Christ Church

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.

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“Ephphatha”… “Be opened”

Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of the understanding. It might seem, at first, that they are simply about what is received, that they are, as it were, merely passive senses, the senses of reception. Something seen is received by the eye; something heard is received by the ear. But there is an activity as well, the activity of seeing and the activity of hearing.

What is seen and heard is there for the understanding. There is something communicated, the meaning of which we enter into through the activity of understanding. For it is not just the words which are heard or the vision which is seen that is received. What the words signify, what the vision reveals, is given to be understood.

Our understanding is our wrestling with the significance of things. It is a profoundly spiritual activity. It speaks to who we are in the sight of God – those to whom God reveals himself and into whose presence he would have us come. Hearing and seeing as the senses of understanding mean that there is an acting upon what is received. There is a similar double-sidedness to our “being opened.”

In the Gospel for today, “they bring unto [Jesus] one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech”. They beseech the healing touch of Jesus upon someone who is deaf and, if not altogether dumb, at least impeded in his speech to the point that others must speak for him. In response to their request, Jesus puts his fingers into his ears, spits upon the ground, and touches his tongue – all outward, tangible and physical acts – but, as well, and just as remarkably, Jesus’ “look[s] up to heaven”, “he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, be opened”. There is, in short, a healing: “and straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”

As with all the healing miracles of the gospels, they signify the restoration of our humanity. What is wanted by God is not the deformity of our being but the perfection of our humanity. What is wanted is our being made totally and completely adequate to the truth of God; in short, our being opened to God signals our willingness to will what God wills for us.

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