The Monstrosity of the Christ-Child

“The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

[from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats]

         As we round the last corner of the semester and plunge full throttle toward the Yuletide, we are cheered by many types of Advent themes. Nearly every one deserves to be reveled in; however, we oftentimes too easily fixate on either the Christ’s divinity or his material humanity. Both of these need to be stressed, because different contexts need to be reminded of Christ’s wholeness in different ways. But I think we need to backpedal from an easy hope, a cheap hope. We must remind ourselves that much of the time, we act as though couldn’t care less about redemption, about reconciliation, about hope. At least, that is my story. My forgetfulness of the possibility of restoration is matched only by my indifference about the matter. Today, I want to awaken the primal feeling of awe at the fact that God become flesh that we might become like God.
I am not advocating a gospel of fear, but trying instead to recall the trembling I have had before the face of righteousness. I can only do justice to this God-awe-fullness by comparing it to absolute horror and revulsion. When the gospel does manage to break through the surface of my consciousness, it often disintegrates into boredom. This malaise is my soul’s defense against the bombshell which is Christ’s life-death-resurrection. I cannot stomach the love and amazing grace embodied in the natal form of Christ – a wretch like me can only retch at the smell of the manger. The stable destabilizes me. If hope would only leave me alone, I can make my tepid peace with the fragments of this city, and I can avoid the strangling sensation of longing for redemption.
           If hope never arrives – never advents – then I will never have to change and leave the shadows. My body lives in tension throughout the Advent/ure: while my head may know that the arrival of the Christ bears glad tidings of great joy for all people, my guts scream out that he will undo all the nothingness that I have assimilated to. What will be born on Christmas is not something which I can honestly praise – I have embedded myself so firmly in the mould of the world. I shudder with the powers and principalities at the name of the Christ child, because he threatens to strip my own identity from the tentacles Sheol which I drape myself in securely. I betray my longing for gospel-redemption with every thought, desire and action which secretly hopes that the hope-creature will be stillborn, dead on arrival. Abort this hope-creature, lest I cry out with Isaiah, “I am undone!” (6:5).
           Hope is not a promise – it is a warning. The prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 (“the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Immanuel”) is not something for an unjust world to long for – it can’t, because the redemption which the God-child bears will make all things change. He will alienate us from our alienation. In terms of its visceral impact on our hearts and our guts, Mary’s baby should feel to us more like Rosemary’s baby.

“To them [the vampires], he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, 

a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with…

He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, 

he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed

…A new terror born in death.”

[I Am Legend by Richard Matheson]

            I have long since assimilated to the ecology of death and despair. My heart’s twin pulses attack one another: my longing for hope is violently countered by my longing for the corrosive quotidian. I don’t want that hope. Shove it back into its uterine cocoon. Suture the creature to the walls of the womb. For if this god-creature is unleashed upon our planet, there is no power in heaven nor on earth which can pry its love-clutch from the crevices of creation. In an upside-down world, the one who stands right-side-up is the gestating Christ-fetus, bobbing like a gyroscope inside its host-mother.
            When the gridwork of constellations sagged downward, bending toward the Bethlehemic birthing-trough, astrologers from the East read this event in the stars. Once their message reached the king, he responded as we all do to the news of the coming coronation: the king launched a infanticidal spree against the boys of the region (Matthew 2:16). He knew the consequences of what was prophesied – he tried to exterminate the monster, lest the monster change everything.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.”

[From “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot]

            Eliot’s Magi know that the death-birth of the Thing called Christ is a singularity point, which collects the crushing weight of the distortion-driven universe into infinite density. The god-creature sucks into his very being every last drop of sin and every last drop of righteousness in the cosmos. Advent is the process of being sucked into the black hole of rebirth – and who knows what we may come out as on the other side? I am horrifically ambivalent about the horror of this vortex – I wouldn’t choose it, though part of me still desperately longs for it. There is nothing in my imagination which would choose to encounter such rebirth pangs. By the time Advent rolls around, I am depressed and weary from habituating myself to sarx, the resurrection-denying body-decay – and yet, I am confronted by a historical infant with a paradox which threatens me with absolute transformation.
              Thrown into being in the uterine deapths of a virgin teenager, the god-creature feeds off of utter humanness. It adopts the motions of a human child. It patterns its brainwaves after the mental frequencies of humanity. It guzzles umbilical nourishment, and makes itself into humanity. It is not made to sin. It is made to become the very likeness of sin, so that in it, we might become the very likeness of this god-creature (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV). As Athanasius said, it has turned itself into us in order to turn us into it. What B-movie monster could menace humanity more horrifically than that?

World War Too Much?

Okay, at long last, I’m finally back from my sabbatical (also known as “job search”, “working”, “getting married”, etc.). I have several topics that I probably should be writing about: first and foremost, I have to pretend to have a final word on the discussion of ethical-ontological complexity begun in the last post. I also have been planning an epic series of posts exploring the relationship of the Bible to myth, an invigorating task which neither concedes to the cold rationality of demythologizing liberal Protestantism nor to the reductive easy answers of Bible belt fundamentalism. But instead, I'm just going to write about what's on my mind. This topic has been ping-ponging around my noggin for many moons, and I'm eager to share it with you. What I'm alluding to is, of course, America's obsession with World War II.

Two years ago, my roommate convinced our suitemates and me to shave our heads. I was interested because my hairline is retreating (albeit so slowly that it thinks that I don't notice) and he was once a swimmer (and thus shaved every hair on his body). Now, I usually wore a cap, so it wasn't a huge difference anyway. But the weekend after we chopped it all off, the two of us attended a lecture by Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor. Neither of us had thought about the fact that, without caps, the two of us sitting side by side at such an anti-racist event painted us as Neo-Nazis. Suffice to say, security was all over our butts. It was embarrassing, but I'd like to think it makes for a good story.

Anyway, the point is, we didn't really have to attend this lecture…and I'm not just saying that because it wasn't for class credit. No, I’m saying that our generation has been born and bred (and bored?!) on the Holocaust and World War II. There was nothing at the Elie Wiesel speech which I hadn't heard before. (Granted, I still furiously scribbled notes, but that owes more to a personal quirk than to the novelty of his ideas). I'm convinced there is, quite literally, nothing new to say about the subject. Let me spin a brief yarn (yarn briefs…cozy?!) of how WWII has informed American culture by looking at movies:

At first glance, it seems utterly baffling that seemingly half of the historical movies that do come out (at least the war ones) tend to focus on the WWII era. If this was the 1960s, this might makes sense (actually, probably not, given the pacifist tectonic shift of that revolutionary decade). But it's not as if the sequel to the War to End All Wars had the last say on national violence in the previous century: obviously, we've seen a spurt of Vietnam-related media, mostly in the late 70s and early 80s - but we seem to associate that with the zeitgeist of the 60s counter-culturalism. I am not aware of a single Korean war movie besides M*A*S*H (which was a thinly-veiled commentary on Vietnam). It’s true that the Civil War has gained some traction, but I’m convinced that much of its appeal rides on the coattails (or saddle) of The Western, the gold standard for America’s myths. And for all of its eccentric heroes, philosophizing, and all-around momentousness, the American Revolution has offered only the John Adams miniseries and a second-rate musical (namely, 1776) as serious contenders against WWII’s cinematic hegemony. There was a War of 1812? What’s all this about the French and Indians? No, there's something markedly different about the cultural domination of WWII.

Basically, WWII has entered the halls of mythology - not the Johnny Appleseed variety, but the Trojan War category. Interestingly, it seems that the same archetypal reverence for the state which seduced German citizens into flocking to support the Third Reich, rears its head in the ready-made sentimentality for the good ol' days when American men were men and women molded bullets for them. It offers a ready-made panoply of demigods and demons: it is the palette for the aesthetically lazy. It serves as the staging ground for the last gasp of clear-cut ethical decisions for the American public (so the story goes, although many German-American immigrants returned to fight in the Fatherland, suggesting that our collective conscience has never broadcast in black and white, as it were). Even today, the idea of “Nazis” and “Hitler” are not only the go-to concepts in ethics classes: they are literally the only phenomena which our postmodern culture dares to unflinchingly label as “evil”. I daresay that in the last half-century, all the derision cast upon the entire dark pantheon of people and movements which previous ages condemned without a second thought, has been subsumed into the Nazi apparatus. Only “the Krauts” and their pate-shaven successors have been solid enough archetypes to bear the load of wickedness. Only Nazis have no excuse.

Now, a case can be made that American conservatives, who defined themselves for at least four decades against the Red Menace, managed to reserve some degree of moral indignation and judgment toward Communism alongside fascism. But their strategy is almost always to portray the Communists as akin to Nazis. Thus, Nazism is always the most obvious yet most pervasive type of evil, and is therefore the measuring stick by which all other movements and actions and people must be gauged. In the 20th century cast of archetypes, there simply is no room for more than a single fundamental villain, and the fact that no one can ever again grow a toothbrush mustache without a severe case of irony or misanthropy is testament to Nazism's reserved parking space in American mythology.

There are two sides to the coin here, both equally disturbing. On the one hand, WWII (okay, and its predecessor) once again woke up the Western World to the reality of evil (okay, evil is a privation and not a reality, but I digress). Liberal protestant theology and the promise of progressive politics had seemed to forget that unpleasant aspect of our nature and cosmos, but what the first war failed to call to mind regarding desolation and sin, the second did with a vengeance (literally, given the Third Reich’s thirst for reclaiming power). So, we remembered that we are still pretty rotten, to say the very least. So that’s good (er, as it were…). But on the other hand the moment it (the other hand, as it were) opened its fist to reveal the reality of evil, it snapped it shut again on the one towering figure whom embodied the whole of the Axis’ ideological bloodlust: Herr Hitler. So, evil exists once again, but only in the guise of Nazism. This simultaneously ignores all the other manifestations of death and iniquity (lust, cowardice, selfishness, and the lot) but it also reduces the one true application of the label “evil” (namely, Nazism) to a tired insult thrown around by middle-schoolers bemoaning how hard a grader their English teacher is! The moral lessons of WWII are a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, at best.

I just watched Indiana Jones (one of my first eternal loves) with my wife, and was disappointed that the Hitler book signing scene didn’t give me chills like the first handful of times I watched it. Maybe it has something to be with the fact that I was young back then, or that I’ve seen it too many times now, or that the TV was far away and unimposing. Whatever the case, though, the WWII mythos seemed significantly less immanent and moving in this viewing. If for no other reason, I wish that America would get over its WWII fetish long enough that I can be enraptured by Indy’s Nazi-trouncing once again.