Dr. Freeman

Are you sick of pretending to have your shit together? Is the task of feigning sanity driving you mad?? Is the honest confession that you may be totally deceived in your highest aspirations precisely the thing that makes your passion for life authentic?

No, not me either… for just as the real journey only begins when we do not see exactly where we are going, and just as existential resolve is never stronger than in the morning after the night when it was never weaker, in a time of peace the war like man sets about surrendering everything to a passion for Not-Knowing that undermines all his claims to premature self-actualization with a free gift of Love that costs him precisely everything…

And just as God created the world “ex nihilo” (out of Nothing), when this very same God wants to bring forth a great man he must also firstly reduce him to nothing… and thereby show him that in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in a life and death struggle to subvert, transgress, deconstruct the thin veil of righteousness that centers everything around itself, become vulnerable to the strange truths that threaten one’s self-boundaries and honestly face up to the Impossible/Real in which the absolute Truth is logical nonsense…

So with a tremendous affirmation of the Mystery that derails or unsettles the standard use of language on the basis of its established meanings, leaving it’s reference (developmental signified) Empty, I will infuriate politically correct thought police and hereby maintain the radical un-decidability between the sacred and the obscene, the existential ambiguity between love and murder, and the phenomenological confusion between God and Terror – for all of these are radically Not-Two!

Both the actual occasion of ones profound spiritual awakening and the most overwhelming forms of violence (e.g. the Tsunami that occurred on the day after Christmas 2004 destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and the world-wide shock and awe stemming from the terror attacks of 911) - both of these events – the wonder of radical awakening and the horror of meaningless suffering – events that are said to be at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience, are intrinsically unforeseeable, utterly unimaginable and totally unbelievable. That is, both Love and Death come to us from out of nowhere and leave us spell-bound and speechless, both come to us as an absolute surprise, and often as something monstrous, a horrendous apparition that explodes all our standards for harmony, order and ethical conduct… Yes friends, both Terrorism (Death) and God (Love) go past all conventional standards and ethical value-judgments in a dreadful awakening to the groundless abyss, and so the question remains: how much truth can you handle without the sugar coated defense against the shattering experience of chaotic vulnerability??

As all those Christians who read their Bible and all radical Muslims know, just like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Issac, when we obey the unconditional claim of God on our lives we must give up any human justification, any rational grounds, and any merely human calculation. For as soon as you know for sure where you’re going and seek make everything turn on a clear-cut distinction between the Divine and the Demonic, the saint and the heretic, the messiah and the false prophet, as soon as you think you have a handle on this distinction, then that is the foreclosure of faith, the end of hope and an obstacle to love!

When you are sure you have the Real one, you can be sure that you’re lost in the wilderness, and so maybe it is better that the Secret remains secret after all… for who can we trust to administer it, interpret it, protect it?? In other words, if the Secret were given, the cure would quickly turn to poison…

And so in the cloud of Un-Knowing, where we give up any calculation, any claim to know the Name of that One, if God is found anywhere it is in the Nameless - i.e. the crucified, the abandoned, the destitute and those despised by those well bred, well-fed upholders of the established structures of goodness, truth and beauty…

Yes indeed, there is time-honored trajectory in the Western tradition from Isaiah to Paul to Luther to Kierkegaard to Derrida: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… I will deconstruct the civilized madness of the ones who are supposed to know… for the foolishness of God always trumps the wisdom of the world.

The Christ-event is therefore a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that disrupts and destabilizes the predominant symbolic code. And since this event is not mediated by the domain of terrestrial finitude with its propensity for corruption and the abuse of power, this intrusion of the traumatic Real - this crucified God - renders obsolete the conventional distinction between the believers and the infidels, the saved and the lost, the theists and atheists with an amoral reversal that cuts to the heart of Jesus’ own radical teachings on the Kingdom of God.

For in the in-breaking of the already/not-yet Kingdom where everything is turned inside-out and up-side down, who can be left out?? And who can say for sure that they are in?? For where the absolute religious experience is made possible by “an asymmetrical obedience to an absurd order” (Derrida), an space that is otherwise than the structures of power that service the privileged few, everything that goes by the name of religion, philosophy, truth and goodness would actually get in the way – lest we forget the dangerous memory of Jesus of Nazareth - for the Truth will strike us as deeply Absurd, and come to us as something that we did Not see coming… so all we can do is stay open to an unpredictable earthquake, and hope and pray for something, we know not what… as our true purpose in life will come over us in an event that at first looks like a sheer accident, a complete failure or an unmitigated disaster…

So, when all the boundaries between God and Satan collapse then we have no way of telling a terrorist from a freedom fighter, a democratically elected leader from a religious fundamentalist, a nation of civilized people from a collection of fearful and desperate barbarians, an illegal bombing from a legal war… and when we shatter the categories that hold together our fragile grasp on (so-called) reality then we are in a fruitful space, an empty/pregnant/void in which all values can be created anew. So rather than radically dissociating Good and Evil, Us and Them, Resurrection and Death, I suggest that we are to assume our mortality and suffering in its most radical form. To be sure, the incomprehensibility of Terror IS indistinguishable from our divine stupor before the un-knowable Other-ness of God… and neither of these limit-experiences can be domesticated or made ones own… for they both elude all our programs of mastery, slip through the grasp of all our schemes, and resist reduction to all history, revelation, and all truth…

And so maybe behind it all there is Nothing behind it all, there is nothing to prop up our established beliefs and practices – maybe that is the condition of Truth. It is there, from a time out of mind… It already has me, before I have IT, before I Am – it is there – a matter of my undoing, like the heat death of the Universe… I am made destitute by It… I am debilitated by It… It holds me there ‘without remission’… I cannot say what it is - Being and God and Truth have been reduced to ashes and consumed by this nameless, formless Impossibility… this indeterminate desert-like emptiness that antedates all determinate forms and structures… it is Nothing that I own but Something to which I must own up… I call out and it doesn’t answer – there’s no body there… Its bottomless depth eludes my grasp, haunting me, unknown, ungraspable, an Abyss that threatens to swallow up everything that keeps me here… like a black hole that follows the death of a star absorbing the light of all the smaller bodies around it. Yet, it is there. This is what has us…and maybe all our little truths, and virtues and institutions and programs for self-improvement will be reduced to ashes without a trace… for all we know the stars twinkle in the void of endless space and the little planet teeming with life will one day sink back into the sun… Will anyone ever know that we were here?