All Souls: Derrida
Guest Blogger: Lindell Alderman
Most days my faith is not a comfortable place. It’s not a warm, fuzz-balled sweater that snuggle over myself when I’m feeling lost or confused or depressed. It’s not a shot of whiskey that I take to turn off my brain when the thoughts won’t stop racing. It’s not an epic liturgical drama that allows me for a moment to suspend my disbelief. It’s not the thump of a bass drum and the drone of a keyboard that wash over me in estatic worship.
Faith is tension. Faith is paradox. Faith is struggle. Faith is forcing myself to sit in uncomfortable spaces: Wrestling with ideas and relationships and answers that I might not like; standing on the edge of a cliff, with my toes hanging off, staring straight down. Faith is confronting my xenophobia, looking into the face of the Different, the Other…and seeing beauty. Faith means releasing my obsessive grip, breaking the dam and letting the river of change pull me into my destiny.
I look into the eyes of Derrida and I see a man utterly devoted to asking “Why?” His mind embedded with the splinters of doubt and curiousity, religiously devoted to ripping apart the facade of reality to see the tender, pink flesh underneath.
Derrida helped us to see the living, bleeding, organic beast that lies untamed beneath the neat frameworks of logic that modernity constructed. Paradox is inescapble. Contradiction is truth. Truth is contradiction. He replaced the straight-jacket of “Either-Or” with the loose, fleecy goodness of “Both-And.”
I need people like Derrida in my life. I need those who can help me see that the categories I try to apply to life are not true for all. God has blessed me with a unique set of experiences that have beautifully and wildly colored my paint-by-number reality. But my choice of colors, my set of Crayolas, isn’t the same as everyone else’s. Truth, if it exists, exists only in the overlap of our paintings, in the summation of our rainbow experiences. Everyday six billion stories, everday a trillion truth-moments, everyday the mind of God directing a movie with infinite entangled sub-plots.
So I pray today that St. Derrida would intercede for me. That God would open my mind like his. Let me give the space to the Other to be inscrutible. Let me give up my lust for control that demands the hammer of absolutes. Let me find in the tension of diversity the truth that lies shimmering and sparking in the middle.
This got me all teared up. Thanks for writing this, Lindell. I’m a part of no faith community at present, but reading things like this makes me want to find people like you and nurture hope that meeting with them could be good.
There’s plenty in your post to commend, no doubt. But I don’t know whether to laugh or be grievously offended by an iconographic representation of Derrida, and his ad-hoc canonization. If you crave a saint’s intercessions and guidance to help you “give space to the Other to be inscrutable,” I dare say you’ll find more fruitful ground with St Dionysius the Areopagite or St Gregory of Nyssa.
God bless.
Douglas,
Thank you so much for your feedback. One of the reasons I chose Derrida is because I’m trying to rip off my old blinders that kept me from seeing the image of God in non-Christians. I assumed that only especially “holy” people had something wise or spiritual or important to say. By making Derrida my Saint-for-a-night, I’m thanking God for the inspiration that Derrida has been to me in my spiritual journey. His hunger for the truth - his desire to ask tough, uncomfortable questions about life and relationships - pricks my soul and makes me want to open up and question my relationships, question my perspective, question God. I need that if I’m ever to grow, if I’m ever to become mature in my faith.
There is nothing heretical about questioning and challenging God. Abraham, Moses, Thomas, and Peter all questioned God. And somewhere along the way, evangelicals got timid, got scared, and stopped questioning. It’s no wonder then that non-Christians find our faith irrevelant. When we are scared of God, scared of life….scared of ourselves….we are.
-L
I’m inclined to feel there’s a difference between seeing the impress of the divine in all things (a holy and good impulse; “He is all things in all things and nothing in any” per Dionysius and Maximus) and creating a mock sacred image Derrida as one of Christ’s saints in glory.
Nonetheless, that’s well said, Lindell. One can’t help but like you.
Neediness!!!!!!!!!!!
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