Dukkha in Christianity

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In this post, I’m going to—for now—sidestep the issue of how I think the Christian should consider other religions in relation to her own. Instead, I want to talk about how the study of the theology of other religions can shed insight of our own Christian theology.

I’m going to do that with the specific example of my encounter with Dukkha in Buddhism. Dukkha is a Sanskrit word often translated as “suffering.”

Although Buddhist thought sometimes considers suffering in a broad sense, it has a rich vocabulary for talking about different types of suffering. There is dukkha-dukkha, “true suffering” the suffering that comes from injury, illness, the aging process, emotional hurt and painful experiences; what we tend to think of when we talk about suffering. But there is also viparinama-dukkha, the suffering that arises from the transient and changing nature of things. Also sankhara-dukkha, what the Germans would call weltschmerz, the suffering caused by a knowledge of the way things should be compared to the way things are.

It is the specific interrelated categories of viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha that most interest me.

Sankhara-dukkha interests me because it points to a fundamental and primal human desire for that which is perfect. Complete happiness cannot be found in this world not simply because the world is not perfect, but because those fleeting glimpses of perfection are so rarely seen and dissipate so quickly, leaving us struggling to remember the sensation they caused. This inherent desire for perfection is our desire for God, our desire for participation in the Kingdom of God, our desire for paradise, our desire for perfection. Naturally within us there is a desire to “become perfect as our father in heaven is perfect” and to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. That we do not readily achieve those things causes us to suffer in a deeply existential way. At the same time, our faith in a God who has promised these things to us brings us hope, from hope, joy. This dramatic tension is surely one of Chesterton’s paradoxes, where Christianity gets “over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious” (from Orthodoxy).

While sankhara-dukkha made me think about God and theology, viparinama-dukkha actually opened up scripture to me. In hearing about viparinama-dukkha, I came closer (I think) to an understanding of Jesus’s admonitions about material wealth.

As is clear from some of my other posts, I believe that we take many of Jesus’s teachings as proscriptive when they’re really meant to be descriptive. We hear a command when Jesus intends to teach, when awareness might do far more for our obedience than authority.

When Jesus warns that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mark 10:25, Matthew 19:24), the thought of viparinama-dukkha changed my reading. Viparinama-dukkha destroys the happiness that we think we have in material things. Upon acquiring material wealth, we must necessarily lament its transient nature, fear for its loss, and suffer emotionally when it is damaged. Thus, our enjoyment is incomplete.

Viewed through this lens, we can see Jesus’s statements about material wealth as a description of the same idea captured in the Buddhist term. It is not necessarily that wealth in and of itself is evil.[1] On the other hand, the pursuit of material wealth has significant consequences if one is not careful. Such a pursuit is the chasing after a joy that will never be complete because of its transience, a false joy that leads us only to seeking more in hopes of recovering that fleeting joy first found. Worse, viparinama-dukkha has a strong propensity to lead to sin. The fear of losing material things has led many a man to his perdition when he finds the lengths to which he will go to cling to wealth. Our own times are replete with examples, from the common criminal to the Bernie Madoffs of the world.

And so we find in Buddhism—a religion as far from Christianity as it might be possible to be—ideas of value to our own understanding of our faith and the world. No religion can shy away from the problem of suffering (the field of theodicy is devoted to said problem), so why confine ourselves to our own tradition and history when exploring an issue that is so present in our everyday lives?

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[1] Chaucer’s quotation is often misremembered as “Money is the root of all evil,” though it is actually “The love of money is the root of all evil. The original is found in Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner’s Prologue, where it appears in Latin, “Radix malorum est cupidatis.”

Useless People and Worthless People

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I recently spent some time hanging around downtown Houston, and one of the things that struck me was the strange mix of feelings I had about the homeless, the strong desire to be compassionate combined with a latent unease at their presence and, of course, the shame that accompanies such a feeling.

I often tell people, mostly jokingly, that I don’t really like people very much. As K reminds me, it’s a horrible thing for a Christian to say. Even more, it isn’t true. Part of the reason I say such things is that I’m an introvert and especially uncomfortable in large crowds or gatherings. Really, though, what I mean to say is that I love people, but I find myself frequently disappointed by humanity as a whole.

Seeing and interacting with the homeless brought to the forefront of my mind my own complicity in the corporate horribleness of humanity at large. But it also made me think about the way society tells us we should view people and the way that Christ tells us that we should view people.

At least in Western (and specifically American) society, we are taught to commoditize people, to value them based on their productivity. What is the first question you’re inclined to ask a stranger after learning her name? “What do you do for a living?” It’s a shortcut to a determination of pecking order. We could just as well ask, “How much money do you make?” or “How important are you?” or “Where do you rank in the social hierarchy?”

We live in a society that believes that success means the accumulation of personal property–especially the ownership of more home than a typical nuclear family could practically use. We hear about “boomerang” children with jocular disdain and live in a society where a stay-at-home parent must defend himself from accusations of “having it easy” because he does not occupy a place in the standard workforce.

In short, we see useless people as worthless people. This, I think, is what gives us trepidation about the homeless: we fear associating ourselves with people whom we view as worthless. Hence the common fear about giving a beggar money that he’ll only use on booze and drugs–it’s the primal fear of wasting resources, the selfish fear of losing personal worth in giving away that for which we’ve worked.

Jesus does not think this way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I don’t need to provide specific scriptures for you to know that he called poor men to be his disciples, that he spent much of his time with the downtrodden of the lowest social classes, and that he warned repeatedly about the dangers of worldly wealth (see the post on Dukkha in Christianity).

But, there are scriptures that describe people as “worthless.” In the old testament, we have the Hebrew word בליעל (bĕliya`al; Strong’s H1100).[1] The New Testament gives us several words that have been translated to “worthless.”[2] Ultimately, though, I think that a word study on “worthless” in the scriptures is unhelpful. For one, this is a lexicographical or semiotic inquiry more than a theological one. More important, the words used in Greek and Hebrew seem to fall prey to the same conflation of profitability and worth—this issue is not a modern one.

One important thing that struck me from reviewing the words translated as “worthless” is that the use of these words tends to describe moral or spiritual worth rather than practical worth. Those described as “worthless” are those who have fallen away from righteousness or those who destroy rather than create. From this point of view, the words provide an important soteriological reminder—our salvific worth comes from the grace of God’s intervention within us and not from ourselves (compare with Romans 3 as cited below).

Instead of focusing on specific words, though, I think it’s best to focus on God’s assignment of worth to individuals. In both the Old Testament and the New, we see that God’s measure of worth is, at the very least, more complicated than what one produces. We commonly speak in Christianity about how God chooses the unexpected or seemingly unfit to become leaders—the younger son David, the stuttering Moses, etc.

If this is our tack on the subject, we focus the potential usefulness of a person as a sign of worth. A person who is in some way available to be transformed and used by God has a worth apart from her current contribution to society. In this way, all people have worth, because all may be—knowingly or unknowingly—servants of the Lord.

Even this thought gives me some trepidation, though. This again reduces human worth to our ability to do or produce—on a cosmic scale to be sure, but it nevertheless associates the value of a human with his action as an agent for God and not his identity. Despite our common imagery of the sovereignty and lordship of God—which I do not discount—it is also clear that our God is a deeply relational one. If the heart of Christian doctrine is that God created out of love and a desire for relationship beyond God’s self (which I argue is correct), then it is axiomatic that real worth comes from relationship and love rather than use.

The scriptures support this. We see this clearly in the first part of Psalm 139 (before it turns to asking God to slay one’s enemies!), where the psalmist exclaims “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” (Psalm 139:14) and describes how God knew him from his very creation. We see it so profoundly shown in the Incarnation of Christ and in his treatment of the least and the last, his willingness to spend time with sinners, his healing of those who produce nothing for society. We see this in the very nature of a triune God, where in three parts God is in relationship with God’s very self!

In the beginning, God created man (and woman) and pronounced them good. The Fall may necessitate our redemption, but it does not change the fact that God created us to be good, not just to do good.

As we relate to other human beings, then, we ought to take an ontological view of worth rather than a teleological one—each person is created to be a child of God, a unique and individual creation whose very existence is wonderful, to be celebrated and protected.

Are there useless people in the world? Under the secular description, we must admit that there are—people who take more than they give. Should we assign blame to such uselessness? That depends heavily on circumstances if we are to judge at all. We might also say that there are useless people in a spiritual sense—those who seek to destroy, to tear down, to lead astray rather than to create, to build up, to love. I would stress, though, that we ought to think that thought only in terms of the abstract and in the evaluation of our own selves; to do otherwise would certainly attempt to judge the spiritual value of another, something that we should humbly acknowledge is to be reserved to God alone.

Are there worthless people? No. The work of Jesus Christ clearly shows us that all people have intrinsic worth and we ought to love them, even when doing so is difficult or uncomfortable.

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[1] The word is often translated as “worthless,” but carries with it connotations of “wickedness” and “destruction.” So we have:

(1) “worthless fellows” in Deuteronomy 13:13 who lead others to serve foreign gods

(2) “base” thoughts that lead to sin in Deuteronomy 15:9

(3) “worthless fellows” who attempt to rape a sojourner in echo of the Sodom and Gomorrah episode in Judges 19:22 and 20:13

(4) “worthless men” throughout 1st and 2nd Samuel

(5) torrents “of destruction” in 2 Samuel 22:5

(6) “destruction”, “deadly things” and “worthless” things in the Psalms

and a smattering of other “worthless men” who are evildoers. Note also that the Belial is the name of a demon (or the devil) in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocrypha.
[2] Curiously–or perhaps accentuating the conflation of use and worth–Strong’s gives the definition of ἀχρεῖος (achreios; Strong’s G888) as “useless”, despite its being translated as in Matthew 25:30 as “worthless (servant)” and in Luke 17:10 as “unworthy (servant).”

The verb form of the same word (Strong’s G889) is used in Romans 3:12 in Paul’s citation of the Psalms that “all are worthless.” Both G888 and G889 also carry the possible translation of “unprofitable.”

 

Review: Pawn

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Pawn by Aimée Carter

Audible Narration by Lameece Issaq

We find ourselves at some time in the near future, after the fall of the United States led to the rise of the Hart family as the dictators over an America subject to economic collapse and resource shortages. As a result, all citizens take a test on the day that they turn seventeen. The results of the test determines their number—one through six, with sevens being reserved for the Hart family—which thus determine their futures. Fours occupy the middle class, with fives and sixes serving as the administrators of the government and management of production. Threes serve as skilled or semi-skilled labor in maintenance jobs and other services needed to keep the country operating. Twos live in poverty, working those jobs too dangerous or taxing to give to anyone of a higher number. The ones—well, let’s just say that no one wants to be a one. The availability of goods and services is restricted by a citizen’s number, and those who break the law or attempt to buck the system are sent “elsewhere.”

Into this situation comes “extra” (second child) seventeen-year-old Kitty Doe. She has just taken her test and had her result, a three, tattooed and scarified on the back of her neck as with all other citizens. She has orders to travel from Washington, D.C. to Denver, where she will serve in sewer maintenance for her entire life. She struggles to find a way to ignore her fate, hoping to hold out for at least a month so that her boyfriend Benji can take his test and they can figure out a way to stay together (it being expected that Benji will be a six).

By a strange twist of events, Kitty finds herself inducted into the circle of the Hart family, where she becomes a pawn in the interfamilial strife of the family’s members. As a result, she discovers that little of what government tells the citizenry to ensure their docility is true. She has a choice: fight for the people or go along with her puppetmasters to ensure her own safety—and the safety of those she loves.

Pawn is a young-adult (read: teenager) novel. As you’ve probably surmised, it bears a striking resemblance to The Hunger Games—post-apocalyptic America ruled by a dictatorship, a female protagonist with a feline-sounding name being forced to choose whether to become part of the system or struggle to end it and, of course, questions of romance and love with several potential suitors. I believe that this also coincides with much of the Divergent series, but I know too little about those works to be sure.

I would say that Pawn is slightly more adult in tone than The Hunger Games, as early in the story Kitty seeks to sell her virginity to the highest bidder at a brothel in a plan to make ends meet until she and Benji can find a more-permanent solution to her “three.”

I found Pawn to be an enjoyable read (or listen, as the case may be). Kitty and the members of the Hart family are well-developed, with complex and sometimes conflicting motivations sometimes driving them to do the unexpected. Over time, as Kitty discovers them, we learn the history and secrets of the Harts, seeing just how deep the deception, manipulation, and spite goes. The close proximity of the themes and general thrust of the plot to The Hunger Games series ultimately does not detract from the novel, as plenty of unexpected plot twists and a focus on character interactions gives Pawn a different place within the subgenre of (perhaps Feminist?) Teen Dystopian Drama that both works occupy.

The politics of the nation and the far-reaching consequences of the actions taken by Kitty and the Harts remain largely on the outskirts of the story, almost a MacGuffin to drive the more important familial politics upon which the story turns. By keeping things focused on the personal conflicts, the story manages to largely brush aside its lack of development of a believable setting.

My only other significant criticism is that Kitty’s male “love interests” (it should be mentioned that the romantic subplot of this novel provides an undercurrent rather than a central force) remain less developed than the other characters. Lennox Creed, who plays an essential role within the plot, never really gave me enough to understand him or believe his motivations. Benji proved even worse for me—Carter writes him such that he is uninteresting and of little consequence to the story except as someone who Kitty desperately wants to protect. The fact that Issaq voices him as an oafish dullard doesn’t help.

The characters of Lennox and Benji are forgivable if they are meant to serve as a critique of the writing of female characters by male authors in similar tropes of fiction (i.e., the need to save the girlfriend, who appears to be entirely helpless to take care of herself). I can’t be sure, however, that such a pointed critique was intended and that they are not simply sloppily written.

Pawn remains at least moderately interesting throughout its twists-and-turns, though I will not be spending any time on the rest of the series. For a teen audience, I think that this is a solid book that bridges the gap between the “classic” literature that most of us studied in high-school and the ultimately more interesting works of fiction we read in high school on our own time (instead of what we were supposed to be reading for class) or found in our adulthood.

Review: Under the Amoral Bridge

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By Gary A. Ballard

Audible Narration by Joe Hempel

A cyberpunk backdrop of 2020’s Los Angeles sets the stage for Under the Amoral Bridge. This novella follows the exploits and misadventures of one Artemis Bridge, a former hacker-cum-fixer linking seekers with hard-to-find or not-so-legal goods and services, all the while trying to stay above any ethical quandary about his profession by never touching the goods or services directly. When a piece of information that could determine the results of the first election in Los Angeles since corporation Chronosoft purchased the right to govern the city, Bridge knows that he’s unwillingly been inserted into a game of life and death.

Bridge reminds me vaguely of Lenny Nero in the film Strange Days (one of my favorites and one of few arguably mainstream films in the cyberpunk genre). While Nero’s character gives you a man of some conviction struggling to survive an increasingly corrupt world—with a likeable personality to boot—Bridge simply is. He’s not sardonically witty enough to amuse the reader with his cynicism, too self-interested to hold our interest as an exemplum of the “man against the world” theme, and too petty for us to pay him much respect. After meeting him in the world of this novella, I find him an ultimately-forgettable example of the all-too-common lowlife hustler that appears in cyberpunk.

Had Under the Amoral Bridge been written and published in the 80’s, I would probably find it more difficult to be so hard on the story. But, the book first appeared in 2009. Coming so late to a genre so well-explored in print, film, anime, roleplaying games and video games, a modern cyberpunk book needs to bring something new to the table. I’m not saying that no one can write good cyberpunk anymore (Richard K. Morgan wrote Altered Carbon, a masterpiece of both cyberpunk and noir, in 2003), but we’re well past the point of using a plot arc known by wrote with a cardboard façade of corporate control, ubiquitous technology, topped with a healthy dose of paranoia, slapping it all together and throwing it out like it’s something special.

Looking at Amazon, the book enjoys pretty positive reviews, so I ought to defend my general lack of enthusiasm for the work. I discussed the flatness of the protagonist above, but it’s the rigid and predictable nature of the plot that really gave me fits.

Cyberpunk descends in many ways from noir: the gritty feel, the moral ambiguity, the selfish motivations of the bad guys, the protagonist who we cannot expect to succeed. This doesn’t mean that every cyberpunk story must be a mystery, although many are—again Altered Carbon comes to mind, as does Snowcrash. The best writing within a genre uses the conventions of the genre, but not rigidly, and not always expectedly.

Instead, Under the Amoral Bridge follows convention too closely, making everything feel caricatured. As I stated above, the cyberpunk background of the story feels too canned and too well-trod, coming across like an original Star Trek set piece that will topple if pushed too hard. To be fair, there are a few places where convention is toyed with: the role of the “femme fatale” (if this story really has one) is a relatively unattractive woman who only truly steps into the role when masked behind her net avatar—there’s interesting stuff about identity that could have been explored here, but the opportunity is lost. Then there’s Artemis’ bodyguard, affectionately referred to as Aristotle. He’s a large black man with a penchant for philosophizing and as much brains as brawns, both of which seem to be considerable. I can’t help but think of him being played by Ving Rhames as the story plays through my mind. Aristotle is by far my favorite character in the novella (perhaps the only one I actually liked), and his relationship with Artemis has enough nuance to break away from being a half-hearted twist on convention (as most of the other minor tweaks throughout the novella come across).

Ultimately, the story plays by the numbers, remains relatively predictable to the end, and contains plot “twists” that the characters themselves should have been able to see coming. This culminates in shameless exposition by the bad guy at the end to make sure that the reader gets what’s happened—even though it’s already painfully clear to everyone except Bridge himself.

The work leaves a bit to be desired stylistically as well. In particular, I found myself often distracted by the use of the passive voice where just a smidge of effort could have crafted a stronger sentence. That said, the craft of writing proves exceedingly difficult, and a less-skilled wordsmith can be forgiven if she tells a powerful and satisfying story. The author skilled in technique but without solid storytelling skills is not so lucky. I see a potential in Ballard to rise to the occasion, and it is quite possible that his later works prove that he has improved his technique and storytelling, but I have only read this small part of his corpus.

In full disclosure, I found that the narration of this book on Audible lacked as well, and that might have contributed to my rather harsh assessment of it. The narrator mispronounced a few words, and his accents and voices for characters failed to bring them to life, only adding to their cardboard cut-out feel.

Overall, this is not a bad book. But neither is it extraordinary in any way. With a world so full of amazing works of fiction (and more created every day) and lives so bereft of time in which to enjoy them, I have to recommend picking up something else before Under the Amoral Bridge, unless you want to continue in the Bridge Cycle (currently a four book series) in hopes that Ballard constructs something more grandiose upon this rather plain foundation.

 

Reading Matthew 18:15-17 as a Joke.

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The passage Matthew 18:15-17, where Jesus talks about how to treat believers who continue to sin, is often pointed to as permission to “speak authority into the lives of others” or to cast out particular members of a church. But is Jesus, who generally seems to hate rigid systems, really giving us legal procedure for excommunication in this passage, or is something else going on?

The passage reads as follows:

15 “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.

16 “But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.

17 “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

I think that the last phrase, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” should be thought of as something of a punchline of sorts. By way of explanation, let’s look at how Jesus treats a tax collector. In Luke 19, Jesus (as my Bible titles it) “Brings Salvation to Zaccheus’s home.”[1]

In that passage, Jesus elects to stay with Zaccheus, a tax collector. Luke 19:5. This is phrased as a statement rather than a request. We are even told that the crowd “began to grumble, saying, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’” Luke 19:7. Note that the crowd wants to condemn, while Jesus wants to demonstrate compassion.

The presence of Jesus, as it is wont to do, brings about a transformation in Zaccheus, who promises to right his wrongs. Luke 19:8. Then, Jesus tells him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Luke 19-9-10.

This takes us back to Matthew. Based on Jesus’ treatment of Zaccheus, I would suggest a paraphrase of Matthew 18:15-17 that does something like this:

“Jesus said, ‘If a believer in your midst is a sinner, go and help him not to sin. If you win him over, he wasn’t an intentional sinner. If he continues to sin, take some other people to talk to him again, to make sure that it’s clear what was said. If he still continues to sin, he might be a true sinner, and you need to put him before the church. If even after being put before the church he continues to sin, he might be a really bad sinner, so you should continue to do the best you can to love him like I’ve been telling you to do this whole time!’”[2]

Comedian Bo Burnham says, “For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.” I think many professional comics would agree, and that’s exactly what Jesus is playing off of here—he knows that (as we see in the Luke passage) the crowd expects condemnation. He twists that expectation with an exhortation to compassion, and there is a hopeful humor to be found there.

It is important to note that Matthew 18:15-17 is followed by the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor (Matthew 18:21-35), which Jesus begins by warning Peter not to forgive just seven times, but “seventy times seven” times. Matthew 18:22. Keep in mind that seven is a number of Biblical completeness.

In the parable, Jesus contrasts the righteousness of one who will forgive an insurmountable debt with one who, having been forgiven, will not himself forgive a (relatively speaking, of course) trifling debt. The passage concludes with a stern warning from Jesus: “My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.”

If we take the “traditional” approach of interpreting Matthew 18:15-17 as the proper procedure to earn the “right” to condemn someone and to cast them out, the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor is a strange passage to follow. But if we believe that the ultimate point of Matthew 18:15-17 is to tell us not to condemn but to love (and I think it’s fair to say that Jesus’ words in the scriptures never give us permission to condemn), then there is no apparent conflict between the two passages.

Some caveats are probably due here. I am not asserting that we should not oppose sin and help others to defeat their own sin, although how we do that is worth a (very) complex discussion at another time. Instead, I’m trying to communicate through the above interpretation that Jesus wants us to be compassionate to others above all else, and that we are not to condemn.

As important, I want to affirm that there is a difference between distancing yourself from some people and casting them out with condemnation. There will be people in all of our lives who, for many different reasons, it is not beneficial for us to associate with. This could be about temptation, or the abusive behavior or one of many other difficult social and psychological issues. If a destructive person does not want to change, you don’t need to put yourself in that person’s path to be left in his wake. But, as much as you can, as often as you can, in every way that you can, you ought to be compassionate.

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[1] Admittedly, there is a disconnect in jumping from one Gospel to another for explanation here, and there are certainly historical and literary criticisms to be made for my doing so. In one sense, such criticism is lessened if we are to believe Q theory as the source of both Matthew and Luke. For my part, I’m going to take a more Barthian and Tillichian approach and assert that we should use the person of Christ (as the manifest Word of God) as the lens through which all scripture is interpreted. I assume that both passages are generally reliable relations of actual events meant to be taken seriously (even while claiming one is a joke—the best jokes educate and delight).

[2] I am tempted to add expletives for effect to the last line of the paraphrase (mostly because it makes it funnier to me), but I think you get the point as it is.