Peace, Advent and The Event

Advent reminds us of the great messianic tradition we have inherited from Judaism. The liturgical calendar embraces the kairos, the seasonality, the right-timeness of hopeful anticipation, the catching a glimpse of something approaching from the horizon. Liturgically, we come before God, love, joy and peace. Something’s coming, familiar and strange, known and as if unknown. If we let it free, it comes at us completely new. Something must be truly free so it can release itself, give itself.

The evangelist of Matthew’s gospel presents the Nativity as an event so surprising, so expectant and unexpected, that the earth alone cannot contain it, cannot bear it alone; and so he gives us its extension in the heavens, a supernova, a release of cosmic energy arriving just in time to herald an event of astronomical magnitude; yet more than just a herald, a light to the nations. 

Pax in terris. A righteous hope or a cruel joke for the holidays? Sometimes it seems the public sphere has lost its stomach for peace, hope and revelation. Here in the United States many of us prefer freedom from religion to freedom of religion, prefer to think religious things as if a 19th century child, something seldom seen and never heard. Where is the peace? Where can a sea of faith rest its head? When Motl Kamzoil asks, after hopefully suggesting that it would be a good time for the Messiah to come now, now that his community has been exiled from the shtetl, the Rabbi simply says, “we will have to wait for him someplace else.”

Where shall we wait for the Messiah? In our homes, in a closet, in a shrinking recess of our hearts? How will peace ever find its way to where it needs to be that way? Advent bears the progeny of divine love, of an irrevocable event of peace in the irrevocable event of the union of the human and the divine.

Advent speaks of and to interstellar and intrastellar happenings. Advent truly speaks to the heart, to the secret places, to the slivers of the smallest spaces. Advent also speaks in the larger spaces, in those places in desperate need of peace. It is a message of peace, and if something other than peace is heard, I suppose we’ve forgotten how to hear.

Death of the Flesh: The Way of All Flesh as the Calling of Religious Community

The natural disposition of the flesh rejects non-self. Auto-immune disease results from the flesh's self mistaking itself for non-self: the flesh rejects itself. Since I provisionally accept that the body can become diseased, but we always suffer in the flesh, the self never finds itself in the body. The self and the flesh form a unity. Immunology, though, occludes the possibility of any kind of dualism in this state of affairs.

When we declare the death of the body, the body, or parts of the body often remain viable; transplant medicine bases its project on this condition. Transplantation poses problems for the flesh, as it sets up a collision of two selves. The donor's self remains in the organ (the graft) that survives the death of its body, and when transplanted into the body (the host) of another imbued with flesh, self and non-self reject each other, in the clashes of host versus graft and graft versus host. The solution to this problem is to alter the host (and graft), via immune-suppression, so that it does not recognize non-self.

As we keep the matters of the self (or selves) in mind, we can return to death. That the body, or parts of the body remains viable, we continue to note that the body experiences disease and dying, but only the flesh experiences death. Dying of the body implies cessations of functions, shutting down of systems resulting from disease. But death never completely comes to the body until every process within it ends. Such is death for the body: absolute cessation of processes. I think HAL had it right as it flashed: "life functions terminated."

The flesh suffers, and it eventually suffers death. This death is the death of the self, as the flesh and self saturate each other: there is no room for another flesh or self: relationality, saturated with the flesh, in its very excess precludes another self in the same place. Self rejects non-self.

Which is the richer phenomenon, the living on of the body, with all its life-processes and genetic coding for more function and more life, albeit in the flesh of another, or the "living on" of the flesh and self, in their excess of relationality, after the suffering of death? We cannot speak here of an "afterlife," for otherwise we would not be speaking of a saturated phenomenon: we speak therefore of the life of the flesh, and the death of the flesh. The saturated phenomenon of the flesh achieves a negative certainty that the death of the flesh and death of the body are different phenomena. Better we should speak of something like an "afterdeath," or come up with a more robust understanding of death as it applies to the flesh. The reader should abandon this reflection now if she expects a discussion of 'consciousness after death' to ensue.

The event of death forecloses on disclosure. We defer any exploration of the relationship between self and consciousness. Instead we maintain the location of consciousness in the flesh and body of living creatures. So our question[s]: does the givenness of death constitute the self of the recipient in the phenomenological moment? Is that constitution fatal, or does it itself impart 'mortality?' Because we do not experience death as the death of our own flesh as a counter-experience, we are open only to the experience of the death of the other as death of the flesh. This is not to say that we do not have some experience of some aspect of death as our own, and in this regard, imaginative variations of the reduction can be in play; but because of the foreclosure of the event to us, that is, the necessarily incomplete 'reportage' of this event, the reception of death has no place to project itself.

If the flesh grounds Dasein's being in the world and its authentication through its being toward death, then at least one response of the self to the givenness of death is expectation. This is the way of all flesh: to receive formation of the self from the givenness of death, not in its lethality but in its invitation to authenticity, albeit in the manner of a special case of expectation: of advent and a messianism. The givenness of death calls the self into being, the self into a formation. The community, grounded in the experience of the self as the witness of phenomenality of the death of the other, arises in response to the same call.

The death of the other discloses terror or hope; if terror then a community of magic and superstition arises. If hope, a community of advent, of a messianism of an anonymous religion, an unthematic religion, arises. The former community is poised for a pantheon, the latter for Mashiach. The former is poised for rejection of non-self; the latter is poised for the self of the other as another in the flesh that is the image and likeness of my flesh. In this manner the phenomenality of death, the event of death, recapitulates the call of a community into the event of religion in each and every death; as the 'called' community recapitulates the givenness of death in the phenomenological moment. It is through religion that expectation, the response to the givenness of death, opens upon the possibility of revelation.