Religious feeling

It is that time of year again when some of us go to hear performances of St Matthew’s Passion and revel in those slow majestic chorals centered on the suffering of Jesus: “O sacred head sore wounded, with grief and shame weighed down”.

I did not see the film, but I hear that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in contrast to the slim descriptions of the crucifixion we find in the gospels, milks the suffering of Jesus to the full. The church itself has not shrunk from a preoccupation with the blood and the degradation. On the Protestant side this has been muted except for the above-mentioned music of Bach. On the Roman side it has been given full reign as in “The Stations of the Cross”. The motive for graphic representation, indeed dwelling on, the physical suffering of Christ, is to shift the scales in the economy of salvation: The more he suffered the more we owe him, and the more we are saved.

But there is no meaning in suffering per se. In our time Jesus’ execution could have been by lethal injection. Would the meaning of his death have been diminished if it had been quick and painless instead of drawn out and cruel? It is not the suffering of Christ that is redemptive but the conflict between the death dealing powers of the world and the life-giving power of God. Therefore it does not benefit us to dwell on the suffering of Jesus as if there is some message there for us. Neither is there a message for us in the death of thousands in the tsunami, other than the obvious one that we are creatures that are vulnerable to chance event.

Any theology that posits human suffering as a necessary and redemptive component of creation ignores the thrust of the first creation story in which the whole creation was seen to be good by its creator. In the second narrative man was not put in to the garden to suffer and hence become a more spiritual being, he was put in the garden to till it and keep it and for joy in his partner. Being a disciple of Jesus, even when it is described as “taking up the cross”, does not necessarily lead to suffering, although of course it might, as the martyrs found out.

We know that we will all suffer some way or another; it will come round to us. But that is not to say that we were made for suffering or that suffering in itself is redemptive. It may be that great sufferers will be even greater personalities or it may be that suffering simply grinds us down and leads us to the grave. While the ancient Greeks would invoke the Gods in this, the Christian tradition has remarkably little to say on the matter, except to indicate that fate has nothing to do with God. God is not in the cancer cell or in the motor vehicle accident, if indeed it was an accident.

For many, religion is to do with sentiment. We can spot the sentimental in art because it is formulaic, the child’s footsteps in the snow leading to the half frozen lake in the Victorian painting, the miner’s wife being comforted by neighbors, the triptych The Pioneer by Frederick McCubbin that shows a hopeful beginning and a tragic ending. These paintings tell a sad story and the viewer, when he interprets this story, is meant to feel sad. Our experience of the painting relies on our compassion for the actors betrayed: we feel along with the story. It is not necessarily the quality of the painting that is important but the feelings elicited by the story. Of course, in McCubbin we have both a good painting and a sad story.

Some of us have more of the tragic-romantic component of our personality than others and we love music in a minor chord and Wagnerian opera that centers on unrequited love and death. If we are Christian we love the psalms of lament: “I am a worm and no man!” and we love Good Friday over Easter Sunday. There is often suspicion of and a feeling of not belonging on festive occasions: such is our melancholy frame of thought.

I would suggest that this is entirely the wrong way to experience the passion of Christ. The gospel writers were not interested in eliciting our compassion, as if we suffered with Christ. They were interested in relating the event in terms of politics, in terms of the cosmic conflict between good and evil. What is at stake here? Who is this Jesus who should upset the powers and walk calmly into the maw of the beast? Who were the powers, what part do we play? When the passion is approached sentimentally, then the main action is missed, so involved are we in our own feelings.

This is all grist for the mill for psychologists who specialise in the religious affect, but where does it lead us? Thought and feeling go together. If we attend the Good Friday liturgy and feel nothing, then we would wonder at the wholeness of our humanity. But there is a difference between maudlin sentimentality and feeling that is elicited because we understand the dynamics of the passion. One is self indulgent, even narcissistic (what sensitive persons we are to feel so deeply), the other springs from real profundity. In one we use the story for our own purposes, in the other, the story strikes at our lives.

I am trying to distinguish between the maudlin and the sentimental response from a response that is based on more than sadness which many of us actually enjoy. One is a superficial emotional response that evaporates very quickly, the other an enduring memory that is connected to an understanding of what is at stake.

In other words, the importance of the passion of Christ is in the content, not the details. Crucifixions were common, so were religious martyrs, what was so important about this particular one? We do not need the passion of Christ to remind us of the depth of human suffering, surely there are horrific tales of suffering enough even in our own street. Wallowing in the darkness is not a sign of a sensitive spirit nor of a spiritual hero. It may be just an attempt to feel something in a life barren of feeling. It is interesting that attendance at Anzac Day services has become popular among the young in Australia. I am suspicious that there is something of the tragic-romantic going on here, a wish to draw near to something momentous and awful, which contrasts so much with the superficiality of modern life.

Romanticism in the West came about as a reaction to what was seen as the cold hard rationality of the Enlightenment, life dissected into parts, nature described in terms of mathematics. The mistake of romanticism was to pitch rationality against feeling and opt for the latter. This polarity is with us today, either we think or we feel, either we go with our heart or with our mind. But this is an artificial duality - feeling is evoked by the cognitive and the opposite is also true: feeling may awaken us to something unthought. When we detach one from the other we produce a schism in the human psyche. So when we attend the liturgies of Holy Week we attend with thought and feeling.

Emotion alone is not a good basis for epistemology because it does not represent the world aright: it is subjective in the worst sense. But having said this we must affirm that emotion is a key indicator of the state of the self. The mistake of romanticism is to give what is indicated the status of truth without rational interrogation. But acting against our emotional impulses is a part of becoming an adult. The continuing effect of romanticism is evidenced when we are told that feelings are the true thing. What we get are unwise marriages lived out de facto and disastrous life decisions that are based on wellsprings of emotion.

We are placed in a situation in which our one experience of the divine, of ecstasy, is the experience of falling in love in which we are taken out of our senses by cupid’s arrow. This is celebrated because it offers an escape, even if often disastrous, from cold rationality. It has taken the place of God for us, the one who calls us out of ourselves. But it is not God, it may be hormones and sex and even a desire for death, but it is not God. If we look, we will find many an idolatry based on feeling divorced from rationality.

Feelings alone will not get us far when it comes to God. The mystics had to beware of feeling because they knew that they would lead them astray. The growth of the mega churches is based on the promotion of feeling and the denial of rationality enabled by a supernaturalist understanding of the Holy Spirit. When the main line churches take the soft option of inclusivity and recognise these movements as another form of Christian spirituality then an important line has been crossed. Not only will the derision of those who rail against religion be justified, but the church will sacrifice its unique vision for what looks like success but is really only the assertion of the narcissism of the modern self.

God does not reside in high flown emotion, an interaction with him may cause such an event but cause and effect must not be confused. This Easter we are reminded that we see God in the narratives of the Bible, not as abstract first cause, or divine instigator of the big bang but as revelation of what we are and what we were destined to be. We must admit that what we are does not come off well. We are mirrored in the welcoming cry on Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem which turns into a demand for crucifixion only a few days later, in Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial and the fleeing of all of the disciples to their homes.

We are complicit in the rigged trial, the lies and Pilot’s real politic. When we understand these things we experience the judgment of God and that may be cause of feeling for us. When we see Jesus tormented in the Garden while his disciples sleep and we see him resolutely walking towards his doom, we experience the grace of God that survives even death. This may be cause for feeling of a different kind. This is as far as we need go in our search for God. Indeed, to search for God in places other than in this enstoried event is to go looking for ghosts.

This is the point that our modern persecutors of Christianity fail to see. When we talk of the Christian God we are not championing the possibility that there exists a ghost in the machinery of the universe. Our claim is that the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth defines our humanity. It is in this event that the tables are turned on us, the one whom we judged became the judge, the one we put to death became our source of life and freedom. This is how Christians should talk about the reality of their God, as the enduring truth of the enstoried event of Christ.

The early church had such a struggle to define its theology because this was a new definition of God that subverted the Greek pantheon and the civil religion of Rome while it carried forward a refreshed understanding of the God of Israel. The irony is that the old gods have been revived in our time. These include the God that the sceptics rail against as well as the enthusiast God of evangelicalism and of the naïve believer. The troubling thing about the church of our day is that is behaves as if the theological travail of the early church never happened, with the result that we have a revival of the old god of supernature. What we need is clear theological thinking, not explorations of “spirituality” or touchy feely workshops in which the participant’s feelings take centre stage in a parody of therapy. We must resist the turn to the self and direct our attention to the one who calls us to come and die.