can he sell the contradiction?

I should finish building my patio right now, but it’s raining, although the local weatherman’s “pinpoint” forecast assures me it’s not. Besides, as I drove home from my piano lesson today, I punched the buttons on my satellite radio to the “Big ’80’s”, and heard “Karma Chameleon.” That Culture Club song naturally got me thinking about Girardian theory, because once the connection rivalry/original sin sinks in, you see it everywhere, even from Boy George’s lyrics: “You’re my lover not my rival.” So where’s all this leading? To James Alison.

Alison usually draws on an opera or Broadway for his analogies, but since I’m not a gay man, I don’t often relate to show tunes. I rely on 1980’s pop radio. Boy George couldn’t “sell a contradiction” but Alison can. I liked “God and Desire,” mostly for its call to conscience and hope through confusion. He has a unique way of making me feel joyful about knowing less than I thought I did.

Alison compares our era of the Spirit to the rovesciamento of an opera, the “turning everything upside down” of the false reality of Act I that leads to Act II, wherein the characters learn to live with the real reality. His writing is engaging, like a friend talking, deceptively simple. But no simple answers. No soundbites. And after you’ve read it all, you find he’s only complicated your understanding of the nature of God and the authority of the Church.

Alison uses words like “suspect” and “glimpse” to emphasize our elusive understanding of God, and like many philosphers, he confirms that the beginning of wisdom starts with acknowledging how little we know: “What I want to suggest is that this is a complete misunderstanding, both on the part of the deniers and the affirmers, since the God to whom at least Christian, and I respectfully suggest, Jewish, theology is beholden, this God is only able to be talked about at all as the rovesciamento gets under way, that is, from within the losing of bearings of everyone involved in the opera.”

He criticizes Church authority: “Part of the problem has been that, not for the first time, it is beginning to look very much as though Church authority has been too quick to consider itself the fruit of the rovesciamento and too slow to consider that elements of itself might also be part of Act I, and in the process of undergoing the ‘turning everything upside down’ .”

Nevertheless, he’s careful to keep his criticism of the hierarchy focused on the Gay and Lesbian issue, even going out of his way at times to give a nod of respect to Tradition: “As I understand it, the extraordinary and unique thing about being a Catholic is just this finding ourselves, through no merit at all of our own, being sucked through a veil which allows us to see and participate in the beginnings of an Act II that is already well under way…”

He also sees the Church as the way to experience ”living in a world in which this strange form of presence, that of the artist formerly known as YHWH who has come amongst us giving himself the name IHS, this strange presence made alive to us through signs which constitute what we call the Church, this presence is just there, just there as stronger than anything else which can be imagined, such that the whole world is, as it were apparently unchanged, but in fact with its axis completely reversed.”

Alison is a gay Catholic priest gazing on the intersection of sexuality and Catholic theology through Girardian eyes. In a presentation for British radio, “Finding a Narrative,” he criticizes self-righteous authorities: “God squads, the world over, and in all religions, want quick decisive rulings which separate good from bad. But Jesus throws a monkey wrench in the decisive-ruling machine works. He tells them that before you can apply the word of God, you need to have dwelt under it, and sunk into its digestive juices for a long, long time, so as to make quite sure that you are not using it to sacrifice people, but instead, to show them God’s mercy and love… He’s bought time for us because he’s sent off the authorities to work out what God means by saying that He wants Mercy and not Sacrifice. Which means that they keep getting themselves caught up in knots as to whether they really can throw us out or not, whether we really are such awful people as their rule books seem to say.”

Because of statements like the one above, I don’t believe it when he claims uncertainty about his morality: “has the Spirit prodded us…into seeing more good in our enemies and being more sensitive to needs which we might satisfy as we have come to accept ourselves as Gay and Lesbian.” Or has it “been an act of self-indulgence, a darkening of our minds, a diminishment of our horizons…”

Since reading his Undergoing God, I’ve been thinking Alison is becoming a mystic. He’s keen on contradictions, complications, and ambivalence. He invites us to a deeper awareness of God, one that reveals our misperceptions about Creation and the ultimate unknowability of the Creator. Alison has begun to roam a foggy field, his perception of God seeming to me as ever more impersonal and indescribable. He wants to take God out of our stories, because our stories are about ourselves — our projected fears and rivalries and desires.

In earlier writing, he gives us a personal protagonist sort of God who “likes us,” but how can a God who is not a protagonist (as here in “God and Desire”) ”like us”? For Alison, God has become an object about which we cannot speak, the “I Am.” Maybe he reconciles this seeming contradiction when he says, “Jesus was about God coming into the world so as to give himself a Name by which we might know him” before he’s consumed in the rovesciamento, leaving us to become characters in Act II, “the idea being that we become his person, his body, over time.”

Still, Alison didn’t seem so mystical in his earlier writings. Then, he seemed to walk with a more companionable sort of God. God seems to evolve, losing none of his love (in the agape sense?) but a lot of our personal connection. He’s not “a god”, as Alison says, but “God,” who is unknowable and, therefore, in my mind, less relational. I wonder where Alison would stand on the foundation of the Trinity, as I wrote in an earlier post: is God known first through his being or through his communion? Would Alison agree with Catherine Lacugna when she says, “That God is, is secondary to who God is”?

“What are the signs of the New Creation in our midst? What is coming into being through us which is new, and solid, and for others? What is the testimony of the Spirit? How do we test the spirits? Because it is this testimony that is going to carry us through this strange, confusing stage in the history of the Church. A stage where it is genuinely not easy to tell whether, in matters related to being gay or lesbian, Church authority has been acting as a properly stern emanation of an Act II which is indeed a real upheaval of desire. Or whether we aren’t finding ourselves being given places and names of surprising honour (cf. Isaiah 56) in the Act II which Jesus inaugurated, while some parts, at least, of Church authority, thinking themselves the owners of Act II, are refusing to let go of something which was in fact an element of the cruelty and futility of Act I, and are vainly struggling against the rovesciamento which is breaking in amongst us all?” (James Alison, God and Desire)