Anticipation

Jesus said to his disciples:

"Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy

from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life,

and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.

For that day will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth.

Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength

to escape the tribulations that are imminent

and to stand before the Son of Man."

Luke 21:34 – 36

We don’t know when and we don’t know how. But if there’s one thing we do know from astronomy is that the moon, planets, stars and even galaxies have an end. For just how long the universe waxes and wanes until it finally collapses is known only to God. For the Christian believer there will come a time, at the end of time itself, that all humanity, every human being who ever lived, will be called to account. It’s an unattractive prospect given our meagre three score and ten that we have been allocated!

And yet Advent begins as a poignant if energetic, multileveled reminder of, firstly, the expectation of the arrival of the Christ-child, God-made-flesh; secondly, the anticipation of the coming Messiah by John (and the Jewish community); and thirdly, awaiting the second coming of the Messiah (the Parousia). The early Christian communities had a strong, urgent sense of the imminent arrival of the Lord, so much so that Paul recommended against marrying (1Corinthians 7:8). But like our latter day millennialists, Paul was not quite on the mark. Even greater patience was required.

And today – with our seemingly embedded postmodern deconstruction of biblical texts we have rationalised away this vital tension between the ‘now’ and the ‘yet to come’. The four weeks of Advent remind us of our being human, about our place in great scheme of things and our deepest need for hope that there is something more than our brief stay on earth.

Advent is a gift, accept it and live like you have been promised eternity.

Peter Douglas

With Anti-Semitism on the rise, can Poland come to terms with its past?

Heroic and Unheroic Poland

by Monika Rice

In coming to terms with a Holocaust that played out on its own soil, Poland has staggered along a tumultuous path. The country lost more members of the Jewish diaspora to the Holocaust than any other European nation. Meanwhile, the citizens of Poland have been forced to reconcile a wide spectrum of attitudes toward their Jewish compatriots.

When the Soviet Army “liberated” Poland from its German occupation in 1945, those Jewish survivors who attempted to return to their homes frequently met with a hostile curiosity at the very fact that they were still alive. They also faced threats and sometimes outright attacks. Most infamous was the killing of 42 Jews in the Kielce Pogrom of July 4, 1946, or that of hundreds in the so-called train actions (1945-46), in which Jews were pulled from trains by Poles and killed on the spot. Unlike the actions against Communists by partisans of the Polish underground, in attacks on Jews Poles targeted also women and children, in a viciously unheroic display of greed and fear.

When they were in power, the Polish Communists banned any discussion of the fate of the Polish Jews, and Jews were often the target of intraparty feuds—most notoriously, after the events of March 1968, when about 20,000 Jews were forced to leave Poland. It was not until the late 1970s that a genuine interest in Poland’s Jewish past would begin to arise among a generation associated with the Solidarity movement. In 1987, Jan Błonski’s essay, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” (in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny), famously challenged the widely held Polish conviction that the Poles were exclusively victims in the Second World War, and that they had heroically done all in their power to save Jews. Błonski’s essay spurred a discussion on Polish-Jewish relations, and some historical works on the subject followed. Mostly negative reactions to this essay signaled that Poles were not yet ready for a soul-searching examination of national conscience.

In 2000, however, a full decade after the fall of Communism, Jan T. Gross published his groundbreaking book Neighbors in Poland (published in the United States in 2001), which permanently altered the landscape of Polish memory, identity and scholarship on the Holocaust. Gross’s book described the Polish pogrom of the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne in July 1941, shortly after the onset of German-Soviet hostilities. Drawing on first-person accounts, Gross reconstituted the horrific circumstances: the wanton murders of Jews around town; their humiliation by forcing them to carry a monument to Lenin; finally, the mass murder of several hundred Jews, burned alive in a barn. This pogrom—and its perpetrators—was known to historians as well as to the local authorities; some of the perpetrators were charged with crimes and served their sentences after the war.

Nevertheless, to the average Pole, the fact of this pogrom was something to be neither confronted nor even acknowledged. Gross himself had remained silent for four years after discovering the grisly details in eyewitness accounts, for he could not bring himself to face what had actually happened. A truth like this, however, could not be pushed aside. Neighbors would evoke the greatest public debate in free Poland. It inspired the creation of a prolific line of Polish research, mostly conducted by scholars from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. One leading academic, David Engel, has reported to a conference that “the most cutting-edge Holocaust research is currently being done in Poland,” where it is focused on Polish-Jewish relations in the countryside and within the underground.

The debate has raised the popular consciousness of wartime crimes committed by Polish Gentiles against Polish Jews. Research performed between 2002 and 2011 has shown that, while the number of Poles who mostly blame Germans as the perpetrators of Jedwabne has remained constant at 26 percent, the number of those who mostly blame Poles has increased from 10 percent to 18 percent. (This correlates to education level; the higher one’s education level, the more likely one is to display willingness to see fellow Poles as perpetrators.) An even greater number of Poles also believed that it was good for Poland for the truth about the Jedwabne massacre to come out (85 percent in 2011). Unfortunately, the overall number of Poles who remained utterly ignorant of Jedwabne also grew, among teenagers in particular, possibly because the massacre is not included in school curricula.

At the same time, the higher-level disciplines of Jewish and Holocaust studies have been booming in Poland, as almost every institution of higher education now offers courses or sponsors institutes devoted to these areas. Poland’s cultural memory of its Jewish past has demonstrated an impressive commitment to coming to terms with its history, so much that it could be perceived as a model of the self-critical work that other nations, such as Lithuania or Ukraine, have not yet been able to face. At least, that is how it has appeared until now.

An International Crisis

Many participants and observers of this historic shift feel that we have been deluding ourselves that the work of the rectification of the Polish cultural memory has been mostly achieved. While over the past three years it became apparent that there were certain setbacks—for example, an increased polarization along pronationalist and prodemocratic lines, or a public display of xenophobic behaviors—nothing prepared us for the shock that came last January when the Polish parliament passed amendments to the Polish law concerning the Institute of National Remembrance. The law evoked an international crisis. One controversial element was the criminalization of the use of expressions like “Polish death camps.” But the real source of Polish and international outcry lay in other injunctions, like the following:

1. Whoever publicly and contrary to the facts attributes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich..., or for any other offences constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes, shall be liable to a fine or deprivation of liberty for up to 3 years.... 2. If the perpetrator of the act specified in section 1 above acts unintentionally, they shall be liable to a fine or restriction of liberty.... [T]his Act shall be applicable to a Polish citizen as well as a foreigner.

Critical international reactions to this law have included official responses from Israel, the United States and Ukraine. Meanwhile, public opinion in Poland has remained deeply divided. In general, the ruling Law and Justice Party, known as the PiS, as well as many Catholic bishops, supported the new law, seeing in it a tool for defending against defamatory characterization of Poles as an international “whipping boy” for anti-Semitism. This perspective focuses on the offensiveness and incorrectness of the term “Polish death camp.” Those who were critical of the law, on the other hand, including Catholic circles concentrated around Tygodnik Powszechny, in which the future Pope John Paul II and his fellow scholars published, point to the detrimental effects the law would have on the future of Polish scholarship, education and public debate.

On June 27 the Polish government unexpectedly backed down from the amendment. In a procedure described as an “urgent project,” both houses of parliament did away with the law within five hours. The president signed the change immediately afterward. The lightning speed of this process, in which members of parliament had a limited chance to ask questions, was probably due to a desire to appease Poland’s most powerful ally. The dots are not difficult to connect. On his visit to the United States in May, President Andrzej Duda was not invited to a meeting with President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence. The Polish deputy prime minister later acknowledged that the new law was blocking talks about American military presence in Poland. During the July NATO summit in Brussels, however, President Duda was able to secure an invitation to the White House, as well as American promises of greater military presence in Poland and sale of military equipment. On the same day as the removal of the amendment, the prime ministers of Poland and Israel also signed a controversial joint statement about cooperation, in which “anti-polonism” is mentioned on a par with anti-Semitism, a correlation that has since gained severe criticism in Israel. The new version of the law removed the threat of jail sentences and established that expressions perceived as defamatory toward the Polish nation will become civil offenses, not criminal.

A Disturbing Reality

While the change in law, even under pressure, was a positive development, the affair revealed a disturbing reality about Polish society and its latent anti-Semitism. The timing of the amendment, on the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, only added to its incendiary effect. The amendment’s phrasing, apart from major legislative flaws that would make it tortuous to apply, demonstrated monumental myopia of historical reasoning. Past Polish leaders have recognized the role the country played in the horrors of the Holocaust. One of the earliest attributions of “co-responsibility” for Nazi crimes to the “Polish Nation” was by no other than Jan Karski, courier of the Polish Government-in-Exile, who tried in vain to alert the Allies to the annihilation of Poland’s Jewish population. In a February 1940 report, he assessed Polish attitudes toward the Jews as...

overwhelmingly severe, often without pity. A large percentage of them are benefitting from the rights the new situation gives them. They frequently exploit those rights and often abuse them. This brings them, to a certain extent, nearer to the Germans.... “The solution of the Jewish Question” by the Germans—I must state this with a full sense of responsibility for what I am saying—is a serious and quite dangerous tool in the hands of the Germans, leading toward “moral pacification” of broad sections of Polish society...although the nation loathes them [the Germans] mortally, this question is creating something akin to a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large part of Polish society are finding agreement.

Ironically, Karski—a national hero who, as a “man who tried to stop the Holocaust,” became an icon for a certain Polish narrative in which Poles did all in their power to save Jews but became a target of “anti-Polish” prejudice—could have been imprisoned had the amendment not been changed.

This possibility points to the conclusion that the new law was not really about the semantics of “Polish death camps.” It was rather about muzzling the scholarly research that has burgeoned in free Poland since the publication of Neighbors. Whatever one thinks of Gross’s book, politicians have attempted to charge him with libel against the Polish nation for publishing it, and the current president has attempted to deprive Gross of the Order of Merit he received for outstanding scholarship in 1996, when he was widely hailed as a historian of safer topics, such as the Polish society under German occupation or under Soviet rule. The amendment represented the success of an anti-Gross narrative that sees him as a liar and a traitor.

The final report of the Institute of National Remembrance itself substantially confirmed Gross’s basic finding concerning the participation of Poles in the massacre of several hundred Jews in Jedwabne (while disputing Gross’s numbers), stating that at least 40 Poles brutally murdered several hundred Jewish inhabitants of the town, including women, children and even infants, with no more than a passive, “inspirational” role ascribed to the Germans. A former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former prime minister, Jerzy Buzek, and a number of Polish Catholic bishops have already acknowledged the guilt of these Poles and have expressed their apologies for these acts committed by Poles.

Unfortunately, political changes in the Institute of National Remembrance have now created a different climate. Its current director, when he was interviewing for the position, claimed—against the evidence and contrary to previous institute findings—that the Jedwabne pogrom was executed by Germans forcing innocent Poles, in fear for their lives, to kill their Jewish neighbors. His nomination in 2016 coincided with a purge of precisely those historians who had been crucial for deepening our knowledge of Polish behavior toward the Jews from the outset of German-Soviet hostilities in 1941.

Recent actions of the Law and Justice Party threaten to reverse the important academic advances made in post-Communist Polish scholarship. Polish governmental institutions have, I have learned, reneged on support for academic conferences dealing with Polish-Jewish subjects, and Holocaust courses have been cancelled at Polish universities. I have also heard that Polish academics are even refused institutional and financial support to publish on Jewish history not directly related to Polish-Jewish relations and are told, “It is not the right time.” Both students and scholars, faced with such a hostile atmosphere, may decide not to risk their academic careers by working on similar topics.

In the present context, the mounting anti-Semitic demonstrations in Poland can no longer be characterized as marginal. Events like the burning of Jews in effigy, pro-fascist demonstrations and a massive neo-Nazi march during the recent celebration of Polish Independence, are not normal signs of a functioning free society. Although the government officially dissociates itself from such demonstrations, it fails to signal that they lie outside of acceptable discourse, even as it passed this new law regulating contrary speech. Government officials downplayed the neo-Nazi march, but they prosecuted members of a countermarch. If free speech is good for one side of an issue, why not for the other?

Even such demonstrations, however, do not compare in their impact to the expressions of certain government officials since the law was proposed. One presidential advisor has claimed that Israel’s protest stems from a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.” The PiS has renewed its plans to outlaw kosher slaughter, with a penalty of four years imprisonment. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki poured gasoline on the fire when, at the Munich Security Conference, he answered a question from an Israeli journalist on whether the new law would criminalize him for saying that his parents’ family members were killed after their Polish neighbors reported them to the Germans. Prime Minister Morawiecki replied, “You’re not going to be seen as criminal [if you] say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators as well as Ukrainian perpetrators—not only German perpetrators.” This response was, understandably, interpreted as a blurring of distinctions between perpetrators and victims and relativizing—thus erasing—any responsibility that certain Poles had in the elimination of their Jewish neighbors.

Expressions like these convey a desire to whitewash the Polish national memory, erasing any notion of complicity by Polish citizens in crimes against their fellow citizens who happened to be Jews. There is also a not-so-subtle link between the vox populi and the party in power. When President Duda received the new law to sign it, demonstrators before the presidential palace brandished posters and shouted the following slogans: “Stop the Jewish aggression against Poland!” “Enough, enough Jewish lies!” and “Take off your yarmulka. Sign the law!”

Anti-Semitism has also breached the mainstream media: Dr. Adam Sandauer, a Polish-Jewish physicist and social activist, found it necessary to walk off the set of a television talk show when he was ambushed with anti-Semitic canards by an audience member, who was not stopped by the talk show hosts. Two other television hosts have told “Holocaust jokes.” Written screeds have since appeared in mainstream newspapers.

The increase in public manifestations of anti-Semitism is not the only symptom of growing hostile attitudes toward the other in Poland. Verbal attacks on foreigners tend more often now to turn to violence, from which even children are not spared. A 14-year-old Turkish girl was beaten on the street while the attackers were shouting “Poland for Poles!”Foreigners from Africa or India are routinely insulted with the “n-word” and also physically attacked. Crimes committed from racial prejudice are on a sharp rise. There were 835 cases in 2013, 1631 in 2016 and 947 in the first six months alone of 2017.

This is the climate in which this new law sought to limit free speech and open debate that was recently restored after Communism, a climate that is essential for Poles to face a history in which they are not exclusively victims. The effects of the law could have been not only long-term losses in scholarship. More ominous is what it appeared to sanction in the public sphere: an outburst of unlimited expressions of anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia that present to the Poles a very unpleasant self-image.

Polish historians already ask whether the situation is beginning to resemble the 1930s, with its anti-Jewish street violence, attempts to outlaw kosher slaughter, numerus clausus and press assaults on prominent Polish Jews, or, perhaps, 1968, with its state-sponsored “anti-Zionist campaign,” but also with the popular social exclusion of Jewish Poles. There are not many Jews left in Poland to harass or expel, but what will happen to the Poles and to their soul as a “nation” as anti-Semitism is left unchecked?

At Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust remembrance center, Pope John Paul II remembered Poland’s Jews and warned the world to be attentive to their unique suffering: “How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale.” We owe it to them to tell the whole truth, not just that which certain Polish politicians find appealing to a nationalist base.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Heroic and Unheroic Poland," in the November 12, 2018 issue.

Monika Rice is director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at Gratz College.

Not of this world

Jesus replied, ‘Mine is not a kingdom of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my men would have fought to prevent my being surrendered to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this kind.’ ‘So you are a king then?’ said Pilate. ‘It is you who say it’ answered Jesus. ‘Yes, I am a king. I was born for this, I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’

John 18:36 - 37

There are few monarchies left. Those that are, are often surrounded by bizarre rituals that are remnants of great power. There are 195 countries recognised by the United Nations (and doesn't include the Vatican, Palestine, Taiwan or Kosovo) Absolute monarchies make up 7 of the 43 sovereign states possessing monarchs. Five of these are Arabic and Muslim, one is the Roman Pontiff and the last the king of eSwatini (formerly Swaziland).

Bowing, kneeling, walking backwards, not looking directly into their eyes, lying prostrate, when and when not to speak, forms of address, clothing and any number of protocols, rules, customs, etiquette, precedence which accumulate to and by the institution of the monarchy. Let's be honest, such nonsense is totally unnecessary. Primary in the meeting of any two human beings is surely mutual respect.

For those monarchies that adjusted to democracy, various constitutional arrangements ensured that rule and reign were separated.

In kingship hereditary, elected or both, the king is a symbol of the people's sovereignty and nationhood, they embody the aspirations of their people, but who remain above the affray of politics.  For many, these attributes can be assumed by an elected president or national hero.

At this time each year the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe (generally called the feast of Christ the King) is celebrated a week before the commencement of Advent. Of course, Jesus wasn't a king in the sense of a temporal ruler, absolute or otherwise, and he never claimed to be so. To be clear, his kingship was the complete contradiction to earthy rule: he was powerless, his closest supporters were weak and afraid, his court was the hilltop or table, his wisdom brought personal transformation and healing, he turned human rules and regulations on their head, people approached him without ceremony, he wore unadorned clothing (no phylacteries), and instead of bearing arms, told his followers to take no purse, haversack or sandals.

The feast was instituted by Pius XI in 1925 at a time when monarchies were failing across Europe, when nihilism, Marxism and other philosophies were challenging the Church. Pius desired that people everywhere should place their trust in Christ, beyond national borders, beyond human governance, into his kingdom that 'is not from this world (John 18:36)'. This feast transcends the US-China fracas, Brexit and asylum seekers and calls all peoples to be members and citizens of the Kingdom of God, praying always, 'Thy Kingdom come..'

Peter Douglas

Bottom of Form

The Evolution of René Girard

by Cynthia L Haven

Armed with a copy of the Iliad and a shovel, Heinrich Schliemann set out to find Troy in 1871. Two years later, he hit gold.

He was vilified as an amateur, an adventurer and a con man. As archaeologists refined their methods of excavation in the subsequent decades, Schliemann would also be deplored for destroying much of what he was trying to find.

Nevertheless, he found the lost city. He is credited with the modern discovery of prehistoric Greek civilization. He ignited the field of Homeric studies at the end of the 19th century. Most important, for our purposes, he broke new ground in a figurative, as well as literal, sense: He scrutinized the words of the text and believed that they held the truth.

 “I’ve said this for years: In the global sense, the best analogy for what René Girard represents in anthropology and sociology is Schliemann,” said the French theorist’s Stanford colleague, Robert Pogue Harrison. “Like him, his major discovery was excoriated for using the wrong methods. The others never would have found Troy by looking at the literature—it was beyond their imagination.” Girard’s writings hold revelations that are even more important, however: they describe the roots of the violence that destroyed Troy and other empires throughout time.

Like Schliemann, the French academician trusted literature as the repository of truth and as an accurate reflection of what actually happened. Harrison told me that Girard’s loyalty was not to a narrow academic discipline, but rather to a continuing human truth: “Academic disciplines are more committed to methodology than truth. René, like Schliemann, had no training in anthropology. From the discipline’s point of view, that is ruthlessly undisciplined. He’s still not forgiven.”

I have appreciated Harrison’s analogy, though some of Girard’s other friends will no doubt rush to his defense, given Schliemann’s scandalous character—but Girard scandalized people, too; many academics grind their teeth at some of Girard’s more ex cathedrapronouncements (though surely a few other modern French thinkers were just as apodictic). He never received the recognition he merited on this side of the Atlantic, even though he is one of America’s very few immortels of the Académie Française.

For Girard, however, literature is more than a record of historical truth; it is the archive of self-knowledge. Girard’s public life began in literary theory and criticism, with the study of authors whose protagonists embraced self-renunciation and self-transcendence. Eventually, his scholarship crossed into the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, psychology, theology. Girard’s thinking, including his textual analysis, offers a sweeping reading of human nature, human history and human destiny. Let us review some of his more important conclusions.

He overturned three widespread assumptions about the nature of desire and violence: first, that our desire is authentic and our own; second, that we fight from our differences, rather than our sameness; and third, that religion is the cause of violence, rather than an archaic solution for controlling violence within a society, as he would assert.

He was fascinated by what he calls “metaphysical desire”—that is, the desire we have when creature needs for food, water, sleep and shelter are met. In that regard, he is perhaps best known for his notion of mediated desire, based on the observation that people adopt the desires of other people. In short, we want what others want. We want it because they want it.

Human behavior is driven by imitation. We are, after all, social creatures. Imitation is the way we learn; it’s how we begin to speak, and why we don’t eat with our hands. It’s why advertising works, why a whole generation may decide at once to pierce their tongues or tear their jeans, why pop songs top the charts and the stock markets rise and fall.

The idea of mimesis is hardly foreign to the social sciences today, but no one had made it a linchpin in a theory of human competition and violence, as Girard did, beginning in the 1950s. Freud and Marx were in error. One supposed sex to be the building block of human behavior; the other saw economics as fundamental. But the true key was “mimetic desire,” which precedes and drives both. Imitation steers our sexual longings and Wall Street trends. When a Coca-Cola advertisement beckons you to join the glamorous people at a beach by drinking its beverage, mimetic desire poses no immediate privations—there is enough Coca-Cola for all. Problems arise where scarcity imposes limits, or when envy eyes an object that cannot be shared, or one that the possessor has no wish to share—a spouse, an inheritance, the top-floor corner office.

Hence, Girard claimed that mimetic desire is not only the way we love; it’s the reason we fight. Two hands that reach toward the same object will ultimately clench into fists. Think of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where couples dissolve and reassemble, tearing friendships asunder as the two men suddenly want the same woman. Whatever two or three people want, soon everyone will want. Mimetic desire spreads contagiously, as people converge on the same person, position or possession as the answer to a prayer or the solution to a problem. Even conflict is imitated and reciprocated.

Eventually, one individual or group is seen as responsible for the social contagion—generally, someone who is an outsider, who cannot or will not retaliate, and so is positioned to end the escalating cycles of tit-for-tat. The chosen culprit is therefore a foreigner, a cripple, a woman or, in some cases, a king so far above the crowd that he stands alone. The victim is killed, exiled, pilloried or otherwise eliminated. This act unites the warring factions and releases enormous social tension, restoring harmony among individuals and within the community. First the scapegoat is a criminal, then a god. More important, the scapegoat is both, since the single-handed power to bring either peace and harmony or war and violence to a society is seen as supernatural. Oedipus is deified at Colonus, Helen of Troy ascends Mount Olympus, and even as Joan of Arc is burned at the stake, the mob begins to murmur, “We have killed a saint!” Archaic religious sacrifice, Girard argued, is no more than the ritual reenactment of the scapegoat’s killing, invoking the magical powers that pre-empted a societal catastrophe previously. He offered a complete deconstruction of religion, just as he had deconstructed desire.

He not only replaced Freudian desire with a more streamlined notion of mimesis, he also reconsidered Freud’s Totem and Taboo, the psychoanalyst’s ventures into archaeology and anthropology, at a time when the book was largely rejected. Girard took its notions of collective murder, and its insight that the foundation of culture is murder, one step further. He reaffirmed the book’s importance but ultimately refuted it with his daring, erudite argument.

His next step was to prove the most provocative of all. He describes how the Judeo-Christian texts are unique in revealing the innocence of the scapegoat, thus destabilizing the mechanism that allowed the victim to be both criminal and redeemer, the violent solution to social violence. We can no longer have clean consciences as we murder. Individuals and groups even compete for the cachet of being a victim in the Oppression Olympics, as the power-holders play defense. Wars continue but end with no clear resolutions. International rivalries still escalate toward uncertain ends. The stakes are higher than ever today: We teeter on the nuclear brink.

For the reader meeting René Girard for the first time, the obvious question is why, in a world flooded with new information daily, we should care about the books, interviews, articles and life of a man who died quietly in his early 90s in late 2015. I would begin by noting that he is a champion of the long thought in a world that favors increasingly short and trivial ones. He is one of the few real thinkers we have had in our times.

Many have attempted to compartmentalize him according to his various interests (literature, anthropology, religions) or according to the distinct phases of his work (mimesis, scapegoating, sacrifice). However, Girard cannot be parsed into segments because the phases of his work are not diverse moments in one person’s episodic life. They show the substance of his intellectual, emotional and spiritual involvement with 20th-century history and his personal effort to come to grips with it. More often, journalists and others marshal one piece of his thought to support the discussion at hand, while failing to consider the context of the whole. But attempts to put him in a box reveal something about our own need to comfort ourselves.

Compartmentalizing his ideas is a mistake, obviously. It cannot and should not be done, for the simple reason that if you do so you won’t be changed. That, in the end, is the real core of Girard’s thought: change of being.

 “All desire is a desire for being,” he wrote, and the formulation, stunning in its implications, is an arrow that points the way out of our metaphysical plight. We want what others want because we believe the “other” possesses an inner perfection that we do not. We become consumed by the wish to be the godlike others. We hope that by acquiring their trappings (their cars, their couturiers, their circle of friends) we will acquire their metaphysical goods—authority, wisdom, autonomy, self-fulfilment—which are largely imagined, anyway.

The imitation puts us in direct competition with the person we adore, the rival we ultimately come to hate and worship, who responds by defending his or her turf. As competition intensifies, the rivals copy each other more and more, even if they’re only copying the reflected image of themselves. Eventually, the objet du désir becomes secondary or irrelevant. The rivals are obsessed with each other and their fight. Bystanders are drawn into “taking sides,” and so the conflict can envelop a society, with cycles of retaliatory (and therefore imitative) violence and one-upsmanship.

That’s why Girard’s theories must explode inward rather than outward. If you use these tools to castigate the defective “other,” you miss the point. Desire is not individual but social. The other has colonized your desire long before you knew you had it. And the phantom being that you covet recedes as you pursue it. Girard asks you to ask yourself: Who do I worship?

This article appeared in print, under the headline "The Evolution of René Girard," in the November 26, 2018 issue of America

Fig tree lesson

Learn a lesson from the fig tree.
When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves,
you know that summer is near.
In the same way, when you see these things happening,
know that he is near, at the gates.

Mark 13:28 - 31

The best things in life might well be free, but they also take time. Time is the great revealer of mysteries and secrets, the healer of bereavement and pain. Ovid famously advised: Time conquers all.

Our children grow into young men and women, the seasons take their turns, a new generation begins and an old passes away. At various stages of our lives we dispense our time either sparingly or lavishly to our families, friends, work, sport, leisure, or travel. And over this time we become who we are by the experiences we have, through the relationships we establish and what we learn from our environment. Life is an unfolding, an unveiling.

There are dreams we have for our children, for their futures, and what we must provide for them is the scaffolding for a good life. A good life is not a topsy-turvy, unpredictable place – it is organised, planned for, achievable. Everything we choose either builds up, diminishes or adds colour and flavour to that life. Success and happiness do not come from winning Powerball. Self-discipline, resilience, the ability to stand on your own two feet, roll with the punches, to withstand disappointment and a little heartache, being a part of a team are keys to a successful life lived with others. Do we dream that our children will be dependent, fragile and selfish? That is most unlikely. But a childhood is the time when we begin to teach the necessary skills, and our child’s character unfolds like the sprouting fig leaves.

Mark’s fig tree metaphor once again attempts to unveil the mystery of what is to come, the end times, the heavenly kingdom and beyond. The present reality is only a pointer to that future, and what is happening before our very eyes is calculated to give us insight beyond the now into eternity.

But this metaphor is also about us. What we see in our children, what we see in ourselves today are indicators, points of reference, the potential for who we will become. And if we need to change behaviours and attitudes, develop news skills to become the person we want to be, then we start today afresh. And when we do struggle, and when it does get tough, and when we do fall, time is our ally, experience our guide, hope is our shoulder to lean on.

Peter Douglas

Women have been leading since Biblical times—they can lead again today.

by Richard J. Clifford, S.J.

The record number of women who will be serving in Congress following the momentous 2018 midterm elections may not be aware that the Bible supports their initiative to serve in this moment of political crisis. Normally, women in the Bible appear in subsidiary roles, for the action most often takes place in the public square, the exclusive domain of men in the ancient world.

But “normally” does not mean “always.” There is an important and often overlooked side to biblical history: It does not move forward in an unbroken stream but rather bumps along and in critical moments turns in new directions. In those turning points, women, surprisingly, take on leadership roles.

Consider three such turning points in biblical history. In each one, male leadership fails or is absent and women take up the slack, employing wit and courage rather than recognized authority and power to lead the community. The three turning points are the transition from one elect family (Abraham’s) to one elect nation (Israel); the transition from the failed rule of tribal chieftains (the Book of Judges) to Davidic kingship; and the climactic biblical moment—the transition from Jesus’ crucifixion to his resurrection as risen Lord.

The record number of women who will be serving in Congress may not be aware that the Bible supports their initiative to serve in this moment of political crisis.

1. From an Elect Family to an Elect Nation

In Exodus 1 and 2, Abraham’s family of 70 members fled famine in Canaan and found refuge in grain-rich Egypt under the patronage of a welcoming pharaoh, a friend of the patriarch Joseph. When that pharaoh died, “there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Ex 1:8), who adopted a policy that both exploited and decimated the Hebrews. There is no mention in the text of the Hebrews praying to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Instead, they “groaned,” watching in horror as family members were enslaved and their male children were exterminated. There is also no mention of a leader in Exodus 1-2 except Moses, who is distrusted by his fellow Hebrews because he could not answer their question: “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?” (Ex 2:14).]\

In this political and moral vacuum, five women emerge as leaders—the two Hebrew midwives named Shiprah and Puah, the mother and sister of the infant Moses, and the pharaoh’s daughter. The midwives, unwilling to follow the pharaoh’s orders to kill the Hebrew infants, invented the excuse that Hebrew women were so vigorous they gave birth before the midwives arrived. Another pair of women, Moses’ mother and sister, figured out how to literally obey the pharaoh’s order to throw every baby boy into the Nile while utterly subverting it. They “threw” the infant into a seaworthy basket and shrewdly positioned it to float by the pharaoh’s daughter while she was bathing in the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter, recognizing the child as a Hebrew, defied her father by seeing to it that Moses was brought up as a proper Egyptian in the pharaoh’s household. Each of the five women stepped up in the crisis and enabled Abraham’s family to survive and become a mighty people.

2. From Tribal Chieftains to Davidic King

A second example of female leadership in a critical time is narrated in 1 Samuel 1-3, which in the Hebrew Bible comes immediately after the book of Judges’ vivid depictions of misrule by tribal chieftains. The final chapters of Judges show the self-centered leadership of Samson and the moral and social chaos of a people adrift. Change was urgent if Israel was to be a people worthy of the Lord.

In this crisis, the agent of change was Hannah, a woman with the stigma of childlessness in a culture that revered motherhood. Weeping one day over her plight at the shrine at Shiloh, she interpreted the priest Eli’s conventional response to her prayer as if it were an ironclad promise: “May the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.” Upon becoming pregnant, she uttered her Song (1 Sm 2:1-10), similar to Mary’s much later Magnificat, and gave birth to Samuel, the prophet who would in the course of time anoint David as king, establishing a dynasty that would last forever.

That transition in the Old Testament from chaos to effective kingship became a template for the Gospel of Luke’s depiction of a similar transition to the rule of Jesus, son of David. Women play a prominent role here, too. The parallels between the coming of David’s kingship and the coming of Jesus’ kingship are hard to miss: the miraculous birth of Samuel to the barren Hannah and the miraculous birth of Jesus to the virgin Mary; Hannah’s Song in 1 Sm 2:1-10 (“My heart exults in the Lord”) and Mary’s Magnificat in Lk 1:46-55 (“My soul magnifies the Lord”); and the nearly identical comment on Samuel’s character in 1 Sm 2:16 (“young Samuel was growing in stature and in worth in the estimation of the Lord and the people”) and on Jesus’ character in Lk 2:52 (“And Jesus advanced [in] wisdom and age and favor before God and man”).

Further, the priest Zechariah’s deficient response to the angel’s birth announcement in Lk 1:5-20 parallels the deficient leadership of the priest Eli. Finally, it should be noted that in both Samuel and Luke the wives, not the husbands, act and speak: Hannah, not her husband Elkanah, Elizabeth, not her husband Zechariah, and Mary, not her husband Joseph.

It is clear that the author of Luke’s Gospel, searching the ancient Scriptures to validate Jesus’ claims to kingship, found confirmation in the transition from tribal chieftains to Davidic kingship in Judges and Samuel. As James Kugel has pointed out, Bible readers of the time “assumed that, although most of Scripture had been written hundreds of years earlier and seemed to be addressed to people back then, its words nevertheless were altogether relevant to people in the interpreter’s own time.... Its prophecies really referred to events happening now” (“Early Jewish Biblical Interpretation” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, emphasis in original).

   3. From the Death of Jesus to His Resurrection

The most momentous transition in the Christian Bible is Jesus’ passage from death to resurrected life, which is detailed in the Gospels, announced in the Acts of the Apostles and preached by Paul. During this three-day crisis, women, not men, exercised leadership. Of the women, one was extraordinary during the entire period when men, the expected leaders, withdrew.

All four Gospels tell the same story: Mary of Magdala (identified by her hometown rather than by the name of her husband or son) accompanied Jesus through his suffering and crucifixion (Mt 27:56; Mk 15:40; Lk 23:27-31; Jn 19:25) and was the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection (Mt 28:1; Mk 16:1; Lk 24:10; Jn 20:1, 11-18). At the resurrection, Jesus chose her to announce the news to the disciples. According to Jn 20:11-18, she had the privilege of seeing the risen Jesus before anyone else. Truly appropriate is the epithet tradition has bestowed on her, apostolorum apostola, “apostle to the apostles.”

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For centuries, she was mistakenly identified with the unnamed sinful woman in Lk 7:36-50, and her faithfulness went unnoticed. In recent years, however, Mary has been recognized as the model of a faithful and courageous disciple, stepping up in a crisis and embracing the task of announcing that Jesus has been raised from the dead. Mary’s greatness consists not only in her presence at Jesus’ passage from death to life but in defining Christian discipleship as both witnessing to Jesus’ death and resurrection and announcing the good news to others.

A Final Reflection

These instances in which the Bible portrays female leadership at critical moments are not just acknowledgments that women were present or filled out the scene. In each case, they proved instrumental in moving the history of Israel forward, and what they did had an enormous influence upon subsequent events. Leadership by males proved inadequate for a new era; another kind of governance was called for, and it was done by women. Their stories illustrate vividly what Paul meant when he asked his congregation at Corinth to look around and see if they could find among themselves “the wise” and “the strong” of this world. Paul concluded, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).

In moments of such “weakness,” when conventional structures fall away, the divine intention becomes visible in unexpected ways. The Bible catches such moments with characteristic subtlety and expresses them with memorable flair.