James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatalogical Imagination.
Let us imagine Cain, sentenced to wander forever over the face of the earth, unable to find a lasting home, always with fear of some vengeance for his brother's murder, and only half-protected by the laws which God gave after that incident, laws whose purpose was to contain the violence of reciprocal vengeance. Cain is getting on now and feels that death draws close. Wherever he goes he hears rumors that something terrible will happen, some fearful end will befall him, with a judgment in which he will be declared guilty.
The truth is that matter of his brother has been clouded from his memory, or is there as a very distant, vague sense of unease. What he knows is that he has been wandering all over the face of the earth since a certain time ago, without managing to settle anywhere, and it hasn't been for want of trying. He has had to fight bloody wars to protect himself; he has helped others to build sacred frontiers to protect themselves, also, against the violence which spreads everywhere. He spread a theology, he too, in which god is worshiped by people upholding strict laws separating good from bad, pure from impure, so as to keep God safely in place as the guarantee of social order. But now he feels, he knows not how, that things are winding down, coming to such a cosmic end that neither he nor anyone has a real protection against the threat.
Let us imagine him in a hut, not very well built, trying to sleep. Sleep does not come to him easily, because he has a presage of danger, and at times he stays half awake through the night. This night is no different, but suddenly he is fully awake when he realizes that someone has entered, burrowing a small hole in the wall. Cain is frightened: it will be either a thief or a murderer. The intruder seems unalarmed by having been detected, and this is probably because he is young and strong and would have no difficulty in overcoming the old man who is before him, an old man who would once have known how to put such an intruder to the sword. Not only does he not seem alarmed, but he draws close the one who has intuited him in the darkness, so confirming all the old man's fears that, at last, he will perish defenseless, as he has made so many others to perish.
However, the young man, on whose face can be glimpsed, even in the shadows of the first hours of dawn, certain half-healed scars, says to him: "Fear not, it is I, your brother, do you not remember?" He has to help the old man to remember that strong and handsome youth whom Cain adored, and who was his brother; so much did he adore him that he felt prostrated before him, loving him so much that the only way of being like him was to be instead of him, and he killed him, not out of hatred, but out of envy, devastating excess of a love which grasps at being. This process of remembering his brother is not at all pleasant for the old man, since at every awakening to what had really happened, it shakes him to see what it was that had been driving him since then, what strange and fatal mechanisms of love and hatred interlaced; and his whole story of wandering, of searching for shelter, of killing and driving out to protect himself, all stand revealed as unnecessary. At every step his brother allows him to see what had really been going on, and at each step the old man would like to do what his leathern'd legs will no longer allow him to do: to flee before hearing more, so much does he fear the turning inside out of everthing he has come to be.
Nevertheless, the young brother doesn't let him off this strange trial, strange, for in this court, the younger brother is victim, attorney, and judge, and the trial is the process of unblaming the one who did not dare to hear an accusation that never comes. Strangely, as his memory takes body, the old man begins to feel less and less the weight of the threatened end, which he had almost heard roaring about his ears. And he is right to lose that feeling, for the end has already come, but not as a threat: it has come as his brother who forgives him. He begins to glimpse that at the end of this trial he may have no physical strength left, but with all the strength of his heart which is unfolding into youth, he wants to kiss his brother before dying, the rest does not matter.
All this will no doubt have been pretty obvious to you, heavily Dostoyevskian tints and all. What I wanted to suggest is that, in this, very exactly, does the Christian faith consist: in the return of Abel as forgiveness for Cain, and the return of Abel not only as a decree of forgiveness for Cain, but as an insistent presence which gives Cain time to recover his story, and, with the years which remain to him, which may be only days, who knows, to begin to reconstruct another story. This he will manage to do in the degree to which, at every step of that painful process of calling to mind, he manages to stand loose from what he was doing, driven on by his poorly hidden flight in shame, and to build another story in which he has ceased to swing between playing the role of hero, who has to face up to a senseless life, or that of the victim, against whom all whisper, and who must protect himself against them all; to build a story that is "other," somewhere between forgotten and unimagined, the story of the brokenhearted fratricide to whom his brother has come back in peace, naked of threat. However the story is to finish, between this arrival of his brother like a thief in the night and the end of his days, Cain will be hard at work in the construction of the story of one who can look into his brother's eyes neither with pride nor with shame. He will look instead with the gratitude of a man who has received himself back at the hands of the one he himself killed, killed to fill the vacuum of the feeling that, before that other, he, Cain, had no "himself" to give, no "himself" with whom to love.
This is the story of which we are talking when we speak of the human story in its working out starting from the resurrection. It is what I call the time of Abel. The time in which the innocent victim is made present to us as forgiveness, and thus, little by little, allows us to let go of all the sacred mechanisms of which we lay hold to fortify ourselves against our own truth. Of course, this process of letting go is violent, because we don't let go easily, or at once. The problem is that, at every step of our removing the sacred, the desacralized gets resacralized, but under a different form, opposed to the previous sacralization, and we think that, at last, we have managed to set ourselves free from the sacred...
None of us escapes from living in the midst of all these contradictory and oscillating desires and tendencies, and we are all formed from within by means of them. This is the time of Abel, the time of the scandal revealed where there is no longer any formula for reunion, where there is no easy peace, and in the midst of which the one who refuses to participate in the current game runs the risk of being lynched, but also has to take great care that her way of playing the game is not to seek to be lynched, to sacralize herself as a victim. This is one of the possibilities that only the scandal of the cross has been made viable.
The task is to live in the midst of this, learning not to be scandalized either by oneself or by the process, nor by finding oneself living out simultaneous contradictions. Being scandalized means, in the first place, always being in flight from one form of the sacred to another, in a series of strokes of the pendulum where the most that we manage to hide from ourselves is the identity of what is apparently different. The only one who can cease fleeing from these strokes is the Cain who accepts forgiveness, accepts that he has no city, and that there is no need to seek to found it, because the Son of man has no place, like Cain, and his story is built wherever, and has no abiding city, because the nen Jerusalem is coming down from heaven.
When Jesus says, "And blessed is whosoever is not scandalized by me" (Matt. 11:6) and Paul preaches the scandal of the cross (1 Cor. 1:23), they are revealing, and making habitable, life in the time of Abel. Whoever is not scandalized by Abel, who does not have to flee in scandal from the sacred to the secular and back again to the sacred, without ever leaving that same cyclical movement, is being enabled to accept the contradictions which move him or her and, in the midst of them, to stretch out a hand to the victims of the scandalized sacred in which that person has, him or herself, participated, and to some degree participates still. The peace which Christ gave and which the world does not give, the creation of habitable time, is this peace of Cain in the time of Abel, in patient and humble hoping for the coming of a new heaven and a new earth.
Thanks for your response, Brad. It helped to activate my thoughts a bit. Forgiving, on the part of an abused woman, shouldn't be equated with taking back the abusive husband and submitting to continued abuse. Walter Wink's interpretative of "turning the other cheek" comes to mind (and as applied by the Linn's in "Don't forgive too soon") and is illustrative of this, and helpful in my thinking. Parenthetically, I look forward to reading the book you recommended.
Posted by: John Shorack | May 21, 2008 at 01:17 PM
Dear John,
I think on this point that your wife's objection is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, Alison himself would concur. The history of atonement theology has often been extremely oppressive to women, but I know for Alison's part, Jesus' view of the nonviolence of God would take her concerns seriously.
A tremendous companion volume to "Stricken by God?" that takes into account the feminist and womanist perspectives is "Cross-Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today" edited by Marit Trelstad.
Posted by: Brad | May 19, 2008 at 10:38 PM
My name is John Shorack. I read "Raising Abel", in part, through the lenses of another article by James Alison, "God's self-substitution and Sacrificial inversion" found in the book: "Stricken by God?" I deeply appreciate the author's basic narrative, that is, the disturbing reality of being approached by one's forgiving victim. Yes, this is scandalous. It is also, I believe, liberating, for all parties. Curiously, when I shared this with my wife, her response caught off guard. In essense, she said: "That's what the Church has always been telling abused women to do: forgive their abusive husbands. That's not liberating." Though she has a good point, I'm not ready to give up on the truth of Alison's insight into the biblical narrative of God's redemptive work. Can anyone have thoughts on this?
Posted by: John Shorack | May 19, 2008 at 07:30 AM