Theological Journal - March 11: Empire and Joy

Theological Journal – March 11

Empire and Joy

Empire is a cluster of processes acting and interacting simultaneously with each other. Their actions both consolidate empire’s hold on us and at the same time separate us from sources of potential power and the capacity and energy to connect. Empire is not invulnerable, however. Arounds the edges, at the margins there are fissures and slippages where its powers are incompletely formed or not present. It is in these spaces that energy and room for joy and transformation exists. And those energies are constantly brewing. Empire is ever vigilant, though, in seeking and crushing them. Empire cannot stop Joy from coming (it is a gift of God to his people, after all) but it can attack its recipients so as to denature and dilute its reception and practice. And that is what we see in the church all around us in North America.

Without attending to Empire’s presence and power our practice of faith will never break out of the confines it allows it to exist in. Empire seeks to determine our

-identity (or our priorities)

-desires (or our passions)

-relationships (or our practices)

Our lives are the confluence of our passions, priorities, and practices. Working together in congruence and a mutually supportive fashion these 3 P’s give us lives of integrity and coherence. Joy, theologically speaking, is these 3 P’s working in trinitarian harmony making human life what it was meant to be. 

But in time of imperial dominance this Joy is a contested reality. The Empire’s strategy as we have detailed in previous posts in this series is a concerted effort to lock us into what I call our contemporary I.C.E. Age (even in a time of global warming!):

Individualism/Consumerism/Experientialism. This strategy individualizes, isolates, and subjectivizes our lives to such a degree that we become insensitive and even immune to reality. The 3 P’s of who we are taught (passions, priorities, practices) retrained and taught to dance to a different tune than the one our Creator wired us to hear and respond to and our Redeemer saved us from so we might live by the music we were meant to dance to.

This imperial strategy is not as comprehensive and all-embracing as we might think, however. There are nooks and crannies where we can still hear echoes and whispers of the Creator’s music. Michel de Certeau, French Jesuit historian and social critic, drew on his observations of ordinary people in everyday life and drew a distinction between strategies and tactics. Strategies, he claimed, were the province of power and insiders. They assume control and create insider spaces from which functionaries backed by the force of law administer their dictates. These people become the Subject while those they lead and also oppose become the Objects.

Tactics are the gambits the non-powerful use to work or work around the strategic systems to meet their needs or for their benefit. Tactics are adaptive and reactive to the strategies of the powerful, constantly reassessed and corrected as the strategies shift and change in an ongoing feedback loop. Stan Goff notes: “There is no presumption of how things will turn out, as there is in strategy. Instead, there is readiness to take advantage of unpredictable changes; this is called tactical agility, and it is often what sets popular uprisings apart from the institutions they seek to overthrow: they have strategy, we have tactics” (https://beautifultrouble.org/theory/the-tactics-of-everyday-life/). Tactics thrive on unpredictability. De Certeau mentions cabbies who work within the strategies of city planners in laying out streets to shortcuts, cut-throughs, and any other ways they can find to enhance their cab service. The non-powerful develop a nose for where strategies fail or leave room for movement. A sense for where they can “beat” the system.

I suggest that, similarly, the church, as the company of those called to implement God’s “preferential option for the poor” (Gustavo Guttierez), we will find joy in those places where we live and serve with them. There we will hear the music we are created to dance to and find a deeper integration of the 3 P’s. In short, there we will find our Joy. There we will find the capacity to rest on the Lordship and victory of Christ, bear our cross willingly and even joyfully (James 1:2-4 again), and discover a coherence and integrity in our living we never dreamed possible.

Though we may work with and even within strategic systems for various ends and reasons, we will never be at home in their drive for systematic control and direction of life. We will make common cause with those with whom we share life to find tactics that exploit the cracks and aporias in the system for their benefit even as we await the coming of the fullness of God’s new creation. This, I believe is the character of the joy the church today (indeed of everyday) ought to pray for and seek with everything in it.

Life under empire for the church will always be conflicted, partial, messy, incomplete, and catch-as-catch-can, and tactical. Spontaneity, joy, and flexibility will be its hallmarks. No grand strategies for reaching our cities or winning the world for Christ; only a commitment to live out a theology of the cross in the midst of the chaotic debris of a world where fewer and fewer have more and more power over the rest of us. Till the day when that is no longer the case that is where the church can and must be. Learning ever new stanzas with which to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land (Psa.137)!