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Stories/Myths and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

Liz McAlister
(Talk given at the invitation of people at St. John's Parish Church ,
Duluth, MN, May 13, 2004)

Let me begin with a word or two about stories and myths. Are they the same thing? Are they connected? If so, how?

STORIES - “All the stories are true. Some of them even happened!” (Megan McKenna) We are beginning to understand the importance of stories and are witnessing the emergence of story theology. With story theology, we get inside the story, move around in it and appropriate it. Thus we experience the power of God in our lives. Thus we experience healing. Thus we experience the power of the stories and especially our connections and our interconnectedness.

Each of us is a story. Each of us has to find a place in which and/or a person to whom we can tell our story. Because it is only in telling our story that we ourselves appropriate it. Those who have no one or no where to tell their stories are never able to come into possession of themselves. A tragedy of our day is that so many lives go down with no one to take note.

MYTHS – Those who regard myth as something not true grossly misunderstand myth. Myth is so true, so profound, so powerful it can only be encapsulated in story form. It can't be abstracted or objectified. You have to go into it, walk in it, and move around in it. Myth is personal, shared, and experiential. Myth is the collective dreaming, collective wishing, and collective experiencing of a group of people. There is nothing more powerful than collective remembering – especially collective remembering of how we came together as a people.

What then is the myth that we, as residents and/or citizens of the U.S. of A. share?

The myth is
•  that violence saves
•  that war brings peace
•  that might makes right
•  that we can conquer violence with violence.

These are the main elements of the Myth of Redemptive Violence . It is one of the oldest repeated stories in the world. It – and not Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc – is the dominant religion in our society today. It has been carefully and thoroughly inculcated in us from our mothers' wombs. It is the story line of our nation's history, of kids' books and cartoons, of TV and movie, of history from Christopher Columbus to George W. Bush – from conquest of land from native peoples, Mexicans, the French and Spanish and English, from Revolutionary War - it is a history of wars and justification of wars.

A significant aspect of the myth of redemptive violence is its contribution to international conflict. There, the survival and welfare of the nation becomes the highest earthly6 and heavenly good. Nation alism is made absolute. There can be no other gods before the nation. The myth of redemptive violence is the spirituality of our national security state. More –

  it speaks for God; it does not listen for God to speak •  it invokes God's sovereignty as its own
•  it misappropriates the language, symbols and scriptures of Christianity
•  it does not seek God in order to change but embraces God in order to prevent change
•  it boasts a tribal god worshipped as an idol
•  its metaphor is the fortress not the journey
•  its offer is victory not forgiveness
•  its good news is not unconditional love of enemies but their elimination
•  its salvation isn't a new heart but a successful foreign policy
•  it is blasphemous
•  it is idolatrous
•  it is immensely popular

More – it's been growing and developing for some 5,000 years during which those in power have created myths to socialize women, the poor, captives to believe and accept their inferior status.

As part of that growth and development, those in power (The Powers that Be) are linke (when did it all happen – Military Industrial Complex, add Academic, add Media, add Legal) that we call the domination system. The domination system is characterized by

•  Unjust economic relationships
•  Biased race relationships
•  Hierarchical power relationships
•  Oppressive political relationships
•  Patriarchal gender relationships
•  Exploitative relationship with the earth
•  And violence to maintain the system
•  And the law to enforce it

That's where we are; that's why we are in the morass we are in. And maybe it helps to explain why we torture Arabs (and each other) with impunity. And maybe it helps to explain why we so readily accept that behavior as soon as we get beyond being horrified by it and why it becomes commonplace – which I fear is happening.

O.K. The news isn't all bad. We're in a Christian church. We've got our scripture, our stories, we've got each other. We've been shown another way – if we would only listen, study, observe, and practice it. The other way is called the KINDOM OF GOD or Jesus' domination free order. It is not hard to find or flesh out with a little reading and study – and what a necessary and urgent counterforce it is to the Domination System and its myth.

How do we confront the powers, their domination system and the myth of redemptive violence?

•  Naming the powers = identifying the real spiritual forces at work in our world
•  Unmasking the powers = removing their invisibility, their ability to coerce us unconsciously to do their bidding
•  Engaging the power = joining God's purpose to bend them back to God's purpose.

THESE ARE SOME OF THE WAYS JESUS ADDRESSED THE DOMINATION SYSTEM and they are the attitudes that make for the domination free order that was his greatest gift to us.

•  Concern for outcasts and the marginalized (cf. the Beatitudes)
•  Respect for women (all through the Gospels but most notable in Luke)
•  Rejection of domination hierarchies (cf. Lk 12:37; 22:24-27; Mt 23:8-10; Jn 15:15)
•  Embrace of economic equity
•  Rejection of violence ( cf Lk 9:51-56; 22:51; Mt 5:43-48;   26:52)
•  At the crucifixion, he refuses the last resort to violence.

Jesus regarded holiness and wholeness as contagious, therefore touching the sick, women, etc. He offered an alternative concept of family as solidarity in the work of God.

Jesus died as all others who challenged the domination system. That is he died subject to its gratuitous violence; mocking derision; intimidating brutality in the means of execution. Jesus' death revealed the society's sacrificial system as a form of organized violence in the service of social tranquility. The gospels denounce the verdict against Jesus (cf. Jn 11:50) as a total miscarriage of justice, as a crime against God. Jesus' arraignment, trial, crucifixion and death stripped the scape-goating mechanism of its sacred aura and exposed it as legalized murder. We can each name others who died in the same way! (It needs to be said that the Church failed to sustain this revelation and preached that God sent Jesus to be the last scapegoat and reconcile us to God.   Thus the Church failed to unmask the violence at the core of society.) Susan 's search for a book for kids that gets the story right .It remains for us to get it right.

Jesus lived and died teaching us that defeating the powers means that we die to their control. He drew a line in the sand and asked that we step across it; that we step out of one entire world where violence is the ultimate solution and into another where the spiral of violence is broken by those willing to absorb its impact with their own flesh.

Jesus' third way counsels resistance without violence

“Turn the other cheek” – a backhand blow to right cheek was meted out to inferiors – therefore turn the other cheek to face the oppressor as one human being to another. Therefore non-cooperate with humiliation.

“Give the inner garment as well – that is strip naked and shame the oppressor and so rise above being shamed.

“Go the second mile” – recover the initiative and assert human dignity especially in a situation that, for the present, cannot be changed.

In short, oppose but do not mirror the evil. Each of these was meant to tickle the imagination of an oppressed and occupied people to discover ways to assert their humanity and begin to change the power relationships. They are a primer in creative nonviolence.

Practical Nonviolence rests on 3 basic principles

1. ends and means are consistent
2. respect for the rule of law which discourages frivolous violations of the law
3. don't become what you hate.

It works. We've seen it work. We've seen the bush burning and not being consumed (one of the stories of our tradition that can seem so mysterious until we get inside it and see evidence of it today. We can see it. We saw it in Gandhi, in King… We saw it in 1989–90 - miracles of transformation. 1.7 billion People (32% of humanity) experienced nonviolent revolutions. Except in China all succeeded. Except in Romania and part of the southernmost USSR , all were completely peaceful. If we add countries touched by major nonviolent actions in the 20 th century, the figure reaches almost 3 billion people involved and radically affected. The issue is moving from occasional nonviolent actions to creating a sustained movement – staying with it, being out there, considering it more important than the day-to-day business of our lives.

“But what if….”

Stories of nonviolent response to rape, to assault…

Stories of nonviolent responses to Nazism

Can we find God in the enemy? We can if we learn to love the enemy each of us carries within us. And there are great stories of people who did just that.

Which brings us to the discipline of prayer in nonviolence – social activism runs the danger of becoming self-justifying good work. And so it will unless the practitioner is devoted to and thus protected by prayer. Our prayers to God reflect back on us as a divine command to become the answer we seek. We are the ones we've been waiting for.   Maybe history belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being. In prayer we cast fire onto the earth and will the future into being.

I need, in conclusion, to emphasize that these are our stories; the Jesus experience/experiment can be our myth but only if we enter into it and only if we abandon the Myth of Redemptive Violence which is the myth of the domination system and only if we make these stories our own – take them off the pages, walk in them, listen to each other in them, and then practice them with all the human creativity we can muster.