A fourth letter to James
Dear James,
The scholars are going to call you a Marxist revisionist for offering an economic explanation for the circumcision party’s stance, but I suppose your present-day Marxism makes sense since you were originally the leader of a commune in which all things were held in common. What I’m most interested in pondering in our present moment is the role of puritanism in covenant-building since you have complicated the word for me.
It’s easy for me to dismiss the puritanism of the bourgeoisie who make morality about sexual propriety in order to make it not about sharing their wealth. But what about the puritanism of choosing to pay musicians on Bandcamp for their music instead of listening to Spotify or going to the local bookstore to buy a book instead of ordering it from Amazon or whatever other sacrificial meats we avoid to order the world differently through our choices?
When we choose to live according to principles of ecology and justice, to what degree does it require breaking away from the larger society with like-minded people in order to build an alternative social order? How much should we remain embedded in relationship with people who remain in conformity to the pattern of this world and have no intention of changing anything about it?
How many hours should we sit in sports bars with them and make shallow small talk? Or watch trashy celebrity news shows with them and chatter about the latest dramas of the rich and selfish? Or do we focus our attention on those with ears to hear and invest our time and energy into building harmony with people who are singing our song? That is what we’re talking about when we talk about table fellowship. Not just who is allowed, but who is pursued.
Puritanism does not have to be the piety performed to prove loyalty; it can describe the intentionality of building community with those whose visions are aligned. It’s not snobby to steward our time and energy for relationships syntropically (I love that term!). We can be open to all, but that doesn’t mean that we pursue everyone equally. We pursue people who are ready to go all in on the queendom of love.
To build an entirely new world, we must gather those who are entirely open to it because they have no stake in the old world: unemployed addicts who make porn to pay their bills, homeless gutter punks, runaway transgirls, the disabled, welfare mamas, foreigners without papers, one-legged Palestinian orphans, the mentally unstable.
It’s fine for the wealthy and privileged to join the banquet but not to control it like the way they control the church, because the new world comes into power to the degree that the outsiders are enthroned and their gifts and needs are cherished. When the last are truly first, the queendom of love is at hand.
As Jesus described in his parable, the outsiders are the ones who accept the invitation that the rich reject to a wedding banquet that cannot be enjoyed by those who obey the rules of the market. Because the banquet is the rich experience of syntropic community that resists the entropy of hypnotic mindless consumerism.
The banquet happens when we think collectively about how to house and feed our community members, when we drive them to recovery meetings, when the dance of our interaction becomes a fully integrated body instead of the smiling hand waves of perfunctory friendliness across the pews on Sunday morning. How did the body of Christ became an idea for expressing a collection of people who believe the same ideas instead of a physical body of people who make their lives a coordinated dance of mutual aid in which everyone is family?
There is nothing like the physical experience of feeling your body absorbed into a choreography of bodies that move as one organism. It is a belonging that seeps to the marrow of your bones in a way that ideological uniformity cannot. Ecstatic dance and contact improvisation and cuddle parties are today’s version of what Jesus was doing with his disciples when he dipped the bread in his cup and put it in each of their mouths.
Feeding his body and blood to his disciples after washing their feet as they cuddled around a shared meal was a physically intimate and potently erotic experience categorically different from the crackers and grape juice we pass around today though I have experienced ecstasy partaking in Roman Eucharist illegally.
An individual lost in a modern Christian praise stadium can have an exhilarating solipsistic encounter with a powerfully pious performance that feels personally packaged by God and offers a satisfying catharsis, but making our bodies a single vine the way Jesus did when he cuddled with his disciples at his last supper before he was crucified requires touching in a way that would scandalize most Christians today.
How much more time do we waste on people who want to spend the rest of their lives maintaining their single family homes and building their wealth while keeping others at an amicable arm’s length since they believe their real home is elsewhere in a Disneyland without biology in the sky after they die? I want to build heaven now with those who realize this is the only heaven we’re going to get because we are the living ones who are creating this moment as we have been doing this entire time.
The dead will not be satisfied until they can feel the deep rest of the seventh day of creation in our bodies; there is no rest for them as long as their legacy continues to judge them in the brokenness of our world. Our world’s brokenness is the final judgment of our ancestors, to the torment of many. They need us to heal the world from the impact of their sin so they can finally rest.
So they resurrect into us in order to enact their repentance and make this world into the heaven of their dreams. Because there is no escape from this world. The dead stay right here with us, more intimately aware of everything that is happening than we can be within the limitations of our bodies. They do not go elsewhere; they go deeper into the truth of our reality that we hide our faces from. They watch and learn with us. And they want for us to finally make it to heaven.
Did you really think I was going to stay frozen in place in my first century Hellenistic Jewish body? Did you think I wouldn’t explore other bodies over the centuries with different mantras and practices? I become all things to all people. I explore everyone and everything.
Why wouid I stop after two thousand years of afterlife? I go on tantra retreats. I let Pachamama’s shamans give me strange potions that show me my past lives and guide me to the dharma of this life. I build friendships with sycamores and sing with the forest’s symphony. I lounge with Maitreya, the fool who is always laughing. The witches are showing how to love the land and the dead again so I can be native again and lose the restlessness of the white man’s ego. My purpose in this lifetime is to embody the white man’s repentance.
I relish the ease and intimacy I feel with the entourage of dead who walk with me. We have been doing this for many lifetimes. I leaned in this lifetime that the burning bush is the mother of my children. Her womb is the center of my universe. I worship God through my devotion to the one whose feet I hold in the evenings on our couch.
It makes sense to me that celibate men made Christianity into scholastic intellectualism because they didn’t have the sacred interaction of erotic love as their primary learning ground for finding love’s voice. The bed where I worship the burning bush is our temple. I am married to God, a mother who acts with perfect integrity and compassion and faces endless frustration in a world that lacks integrity and compassion.
God is not in control of the earth, which is her body. She is holding all of its trauma and rage in her belly which gives her all sorts of autoimmune disorders and cancers. But she is determined to declutter her house and show up for the people who seek her wisdom. And over time, she’s coming to realize that she really is the one creating the universe right now through billion of bodies and she leans into that delightful awareness, she feels hope for the first time after the weariness of centuries of stupid religion. She can make the world heaven right now because enough of us are waking up and finding her voice.
For there isn’t an unmoved mover outside of time that made all of this in the primordial past. God is an artist who never stops painting her own body. Like every artist, she discovers herself through her art. What she saw dimly in a mirror, she is starting to see face to face. The real is coming into focus. We are remembering the past that dreams the future love wants to build through us.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness could not seize it. The living ones are singing the song that is God and drawing us into their harmony. When all eyes are opened, no one will resist her will. She is making the playlist for the dance party that will liberate us from hell.
Yours in foolishness,
Sh’aul, a student of love