hum.

When John Caputo asserts that physics is all the metaphysics we're likely to get, he does not mean to transpose the transcendental signifier onto the negotiations with the natural world. He is more likely arguing for the jouissance in physics (and all of science) with its awe and mystery as all the wonder the postmodern world can take. He seems already to be intuiting the conceptual equivalence of all the physics we're likely to get as well. There are no permanent gaps in the human understanding of the universe, and any God that would fill them is dead on arrival, and so Caputo's entire project: the weakness of a God without sovereignty whose insistence is the gap God opens in 'events.'

Stardust memories light the corners of any mind open to the event: if the 'penny drops' in  the 'AHA' moment that gives Neal DeGrasse Tyson goose-bumps--the realization that everything in the universe is made of the same stuff, the same stardust--that mind is beckoned by a call made from a telephone booth in scientific "truth," whatever that is, and responds to its insistence, which gets itself done (in the middle voice, Caputo would say) in what we are calling the 'event.' No theory of everything here: the nature of events is ruled by uncontainability. The very excess of truth is the moment of the event.

And no Begriff is large enough to manage the excess in such moments; not unless it is constantly regenerating itself from nano-second to nano-second in the flow of streaming events that recede into vast distances.

Spectral Christianity

Although the possibility remains that some of John D. Caputo's critics might dismiss his work as so much post-modern theosophy, I have found his work refreshing and authentic. I certainly have some difficulty with some of his strategies in The Weakness of God and The Insistence of God, but the movement from an apophatically derived humongous onto-theological entity to 'the event' is fascinating and compelling. Does Caputo pass for an atheist? of course; yet the creative gesture of dissolving the Tillichian 'ground of being' into vocative, middle-voiced insistence treats the problem of omnipotence in a very satisfying way.

Truth be told, omnipotence has never enjoyed an unassailable place in dogmatic theology. There are some things that God simply cannot do. Despite all the literary violence in the Old Testament, the God of theology cannot be the agent or source of murder or human sacrifice. He just can't do it, and that's the conclusion of the strong theology which Caputo critiques in his work. Though Caputo does not begin in dogma, he would rejoice in the theological discomfort with omnipotence as evidence of the haunting of orthodox theology by a radical, weak theology.

Caputo's 'hauntology,' as he calls it, does not originate with him. I would think that every theological punctuation finds its engine in a haunting. The council of Nicaea was no doubt haunted by what was tearing Constantine's Empire apart---the very nature of Jesus Christ (ah, those were the days when christology could disrupt an empire). The holy spirit spooked the council fathers into consubstantiality, and the rest is, as it were, history. The Second Vatican Council found itself spooked not only by Catholic dogma, but also by the palpable ghosts of the very flower of modernism: the Shoah . And, most recently, the extraordinary Synod of Bishops is haunted by St. Francis himself as it sets its agenda to address just what family and love really are in the post-modern world.

The Weakness of God is the more sanguine of the two works, as The Insistence of God is written with a healing black eye, and I have a greater affection for the former than the latter, perhaps because any  weak theology that I would adopt would not approach anything with a chip on its shoulder. Still, both works share a broad, sound intellectual underpinning that gives a voice, a language, to what may be coming in new theological gestures. The hopeful enthusiasm of Weakness emerges as the sobriety of a critique of speculative realism in Insistence. The relentless logic of development in Weakness, yields to some jagged insertions (e.g., Caputo's response to Zizek) in Insistence. Interestingly, I agree that Caputo sympathizes with much of Zizek's work, and even with Meillassoux (doesn't Caputo meet Meillassoux in the latter's perverse but brilliant piece, Spectral Dilemmas ?).

The problem of God and religion remains in Zizek, Caputo, Meillassoux and in the work of all the other thinkers Weakness and Insistence engage. Caputo's grand step away from God-as-ground-of-being, or even as Robert Barron has recently called God, "ground of contigency," provides fertile soil for dialogue, even with the so-called new atheists. I wonder how distant Sam Harris's 'spirituality without religion' is from Caputo's "religion without religion"; or perhaps the former's 'self-transcendence' is from the latter's 'insistence'? If Barron is right that serious theists call the unconditional, unconditioned ground of contingency "God," then, despite how metaphysical the sound of ground appears, the event of religion as response to God's insistence remains possible. Serious theists who acknowledge that the grounding of contigency is what religion calls the Creator of the Universe would seem to be open to scripture and religion as events harboring other events.

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.