The Present Prison
I have been listening to The Pilgrim Soul podcast over the past year, largely because this is the first podcast where I have seen a sustained application of the thought of Luigi Giussani and the charism of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation.
One of the hosts, Sofia Carozza, is currently undertaking doctoral studies in Cognition and Brain Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and has penned a number of articles at the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal.
What struck me in listening to the podcast this year were two episodes, one dealing with the theme of restlessness and another dealing with living the resurrection. In the latter episode, mention was made about the way in which we, Christian or otherwise, treat the contingencies of the present as a prison, walls that stand in the way of us fulfilling our manifold desires. What connected this episode with the other (at least in my head) was that in the face of reality (and that is what it is at the end of the day) blocking our desires, there stirs a restlessness within us that longs for escape from these limiting circumstances that mark the present moment.
I found this point of the present as a prison striking because it gave flesh to an experience that I hinted at in my article on Pornography and Christology, but never put into so many words. In my article I merely spoke of circumstances that blocked my desire, while the podcast hinted at the time that blocked my desires. This temporal dimension is something that is just as viscerally felt in our own experience as circumstance. We feel the frustration as strongly at the present as we do at the slow traffic, service denied, or anger expressed and, as I argued in the article, we strongly desire what Walter Benjamin called a messianic moment, a moment when we are saved from the present or the circumstance.
And having no concrete means of our own to save ourselves from the present or circumstance, we turn to fantasy as our saviour, something that removes us from the reality that is in front of us. We start idealising our past or fantasise about some future moment instead of facing that which is in front of us. We might even bring these fantasies into our spiritual life, thinking that our life, both physical and spiritual, would be so good as if only we can live out these fantasies we have created for ourselves.
What makes this temptation so strong is that it come from the right impulse: we longed to be saved.
For Christians, our faith does not make sense outside the history of a people that, from epoch to epoch, long for a saviour. This is something recognised even within the seemingly atheist Critical Theory. Theodor Adorno once said in his Minima Moralia, that the only kind of thought worth thinking is what he called “the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption”, and “knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption”.
Where it goes wrong for us is, as hinted earlier, we long for salvation on our own terms. Our fantasies are just that - fantasies - for the simple reason that we long for an overcoming of these blockages in our lives, so long as the salvation are self-generated. In our sin-stained desire to dominate, we long to become our own messiahs.
But as the episode of The Pilgrim Soul makes clear, what makes salvation what it is is because of the fact that the source of salvation comes from outside ourselves. If we come across blockages in our lives, it is only because we have reached the limits of our own ability, which means that the salvation we seek must come from a source that lies beyond those limitations, something that we cannot devise or conjure up. The good news is that this very salvation is something that is offered to us at every waking moment, if we but have the eyes to recognise it as well as the disposition to receive it.
What is more, the episode also makes clear that the salvation that is offered up may not even be an overturning of the outer structure of our circumstance. We may still have to face slow traffic, still have services denied, and still have anger expressed. What changes in the act of salvation is in their interior structure, as the lordship of the blockage becomes overturned. The blockage may still exist, but it does not have the final word in our story or experience. The act of salvation is the creation of a new final word, one that opens up possibilities that circumstances and our own limitations might have previously closed off.
Further still, salvation will not be found by removing ourselves from the present that we find a prison. Indeed, salvation is to be found only within the present. It will, as Scripture says, come at a time that we do not expect, and a form that we may not recognise. The messianic moment will be a day made by the Lord, if only we recognise it with a posture of receptivity as well as gladness, as the Psalm says.
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