Reading notes from Aquino interpreted eco-theologically

The following is something I realized when reading Jorge Aquino on the subject of Mestizaje in Latino/a Theology. Mestizaje, roughly understood, is the history of exploitation, conquest, and suffering experienced by Hispanics and mixed race at the hands of Eurocentric colonialism. The problem was originally framed in the context of race, but I find this ultimately too anthropocentric. Here is what I mean by that.

“I propose grounding our “mestizo” theologizing in an understanding that race is a long-historical ideological apparatus fomented to create and discipline subaltern labor in the modern capitalist world-system. The only way theology can confront this risk – which may not finally be superable, either in scholarly practice or in activism – is to frontally critique capitalism as a system of exploiting and destroying racialized bodies” (Aquino, page 285).

The thought occurs that capitalism as it exists today thrives off the exploitation of all that is not recipient of the fruits of such exploitation. Only a few benefit from the suffering of billions. Who are the billions? They are those who are not denizens of the center. They are all those who can be identified as 'other.' Race, class, species, it does not matter. The oppressed whose suffering affords the center luxury are racial and ethnic minorities, working classes, cattle, laboratory animals, ecosystems.

This is not to equate the human oppressed with the non-human oppressed in any pejorative or degrading sense. And why should it be interpreted as degrading of a human being to equate her to an animal? Both are God's creatures, expressions of life, beauty and creativity, and both bear the Imago Dei. Creatures are never "better" or "worse than," only different.

No, it is merely to point out that to those in the center, whose greed is laced with ignorance and indifference to the other, there is no difference between the human oppressed and the non-human oppressed: the migrant worker, the racial minority, the poor, they are all seen as another kind of animal, one too complicated and perceptive to be enslaved in the same way a cow or a pig might. Human oppressed are allowed to benefit, however slightly and pitifully, from the spoils of modern capitalism's plundering because they have a voice that an anthropocentric worldview recognizes. They must be enslaved differently than cattle and by much more sophisticated means. The non-human oppressed have no voice recognized by the center's anthropocentrism, but they are exploited all the same.

To borrow Aquino's words, capitalism is a system of exploitation and destroying peripheral bodies, bodies that are barred from the center, whether they are human or otherwise. Different race, different ethnicity, different species, these distinctions are irrelevant, so long as these can each be made subservient to the system, that its misguided attempt at sating human greed might be perpetuated just a little longer. Theologically speaking, this kind of capitalism is the purest form of systemic sin, as it enslaves, exploits, commodifies and cheapens all of God's creatures. Human beings are creatures too, but modern capitalism would not be viable if it considered anything sacred.

Something to think about

Human civilization is insanity in the eyes of nature. Remember that pre-socratic distinction between Physis (the laws of nature) and Nomos (the laws and conventions of humanity)? Never really got a proper resolution, and now we're living in a world of radical Nomos that takes itself WAY too seriously.

We've forgotten that Physis, not Nomos, is the real world. We've all gone collectively insane, and our society/infrastructure reflects that.

So the next time you wonder why the world's gone topsy turvy, just remember that Physis is perfectly sane. It's Nomos that has gone mad.

A Post from October 26th, 2016 about the metaphor for God as Female Lover

You can't even begin to experience God without a metaphor in mind. We all have them, whether we draw from those provided by a holy book or from our own experiences. And for many, the immanence and significance of God is best conveyed in the incarnational metaphor of God as Son, and the authoritative and righteous metaphor of God as Father.

But all metaphor breaks down at some point. People change, and with them change the means by which they relate to that divine being we so crudely call God. The changing of metaphors for God is messy business; movements divide, wars are waged, confessions are written and heresies are named. A person can describe God in a new way that is meaningful to them, only to be shut out and denounced by everyone around them. David Friedrich Strauss faced such a lonely fate.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have been struggling with what metaphors best fit God as disclosed to me. God as Father is out. My own father was abusive and largely absent. As a result of study and reflection, God as Son does not work for me either.

But there is one powerful metaphor left to me in Christianity; God as Holy Spirit, particularly, God as female, God as lover, God as sustainer, God as the object of all passion and desire. Augustine once wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, an expression of his own wandering life and corrupted desires. But I'd say that my heart and spirit both are restless until they rest in her, in her embrace, in her kiss, and in her gaze. We've spent so much time thinking of God as masculine, powerful and unshakeable, but perhaps God is also vulnerable, tender, and tremulously self-giving.

Could it be for someone like me, barring all dogma, that the Holy Spirit is the single most important person of the Trinity? No, could it be that God is the Holy Spirit alone?

Private Prisons, Black American Liberation Theology, and Overpopulation

In reading James Cone's black theology, the subject of private prisons inevitably appears. “Through private prisons," he writes, "whites have turned the brutality of their racist legal systems into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.” Crucifixion and lynching can occur in systems as well as in oppressive acts committed by human agents. That's one of the fundamental claims liberation theology makes. Sin is systemic as well as personal.

Liberation theology in an American context means not only recognizing the lynching tree in relation to the cross and the gospel, but also in identifying and working to overthrow the oppression of a criminal justice system that objectifies human beings as products in an emerging industrial enterprise.

The haunting thought I'm left with is this: human overpopulation has grim anthropological consequences. Fill the earth with human beings, some rich and most poor, and the gaze of corporate entities will inevitably fall upon the poor with terrifying indifference and detached avarice: in greed, they will look upon a vast field of human beings and think to themselves “This is a crop waiting to be harvested. This is a market waiting to be tapped. This is a world of objects from which I may profit.” The preciousness of every human life falls to the wayside as people are slowly cut down like stalks of wheat to be processed and sold. Under the pretense of even the slightest infraction, the black person is cut from the earth of their own lives and sold to private prisons that profess to "correct and reform." But when literally millions of people are behind bars, many of them unjustly so, how much correction and reformation could there be occurring in reality? You don't correct or reform products.

In a world where humans are everywhere and more are born every day, they will inevitably be seen as little more than resources for the ever-growing corporate bodies that choke the skyline.

In a world where the accumulation of capital is Lord and human beings number in the billions, human life will be monetized. That is the consequence of systemic sin.

To borrow from Orwell, if you want an image of the future, imagine a field of boots, stamping on a field of human faces, hauling them up from the dirt, and selling them to someone else to stamp on....forever.

The Intersection of Suicidal Depression and Thirsting for God and for Meaning

A chronically depressed person has to fight to stay alive. A person seeking God has to fight to for every metaphor, every image, every incarnation. One is not enough; grip it strong enough, make it static, and it will fade; listen to a song often enough and it will lose its power to move you.

I'm on a journey, in a struggle to reach the next oasis. Fighting off the desire to give up is, in many ways, analogous to thirsting for new spiritual food.

If I lie in my bed all day, I'm not living. If I stop seeking after the mystery that is God, I will die.

Existence is thus characterized in terms of survival; we struggle to find subsistence. Physis and Nomos. Living in Nomos, living in our artificial world, we can find food, but we still have to struggle to provide for ourselves in terms of meaning, purpose, and new images by which to commune with God. That is, perhaps, our primal connection with the reality of Physis, despite our addiction to Nomos. We have made food abundant, but we still hunger. We in the Global North have seen to our material needs. Great. But we have spiritual and emotional and social needs. Have we seen to those? Can we see to those as long as we are living in the artificial reality of Nomos?

Feuerengel

Feuerengel, bitte lass mich nicht allein,
Ohne dich kann ich nicht sein.