In his book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account , Mathew Potts suggests that at the crossroads of forgiveness and promise lies a necessary appeal to newness, or new beginnings. What binds these two ideas together is the very thing that has been jettisoned by tendencies to read forgiveness as the promise, which is action, or one’s freedom to act.

Potts notes the centrality of human action;
“We enter the human world through our words and our deeds, an entrance that resembles a “second birth in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance… Action establishes the agent within a sociality or a plurality; it reveals who the agent is in fundamental ways.”

This acting within and upon the very reality of our birth (or our existence) is what calls forth newness. Potts writes, “This insertion of ourselves into the human world is conditioned by, and represents a continuation of our birth, since birth grounds our every opportunity to begin “something new on our own initiative.”

Action, Potts notes, “has etymological roots in beginning (as in the Greek work archein, to begin, to lead, and eventually to rule indicates).” The “capacity to begin”, then, is “to act”, and this is what “distinguishes humans from other animals”, is the idea that “the unexpected can be expected from humans.” These are acts of freedom. Acts of disclosure. “Through word and deed others come to know us.” We “come into intersubjective being by acting among others in word and deed, by setting forth a new beginning… to be human is to begin.”

But, as Potts points out, it is here that the central issue emerges. Actions inevitably have “unintended consequences “ which lead to “unpredictable results.” Acting, to put it another way, is risky business. “Because we place our actions into a public space not entirely- or even signicantly- under our own power, we must ultimately yield those actions and their outcomes to the world to come.”

Here Potts offers a critique of the Western movement of philosophy (and theology);
“This lack of complete control has been a constant worry for Western philosophy. Because uncertainty haunts all our unintended outcomes, the West has sought conceptual refuge from unpredictability and uncertainty in its philosophy… Western thought has traditionally displaced action as the singular freedom of the human in the hope of escaping the unpredictability of sociality, in order to evade that haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents. Indeed, escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order, a passage from social vulnerability into the perfect freedom of unconditioned self grounding, becomes a singular priority of Western political philosophy.”

Trading uncertainty and frailty for quiet and order- marks of “unconditioned exceptionality” runs rampant through western philosophy. To be “unencumbered by the messiness of intersubjective action” is what it means to be truly free and unencumbered, “condemning action for luring men into necessity…” Liberation of the individual from the uncertainty of beginning and for self sufficiency of arriving is the goal of western philosophy.

Here Potts arrives at a necessary corrective;
“To be free to act among and with others means to be caught up in the consequences of free actions too… The fact that humans cannot escape contingency and condition does not mean they are incapable of acting… this is our freedom, not to be entirely unconditioned, but to initiate a new possibility into the conditions and contingencies out of which we have arisen… This accepts the risks of the future without pretending to have broken with the past.”

Promise and forgiveness taken together reveal the human possibility to begin again, to begin anew. “Redemption from the predicament of irreversibility- (of being unable to undo what has happened)- is the faculty of forgiveness…. Forgiveness is the only reaction which does not merely react but acts anew and unexpectedly… (it) risks a new beginning.”

Walter Brueggemann writes in his Lenten devotional titled “A Way Other Than Our Own”,
“While his followers met where the doors were “locked for fear,” he came. He stood there in the midst of the violent restless empire, and he said, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19)… And then, “He breathed on them.” In the Bible the notion of “breath” is the same word as “spirit.” He gave them spirit.”

Brueggemann goes on by giving this charge to Easter Sunday-
“Imagine a world of life come amid the destructiveness of empire. It is this life-carrier who said to his followers, “I give you the power to forgive sin.” I recruit you for the forgiveness business. I charge you with healing, transformative reconciliation. It was then, and always is, a hard work for the church, because in the empire there is no free lunch, no open hand, no breaking of the vicious cycles of fear and violence and failure.
So here is my pitch. Imagine that you and I, today, are a part of the Easter movement of civil disobedience that contradicts the empire. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see if life is longer than death. Some will never move and will keep trusting in the empire. But we know this much: we have been breathed on. We have been addressed. To us he said, “Peace be with you.” He said it three times, and then he charged us with forgiveness. We are on the receiving end of his offer of life . . . praise God!”

This is how the promise of Easter meets the proclamation of forgiveness that flows from Jesus’ person and work through the cross. When we detach forgiveness from the idea of necessary retribution. When we begin to see it not as the result of a necessary punishment for sin and death but instead as the freedom to name the reality of Sin and Death in this world and in our lives, we can then see how forgiveness then frees us to act within this reality by claiming the power of new beginnings shaped in the shadows of that which we mourn and grieve in this world and in our lives and in the light of Jesus’ promise of new creation. This is what resurrection hope is all about, not the erasure of the past through the forgiveness of the cross, but the invitation to allow our mourning to lead to new beginnings. If John sees Jesus as the author of a new Genesis, and if the other Gospel writers see Him as ushering in a new Exodus, then what we find in Jesus is God’s acting in and for the world by way of the promise to renew the whole of creation, to defeat the Powers of Sin and Death which define our present reality. The fact that Easter Sunday declares this to be already true is what invites us to risk acting in forgiveness. Not because Sin and Death cease to define our present reality in all its uncertainty, but because we lay claim to a certain hope- God has acted in Jesus. The new creation project has begun, and the wonderful truth about forgiveness is that it removes all obstacles to our free participation in it. To act in forgiveness is to embrace life rather than death while being given the ability to name both.

“For Nietzsche pain is a mnemonic.” And as Potts outlines in his book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, this recourse to pain “all begins in the human capacity to make promises.” For Nietzsche, “To inspire trust in his promise to repay and guarantee the sanctity of his promise, the indebted promiser pledges to his creditors “his body, his wife, his freedom, or even his life as collateral or substitute if he should fail to repay what is owed.” The substitute “reminds debtors of what they owe and what they have failed to repay, while the threat of punishment can inspire others obligation to be met.” In this sense it not only reminds us that a wrong was done, it ensures the other will never forget that they hurt you.- the perceived balancing of debts and guilts.” This categorizes then as a kind of pleasure.

Punishment is a social construction, not an expression of a wrongdoers debt but a compensating pleasure to the wronged. “Punishment is not what crime naturally or necessarily merits or deserves; it is simply what anger wants.” This anger, however, is “held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back.”

It is on the basis of this equation that individual wrongs eventually get swept up into the notion of community and society, wherein an “economy of crime and punishment” develops. But here’s the thing. “The law of talion” only pretends towards equivalence. It plays at a common currency of pain, but in fact what retaliation offers the wronged as payment for their suffering exchanges one currency for another… what compensates for suffering is not equal suffering, and certainly not the replacement of a lost good, but the satisfaction of seeing wrongs visited upon the one whom we resent.” It is at its heart, then both irrational and an illusion. “If your tooth is not equally given for mine, then how much of your suffering should serve my pleasure?” As Potts describes, in this view “there is no rational standard for how much pain pays; there is no going rate for punishment.”

So what is the worth of this plain-pleasure equation? It is “self worth and self assertion” (a feeling of individual autonomy and control or mastery over the wrongdoer) of the offended. Or in broader terms, the illusion of order and balance, the nagging sense that “to eschew retribution is to undermine justice and to give moral license to iniquity in our world… vengeance is the original passion for justice.” It is in this sense that the inconsistencies of retribution cease to matter.

In this same light though, does it not undercut morality to “see people, even offenders, as objects by which ones own status might be restored.” Is it not a problem to assume “that status can be restored only through the same means by which it was taken?” The “problem with (retribution as necessary payment) as “a moral paradigm or framing metaphor” is that “all too often no payment is actually possible… though retaliation offers some satisfaction, it satiates the wrong desire… punishment may have purposes other than payback, but our philosophical justifications of retribution and our penal practices of justice tend especially to cling quite firmly to the idea that payback is crucial and primary.” What also seems clear is that “this compensatory intuition is constructed and conditioned, not natural and necessary.” Whatever payment we imagine such forgiveness satisfying does not actually right a wrong.

Perhaps, Potts surmises, ‘what we really most want is to remember, and we have been tricked by custom or instinct into believing pain will be our best mnemonic… (when) in fact, to remember the past rightly would be to admit that no payment is possible, that what is lost is really lost.” Thus, “grief/lament rather than retaliation should be the outcome or partner of our anger… the fullest, truest memory of the past would acknowledge and address that past’s irrevocability, the irrecuperability of its wrongs and wounds… the will’s loneliest misery is its inability to alter the past.” Therefore, if “law cannot fully determine justice because it is founded on violence and covertly perpetuates it… forgiveness reveals that a fundamental mourning haunts any human justice, and it is upon this irrevocable grief rather than the illusion of its avoidance that both freedom and forgiveness might establish themselves.” This is why “forgiveness is and must remain a fundamentally unthinkable, irrational action… it can serve a heuristic purpose in our reflection and can be a way of diagnosing the limiting frames of our moral reasoning.” As he goes on to say, forgiveness is not limited in terms of human practice, rather it is limited in our attempts (capacity or ability) to think about or conceptualize it in an actualized way.

So how does this all translate theologically? First off, I wonder if our predication towards retaliation has led to tendencies to elevate the story of Adam and Eve as one of crime and necessary punishment, while leading us to miss the larger narrative flow of the story that follows in Cain and Abel. Both stories are patterned after the other, and both examine the issue of injustice in this world from a slightly different vantage point.

The first story tells us how the reality of injustice gained a foothold and entered God’s good creation (through Adam Sin and Death entered the world). It tells the story of a good creation through which we can then perceive that which is wrong- a world where such injustice exists. This is, as they often say in the Orthodox Tradition, a fall from innocence, and the words that cloak this movement from one reality to another are “so that they might not live forever” in this unjust reality. This is framed by two things- God’s promise to make right what is wrong and to make a way back to the garden (the good creation space once again made whole), and the call to participate in the way of God’s working for the sake of the whole, or the other

The second story then is about human participation in this reality of injustice versus participation in the way of God. There are two important markers in this story. The first is a defining of the root of injustice (read: Sin), which is desire for what someone else has culminating in envy. Envy produces fear which produces anger which produces violence. The point in which God addresses Cain is at the point of desire, following God’s favor being poured out on Abel. God asks Cain why his face is downcast. Cain sees this act of God as an injustice and he fails to see how this act of God is in fact the means by which justice will be given to the whole. Instead of trusting in the way of God Cain appeals to his fear and engages in an act of injustice.

The second important point then is this- just like in the Adam and Eve story, Cain is driven eastward and set in conflict with the “earth” or the good creation. As opposed to the once fruitfulness of Adam and Eve meant to image the way of God, the lineages that follow are defined by death (each name is marked by a birth and their death) and an endless cycle of repayment and retribution (if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times, which in the ensuing chapter fills the whole world with death). It is into this picture that we find this curious mention of the mark of Cain which stands in contrast to this cycle of death and restitution- “The LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.” This phrasing is paralleled with another key passage often overlooked, which is the birth of a new child “in place of Abel”, born once more to Adam and Eve- Seth.

Two parallel stories which then define the two realities moving forward in the biblical narrative- a reality of injustice defined by necessary repayment, and a reality of justice defined by forgiveness. Both stories marked by a good creation given to perpetuating cycles of violence and death, the only true end of appeals to necessary repayment. Into this comes the story of Jesus as the one who will crush the head of the serpent, which careful readers will note is tied to the story (seeds) of Seth and Cain.

As Potts suggests, there are two essential realities when it comes to forgiveness:

1. “Without any wrong, forgiveness will search in vain for its object… since forgiveness arises with the wrong, insofar as that wrong is reduced or erased- whether by expiation, explanation, remediation, restoration, reparation, or atonement- forgiveness will be reduced or erased as well.”
2. “If people earn our forgiveness in some manner and we grant them the pardon they have come to deserve, then all we will have really rendered them is their due.”

What cuts through the tension of these two problems is the idea that “forgiveness does not right any wrong, it responds to a wrong that cannot be made right… Forgiveness answers a wrong that refuses to be overcome.” If this is the case, Potts insists that “this should not necessarily prevent our practice of forgiveness, even if it confounds our reasons for it.” It is, as he notes, an act we participate in precisely because it reminds us that a wrong is real and irrevocable and yet we can forgive anyway. “History will continue and with it reconciliation , but with the equivocation of a forgiveness mixed up with the work of mourning… a mourning like this would thus embrace its own incompetence to repair the past or even provide redress in the present. It’s work would be the work of accepting incomprehension… the work of mourning is the spiritual-political kingdom- the difficulty sustained, the transcendence of actual justice.”

It is precisely in this space that we can begin to make sense of Jesus’ death. Where Jesus embraces the inevitable consequence of this perpetual cycle of repayment while simultaneously speaking in to this an inescplicable word of forgiveness. As Potts suggests, “each time forgiveness is effectively exercised, it seems to suppose some sovereign power… one only forgives where one can judge and punish.” And yet, what we find in Jesus is a “worthwhile aspiration” that is also not, in and of itself, a “happy ending”.

“Preserving forgiveness’s conceptual and impossible purity should assist us in recognizing what is more deeply at stake in our systems of everyday and impure judgement and punishment, even in our orchestrations of sovereignty.”

To “dream of” a “forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty” is to open us up to the idea that “to be sovereign is to be free from the need to answer wrong with wrong.” And this is precisely what we find at the cross, is the necessary paradox of God’s promise being fulfilled (to make right what is wrong) with the unconditional embrace of mourning a present wrong, a reality marked by injustice, the very reality God enters into by way of Jesus. This is what it means for Jesus to proclaim “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” This is what it looks like for Jesus to shed tears in the garden and to lament over Jerusalem. This is a forgiveness that “mourns forgiveness”, an unconditional forgiveness that is also “unconditioned by sovereignty.” This is the sort of forgiveness we are called to embrace and enact as followers of Jesus on the way back to the garden, the promised healing of a divided creation.

This is what enables us to locate and name both goodness and the evil, to locate and name disorder and order, to locate and name injustice and justice. We do not move past the cross on the way to resurrection, we remember the cross so as to properly imagine resurrection hope.

I have started this book (Forgivness: An Alternative Account by Matthew Ichihashi Potts) as part of my Holy Week reading.

In the introduction Potts makes the proposition- “If forgiveness is real, then it’s a problem.”

He goes on to say,
“Forgiveness as it is typically understood definitionally defies our ethical vocabulary and destabilizes our moral foundations… Forgiveness resists rationalization.

To wonder about the problematic possibility of forgiveness at all is to presume some limits to our moral language, some gaps in our moral models… I suggest that any “real” forgivness will and must challenge the assumptions and test the boundaries of our moral instincts themsleves… What forgivness actually reveals when it strains our moral sense is not its own unreality or impossibility but the hidden limitations of our moral reasoning.”

These words from this mere introduction has already been unsettling me in a big way. It’s tabled all sorts of questions in my mind. Like, if love of God and love of other cannot be separated or treated as two seperate ideas, what about God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others?

At the root of the words scandalous nature is the idea that it is “offered without any condition at all.” Take this away and word becomes meaningless. I do wonder though. In our efforts to systematize the idea of forgiveness in scripture as part of a necessary process of salvation, I wonder if we have inadvertently reduced the word to a mere function of God’s doing while also limiting it to a truncated form (as in, God can only forgive if He is first satisfied by something).

On the same level, I wonder if reducing and truncating the word in such ways necessarily muddles what it means and what it looks like for us to freely forgive as God forgives. How can we forgive others freely if we perceive Gods forgivness, as it is in much of western theology, to be attached to certain prerequisites, be it moral behavior or imputed righteouness?

I have no idea yet where Potts is headed with his treaties, but his initial words about forgiveness, which reframe it in light of our limitations in moral reasoning, might require us to reimagine one of the central facets of the Christain faith- the saving work of Jesus in the death and resurrection- beyond the limiting capacity of our systematics and within the land of the living.

What if, rather than making forgiveness of one’s sins the point of the Gospel, we make the work of Jesus in establishing the kingdom of God the point of the Gospel. What would it look like then to see forgiveness not as the saving act but as the outflow of this kingdom way? What if rather than tying forgiveness to theories of satisfaction we instead see it as something freely given SO THAT we might then experience the liberating work of Jesus in our lives and in this world? What if, rather than tying it to theologies of satisfaction we instead tied it to participationist theology, rightly freeing the work of God in Jesus from the whole grace versus works Protestant hang up altogether?

Just some thoughts.

“To mourn Jesus in at least one sense is to seek some habitable meaning for and from his death in our own world.”

• Matthew Ichihashi Potts (Forgivness: An Alternative Account)

Potts suggests that forgivness and redemption are categorically different, even though we have become conditioned in the modern west to read them as one in the same. It is on this basis that he wants to step in to a discussion of forgiveness by way of this simple definition- a decision to abstain from retaliation. He anchors this definition in a recognition that forgiveness is always applied to a loss that cannot be recovered, thus rendering the langauge of debt repayment, common to western theologies or forgiveness, insufficient.

Potts argues away from the primacy of debt metaphors, especially considering that such metaphors get muddled in translation from the ancient to the modern, and he argues towards the primacy of spacial language and imagery.

“The governing analogy of sin in the Christian West is economic, and its roots do reach to the New Testament. But there are other ways to read aphiemi (forgiveness)…Aphiemi (Greek) and remittere (Latin)… concern not debt but distance in their literal etymologies. Aphiemi means to send away. To remit, at its root, is to establish a distance…

Were we to think of sin not as a debt to God but as distance from God, and were we then to consider the mission of the Son sent away (aphiemi) by the Father to be the crossing of a distance, the opening of a loving space capacious enough to contain sin; if we thought of Christ’s work as the journey into a far country, rather than the payment of an awful price, we might find that the typically nifty logic of atonment- that the cost of sin must be paid in full and that only the God-man can pay it- falls away and is replaced by another, perhaps more lovingly tragic, far less cruelly heroic one. If sin is distance, then the Son’s obedient estrangement from the Father is a journey already implicated in sin, a mission always and already also a remission. If Sin is distance, then God’s love will be signaled by the chasm Christ crosses to meet us rather than the torture he bears to win us.”

To be clear, Potts is not dismissing the language of debt out of hand. He is simply suggesting we view it through the primacy of distance. It is on this basis then that forgiveness is then freed from the trappings of redemption. It is allowed to embrace the tragedy and the mess. It can be something we necessarily act upon apart from reconciliation. And what does this do for our theologies of atonement? How freeing might it be to say that forgiveness is that which sets us in the space where redemption and transformation is not only possible but promised? How freeing might it be to imagine that forgiving a person or a loss or a tragedy can give us space to mourn rather than the expectation that it in itself must be the restoring work?

Further, and this might be the most shocking observation- what might it look like to grieve the death of Christ in the face of circumstances that look less like the promise than the loss? And similarly, what might it look like to actually forgive in the face of that if to forgive means to resist retaliation? Something I’m mulling over.

Reading Journal 2023: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong
Author: Linda Legarde Grover

In the waning days of summer 2022 my wife and i hopped in the car and took a drive up the Michigan peninsula to spend a few days at the famed Mackinac Island. Michigan wasn’t new to us, but the island was, and whenever I embark on a trip I always try to track down a local bookstore and purchase at least one book by a local author telling a story rooted in the place we are visiting.

In this case I went with the familiar, having come across this book by an indigenous author detailing Duluths history from the perspective of her Ojibwe past. I have always loved visiting Duluth, and this intimate composition, which is part Memoir, part lore, affords it a deeply personal touch.

The book moves easily between the particular locale of a shoe repair shop or a childhood home, for example, to the lands rich spiritual heritage, stretching from the rocks that frame the city to the waters below and framed against the story of the authors ancestors. Anchoring these stories is a portrait of the familiar Point of Rocks. Having driven the highway that breaks into majestic views of this valley and these cliffs many times, I was able to conjure this image as a way of stepping into the greater imagination of Grivers winding and meandering journey.

This book gives us the tools to see both that which is visible and that which lies unseen, recognizing that both shape the reality of this place as part of the cities ethos and Govers shared heritage.

“There is something about the Gospels unlike anything else in the whole Bible. The books of the prophets of the Old Testament, often divided into major and minor prophets, record what the prophets said. We learn very little about their biographies. Our four Gospels are a bit like the vignettes of the patriarchs and Moses and kings and others in the historical books of the Old Testament. Unlike the prophets, our Gospels do not turn their pages into quotations of Jesus. Instead, the Gospels are obsessed, which is the only word for it unless there’s a stronger one I don’t know, with one person from verse 1:1 to the end of the Gospels. In our case, the Gospel of John. If we fail to see this shift in focus—from what the prophet said or even to some short vignettes to lengthy narratives about what Jesus did, with whom he interacted, who decided to follow him, who didn’t like him, how he was arrested and crucified and raised—we fail to read this Gospel well. Every passage of the Gospel of John is about Jesus. Not us. Not you. Not me. Jesus.

Reading John’s Gospel requires something counter-intuitive. What is intuitive works like this: We have a good idea of who or what God is, and we ask, “Does what we already know about God fit Jesus?” The counter-intuitive works like this: We only know who or what God is in knowing who Jesus is, so we now ask the counter-intuitive, “Does God fit what we know about Jesus?” In other words, God is Jesus. The Gospel of John invites us to a fresh reconception of God by showcasing Jesus from 1:1 to 21:25. A Gospel has a mission: to “gospel.” That is, to tell the story of Jesus in a way that compels response. In their essence, then, every paragraph in a Gospel is about Jesus. Who he is, or who the reader understands him to be, shapes how that reader responds to Jesus. In John’s Gospel Jesus is first and foremost the Logos/Word…

in order that God can be revealed for who God truly is. The proper response to this Logos Jesus is faith or believing, and that faith is ongoing abiding in who he is, ongoing obedience to what he calls his followers to do, and ongoing witness to the world about who Jesus is. Those who respond to this Logos Jesus enter into nothing less than eternal life in the here and now as it opens them up to eternal life in the there and then…

Why Logos? Greeks commonly used this term for Reason, for Meaning, for Logic, and for Words Spoken. The Old Testament, however, is John’s world even more than the Greek world, and this term Logos/Word evokes:

1. creation (cf. 1:3–5)
2. the revelation of God’s tent and glory and love at Sinai,
3. the Wisdom of God (Proverbs 1:20–33; 8—9),
4. God speaking and communicating and revealing his will and law (cf. Psalm 119:9, 25, 28, 65, 107, 169),
5. and the prophets declaring the word of God to the people of God (Isaiah 40:11; Psalm 33:6).

John baptizes these Jewish ideas into Greek waters when he uses “Logos,” but his sensibilities are more Jewish than Greek. In this Gospel Jesus is the Logos who reveals the truth, the word of God, to humans (1:1, 3, 14; 5:37–38; 17:14, 17). He is then both God’s revelation and the One who reveals God as the living, speaking Word… “the Logos did not merely descend upon or enter into Jesus, the Logos of God became the human nature Jesus bore.” Which leads him to a profound next line: “The life of Jesus is the history of God himself on earth” (Quast, John, 13). We have become far too comfortable with what John writes in 1:1. Jesus is God in the flesh.”

The purpose of the Gospel of John is explicitly stated at the end of the Gospel (20:30–31)… “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

• The Gospel of John (Scott McKnight)

Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” —Genesis 17:17

There is a dialogue set up in our faith. One voice says, “Can you imagine!” The other voice answers, “Yes, but.”

God brings into existence that which does not exist. Did you know that the Bible never uses the word create with a human subject? We may “make” or “form” or “fabricate,” but only God creates, only God works a genuine new possibility, a new thing beyond our expectations and our extrapolations. It belongs to the mystery and holiness of God to call to be that which is not yet. Because this is God’s world, the world is not closed, either by our hopes or by our fears… by God’s powerful grace, the “Yes, but” of our resistance is broken. Newness appears; we can sing songs, unembarrassed, songs about miracles.
– Walter Brueggemann (A Way Other Than Our Own)

But those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. —Isaiah 40:31

“Here is the good news. The good news is that we need not serve the wrong god, trust the wrong life-giver, fear the wrong power. We may read life differently, and the way to do that is to wait: to wait in eager longing for the God of creation and rescue to work a new way in the world; to wait in keen expectation; to wait in active zeal, receiving every hint of newness and acting on it; to be ready to go for the gift of life; to leave off fear, intimidation, resignation, pooped out-ness as the governance works a newness. This poetic utterance about God and God’s work has concrete counterparts in the realities of economics, politics, social relations, social possibilities. The utterance is matched by a reordering of reality, the transfiguration of the empire itself. It is such an intellectual travesty, such an act of chutzpah, such a subversive poetic utterance that dumps a poem in the midst of resignation. The poem works a newness, not because it is good poetry, but because the subject of the poem, the God who lives in and through and with and under such outrageous assertion, is at work overriding despair, inviting hope, responding to our waiting, and starting the world free again, outside the regimes of weariness. We are left to decide about this outrageous assertion, sung against the resignation of the empire…

The key religious question among us is whether there is grounds for an alternative, an alternative rooted not in self-preoccupation or in deadening stability but rooted in a more awesome reality that lives underneath empires, that comes among us as odd as a poem, as inscrutable as power, as dangerous as new life, as fragile as waiting. The poet names the name and imagines new life, like eagles flying, running, walking.”
– Walter Brueggemann (A Way Other Than Our Own)

Film Journal 2023: Brother
Directed by Clement Virgo
Where to watch: now playing at Mcgilvary Cinemas; watch for a streaming or VOD release in the near future

This is the first I’ve seen from Virgo, who directed last year’s Dahlmer. Its the second film however that I’ve seen in the last two years set in Scarborouh (the other film bearing that same name and making my top list of 2021).

Brother is confined to a singular family, following this pair of siblings over the course of 20 years. The constant jumps in the timeline admittedly does get a bit hard to follow,.especially since the same actors occupy a span of 10 years without looking like they aged at all. What makes this a bit more challenging is that so much of the films emotional impact depends on inviting viewers to get lost in the rhythms of this intentional story structure.

What elevates this though is its commitment to each sequence. If the momentum of the story is somewhat muddled at times, it remains easy to get lost in the moments along the way. So when the climax does come and the trajectory is made clear, it definitely hits with a poetic fervor.

The performances are also quite phenomenal, playing two Jamaican-Canadian brothers separated by years but bonded by their circumstances. Left to care for their struggling mother, we watch these two boys, who exist as complete opposites, one big and extroverted and confident and the other small, shy and introverted, come of age in an uncertain world. Both of them in their own way struggle to figure out who they are amidst deeply felt responsibilities, desires, and struggles, which include growing up black in a neighborhood marked by gang violence and police presence. It’s a reminder that what is often assumed to be a distinctly American problem exists here too, if in a slightly differnt way and not quite as visible and definable.

Much of the Directors style reminded me of a more muted (in a good way) Waves. It’s very poetic, using lots of framing devices to draw out interconnected images and ideas. I would be curious to see if on a rewatch some of the visual pieces of the puzzle become even more clear and more alive in terms of the overall narrative arc.

Definitely one to keep on your radar if you are seeking out good canadian projects. Even with the meandering timeline and a too long run time it still finds a way to pack a powerful punch.

Film Journal 2023: Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming With David Letterman
Directed by Morgan Neville
Where to watch: Disney+

“There is no them. There’s only us.”

For as long as I can remember U2 has existed as a sort of larger than life and largely undefinable enigma. As someone who grew up in those fervently gaurded impassioned evangelical, conservative christian circles, they were those rebellious figures lurking in the shadows who might or might not be safe for impressionable young minds being formed in the “faith”. Emerging into young adulthood and jts post modern reflections, they had become a voice for my generation, a generation dissatisfied with much of what we were seeing in “religion” and institutions and who were seeking a fresh perspective and fresh expression of that faith in ways that made sense to us. This was the band you lined up and camped out for to buy tickets, packed up those vans and traveled miles for, and whom seemingly remained immune to the ebb and flow of an ever changing “cool” and hip pop culture then and now. They were, and remain, a band that could do things on their terms and on their time, disappearing from the fabric of our culture and emerging years later as though they had never left without without blinking and without explanation.

They were, and remain, a band that gave permission to a bunch of struggling people of faith to gather together and worship without feeling ashamed or without need for apology. They didn’t need to articulate the divine precisely or dogmatically, you simply knew it was present.

It seems equally hard to locate and define this present U2 renaasaiance so to speak. Whatever this is- the book Surrender, the reimaging record which functions as a kind of legacy tour through their entire career, this doc (which also functions as an affecifonate love letter to Ireland and David Letterman). Whatever this is- a final magnum opus, a fresh revolution and a sign of more to come- it feels timely, and it feels like a gift. It seems right that these open door projects would be telling more of their story now than I was ever aware of living it in the moments of my own impressionable life. If these songs form the soundtrack of these bandmates stories (and collective story), I know for a fact that it also does for many of us.

Film Journal 2023: John Wick Chapter 4
Directed by Chad Stahelski
Where to watch: now playing in theaters

Where this stands in terms of the larger franchise will be subjective opinion of course, but I do think it’s fair to say that the fourth entry in the series reflects a natural progression in the story. There’s the global setting, and it picks up after the cliff hanger in the third with Wick facing seemingly insurmountable and baffling odds. It also widens the scope of the story while personalizing the stakes.

The real star of course is the set pieces, which continue to push boundaries when it comes to their sheer practicality, ingenuity and commitment to detail. It hits the ground running and never lets up, leaving little doubt that this remains one of the strongest and most relatable action franchises out there right now. It makes dang sure you get your money’s worth when it comes to the big screen spectacle and entertainment of it all.

There’s only so many ways one can reimagine the revenge theme that remains the driving force of this franchise, which is why the world building goes a long ways in giving this legs. This one actually pushes the pause button in that regard, dialing things back to focus on simple one to one relationships. But the narrative fabric of the second and third installments is still there, which means there’s more world to explore. As a character says to John at one point in the film, you can’t possibly kill everyone- it will never end. This is the endless cycle of retribution. Reminds me of the words spoken to Cain in the early chapters of Genesis. And in fact, the Easter story just might have something to say about that too.