Easter

Christmas is relatively easy to explain to a baby: when mean people came from another country to take away the land of people who had lived there for thousands of years, the people who lived on the land dreamed of someone who would save them from the bad people.  One night, they thought that this great revolutionary leader had been born, so everyone celebrated and gave presents to the baby who was going to free them from the Romans.

Yesterday, as Helena and I rode to the playground, we saw children processing through Santa Fe, carrying a cross toward the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  "Girls and boys," she said.  "Doing what?"  And if Christmas is easy to explain, Easter is a whole lot harder.  Oppression and Salvation can be explained through "mean people" and "freedom", concepts that a baby understands.  But the idea that this great leader failed in liberating Israel, that he never planned on making a violent revolution like Simon (the Zealot) and Judas (Iscariot, or Sicarius; the Zealots and the Sicarii were the two most violent (almost terroristic) groups in Judea at the time) had wanted, that he was convicted and nailed onto a cross...  I had no hope of explaining any of these things to Helena Iara.  I tried, of course, but I could tell that she didn't understand.

Even harder to explain, for a baby who doesn't know what death means, is that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that the "failure" of his movement actually gave it more power, and turned it into a universal movement for liberation, and not just a limited anti-colonial struggle of Israelites against the Romans.  Let alone the way that the crucifixion of Jesus leads to a critique of the idea of sacrifice and the incarnation of God-as-Holy spirit in the community struggling for justice and freedom.

As we rode the bike through downtown, Helena seemed to have turned me off, but her final words as we approached the park seemed to suggest that she understood at least something of Easter.  "Green," she said.  "Playground.  Play!"

It's spring, and time to play in the green grass with friends.  That's not a bad summary of the point of the whole Christian project.

Children's books

This weekend, Rita and I went into a bookstore to buy a book for Helena Iara.  As Rita and Helena paged through the kids' section (Rita paged, while Helena removed each book, looked at it, and then placed it on the floor), I ran into a new translation of Paul Ricoeur's famous book on narrative, where he hypothesizes that time is actually constructed from story, not only that we understand history through tales, but that time itself is the result of narrative.

Helena likes some books that have a beginning, climax, and end -- Little Gorilla, for instance, and Fortunata the Giraffe, which Rita ended up buying for her --  but narrative is hardly necessary.  One of her favorite books right now is My Circus, which pairs simple drawings with single words on each page: "Clown; Elephant; Tent; Acrobat."  If I turn the pages one by one as I read the words, she quickly gets bored, but if she turns the pages, sometimes back to forward, other times forward to back, sometimes skipping pages or flipping back to the beginning, she can sit with the book for fifteen minutes happily.

Clearly, she loves to see the way turning pages impacts her world: as she flips quickly between "Acrobats" and "Jugglers," I have to say the words just as quickly as she turns the pages... and then she flips back to "Children" just to see if I notice.  Kids like to exercise some kind of control over their parents, and turning the pages back and forth does that for Helena.

But I think there's something else going on here, too.  Helena likes to see new juxtapositions.  The list "Drum, Tent, Clown, Magician, Caravan" means one thing, but "Clown, Drum, Children, Acrobat, Elephant," that's a different story all together.  Or maybe not a story... and I guess that's my point.  There is something exciting about putting things or images or ideas together in an unexpected or even prohibited way.  That can mean anything from André Breton's surrealism, where poems are made of the seemingly random transpositions of words, to Dalí's paintings, to the chance placement of a book by Foucault next to the New Testament, making one think of new ways to interpret the epistle to the Romans.

Ricouer is probably right: narrative does create time, or at least the way we understand it (thermodynamics probably has something to do with the physical reality, after all).  And I think babies do understand both time and narrative, but that's not the only lens through which they look at the world.  There is also a jumping, random juxtaposition, and then the struggle to make sense of those new orders.  Narrative can be fun, but so can turning the pages any which way.  Things get placed side by side, the brain has to work to make the connection, and that's fun.

Prohibition and desire

Helena Iara isn't even a year old, but she already understands a the logic of desire: when things are prohibited, we want them more.  For instance, imagine that she is sitting in her baby seat, set on top of the table as Rita and I have lunch.  We will offer her toy after toy, which she will play with for a moment, and then throw aside.  A toy left barely within reach deserves a little more attention, if only because it is a challenge.  But... a piece of paper?  A hot teakettle?  The Tabasco sauce?  Anything that we do not want her to touch (and we don't even have to say it explicitly), that's what she wants.

A lot of intellectuals these days connect this idea with Michel Foucault, and he certainly did formalize the ideas in his political philosophy, but Foucault himself attributed the seed of the idea to Deleuze.  And as I explained to Helena Iara a couple of days ago, the idea goes back at least as far as Paul of Tarsus, with his famous, "Were it not for the law, I would not have known sin," and the rest of the epistle to the Romans.  Paul certainly didn't invent the idea, either: any mother paying close attention to the behavior of a baby will see the same thing.

But as a philosophy professor of mine once said, "The dirty little secret of philosophy is that most of the great idea have already been thought.  We try to complicate them up so that we look smart and original, but carpenters and grandmas had them long before we did.  Even so, it's worth while to repeat them, though."

And in the end, as I repeated the connection between prohibition and desire to Helena Iara, I knew I was not being original.  But it helped me not to get irritated as she reached, yet again, for the sharp spines on the crown of thorns plant in front of the window.

Realized Eschatology

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has come to love the anticipation of things as much as the things themselves: sometimes even more.  For instance, she (like many babies) loves zrrrbts, the release of air against her stomach or another big space of skin, but now she smiles and laughs even more as I breathe in, breathe out, come close, pull away... play the game of "zrrrbt coming!"  In the same way, she has long loved to hear a fake sneeze, finds it hilarious, but now she giggles even more in the "ah, ah, ah, ah..." that comes before the "choo" of the expelled sneeze.

So today, she and I talked about the idea of realized eschatology in early Christian thought, something we find in both Paul and John (no, not the Beatles, the Apostles...), expressed perhaps most clearly in the phrase "The Kingdom of God is among you."  (Luke 17:21)  The idea is that the Kingdom of God (generally understood in that time as a kind of worldly utopia of justice and peace, not, as in post-Constantine Christianity, as heaven after death), is a promise of a just future, but also something present in the community that is struggling for that justice.  If you have ever been inspired by a civil rights march or a rousing folk song by Pete Seeger, you probably understand what I mean: people come together to struggle for justice in the future, but as they come together, they have the sense of solidarity and joy that they hope such a future will bring everyone.

Paul talks about politics and religion, but for Helena Iara, the same is true of a funny sneeze: the future begins to colonize the present, and we get the joy of the anticipated result long before the thing itself.  As I told Helena, it reminds me of the way my father always thought about vacations: he would sit over books and guides and photos for months before we left home, not so much because he wanted to make the trip error-free, but because he loved the anticipation of the trip as much as the trip itself.

I think Helena's joy may explain why Buddhism never really tempted me with its condemnation of desire.  Buddha said, quite correctly, that suffering comes from desire, because we almost never get what we want, and when we do, it turns out to be something different that we thought it would be.  As such, to be happy, we must overcome desire.  I think, though, he missed the joy of realized eschatology, the giggle we see on Helena's face as she waits for the fake sneeze to come.  Desire and struggle isn't just something for the future: it's the way the joy we want from the future can touch the present.