Call Me By My True Names

[darnott@xxxxxxxxxxx]

I SEEM TO POST THIS POEM BY A BUDDHIST MONK EVERY YEAR OR SO. 

BELOW IS A PRESS ACCOUNT OF A SERMON BY JACQUES DERRIDA THAT CAME TO 
ME RECENTLY VIA THE BUDDHIST PEACE FELLOWSHIP LISTSERV.


Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow, because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch, 
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, 
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, 
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond,
and I am also the grasssnake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the 12 year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with
plenty of power in my hands, 
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people, 
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open, 
the door of compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh 

****************************


                                                                  
Philosophers perplexed by forgiveness 

A conference at Villanova University addressing the topic starred 
Jacques Derrida, high priest of deconstruction. 

By David O'Reilly
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

When postmodernist thinkers began "deconstructing" Western civilization's
surest certainties and
most cherished texts a generation ago, their radical skepticism seemed
especially hostile to religion.

Devout postmodernists still dismiss all assertions of sovereign truth,
including those made by religion;
they say the texts and "truths" of religions must be seen as human
"constructs," shaped by their times
and cultures.

Yet despite their irreconcilable differences, it seems the two disciplines
can, like a divorced couple
discussing child custody, engage in fruitful conversation - a truth evinced
by the recent international
"Religion and Postmodernism" conference at Villanova University.

"If He Deconstructs It, They Will Come" might have served as a subtitle for
the standing-room-only
conference, Villanova's second religion and postmodernism conference in two
years; some 500
professors and graduate students crowded the school's Connolly Auditorium
starting Oct. 14 to hear
a panel of scholars that starred French philosopher Jacques Derrida, an
early and still leading voice of
postmodernist textual deconstruction.

An elegant thinker elegantly dressed (and sporting the intelligentsia's
unruliest head of white hair
since Albert Einstein), Derrida devoted his presentation to a
deconstruction of "forgiveness," a term
whose rich possibilities and multiple ambiguities he rotated, prodded and
teased during the course of a
two-hour lecture, and a round-table discussion the following day.

"Does one forgive 'something' or 'someone'?" he wondered. How does true
forgiveness - "if such a
 thing is possible" - differ from expiation, or reconciliation? And, this
avowed atheist wondered from
the podium, "Can true forgiveness come only from God?"

With other guest speakers including Francis Schussler Fiorenza of Harvard,
Richard Kearney of
University College, Dublin, Jean Greisch of the Institut Catholique de
Paris, and John Milback of the
University of Virginia, the atmosphere in Connolly Auditorium was rarefied
enough to give nosebleed
to the uninitiated listener. 

 Not all the speakers were particularly "postmodern," a term that
conference organizer John Caputo
admits is "overused."

"I use it only when I need to draw a crowd," he said with a grin. 

And yet the fact that so prominent an atheist as the 69-year-old Derrida
was deconstructing
Christianity's core concept - forgiveness - at a Roman Catholic university
shows that postmodernist
deconstruction can usefully illuminate religious ideas, said Caputo,
chairman of the philosophy
department at Villanova.

"We're seeing a certain return to religion, or religious categories, by
intellectuals" after two centuries
of modernism's nearly wholesale rejection of religion.

That rejection began in the 18th century, when Enlightenment philosophers
argued that logic and
science and mathematics - not mystic visions or Bible stories or salvation
narratives - were the tools
 that would reveal the ultimate truths of reality.

But modernism's supreme confidence in positivism "eventually lost its
punch," according to Caputo.
Beginning in the 1960s, a new generation of philosophers - Derrida
prominent among them - launched
a bitter attack on the West's "tyrannical" and destructive habit of
imposing some totalizing paradigm -
economic, scientific, religious - on so much of life. Fascism, communism,
slavery, the Holocaust,
ecological destruction, the invisibilizing of women and homosexuals and
whole races - all could be
traced, they said, to the arrogant fiction that man could discover stable,
global truths. 

"In earlier years, Derrida was associated with this more hostile branch" of
postmodernism, allowed
Caputo, who in 1997 published Deconstruction in a Nutshell (Fordham
University Press) based on
conversations with Derrida.

"But now you hear in him this distinctly biblical voice, willing to address
ideas like 'forgiveness' and
'gift' and 'hospitality' - even 'the wholly other,' which is a Jewish term
for God."

That deconstructionists including Derrida dismiss the "metanarratives" of
religions, including the idea
that Christ's crucifixion atoned for the consequences of original sin, does
not disqualify him from
exploring religious themes at a Catholic university, said Caputo.

"The university is where the Catholic Church does its thinking," he explained. 

It was Derrida who proposed that he deconstruct forgiveness at the
conference, said Caputo, who
described his friend as "the 20,000-pound gorilla who gets to pick his own
topic." 

Several of the other speakers at the Villanova conference followed
Derrida's lead and wove ideas of
forgiveness into their talks.

"Pardon," Derridas declared at the very beginning of his talk, then
extended his hands toward his
audience. 

"Pardon," he said again, and immediately raised a question: What was this
word, pardon? Was he
asking the audience's forgiveness, or simply placing a noun, a set of
sounds, on the table for
discussion? 

He began to dissect its parts, looking at how the don in the French pardon
corresponds to the give
in the English forgive. Is forgiveness a gift? he wondered, or can it be
merited? And who can grant
forgiveness?

"These are the abysses that await us, not as accidents but as the
groundless ground of the gift called
forgiveness. . . .

 "Forgiveness is not forgetting - as we all know," he continued. "And
forgiveness is not necessarily 
reconciliation. God, for example, may forgive without reconciliation."

Can the aggrieved individual alone grant forgiveness, he wondered, or can
society also speak in her
name? For example, may a rape victim "forgive" her assailant for an assault
and refuse to press
charges? Or does society have a self-protective interest in punishing,
isolating and rehabilitating the
rapist? 

And can the living forgive on behalf of the dead? he asked.

Quoting extensively from the late French philosopher Vladimir Jankelovich,
Derrida said that "pure"
forgiveness may be "an impossibility" in such cases, for only the dead may
possess the authority to
forgive their murderers. 

"And where the crime is too serious . . . too monstrous . . . is
forgiveness possible?" What's more, he
said, a crime such as the Holocaust may be "an experience irreducible to
the present," beyond the
reach of any individual or society to expiate "because the past is past."

But making the sort of double gesture that has made him notorious, Derrida
offered a paradox:
"Forgiveness," he said, "is always of the unforgiven." 

Only when faced with the truly unforgiveable, he suggested again and again,
can we appreciate the
full meaning of forgiveness. And if we are to forgive, must the forgiven
pay for it through through
penance or expiation - or can pure forgiveness only happen as a pure "gift?" 

After two hours exploring ideas of forgiveness in his lecture, and two more
hours Saturday
responding to questions from nine panelists, Derrida's conclusion was
inconclusive. Pure forgiveness,
he said, may pose "the possibility of impossibility. . . . You will never
know."

Caputo said afterwards that the conference had been so successful that
Villanova might try another
in 2001.



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