Rhizomatic Reflections

Discourses on Religion and Theology

Markose

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532630859
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Fecund philosophical reflections on the conceptual metaphor "rhizome" invite us to reformulate the theological engagements today with a renewed spirit. Notably, the subaltern theological engagements make use of this new move in gleaning the fruits of heterogeneity, multiple origins, horizontality, interconnections, and intersectionality. This conscious rhizomatic move is exemplified as a constructive post-colonial move and a useful tool for meaningful subaltern resistance. This move takes us beyond the entrapment of western binary opposites to the challenging cultural and political spaces of hybridity and liminality. Uncovering the underrated cultural and political spaces of subaltern religious experience is an apocalyptic/eschatological activity. Such an apocalyptic activity demands deep theological meditation and committed attention toward the multiple and heterogeneous themes like Casteism, Vedic taxonomy, Dalit spatial discourses, sacred grove, ecological crisis, racism, globalization, neoliberalism, infinite debt, resistance, etc. Such trans-disciplinary reflections contribute to the larger body of subaltern theopoetics. As a rhizome connects any point to any other point, these themes are interconnected, and intertwined rhizomatically!

Chapter 1

Planetary Conviviality

Celebration of Redeemed Relationalities

“Each of us is the destiny of the other.”

—Jean Baudrillard1

We are living in a world of exclusions. Exclusions abound from the supposed benign globalization on the one hand and various forms of militant reactionary movements on the other. The politics of fear and exclusion seem to be evident everywhere. An inevitable violence between the self and the other is assumed, which produces a proliferation of “gated” communities. The notion of “shrinking space” and “Global Village” has become an uncritical romanticization of the homogenizing tendency of the free market culture at the expense of the local and vernacular. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between the notion of “globe” and of “planet.” Spivak lucidly puts it: “The globe is in our computer. No one lives there . . . The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system and yet we inhabit it, on loan.”2 Therefore, she declares, “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere.”3

What does it mean to be a human in this time of exclusion and violence, and what are the responsibilities endowed to us as Christians? Namsoon Kang, the famous diaspora theologian, asks: “What does it mean to continue to live as human, to remain faithful to the divine while living in a cultural, socio-geo-political, and religious world where power disparity between humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, ability, religion and so forth still prevails?”4 Active Christian living, especially in the diaspora context, involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of freeing and enlarging human possibility in everyday realities. If loving one’s neighbor as oneself, the core message of Christianity, is merely a spiritualized, romanticized rhetoric that people simply acquiesce to in the church without rigorously wrestling with the profound questions of the faith—such who is my neighbor, to whom am (are) I (we) neighbors, and what constitutes loving oneself and neighbors—then the significant value of loving one’s neighbor as oneself loses its profound meaning. Based on the Spivakian idea of planetarity, Namsoon Kang proposes the idea of “Planetary Conviviality” as a paradigm for authentic Christian existence, witness and duty in a fragmented world like ours. Planetary conviviality emphasizes the responsibility to understand and to care for those who are on this planet as our fellow beings. The biblical idea of “the Kingdom of God” is proposed as the ethico-political and theological space of planetary conviviality. A few dimensions of this idea are expanded upon below.

Epiphanies of Face

According to Immanuel Levinas, the ethical relation is fundamentally a “face-to-face relation.”5 The simple gaze at the face of the other beyond one’s name, one’s gender, and all other constructions, is transformative and divine. One’s face precedes one’s proper name and any kind of identity marker. There are several Biblical parallels for this sacred gaze at the face. It is in Jacob’s gaze at the face of Esau (Gen 33:10) that Jacob realizes the “divine” on his face. The face was a sacred epiphany to Jacob. Jesus’s gaze in the story of his encounter with Zacchaeus is another example. Jesus did not preach nor criticize him for being wrong. Instead, Jesus looked into Zacchaeus’s face. When Jesus looked at his face, a miracle, an unexpected transformation, happened (Luke 19:2–10). For Zacchaeus, as a short person and tax collector, it must have been the first time in his lifetime that someone truly looked at his face without judgement—an embracing, affirming genuinely human gaze. What Jesus did was to look at the face of Zacchaeus, and Zacchaeus also was able to see the face of Jesus. There was no hierarchy of beings between these two faces. When Jesus calls his disciples at the beginning of John’s gospel, the unconditional, face–to-face encounter leads to the act of following. Thus the primary responsibility of discipleship becomes facing the deep and the divine in the face of the other.

Radical Hospitality

The event of a face-to-face encounter is liminal in character. No one could predict the actions of this event. In the Zacchaeus story, Jesus’s first act was looking at Zacchaeus in his face, in which his first utterance was “I must stay at your house.” There was no question of conditionality. The very liminal space between hospitality and hostility turns into the absolute willing of hospitality from both Jesus and Zacchaeus. Here the seemingly self-evident border between the host and the guest becomes blurry and is made pointless through Jesus’s act of traversing the border. Zacchaeus ultimately welcomes the uninvited visitation, and Jesus offers an invitation of himself to Zacchaeus. Jesus initiates moving beyond the rigid boundaries between the home, the host and the guest, and the borders between visitation and invitation. In this event, the absolute welcome of the epiphany happens in the face of the other. Abrahamic hospitality also serves as a paradigmatic illustration of radical hospitality in the unconditional welcoming of the epiphany of the face of strangers. As a host, Abraham bowed down to the ground (Gen 18:2) to welcome the faces of the three strangers, and then served the strangers water, bread, and meat. Without calculation or pondering their identity, Abraham offers hospitality to the guests. Planetary conviviality demands such radical hospitality, which goes beyond the hierarchy of host and guest. When there is no hierarchy of beings, there would be a genuine exchange of smiles and laughter. The song “Welcome Home,” a celebrated song by New Zealand singer and songwriter Dave Dobbyn, rightly illustrates the notion of radical hospitality. Dobbyn was inspired to write the song after seeing Christchurch anti-racism protests and the sense of community that came through them. The song affirms an idea of radical hospitality: “I made a space for you.”

Redeemed Relationality

Radical hospitality redeems us to the point of celebrating our relationality and interconnectedness. The story of Zacchaeus ends with the affirmation of redeemed relationalities. Zacchaeus was inspired to celebrate redeemed relationality by exemplifying neighborly love, along with deep and radical compassion for fellow beings. Such reconfiguration of relationality is the central message of Christianity. In the Coming of Cosmic Christ, Mathew Fox calls us to reconfigure our relationship with the divine, fellow beings, and the mother earth.6 Fox challenges us to enact the resurrection of the living Cosmic Christ in our beings, and then in our actions to transform society and bring healing to all the world’s suffering, broken parts through the practices of love, imagination, peacemaking, and environmental, moral, and social justice. Fox argues that restoring the mystical mind of compassion, the Christian work of love, can bring a global renaissance to the entire world, including every aspect of society, from religion to sexuality, from peacemaking and disarmament to the mentoring of the youth. In conclusion, Fox calls for the celebration of redeemed relationality. Obviously, the remodeling and refashioning of the uneven world require planetary conviviality, the transformative love for the planet and planetary beings.

We celebrate planetary conviviality, not in a vacuum but community. The community is not a romanticized imaginative space, but a realistic, challenging space where we lose ourselves to find ourselves more meaningfully. Jean Vanier says that “Community is a terrible place. It is the place where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we begin to live full-time with others, we discover our poverty and weaknesses, our inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. While we were alone, we could believe we loved every one. Now that we are with others, we realize how incapable we are of loving, how much we deny life to others.”7 Being in the community always demands a re-positioning of ourselves for the betterment of the community. Planetary conviviality is such a revolutionary mode of understanding and reconfiguring the self, the others and the world. It is an ethic of responsibility, compassion, hospitality, as well as an ongoing exercise of interdependence in the face of violence, war, and exclusion. In the light of planetary conviviality, I would like to re-define “church” as the community which happens in an amazing serendipitous way in the midst of our everyday life with its complexities. The church is a wonderful space, where we celebrate the epiphany of marginal faces, radical hospitality, and redeemed relationality through the paradigm of Jesus Christ.

1. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 84.

2. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72.

3. Spivak, Death of Disciplin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Planetary Conviviality
• Chapter 2: Church as the Coming Community
• Chapter 3: Infinite Debt
• Chapter 4: Black and White
• Chapter 5: The Problem of History and Taxonomy in Sanskritic Traditions
• Chapter 6: Kammatipaadam as Subaltern Sthala Purana
• Chapter 7: Re-Reading Ritual
• Chapter 8: Celebrating “Hybridity” and “Memory”
• Chapter 9: “Sacred Grove”
• Chapter 10: Evolution as Grounding for Hospitality
• Chapter 11: Eco-spiriting our Religious Philosophies
• Chapter 12: Reformation as ‘Dangerous Memory’
• Bibliography