The Raven Foundation

I love Oregon.  I grew up there.  Rain is in my blood.  Indeed, I have webbed feet … err … rather a beaver tail.

So, yesterday, my well meaning Chicago friends said to me with great excitement, “Go Ducks!”

“I hate the Ducks.”  I replied.  “I hope they lose … Bad.”

You see, I’m a Beaver fan.  My grandpa went to OSU, my mom went to OSU, my brother went to OSU, and my in-laws went to OSU.  So, I grew up a Beaver fan and I remain a Beaver fan.  And, when it comes to sports, I don’t think people should be allowed to pick and choose.  I say you get one or the other.  I love black and orange.  Yellow and green, on the other hand, are the ugliest colors on the face of the planet.  What was up with those shoes?!?  I still have a headache.

It may sound nasty to you, but I’ll admit it.  I took delight in seeing the Ducks lose last night.  And those shoes only increased my abhorrence for those ugly webbed footed waterfowls.  After they lost, I thought about posting something like this to my Facebook page:

Ya know, my parents told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, so . . . I feel really, really bad for Duck fans.  I mean, really, to lose the game in the last three seconds with a field goal like that.  I feel your pain.  Really, I do.  And to think, you had the ball in the red zone three times and couldn’t finish.  Shame, isn’t it?  Really a shame.  You deserved to win.  You were sooooo close!!!  But now you are 12-1.  Second place is not the first loser – no matter what anyone says.  Oh well.  There’s always next year…

But I decided I’m not that petty.  But I’m just petty enough to post it on my blog.

Okay.  I admit that I’m a bit irrational when it comes to sports.  Try as I might, I can’t become a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan.  For me, baseball is all about the Mariners.  Unless the Mariners are having a bad year (which is usually the case), and then I root against the Yankees.  I have a natural aversion to all Yankee paraphernalia.  It makes me want to vomit. 

Yes, yes.  I’m irrational.  But I wonder how something like my sports mentality might seep into other aspects of life.  It comes down to identity.  The easiest way to form a strong sense of identity is to be against someone else.  For example, I’m a Beaver fan, which means I must hate the Ducks and take pleasure in their loss.  Well, if I’m a Republican, does that mean I must hate the Democrats?  Should my top goal be to make them lose elections?   (Of course, the Dems easily form identity in the same way.)  How often do we get in a rivalry with our neighbors that mirrors Clark Griswold’s enmity with Todd and Margo Chester in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?  Or a rivalry with our in-laws that mirrors Greg Focker and Jack Byrnes in the Focker movies?

So, yes, accuse me of being irrational.  Accuse me of being a sore loser.  (The Beavers and the Mariners are perpetual cellar dwellers.)  But before you get all self-righteous on me, perhaps this identity formation of being over and against another infects your life, too.  I’m sure there is a way out of this identity formation trap.  There is probably a way to form an identity of openness and acceptance of others, even those we don’t like.  But, for the moment at least, I feel really good rooting against the Ducks.

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_{Please forgive the "JesusSavesAtCitibank" in the bottom right hand corner of the video.  I don't know what that's about.}

I’ve appreciated Christopher Hitchens for a number of years now.  He has done a very good and admirable job of deconstructing poor theology – a theology based on a vengeful god of wrath.  While I disagree with his conclusions, his work in this regard is superb and engaging. 

Sadly, Hitchens was recently struck with esophageal cancer.  He discussed his experience with cancer on Anderson Cooper 360.  What interests me in the interview is the way Hitchens discusses prayer.  Since his condition has become public, many Christians have been praying for Hitchens.  Like much of Hitchens’ work on religion, I find his response to those prayers both thoughtful and a bit confused: 

Cooper: Just one more thing on the prayer group thing: Do you appreciate the gesture?

Hitchens:  Oh, yes. Yeah, and often it comes from people whom I’ve had debates in the past on religion in their churches or in their synaguogues.  People who found me a very fierce antagonist and, um, think that in some way, some bits of me are worth saving.  So, no, I take that kindly, of course.  No, I wouldn’t want to be churlish about any expression of concern, but I can’t keep a slightly pittying tone out of my voice that anyone would think that the natural order, containing as much mystery and immensity as it does, can be changed with incantation.

Hitchens comes back to the topic of prayer at the end of the segment shown above:

Hitchens:  Hence, the refusal of prayer, which is a form of self-pity and self-indulgence.  It’s as if the universe is all about you and response to your entreaties.  I hardly think so. 

Here’s what I find thoughtful in Hitchens’ discussion: Prayer is often used as a bargaining tool in a desire to manipulate God.  In a profound article on prayer, one of my favorite theologians, James Alison, refers to this notion of God as “a sort of Las Vegas slot machine, full of amazing bounty, but inclined to be retentive.  So prayer is the art of conjuring this capricious divinity, by exactly the right phrases, repeated exactly the right number of times, into parting with some of its treasure.”  This is God the Great Slot Machine.  A god that is manipulated by humans certainly is not great.

Here’s what I find confused in Hitchens’ discussion: He begins by saying that he appreciates those who are concerned about him and praying for him.  Yet, he ends by claiming that prayer is necessarily saying “the universe is all about you and response to your entreaties.”

I’m left asking, which one is it?  Is prayer fundamentally about altruistically praying for others-even those others we find to be “fierce antagonists”?  Or is prayer fundamentally about narcissistically putting one’s self at the center of the universe?

Prayer, like all of life, is fundamentally about desire.  Mimetic anthropology claims that we “desire according to the desire of another.”  We see this in our modern consumer culture, where we are told that the universe does revolve around our desires and so we must purchase that thing in order to satisfy that desire.  Well, that thing can never satisfy our desire, because that is a false pattern of desire.  It is false because it claims that we are the center of the universe.

Here’s where Hitchens goes wrong.  Prayer necessarily means that you are not the center of the universe.  Someone else is.  Prayer is not about manipulating God, but about inviting God to indwell our bodies that our desires might be transformed. For Christians, the God who transforms our desires is the God who is Love (John 4:16).  This is the God who doesn’t selfishly put God’s Self at the center of the universe, but is radically concerned for the universe, and everything in it.  This is why Jesus tells his followers, “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you” (Luke 6:28) and “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:44-45).

Here Jesus invites the transformation of our desire, so that desire is based on love and what is good for the other – even desiring what is good for one’s enemy.  As James Alison says, this is not about becoming a doormat, but about courageously and arduously stepping “into a pattern of desire such that you are not over against [your enemies], but are able to be, as God is, for them, towards them, without being their rival.”

Indeed, prayer is about receiving God’s Love for us, but it is also about participating in God’s abundant love for world. 

Frank Rich recently wrote an article in the New York Times entitled, “Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian.”  The Smithsonian’s latest exhibit is called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Rich discusses the Smithsonian’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly” due to protests by certain religious groups.  Wojnarowicz, an artist who happened to be gay, died from Aids in 1992.  Rich claims that in the video, “A crucifix is besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on.”

One can understand why some Christians might be offended and shamed by ants crawling over an image of Jesus nailed to a cross.  Rich names a few Christians who have castigated the Smithsonian for displaying the video, and he asserts that there is a homophobic agenda behind the criticism.  He wrote, “The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America.”  

I’m sympathetic to Rich’s point, but I fear that it could lead to some unintended consequences.  The problem is that everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else.  Everyone feels like a victim.  Rich points his finger at those he calls “gay bashers” while those he calls “gay “bashers” point their fingers at the desecration of what they hold to be most pure and most sacred.

Victims are fashionable in our culture because victims claim the right to have the moral authority.  Western culture has a tendency to glorify victims, which can be a good thing.  But even good things can easily turn bad.  Because of their moral authority, victims can justifiably claim the right to punish their victimizers.  Unfortunately, this only creates a cycle of victimization, where everyone feels like they have been “bashed” by someone and are thus justified to “bash” back.  There are real victims in our world, no doubt, but how do we stop this cycle of victimization?  How do we become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem?

Ironically, the best answer I know comes from the cross.  Jesus, whom Christians believe to be the innocent victim, did not suffer passively (or impassively) on the cross.  Rather, while he suffered his ignominious death at the hands of his victimizers, he offered divine forgiveness in return.  His victimizers thought he was a great threat to their way of life, to their religious purity.  Like many of the Jews that came before him (and after him) Jesus challenged the religious and political establishment that was based on purity codes that demanded those who threatened their political or religious purity must be sacrificed or excluded.  And that’s partly why Jesus went to the cross.

The other reason Jesus went to the cross was to reveal what divine love is all about.  Jesus reveals that God has nothing to do with those acts of religious and political violence based on purity codes; rather, Jesus shows that God takes human violence upon God’s Self and offers forgiveness in return.  The reason that the cross remains a scandal today is because in Christ God suffers a shameful death.  God takes the place of shame on the cross because it is where God is bashed by humans.

Unfortunately, that’s not the God that humans want.  For we want God to be the avenger, the one who excludes the victimizers in favor of the victims.  But that’s not the God Jesus gives us.  The God that Jesus gives us is the One who offers forgiveness and peace to his victimizers after suffering a painful, and shameful, death.  Anything other than forgiveness and peace would mean that God is simply the Supreme Victimizer.  

The Smithsonian issue is obviously not about ants.  It’s about modern purity codes that, when violated, lead to a sense of shame.  If something threatens our political or religious sense of purity, we must clean things up by excluding those whom we find threatening. 

But from the perspective of the cross, God does not demand sacrifice and exclusion.  Instead, God offers forgiveness.  And I want to say that Rich’s sentiment is partly right.  Homosexuality is still an important issue in the United States.  Fortunately, Christians are growing out of our irrational religious fear of impurity that leads to the shameful exclusion of homosexuals and we are growing into a Christ-like love and forgiveness that leads to acceptance and inclusion.  (For example, the open and affirming movement in the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.)  But if Rich is leading us to bash the gay bashers, then I have problems.  For self righteous bashing and exclusion only leads to more self righteous bashing and exclusion. 

The only way out of this cycle is to embrace the ants scurrying on the cross and live in the divine spirit of forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation.