The Always Already
The Always Already
A sermon for Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Reading:
'The very condition of a deconstruction may be at work in the work, within the system to be deconstructed. It may already be located there, already at work. Not at the center, but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct. One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day. It is always already at work in the work. Since the destructive force of Deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work.'
JACQUES DERRIDA
MEMOIRES FOR PAUL DEMAN
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1986
From Showings by Julian of Norwich
After this the Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had to him before. And I saw that nothing hindered me but sin. And so I beheld generally in us all. And I thought if sin had not been, we should all have been clean and like to our Lord as he made us. And thus in my folly before this time, often I wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not stopped. For then thought I all should have been well.
And nevertheless I made mourning and sorrow therefore, without reason and discretion, of full great pride. But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that I needed, I say not that I need more teaching, for our Lord, with the Showing of this, has left me to holy Church, and I am hungry and thirsty and needy and sinful and frail and willfully submit myself to the teaching of holy Church with all my even-Christians to the end of my life.
He answered in this word and said, 'Sin is needful, but all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well'.
Sermon:
This morning’s sermon title comes from the work of Jacques Derrida, a postmodern philosopher from France. He used the term “always already” to describe the place of our thinking – that our ideas always already contain the seeds of their own undoing – their opposites. In the quote I read you, he talks about a process already in motion, in which the deconstruction of the text is always already contained within the text. To write that something is, is to raise the challenge that it is not – each thing carries its opposite, and all of us carry our own deaths within us.
Don’t worry though. Remember that the other reading was from the English mystic, Julian of Norwich, who wrote that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of thing shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich was also acquainted, I believe, with the always already – the thing already in process.
Religion addresses a particular intersection. This is the intersection where much is at stake and little is within our control. There are religions which imply that as long as one follows a given set of rules then one can escape the harsher realities of life on Earth. As an interfaith practitioner I maintain a certain agnosticism on matters of doctrine, but I confess to not finding these types of faiths particularly personally useful. It’s why I must be a Unitarian, I guess. We are not so much into rules.
But somehow we have to have a formula to get ourselves through the dark night of the soul without going crazy from uncertainty. What we are looking for is the opposite of that – certainty. Something we can feel secure about when nothing else feels particularly secure. In training for ministry I can remember some nights during clinical pastoral education that revealed the need for this in pretty graphic and horrifying ways. There was the night that the nine year old boy came in to the hospital, with his large extended and grieving family, having been shot in the head by another member of that family. I can remember the family’s pastor joining them at the bedside and praying for a miracle. I was hoping he would help them adjust to the reality of the situation, but perhaps that’s exactly what he was doing – giving them a hopeful space before they accepted the inevitable. The child didn’t make it. It was a long night.
In these moments people often resort to the image of God the Father – in control, omnipotent and omniscient, and somehow, also all loving, with a mysterious purpose known only to Godself.
In trauma rooms I do not argue theology.
But I know that such beliefs would be of little use to me under those circumstances, because I am constitutionally incapable of believing them. Maybe so are you. It is likely, since you’re here.
So what resources are left for people who can’t accept the God of classical theology?
Many, as it turns out.
One perfectly reasonable option, of course, is atheism. This sermon really isn’t about that, but it doesn’t rule it out either. I often think, as I’m studying away in my theology classes and working respectfully with people of many different faiths that I will eventually argue myself into a nice contented little atheism.
But there are other options, and it’s worth thinking about them before you find yourself, God forbid, in the emergency room.
Throughout the 20th century there was a movement within theology to deal in a new and more meaningful way with what theologians call the theodicy problem. You might have to go to seminary to learn that theologians know that this is a problem. If you don’t you’re going to have to sit there as an isolated rational individual and puzzle over how God can be both all powerful and all loving in the world we inhabit. The problem of moral evil can be resolved (though unsatisfactorily, in my opinion) by saying that free will requires that humans be permitted to sin. But the problem of the car crash in which one child dies and another survives, the problem of the tsunami in which thousands perish, the problem of the drought in which millions are brought to the brink of starvation – these cannot be argued away if God could stop them and does not.
At the point that you realize this you have a few choices and none of them are good in the classical theological sense. You can choose to be an atheist, which, as I said, is a perfectly rational response. You can choose to go on believing in the God of classical theology, but if you do you really can’t worship that God any longer. Or you can redefine the terms and choose to understand God differently.
I’m phrasing this as a choice though on some level I suspect that it isn’t – that we believe in the God who comes and finds us and who won’t leave us alone.
I grew up in the country in a quiet place where the most frightening things I experienced, unfortunately, were going on inside my house not outside them. And from an early age I would go outside seeking sanctuary under the canopy of sky, and knowing, though I couldn’t explain this at the time and probably still can’t, that things were ok somehow. Always already ok.
And what does it mean to say that? Because I’ve certainly had some trouble in my life and I’m sure you have in yours. In some cases here I know that you have.
The always already ok-ness of things is not a cheap assurance of grace. It is something more subtle than that. It is the assurance that while terrible things may happen they are wrapped up in an envelope of care. That the baseline for the universe is love, in spite of all the hate painted across it. It is the thing that allows the woman wracked with cancer to give up her life with a quiet smile on her face. It is the mystery of Mother Theresa carrying the sick up the stairs even as she feels lost and abandoned by the God her order taught her to believe in.
The always already is not an assurance that you will not be harmed. The only thing sure in this life is that at some point each of us will lose it. The always already is the great redemptive process by which we are assured that everything of value is preserved. That souls rise up. That in the end every worthy thing we have done with our time and our energy is still worthy. That the measure of things is not their durability, because nothing is durable, but the love with which they are done. And that love cannot be erased by time, or wave, or fire or anything.
If we believe in a co-creative relationship between God and the human, in which God’s influence is persuasive but not directive, and in which God cannot intervene except through the laws that govern creation – then God’s avenue for activity is at the quantum level, in the realm of molecular indeterminacy. It is not a great large finger riding over the tops of our heads that is there whenever God’s whim puts it there and mysteriously absent when the car speeds toward the cliff and God has other things to do.
Nothing, sadly, will keep the car from going over. Nothing stops the bus on the rainy highway. Angels do not bear the airplanes up by their wings. Wars are not prevented. Children starve in refugee camps and no manna is sent from the heavens. It does not rain. It rains far too much.
If your God operates in the manner of controlling all these events, then I’m going to respectfully and regretfully suggest that you need to think it through a little further. Because you need to think about the God who saved your kid in the car crash and let the other one perish. The God who let you be born in an area of affluence and plenty while two thirds of the world lacks adequate clean water. That God is dangerously likely to justify wealth, dangerously likely to justify power wherever they already happen to be. To return to Derrida for a minute (because it’s always good to have a reason to look back at your class notes from Modern Hermeneutical Strategies), we have to realize that while we may think we are having a conversation this morning about God, we are in fact having a conversation about language. We communicate in words, and words are signs for the thing signified. We know what they are based on what they are not. A cat is not a cap, and we know this from the experience of both cats and caps. But while we may seek meaning through oppositions (man is not woman, God is not man) things are not as oppositional as we sometimes like to pretend that they are. Man is not woman, but man is born of woman, every darned time.
And what we think we mean by man and what we think we mean by woman are, at least in part, social constructs. The words are linked with social associations in our heads – they convey meanings that may not be lodged in any objective truth.
As the hermeneutists say, there is no “transcendental signified” – there is only the specific example for which the sign is invoked. There is no transcendental cat, there are only cats. Two, in my house, and neither would rate as the transcendental cat though I like them.
What is always already present in the text is the web of difference. Derrida, he says, did not cause it – he just uncovered it and showed us that it was already there.
Derrida would say that the very idea of a stable unified human must be questioned. Not only can I not be fully present to you I can’t be fully present to myself – because I depend on signs and signs always already contain the seeds of their own undermining.
So once we have deconstructed the God of classical theology, what remains? Our own leading twentieth century theologian, Charles Hartshorne, weighs in on the subject with his “A Natural Theology for Our Time” in which he says that “it is demonstrable from almost any classical conception of God that he cannot be known in any merely indirect way, by inference only, but must somehow be present in all experience. No theist can without qualification deny the universal ‘immanence’ of God….And if God is in all things, he is in our experience, and thus is in some fashion a universal datum of experience.” [pg.2]
Worship, in Hartshorne’s view, is the act of turning the whole undivided self toward something which is an absolute datum of all experience – the thing to which we assign the sign “God”. The thing which is always already present in everything we experience. While Derrida would question whether we can be fully present even to ourselves through signs, the signs of worship are designed to create a fully present and undivided soul, turned toward the always already loving core of the universe.
You may decide that there is simply no one driving this bus, and that is reasonable. But you may intuit, with your whole self, that there is a force of love which underlies all things. That it is this loving baseline of the creative universe which has given rise, uniquely in our own case, to a creature capable of looking back on it with gratitude and admiration (and with complex hermeneutical questions). It may not be reasonable but you may not be able to think otherwise, because your undivided self tells you that its cells are experiencing the presence of the holy – that God is a datum of all your experience. In that case it will not be a God who stands apart from you and who directs activity on Earth. At this late date, that God is a horror.
The always already is way less reassuring, but at least it’s not like the abusive father in a dysfunctional family – the one who has the kids walking on tightropes thinking that if they just hold their tongue the right way and stand on one foot they can keep him from hitting mom again. The rules-based God who rewards obedience is a God for children, not for adults. The God who calls you quietly from the interior of your cells and reminds you who you were created to be, without possessing the capacity to make you be is a God for grown-ups. To name it God is simply to reappropriate the sign – to expose the discontinuities of its classical significance and reassign it to a new and clearer meaning.
This is the God who can’t keep the bus from going over the cliff, but who can be on the bus, hearing the sounds of the dying, never leaving until the last breath is breathed. This is the God who waits on the side of the hospital bed until the patient declares herself and begins to recover.
This is the God who whispers in your ear that you are still a worthy person when you spouse has left you or the child you care most about in the world is making really bad decisions. It’s the God who reminds you to look at the beauty of the world as you also look at its perishing.
The always already stands before the sign – before the word “God” was this be-ing, this holder of value, this quiet influence toward life and the good. Always already luring toward greater interaction, greater complexity, greater love among the living on the earth.
This is not a God who makes things easy, or fun. It’s a God who makes things worthwhile. It’s not a God who fixes things. It’s a God who gives them meaning, and who then preserves the value of their meaning, world without end. And that is enough. To know this God is to know with strange certainty that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Amen.