Visitation, Hospitality, Advent
CW: A Concubine is Cut Into Pieces
A content warning for this week’s edition of Thinking Aloud: we’re gonna get biblical. And that means some conversation on violence against women. Game of Thrones level stuff. I’m doing close-reading analysis of some key Old Testament stories, connecting those stories in odd ways to the Nativity narrative in the New Testament, and tying it altogether with a strange blend of mythology, phenomenology, and ethics. It’s gonna be rad.
Before I jump into that, I watched Scorcese’s “The Irishman” last night with some friends, and I have some thoughts.
The movie opens and closes in a nursing home, with the titular character Frank (played by De Niro) as an elderly mobster who is reflecting on his life and seeking absolution for his sins. This is a movie that is so fixated on memento mori (“remember you must die”) that every time a mobster is introduced onscreen, there is a caption letting the audience know when and how that mobster will die. And sure, there’s the desire for infamy, for Homeric glory preserved forever in a story. But in this case, Frank’s nurse doesn’t even recognize the names of the most infamous players (to Frank’s shock), and when Frank watches the news on TV, he sees a world that has moved on. All that bloodshed, all that sin, and for what? To be forgotten in history?
A lot of people have said the movie is boring. I didn’t find it to be boring, mostly because the dialogue was so mesmerizing and the acting so solid. But for a mob movie, it does feel pedestrian. Where is the glamour, the allure, the charisma? But no, this is a movie about geriatric mobsters dying alone in a nursing home. This is an honest portrait of the banality of evil. This is the reality that it is goodness that is marvelous and myriad, and evil that is so fundamentally dull.
But though evil is dull, its consequences are not so banal. This is a movie that shows the progression into habitual mortal sin. I don’t want to spoil it, but early on, we see a definitive act that puts Frank on a certain path, and then through a visual montage, we see how that one act becomes a series of acts. Frank is warned about the path he is on, warned that he is alienating himself from family. As in many Scorsese films, there is a distinct moment of grace presented: if accepted, a path toward redemption opens, and if rejected, that choices becomes the undoing. For example, in The Wolf of Wall Street, the titular character almost walks away from the corruption, but doesn’t, and after that, it’s family breakdown and jail and all the rest.
The final hour of the film centers on this question: what do you do when your soul is so marred by what you have done, when you have so seared your conscience that you lack even the basic contrition needed for priestly absolution? Memento mori, how do we prepare to die?
The Irishman may be my favorite film of the year. And I think it’s a compelling and mature denouement to the Scorsese mob anthology.
Receiving The Other: A Biblical Reflection
“The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.”
You cannot read this as a disenchanted modern. You must imagine a world in which gods and demigods walk among mortals. A world in which demigods sleep with the daughters of men and produce giants, as in the Noah narrative. If it helps, take your prompting from Greek philosophy: Zeus taking human form and seducing (or raping) the less divines like nymphs or human women. When the gods visit, be afraid.
The gods appear to Abraham, and he is scared. This is the story.
And when the gods appear, you have one overarching obligation, one definitive virtue: hospitality. You receive the gods, you tremble before them, you offer them food and water and shelter, you satiate them in any way you can.
“He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord,[a] do not pass your servant by. 4 Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. 5 Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”
In the ancient world, hospitality is the singular virtue for reasons divine and human. You practice hospitality because you may be entertaining gods (or angels) in disguise. (The epistle of Hebrews: 13:2: “Don't forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it!”) But it is also because life is hard, and if you do not receive the stranger, do not provide shelter from the elements, she will die.“ In Exodus, the LORD commands, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” This is to say, when an ethic of hospitality is pervasive, you care and you are cared for. You receive and are received. You help others to live, and they help you. (Remember Odysseus, enraged, blinding the Cyclops because the Cyclops was not hospitable.)
When the demigods unexpectedly visit Abraham’s cousin Lot, in the city of Sodom, Lot shows hospitality. He urges his visitors not to remain in the public square. It is not safe. But why should it not be safe? What is the danger? Are there storms or floods that will assail them? And then the night falls, and the men of the town surround the house, and demand that the visitors be turned out so that they can be raped by the men of the city. And so fiercely does Lot feel the weight of obligation, the ethic of hospitality, that he offers the unthinkable.
“Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” (Genesis 19:8.)
The demigod/angels intervene on behalf of the vulnerable women, and strike the men of the city blind. (Cyclops…) And then Sodom is destroyed. The divine pour out judgment. And just what was the city’s sin? According to the prophet Ezekiel, “they did not help the poor and needy” (16:48-50.) Sodom violated the ethic of hospitality, transgressing against the divine and the human. And the city was razed to the ground consequently.
The religious community, the Hebrew people, the covenanted ones, they are not exempted from this hospitality ethic. And indeed precisely because they are within the covenant, they are judged with a higher standard. In the book of Ruth, we see the ethic at its best: Ruth is a Moabite and foreigner, and Boaz is a Hebrew, and the story is largely about how Boaz practiced habitual care for the poor, offering them food from his field. But the community does not always practice this ethic well. And sometimes they violate it.
“Now a Levite who lived in a remote area in the hill country of Ephraim took a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah.”
The story begins by telling us that the events of this narrative occur within the Hebrew community. The story tells us that this is about a Levite, the priestly line, the tribe that serves the LORD on behalf of the other tribes.
You can read the full story in Judges 19. But it goes like this: the concubine is unfaithful, the Levite goes to track her down at her father’s house, the father is hospitable and implores his visitor to remain for several days. Do you hear the echoes? Also note that this is men operating in a male world: the women are on the periphery, pawns to be bartered and battered. If you think this is presented in the text as a normative view of how things ought to be, remember that this is a narrative of divine judgment.
So the Levite and his concubine stay a few days, and then they continue journeying. And they explicitly reject the opportunity to stay in a non-Israelite city. It isn’t safe? Can we trust for hospitality from the pagans?
So they pitch their camp near the tribe of Benjamin, covenant people. “They went and sat in the city square, but no one took them in for the night.” Red flag. But finally one man does take them in, and uh, he has a virgin daughter. And then the men of the city surround the house, and demand that the visitors be turned out, and the man offers his virgin daughter, and they demand the visitors, and so the Levite (the priest) throws his concubine out of the house, and she is raped all night long (and maybe killed), and then this:
“When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home.”
And then he cuts her body into twelve pieces, one for each of the tribes.
The aftermath of this incident is civil war within the Hebrew community. Human judgment or divine? But judgment nonetheless. Because it’s one thing for this kind of gross violation of the hospitality ethic to occur among the people of Sodom. But for this to occur among the people of God?
Here’s the phenomenology, and it’s just one quote, from that master of deconstruction, Derrida (quoted in the book God, The Gift, And Postmodernity): “When I invite someone, I remain the master of the house....you are welcome but under some conditions. But visitation is something else: absolute hospitality implies that the unexpected visitor can come, may come and be received without conditions. It falls upon; it comes; it is an intrusion, an eruption - and that’s the condition of the event. I do not see it coming: it is not on the horizon, so to speak.”
These Old Testament stories are not about guests, not about being a master of a house who can receive a guest on his terms, order his women around because he is in control. These stories are about visitation, divine and human, and the obligations to the Other that are built into the very fabric of those encounters. And if you fail or violate those obligations, there is judgment.
And now at last we arrive at the New Testament, and the story of Nativity.
Mary, beloved of God, visited. “Let it be done unto me, according to thy word.”
“It falls upon; it comes; it is an intrusion…and that’s the condition of the event.” The event: Incarnation. God in the womb of a mortal woman. But she consents to this, and later she will sing: (Luke 1:46)
“My soul glorifies the Lord
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed”
This is a song of empowerment. This is not vulnerable women exploited by fearful men. This is God visiting a woman, and all generations honoring her subsequently.
Nativity is a story of visitation. Mary visited. Joseph visited (in a dream). John visited in the temple (less than hospitable, temporarily muted as a result). Mary visiting Elizabeth. The shepherds visiting. The Magi visiting. Anna and Simeon visited, again in the temple.
And what is the innovation here? In the ancient world, hospitality is about survival, and the avoidance of judgment. In the Nativity, hospitality is a condition for redemption, and grace is found in receiving the visitor.
You may have seen the memes: Jesus fleeing with his family to Egypt to escape King Herod. Jesus was a refugee too. Jesus was a migrant too. And this is true. But it’s so much more than that. It’s so much more even than “out of Egypt I have called my son” - the prophetic word in Hosea that the author of the Matthew gospel connects to Christ fleeing Herod. This is about a divine logic absent from the Greek mythology, not present in Homeric ideals. This is about the fusing of divine power and human dependency, of the LORD saying that it is only in and through the receiving of the Other in the conditions of hospitality that the event of redemption is even possible. It’s not an artificial imperative, imposed from on high, a mandate for escaping fiery judgment. Hospitality is built into the very fabric of salvation.
Okay, I’ll show my cards. I’m not going to tell you how to think about “kids in cages” or deportation or how many refugees to take in or any of that. The point is not to prescribe ethical norms. But I want to shape an imagination rooted in these stories, rooted in the fundamental logic of what it means to inhabit the world, and to do so well. And I think that in so doing, the implications for this kind of imagination are profoundly altering. But that’s the beauty of visitation: in receiving the visitor, you are yourself transformed. In the Christian tradition, we call both the encounter and the transformation by the same name. We call it grace.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
Shot: Pro Publica with an investigative journalism piece on how McKinsey, the premier business consulting company, “Helped the Trump Administration Detain and Deport Immigrants.” Chaser: Matt Stoller’s newsletter, this week detailing Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor.
Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC is one of our nation’s foremost public theologians. And I thoroughly enjoyed this recent interview with him in The Atlantic. Here’s the most intriguing part: “Keller, who has been called “a pioneer of the new urban Christians” for his work in Manhattan, spent nearly a decade pastoring a church in a community where only 5 percent of the local high-school graduates went on to college... as Keller explained it, “in a blue-collar town, your pastoral work sets up your preaching.” Unless congregants have gotten to know you personally, unless you’ve supported them through all kinds of problems and shown wisdom in the way you as a minister treat them, they won’t listen to your preaching. They have to trust you first. In a place like New York, however, “people look for expertise; they’re professionals, and they want to know you’ve got the goods; they want to know you’re really good at what you do. And if they hear you and they say, ‘Oh, that’s smart, that’s very interesting, that’s very skillful,’ then they’ll come and talk to you about their problems.”
I would read any essay or review that Phil Christman writes. For Christian Courier, he reviews David Bentley Hart’s new book on universalism > eternal hell. An excerpt: “His style has made it far too easy to see him as a sort of impious Prometheus, rushing in to God’s secret places with a slide rule. Perhaps this is intentional; in any case, it feels like a bad move...As for Hart’s vision, I think it sounds awesome."
In NPR, a portrait of the politician (Mayor Pete) as a young[er] man. Sad to see the bookish Oxford intellectual who once decried Bill Clinton slowly transform into just another neoliberal. :(
Simone and Andre Weil, two of the 20th century’s greatest minds. She, a philosopher, activist, and maybe saint. He, a world-class mathematician. There’s a new book about these two by Karen Olsson called “The Weil Conjectures: On Math and The Pursuit of The Unknown.” In Los Angeles Review of Books, here’s the review. An excerpt: “Once there were a brother and sister who devoted themselves to the search for truth. A brother who spent his long life solving problems. A sister who died before she could solve the problem of life."
Something I love about Bernie Sanders’ campaign is that he is using his power to get stuff done, beyond just trying to get elected. For example, right now he’s trying to save minor league baseball teams. My god, what a patriot.
In Lit Hub, here’s an essay on the poet Charles Wright: “I don’t claim to understand it, the peculiar, capacious power of his poems, the amplitude they build, how they allow me to wander, to be lost and held at the same time. Wright has taught me better than to call this prayer.”