Reading Gerrman in English words Buber’s Between Man and Man. I read it out loud, then again. Clearly, still don’t get it. But it’s worth it. For example, he said of revelation: “We see the light of the meteor, but we don’t have the rock.”
Posts Tagged ‘Buber’
Between Man and Man
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009Buber Byte: what religion hides
Friday, March 20th, 2009And if there is nothing that can so hide the face of our fellow [woman and] man as morality can, religion can hide from us as nothing else can the face of God. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, 1947
Jesus in I and Thou
Friday, April 25th, 2008I’ve found four references to Jesus of Nazareth in I and Thou:
- Jesus and love (not a feeling): his response to a demon-possessed man, to the beloved disciple; his bold risk “nailed his life long to the cross of the world…to love man” (pp. p. 66-67).
- The craving for redemption grows until “assuaged by one who teaches men to escape the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God” (p. 104)
- In the company of Socrates and Goethe is Jesus’ I-saying, the I of the unconditional relation in which a man calls his You “Father.” (p. 116)
- The gospel of John is the Gospel of pure relationship. “The father and son being consubstantial-we may say, God and man being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship.” (pp. 132-133)
Bare Essentials
Kyrios Christos!
If I strip Christianity bare, what’s left is the cry of the martyrs: Jesus is Lord. Close at hand is the history and experience to which the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament writings bear witness. But at the irreducible core is my experience of the Risen Christ:
You ask me how I know he lives-
He lives within my heart.
My spirituality for the past 20 years has centered on loss:
- loss of the mainstream Southern Baptist identity in which I was reared
- loss of the local church in a crucible of racism and parochialism
- a pastoral counseling residency which I would describe as a shamanic initiatory rite of being “cut up, cooked, and eaten”: loss of self, an internity of which my teaching colleagues were unaware
Anabaptists
Not surprising, then, in the years since to find myself drawn to the Anabaptists of 16th century Europe, slaughtered by the tens of thousands for their simple insistence on adult baptism, symbolizing soul competency and liberty.
My church history course labeled these forebears as the radical reformation, and moved immediately to the English Baptists of the 17th century.
But I’ve been drawn to these men and women who carried lists of scriptures in their boots and bore witness to the living flame of God’s love in their lives and deaths.
The Jesus whom they worshipped as Son of Man, Son of God, Savior, and the exemplary human Jesus of I and Thou are light years apart.
Spirit, which Buber conceived of as existing in between I and You, person and person, human being and God, is light years removed from the Holy Spirit of the New Testament.
How do I reconcile these two very different viewpoints?
Where does Jesus fit in
No need to. Buber wrote as a Jew, and as a Jew viewed Jesus in purely human terms, although his conception of Jesus is quite lofty. Jesus is one of humanity’s great religious founders of culture like the Buddha, one of history’s great philosophers like Socrates and Goethe.
Jesus also boldly risked loving humanity itself, and is an exemplar of the I-You relationship with God as of Father and son. There is not a hint of the Trinity. Spirit is not person, but the in between of an actual I-You relation.
The Jesus of the New Testament is not merely human, however exemplary he might be; he is God made flesh. You can’t work him into Buber’s ideas in some nifty fashion. But, as God-become-human he enters the human condition and relates to human beings as one among us.
However you fit the Logos and the man from Nazareth and the Risen Christ with Buber’s eternal You, Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses from inside our skin.
That changes everything.
Wrestling with Buber
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008Round 1
The sacred is here and now. The only God worth keeping is a God that cannot be kept. The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be talked about. God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or even experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he cannot be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and be addressed by him, here and now-or, as Buber puts it, in the present.
I and Thou, Prologue by Walter Kaufmann, pp.25-26.
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response.
Prologue, p. 39
Who cares about Buber?
Like many today Martin Buber longed to release religion from institutionalism, to free God from theologians.
He stood apart from other Zionist leaders of his day by advocating an Arab state in Palestine.
Because he wrote prolifically about many subjects, people viewed him as a representative Jew in the 20th century. His ideas about dialogue continue to wield a huge influence.
From wordslinger to I-YOUniverse
When I began this blog as “wordslinger,” an image from a poem I wrote in college, I discovered there are dozens, perhaps 100s of “wordslingers” out there. So I tried “wordsLinger” which puts a different spin on it, the lovely sense of words leaving an afterimage like the flash of a camera does. It didn’t make that much difference, however. I wanted something unique.
I wrote something about speaking my words into the ether and stumbled on the idea of “e-thou” a play on “I-Thou” of course. Being a 60s child, I had taken part in encounter groups and sensitivity training, so “e-thou encounter” came easily to mind. I liked the assonance of thou and -coun-.
But people stumbled over it. I had to spell it, spell it again, then explain it. Although I liked it, I decided it might be dated. In a post on suffering I coined the word “YOUniverse” to celebrate God’s presence in the cosmos.
From there it was a short hop to “I-YOUniverse.” In the new translation of I and Thou, except in the title, I-You has replaced the older form.
Absorbing I and Thou
For a buck I had picked up a used paperback copy of I and Thou, 2nd ed., translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (NY: Scribner’s, 1958). The brittle binding and stiff paper suit it.
The first owner underlined the first 34 pages copiously but left not a mark on the remaining 100 pages. I assume she gave up, having read more than I did.
When I started e-thou encounter, though, I felt an obligation to get past the jargon stage of I-It or I-Thou. If I named my blog for Buber’s thought, I ought at least to know it.
Encouraged by reviews of the new translation as being superior to the first, I ordered my copy from Amazon and, when it arrived, dug in. I was going to master this book!
It’s not a book you master, though. It masters you.
Wrestling at the Jabbok
I read it half a dozen times, baffled by some passages. Kaufmann generously footnotes the German vocabulary, which helps you appreciate the verbal fog. Buber, like Shakespeare, could not pass up a good play on words, no matter what the context.
Then, I caught myself striving to manhandle the book. Damn it! I was going to know this book inside and out.
I understand how to use knowledge as power. Except for writing a dissertation, I completed work on a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Old Testament.
Buber, like the wrestler at the fords of the Jabbok, refuses to be mastered.
Round 2 coming up!
My Gog and Magog Blog
Sunday, April 6th, 2008THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2008
There’s still the OG, GOG & MAGOG BLOG to write someday. But this one will do for now-jlh
This is not a war story. It’s about George Bush and Al Qaeda, Iraq and America, Israelis and Palestinians; it’s about the Shechinah God’s glory in exile, how a Jew wrote about the Shoah, and how you and I deal with evil in our own heart.
But all the conflicts of Gog and Magog arise out of those evil forces which have not been overcome in the conflict against the Gogs and Magogs who dwell in human hearts.
-Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), p. 284.
Martin Buber’s novel For the Sake of Heaven, alternately titled Gog and Magog, is set during the Napoleonic wars. In understated narrative it relates the conflict between two Hasidic rabbis, the Seer and the Yehudi. It causes me to reflect on conflict in my personal history.
Conflict ministry ain’t what it’s cracked up to be
During my pastorates I lived on a first-name basis with conflict. At the denominational level, I finished three years of graduate study in Hebrew and Old Testament at Southern Seminary in 1979, the year conservatives announced a 10 year plan to gain control the Southern Baptist Convention by winning the presidency each year. The president appoints trustees of boards and agencies. In 10 years conservatives replaced trustees representing a broad constituency with those who represented only fundamentalists. Depending on your viewpoint, you call this the SBC controversy or takeover or conservative resurgence.
I only went once to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting-in Dallas in 1985. That year, a massive 45,000 messengers attended. The fifth year of the takeover, moderates at last had realized what they were losing and mounted a challenge. Dr. Charles Stanley, pastor, First Baptist Church, Atlanta, presided. On Tuesday morning the crucial vote for president occurred. At 6:00 a.m. thousands of messengers jammed the halls of the Tarrant County Convention Center, waiting more than two hours for the doors to open.
Someone began to sing. Amazing Grace, What a Friend We Have in Jesus. For two hours thousands of voices filled the building with sweet harmony. But, once the doors opened, from the moderates’ viewpoint at least, hardball politics governed the meeting. Of course, conservatives report events much differently.
My wife Sandy and I met Hollie and Janell Atkinson from Texas and sat with them through a Convention totally controlled by conservatives. We wept. We never went to another annual Convention meeting.
Escape to Virginia, bastion of liberty
In 1989, the year conservatives completed this plan, my family and I had moved to Virginia, the state widely regarded among Baptist moderates as least likely to fall to fundamentalist control. For 10 years I pastored a small congregation near Richmond. The controversy raged on at the state level of the denomination. Blow-by-blow descriptions absorbed many pastors meetings: what the fundies did, what the liberals did, what the fundies did back, what the liberals did back. After a year or two, I stopped going.
The controversy was personal. My family were Baptists the way people are Catholics or Jews. It’s engraved in my DNA. I was a Ph.D. candidate at Babylon the mother of harlots, Southern Seminary in Louisville. The year the SBC banned ordination of women, my wife Sandy was ordained at St. Matthews Baptist Church, where her uncle had pastored, her father was married, and her grandparents were baptized. (Her uncle refused to attend.) I wrote curriculum for the Baptist Sunday School Board. The man who installed the modem lines connecting my computer with the BSSB warned me against writing liberal lessons!
Unless you’ve had surgery without anesthesia, you can’t comprehend the pain. One aged matriarch described it as “an unending funeral.” But most ordinary Baptists didn’t know or care what the brouhaha was all about.
Conservatives used to invite liberals to become Methodists or Presbyterians or other liberals.
Exit to Babylon
In the film Places in the Heart, Mose, a black itinerant, teaches a widow woman how to bring in a crop of cotton, in fact the prize-winning first bale. When the KKK shows up, a blind man identifies them by voice and stops a lynching. The widow returns from a dance to find Mose about to leave. “I best be gettin’ along , ma’am, before they come back,” he says. “Guess I got a little more attached to this place than I thought.”
Baptist preachers used to joke: “if the Convention ever splits, I’m going with the Annuity Board.” Some years ago, I transferred 30 years of retirement savings from the Annuity Board. But the joke puts its finger on what really fueled the SBC Armageddon: who owns the billions and billions of dollars worth of assets-the schools, the seminaries, the boards and agencies. My mother and dad gave sacrificially to SBC causes for a lifetime; they considered it giving to the Lord. How could I let people whom I viscerally despise steal what my family helped to build?
I realized that my folks gave to the Lord. The SBC assets belong to the Lord, not to conservatives, not to liberals, not to me. The Lord can do as the Lord pleases with them.
As X-rated as it gets
In the novel the Seer viewed the Yehudi as his enemy. The Yehudi had a vision of a woman swathed in the black veil with bare feet. Apparently, for a Hasidic rabbi, that’s as X-rated as it gets!
The woman spoke: “I am weary unto death, for ye have hunted me down. I am sick unto death, for ye have tormented me. I am shamed, for ye have denied me. Ye are the tyrant, who keeps me in exile.
“When ye are hostile to each other, ye hunt me down. When ye plot evil against each other, ye torment me. When ye slander each other, ye deny me. Each of you exiles his comrades and so together ye exile me.”
[The woman raises her veil and asks:] “When shall I find rest? When may I go home?”
(p. 229)
In returning and rest
Spoiler: The Yehudi gave his life for the Seer and for the woman, the Shechinah in exile. I won’t pin it down with an exact quote, but Buber believed that each of us can redeem evil by teshubah (from the root shuv, often rendered repent), by returning, by using the evil impulse the yetzer ha-ra for good.
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Isaiah 30:15 (NRSV)
Buber’s story of two rabbis, far more alike than they are different, challenges me to find the evil impulse within me; and to deny that within which divides the world into people of God versus Gog and Magog.
When Light Lengthens
Sunday, April 6th, 2008Tuesday February 12, 2008
Lent
Not my favorite time of year. Growing up in El Paso, I belonged to an anti-Catholic family; all I knew about Lent was that on Ash Wednesday Catholic children came from mass with dots of ash on their foreheads. “Lent” struck me as a weird word. I associated it with the bits of string in the wash.
We also used to give up things for Lent, things we never used or didn’t want. It was a joke.
Anglo-Saxon speak
Since then, I’ve learned a little about Lent. The word comes from Old English “lencten,” meaning spring, time of lengthening daylight.
Imagine so-called primitive men and women, gathered around a fire in the midwinter darkness. Comes a shaman, promising the light will return. Day by day, light grows longer, night shorter. The shaman’s promise comes true.
Before electricity, before any really effective light, when the hold of darkness on night dominated the world, the return of the light was powerful magic indeed!
Lent is time to lengthen the distance, that is create space, for the spirit to dwell. A woman’s body has space for a baby. A hospitable life has space where the spirit can abide. The Shunammite woman told her husband, “Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for [the prophet] a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us.” 2 Kings 4:10 (NRSV)
On loan
Lent also describes something on loan. This life is lent to the Lord, we might say. But in fact, life is lent to us by the Lord. You are not your own; you are bought with a price. For that brief time we live, we live for the Lord.
Length
The idea of length suggests measurement. The soldiers building the cross measured how wide Jesus’ arm span was. Then they sawed the horizontal piece. They measured his height and chose a vertical beam to fit. They went about their task joking crudely, drinking heavily, gambling loudly-whatever it took to numb the senses and fog the brain, lest they see, hear, smell, feel the horror of their actions.
Going without during Lent enables us to see, hear, smell, and feel our lives. Going without helps us realize who, how, and why come we crucify.
But if we look at this season only from a human viewpoint, however, we’ll miss it. For, Lent is not about human attitudes and actions. It can be an I-You event, and length of the hyphen representing the relation between the human self and the eternal You can be infinite.
As long as one obtains redemption only and his self, he cannot do any good or harm to the world; he does not concern it. Only he that believes in the world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms-and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.
I and Thou, p. 143.
Roman nails did not attach Jesus to the wood of the cross. Had there been no wood at all, he still would have hanged there, because eternal will held him to the cross. Love for the world held him there.
God will go to any length to redeem the world. Lent.
Note
Martin Buber was Jewish, for many the representative Jew in the 20th century. From his words, cited above, we can’t infer he was some sort of closet Christian. Rather, we may infer that the logic of the cross is consistent with the love of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and that Jesus was a Jew.
The Golem and the Soul-Bird
Sunday, April 6th, 2008TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2008
A companion to Hineni, the previous post
You don’t hear many sermons about the end of David’s life at about 70 years. But I’ve always found 1 Kings 1-2 especially tragic: a man whom we remember for the psalms, vibrant with emotion, unable to get warm, which at least suggests that he’s emotionally and spiritually freeze dried.
Two Ways to Grow Old
Abraham, who married and fathered six children in his later years, “breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people” Gen 25:8 (NRSV). Moses was “120 years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated” (Deut 34:7 NRSV).
David, however, is unable to get warm. This is not ED, in modern advertising lingo, but spiritual wasteland, an I-It terrain relieved only momentarily by a flash of You. His advisers find a beautiful young woman Abishag to “lie in his bosom” (TANAK), recalling with more than a bit of irony the prophet Nathan’s parable of the poor man’s little lamb who nestled in his bosom (2 Sam 12.4).
My Father’s error or his joy
Abishag means something like, “My father’s error” from a root related to error (BDB p. 4, or 922 “go astray” for Hebrew buffs). At any rate, it’s not complimentary. Compare Abigail, an exemplary woman from a more positive time (1 Sam 25), whose name means something like, “My father’s joy.” How much grief David could have spared himself by turning to Abigail, rather than Bathsheba!
David might have answered this question that Martin Buber asks, “Take the much discussed eroticism of our age and subtract everything that is really egocentric-in other words, every relationship in which one is not all present to the other, but each uses the other only for self-enjoyment-what would remain?” (p. 95). Buber insists we build authentic marriages only in I-You mode of existence.
Emotions at the end
David’s sons aren’t grieving as their father lies near death. Adonijah is busy feasting himself as next king, while Bathsheba connives for David to designate Solomon his successor. In addition to the obligatory Deuteronomic admonition to keep the Lord’s statutes, commandments, and ordinances, David urges Solomon to take vengeance on two men against whom David had long held grievances.
David’s end shows the consequences of mishandling emotions. David failed to confront dysfunction among his sons, not least because they were just taking after the old man. But by stuffing emotions, ignoring conflict, playing favorites or at the other extreme giving his impulses free rein, David insured his premature emotional demise.
Buber calls feelings, cut off from the You of self and God “a fluttering soul-bird”; the severed It, the daily grind apart from God, he calls “a golem, an animated clod without a soul” (p. 93).
Healing Emotions through Worship
In the psalms worshippers do not indulge in a tabloid-style exhibitionism. Rather, they share the dynamics of their feelings without blow-by-blow detail. As such, they exemplify the proper role of feelings in worship.
Had he done what the psalms do, express emotions-all emotions-in a healing, disciplined way before the Lord, David could have ended his life able to express as vital and appealing a range of feelings as did the shepherd boy, the young friend of Jonathan, or the ecstatic worshipper who brought the Ark into Jerusalem.
I find myself grieving what David lost when he became heir apparent, then king of Israel. In a sense he’s one answer to Jesus’ question, “What does it profit you if you gain the world but lose your soul?”
Those Magnificent Men and Women in their Flying Machines
Sunday, April 6th, 2008FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2008
The race for the American Presidency reminds me of that contest in England, where people launch home-built flying machines off a pier and splash into the water. You know they’re going down; the only question is, how far they get before doing so.
George Bush’s flying machine has crashed in a mushroom cloud worthy of the Apocalypse; the only question is, how much will go up in flames with him?
He came to office, literally anointed with oil by religious conservatives, standing in that long line of succession we used to call “the divine right of kings.” In the US, of course, we don’t have kings; we just have the federal government, at its head, the successor to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy.
The presidency of George Bush constitutes, not a failure of an individual or a party, but of an entire system which has lost its way, has bowed down to idols of power and money, and is sacrificing chunks of its own body in vain hope of supremacy.
Here no Moses stands on holy ground, only a Bush burning in effigy; I confess, those of us who dance around the flames offer unholy fire like Nadab and Abihu.
Buber diagnosed our situation keenly: we are a vast amalgamation of Its-the economy and the state, the It-district of material hoarding and the I-district of emotional emptiness-being manipulated by whirring machinery which we mistake for civilization.
The solution? Harry Potter calls it remorse; the Bible, repentance; Buber, returning.
Feeding husks to the swine, the runaway boy came to himself and decided to go home. While he was still a long way off, the waiting Father saw him, ran and embraced him and welcomed him home. Returning, coming home-nothing less can redeem our culture from its suicidal course; returning, not by “the other guys” who are responsible for the mess in Washington, not by religious extremists who have hijacked our faith, not by liberals and secular humanists who will be left behind, not by everybody else.
But by me.
Just as I am, without one plea,
but that thy blood was shed for me,
oh lamb of God, I come.
“Every great culture that embraces more than one people rests upon an original encounter, an event at the source when a response was made to a You, an essential act of the spirit… But only as long as [man] possesses the essential act in his own life, acting and suffering, only as long as he himself enters into the relation is he free and thus creative.” I and Thou, p. 103.
Buber conceives of culture as arising from moments when one human being stands before the countenance, or when one person relates to the Presence at the heart of Being-another way of referring to an I-You encounter between human and God.
Life is a melancholy alteration between the actuality of the I-You mode of existence and, at best, those moments when life takes a deep breath, the latency of I-It. When actuality fades in a more lasting way, however, a demonic power usurps the place of the hovering Spirit, shoving matter and people about in an It-world without a soul.
Cultures escape from this zombie-like state only when a human being again steps before the countenance. The human stands without possession, without even clothing, like St. Francis in the marketplace of Assisi renouncing his father’s goods, called to build Christ’s church.. The Spirit hovers over the relation, empowering the human to fashion a human cosmos of houses of worship and dwelling places. The culture escapes from its sarcophagus, the person from her chrysalis, and the I-You of Being emerges, wet and trembling in newness of life.
Photo by Msry Fran