3/3 Say that God is Love
a follow up to "the texture" and "evolution of religion" posts
What follows is the final ascent, building upon The Texture and Evolution of Religion, of some writing I did in the disertation-turned-book: Theology of Consent. There’s a certain kind of momentum to these three sections that are best captured when they’re read back to back (to back), but for the sake of time, I’ve split it up this way for you, the Substack faithful.
And btw, thank you for being a part of the Substack faithful. It is healthy for me to get my writing into the world in this way, and, by faith, I believe it’s healthy for the world. You play a role in all of this with your support, your engagement, and your willingness to share. ♥️
📷: pexels, Julia Sakelli
Say that God is love. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that beauty is truth more than truth is truth. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is without need for binaries, violence, or scapegoats. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is the source of all singularities and eventualities without saying love guarantees all singularities and eventualities. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is uncontrolling but also uncontrollable. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that ingressions of possibility are love and possibilities are replete with grace. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is omnipresent; better yet, say that love is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. (Hermes-Trimegestus)
Say that love offers a solution only in as much as it offers solidarity. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is positive mimesis when it increases our estimation of consent. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is positive mimesis in that it reorients our desires around others who esteem consent. This is an evolution of religion.
Say the truth Omnipotent-religion longs to keep hidden: there are no outsiders. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love is a rock, but less to build upon and more upon which all Omnipotent-religion breaks. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love’s worst seconds are more beautiful than Omnipotent-religion’s best centuries. This is an evolution of religion.
Say that love disorganizes all Omnipotent-religion’s organizing around death. This is an evolution of religion.
Say not that Jesus died to save us; rather, say Jesus died because we killed him. It’s the crucifixion that reveals love’s great commitment and our great culpability. This is an evolution of religion.
Love is the literacy for the illiterate-religion, the language for the mute-religion, and the intelligence for the dim-witted-religion. Love is the deconstruction for the religion constructed upon sacrifice. Religion built upon non-reflexive sacricfice (i.e., coercive) carries around in its heart the corpses of past victims, the victims it deifies, the deity it calls God. It deifies the corpses of its past victims to confirm who it is. In the scapegoat, it finds the threat and remedy, the disease and cure, the reason for repentance and revival.
It’s the Omnipotent-obsessed religion that attempts to see Jesus but refuses to see its neighbor, let alone the glutton, the drunkard, the unbeliever, the cripple, the deceiver, the blind, the prostitute, the foreigner, the woman, the divorced (how about the foreign-divorced-woman?), the diseased, the tax collector, the extortionist, the eunuch (e.g., the queer, gay or transgendered), the Samaritan (e.g., the hated enemy), the violent, the nationalist, the adulterer, the criminal, the beggar, the poor, the possessed, the powerless, the child, the leper, or the least of these.
Omnipotent-religion is dead. Omnipotent-religion is compost. Omnipotent-religion is the body of the victim decomposing. Omnipotent-religion is the inevitable end of the Texture systemizing (metastasizing) over and over. Omnipotent-religion is proud of what is has given because it hides what it withholds. Love, embodied in a brown-skinned man executed in an Omnipotent-religious sponsored act of violence exposes what Omnipotent-religion withholds.
Love poses the question of evolution, the possibility of innovation, the secret heart of creativity. The answer is the end of Omnipotent-religion. The end is a beginning, and the beginning is love. The telios of Breath interacting withTexture is grace, not economics; surrender, not apologetics; beauty, not morality. That is to say that the fundamental aim is beauty.
Beyond ascetics and apologetics, is beauty. Beauty isn’t concerned with “getting” truth. It’s not a thing, an object, a rightness one possesses, a sword one swings. I imagine beauty enjoys rightness only when it resonates with goodness. Otherwise, it’s just another sword in the sheath of Omnipotence. Beauty is uninterested in such powerful objects, though I suspect this is the source of its own irrepressible power. “With beauty like that,” Adelaida told his mother in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, “one might turn the world upside down.”
Beauty is agitation turning the world upside down. It’s not an end; it’s a vector. The vector inserted into Omnipotent-religion creates space for the innovation. The innovation is love. Thank God for the kingdom of love: the risky kingdom built right in the midst of the Texture of our world. It is the indispensable context. It is present.
It has always been present.
Where else would the kingdom be?
There is no kingdom out there.
There is no out there.
Evolutionary religion is world loyalty insofar as we risk and love, but without risk and love there is no evolution. Religion, sans evolution, interacts with the most insecure parts of the Texture to form a malignant bottleneck that serves to introduce and sacralize the scapegoating mechanism. Yes, a most “effective degradation.” It’s challenging to identify because of its capacity to maintain order, though it only does so by perpetuating non-reflexive (i.e., coercive) sacrifice.
The plotline that plays out with the family in the garden, those prototypical human beings, is one version of a story explicating how the Texture overwhelmed us. It’s the founding murder of Cain killing his brother Abel that initiates the kingdom of humanity, but it’s the founding murder of Jesus, even as he calls us all brother, that reconnects and reignites something deeper: the kingdom of love.
May it be so. ✊🏼
-Was great to be with my friend, the Rev. Beth Hayward recently on Souls in Soles.
-Hey, if you’re a clergy type, chaplain, or spiritual director needing to be credentialed or just a new and more expansive theological home, check out opentable.network.
-Thank you to those who contributed to and shared posts about LoveHaiti’s back-to-school fundraiser last week. We exceeded our goal. Also, after the past week and the absurd accusations thrown about … just in case anyone was wondering … I stand with Haitians. 👇🏼
