The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
Just Like The US
A goyish writer wrestles with the anti-imperial themes of Hanukkah and the discomfiting questions it raises for citizens of the American empire. Might an empire be a force for good? Is “force for good” an oxymoron? And finally: how does a Roman manage, in practical terms, to say no to Rome?
Jewish people are ‘thin on the ground’ in much of Australia. In the office where I once worked, people didn’t even know the house next door but one, was a synagogue! This means Hanukkah, the feast that celebrates the victory of the Jewish Maccabean rebels against the Greeks around 150 years before the birth of Jesus, is barely heard of here in Adelaide.
Hanukka comes in the Gregorian Calendar somewhere between late November and late December; on 25 Kislev in the Jewish Calendar, and lasts for eight days. Wikipedia says
The Maccabees successfully rebelled against Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The Temple was purified and the wicks of the menorah miraculously burned for eight days, even though there was only enough sacred oil for one day's lighting.
In his article Goy to the World: What Does Hanukkah Have to Teach Us About Living in Empire? Garret Keizer says “Christmas has some of the same anti-imperial subtext” as Hanukkah. This is certainly the case. Here at Church reWired you can see such commentary on Luke’s Christmas story. We are hardly alone in such an observation.
That 'anti imperial subtext' as Keizer calls it, becomes central in the celebration of Hanukkah. That story is about the rebels who win over the imperial oppressors. Keizer’s article looks at the irony of celebrating such a festival as an American who, by many measures, is on the side of the current Empire.
For we Australians, his article is not so remote, after all. We used to mock John Howard as Dubya’s Deputy Sherriff. We are on the side of Empire, ever eager to help the US in the name of the ANZUS treaty.
My own insight into this came as a high school student, when I bought some ammunition from an Australian company, and was surprised to discover it was made in the Philippines. In one of those odd epiphanies which is sparked by a small event, in this case one of the early off-shorings of Australian industry, I realised we have exactly the same imperial aspirations as the US… we’re just not anywhere near as good at it. For this reason, Keizer’s article is illuminating even for an Aussie.
Hanukkah is not my holiday, at least by religious affiliation, but every year I find it more relevant. With a war in Iraq grinding on, another war in Afghanistan gearing up, and a war with Iran, Korea, or the Idaho panhandle always an option, the holiday’s anti-imperial theme can be unsettling to say the least. Celebrating Hanukkah as an American Jew must feel a bit like celebrating Guy Fawkes Night as an English Jesuit: Putting yourself in the story hardly puts you at ease.
Christmas has some of the same anti-imperial subtext—Julian the Apostate’s sad one-liner, “Pale Galilean, Thou Hast Conquered [the Roman Empire],” could work as a verse in “Silent Night”—but the message has a tough time getting through when Christmas itself has become so imperial. The pale Galilean may hold court in his manger, but Constantine reigns on Fifth Avenue and on the sound system of every Starbucks from one end of Broadway to the next….
Hanukkah also compels us to ask how a conquering nation reckons with recalcitrant peoples—be they Judeans, Palestinians, or Shiites—who fail to appreciate the self-evident superiority of the cultures imposed on them for their own good….
In the days when I preached from a pulpit, I used to say that you couldn’t get the Parable of the Prodigal Son until you were able to identify with his older brother. Here I’ll say that you can’t get Hanukkah until you understand what many Americans find so difficult to understand: that the “good guys” in every story are not necessarily “our guys.”
Yes, Hanukkah is often billed as a celebration of religious freedom and resistance to oppression; all true enough, all in the ballpark of what we like to call American values. The Maccabees revolt against their Seleucid overlords, the heirs of Alexander the Great, in order to preserve their traditional way of life. Just like the farmers of Lexington and Concord firing on the Redcoats, no?
Not exactly. The revolt of the Maccabees was also a movement of “reactionary” Jews…
Echoing Keizer's last words, how do we live as Christians under the Empire? Read on >>>>
Share
Previous page: The Practice of Morality
Next page: Circling, But not Encircling