feast of the circumsicion

Reading Steinberg’s book on the sexuality of Christ in the renaissance was one of the most important things I’ve done this year--really made me reconsider the implications of the lords flesh.

This was one of the most holy days on the calendar, from the 3rd century, well past the council of Trent, and thinking about it, praying about it, one realizes why.

Doing such an earthly act on someone who was somewhere between g-d and man, meant that he became human, there is some Gnostic thought (and Augustine too!), that the removal of the foreskin, was the entrance into Christ’s bridging b/w spirit and flesh. All of this I have written about, extensively, but the foregrounding that Steinberg did, pointing out that ignoring the small delicate thing, in favor of more lofty pursuits led to modern oblivion.

There are 3 foreskins, or portions of foreskins, wandering around Europe now, one in Sicily and one in France, and this is where i would usually go into a rant, about how it didn’t matter where exactly the foreskins they were, or who’s they were. That they were worshiped, bound a community to one story, told us morals, and allowed for feasts where we need feasts, was enough. Right now, in France, forensic anthropologists are going through the ground, where Joan of Arc was buried, and they are finding everything that does not relate to her, the bones aren’t humans, or they are 800 years too new. I think that the last week of advent, then Christmas, then of course, the feast of the circumcision is an important time to do that work.

I think that work, is to move away from labyrinths of language, and into something with more clarity. This is incredibly difficult, we are in a tunnel founded on words, instead of bricks, texts made flesh. The flesh never conquers, the body never centers itself, it retreats into the library, with an inscrutable taxonomy, and madmen trying to find where things belong. The idea of Joan’s flesh is enough. The idea of Christ’s flesh is enough. Saying a word, or a series of words, means that the material reality, the empirical evidence, vanishes into metaphysics. What happens, if words are words and flesh is flesh, and the lirturgy isn’t an abracadabra that makes everything merge? In the service, we touch ourselves, and other people, but before we do that, we ritually clean ourselves. Who was that Rebbe, in that dusty place, that wiped the Christ child, made him clean, and then let others wash, before he turned god into man.

That is what is real for catholics, this seires of abstracted rituals, that turn a narrative, slowly. The cleaning with holy water, before we eat his flesh, is the cleaning before the circumcision, it is the washing of feet, the woman at the well, the meal before his death, and the water at his wounds before. I can point this out for everything we do, every word we say, has precedent and tradition. Nothing ex nihilo. What happens if we pull those traditions out, unabstract them. What happens when we refuse the same script, a scripts that been played as theater for all of our history.

Today, also in France, but in Germany and England as well, was the feast of fools, described in English tradition, as The World Turned Upside down (in a folksong of the same name: I dreamt there was no workhouse/no starving poor/nations never quarreled/no never was there war….and Women wore a crown”) I am not tying this together, I don’t think, just free writing here, and that’s fairly obvious, but lets try this, let us combine the two great medieval feasts. Let us not get stuck on language or power. Let us not think of narrative, and if the words work, and if the magic has happened, and start emptying workhouses, and feeding the poor.

That thin ring of tissue, that made him a man, that centered his power, that transformed something beyond the world into something relating to flesh, needs to be real. But what needs to be made more real, is that his words live.

There is something else, that rests on that foreskin that complicates matters somewhat. By that slip of the knife Christ was made a jew. He had a very specific identity, a community to grow up in, and a set of rhetorical strategies and discourses that he had to follow, when he disobeyed them, he did so in a way that was mostly transformative for the community he was ministering with. We are not christans that follow Christ, as much as we would like to be, because we are not jews of the roman occupation. We are Christians, because the bloodletting baptized us all.

The jewish law, told us, Circumcise, then the, foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer, For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe…” I am going to violence to the text here, because I think of that and I think of the phallocentric violence that erupts. It seems so stubborn, that’s my daddy and not your daddy, that is my god and not your god. But there is good news (pun intended), who is not partial and takes no bribe. The goat, or the half an inch or penile skin, does nto matter as much, is nto as vital, as what happens with you, in that dark spot, when he takes yr heart out, when you give him it, still bleeding (think of those statues, of the holy Christ, with his heart floating free, and think of that—real, anatomical object, and how maybe, all of our hearts will look like that on the seat of judgment. He takes no bribe, he requires no flesh.

Here is Galatians 5:6 for In wait for the hope of righteousness. From in Christ Jesus neither circumcision, nor un-circumcision, counts for anything, the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” I think about that and am made aware, that more and more, I think it is acts that matter. The feeding of the poor, the liberating the poor, the seeking of justice. That idea, of no one needing to be circumcised or the metaphor of the heart being circimused reminds me also, of how universal that organ is, and how important. One cannot live without a heart, and to cut or knick it is to die, to be saved, is to have it started again (and also, oddly genderless).

Faith without works is dead, though what happens when the opposite is true? All of this requires one to be a Christian, the Greek or Jew, the cutting or not cutting, the heart metaphors, all center around accepting the category set of Christian. What can you do when none of that happens? I am reading Elaine White’s essay next year in Jerusalem, and she writes about her brother becoming a Hasid. Elaine goes to Israel, prays, talks, does dishes, argues with the Rebbe, spends a week, living her brothers life. Does nto seek to return him to her secular Jewish roots, bit find why he became so orthodox. She is almost seduced. She returns to New York, realizing how much she wants the stability and purity of that life, but her life is more complicated, she cannot give up her desire to write, to make love, to be a “freewoman”. How do I become a member of the body of Christ, which member of that body do I want to be, when that body is cutting parts off. How does Elaine live her Jewish tradition, when that tradition has done violence to her. How do I live mine? She doesn’t give us an answer. On this holy day, for me, I wonder if there is one.