Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
And who is my neighbour?
In 2014, Grace Gelder, a middle-aged English photographer, married herself. In 2015, performance artist Tracey Emin, best known for her art exhibit “messy bed”, married a rock, a stone in her garden in France; the perfect husband in terms of stability, quiet, comfort and calm. To be sure, it’s not going anywhere. There are those who have ‘married’ bridges, the Eiffel tower (and subsequently divorced), a Ferris wheel named Bruce, a warehouse, and other objects, inanimate and otherwise. Such is the nature of our commitments to various things, I suppose. Yet, rather than immediately and completely dismissing such things as narcissistic nonsense, the philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, suggests that we should consider the moment of truth in such things. To marry oneself suggests that one is not simply identical with oneself and raises the further question, ‘which self are you marrying?’
Your happy self? Your grumpy, catty self? Your anxious, nervous self? Who are you? What is your self? By extension, the same applies to these other ‘marriages’ which are about forms of attachment which reveal aspects of ourselves as well. But even more, they reveal a profound contradiction in our contemporary world. We are autonomous selves and yet utterly unclear and uncertain about ourselves. How can we love anything or anyone given such radical uncertainty about ourselves?
One might at this point opt for the classical Buddhist approach and simply deny that there is any you at all. There is no self. This is indeed a remarkable concept in relation to getting utterly free of all and every form of attraction, of desire, of possession. You are an illusion and so is the world. But the kind of boutique Western Buddhism popular in the west, is neither western nor buddhist. For, on the one hand, it affirms what Buddhism most emphatically denies, namely, the self, and, on the other hand, denies what western culture in general firmly embraces, namely, that there is a world which is in some sense knowable; in short, there is God. I am not sure that these are real options, since classical Buddhism negates the question, while faux western buddhism persists in the same confusions. What then shall we do? Well, we might consider thinking more deeply the familiar and yet unfamiliar parable of the so-called Good Samaritan in today’s Gospel. We know it but overlook its profounder meaning.
