They broke down a part of the wall for him to enter: a city which could produce such citizens had no need of walls to defend it. - CLR James
1
There came to Jesus a woman with an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and as he sat eating with the disciples, she poured it on his head. When they saw it, they were offended and said, what is the use of this wastefulness? We could have sold the ointment and given the money we raised to the poor. When Jesus heard them he said, why insult the generosity of this woman? She has given more than any who gives alms to the poor. They give sustenance but she gives beauty. For ye think only of the prosaic work of virtue but she hath poured this ointment which is the transcendent value that negates the limits of your pieties. Verily I say unto you, wherever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, what this woman hath done shall be included and it shall be told as a memorial of her. Then he said, Caesar may be overthrown but not now, and not by us. And poverty may be abolished but not through our giving. Then he asked them, why are we gathered here? And he said, the woman called Salome has shown us, the kingdom is in the alabaster box. Upon hearing these words, one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests. And he said unto them, what will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver and Judas went to give this money to the poor. Judas said, God gives riches into my right hand, palm upwards, and with my left hand, palm downwards, I give that to the poor. I am the intermediary and what is to be given to them shall be given first to me. And Thomas went away from the others and spake with the woman just as Jesus took Judas aside and spake unto him of the mystery of the kingdom, not because he would go there but because he would grieve for his absence from it. Thomas said to the woman, called Salome, my friend, this is the first time in the world, the very first time in the history of the world, where one has looked, as you have looked, to find emancipation from the binds set by the world upon the way of emancipation. It will not be the last time, but the move you have found, the move you have made, shall always be rare. You are the first to see the problem of the righteousness in refusal, as it may be known only from within the vows of refusal, and you have seen also from within the standpoint of moral non-conformity how non-conformity dwells within the homeostasis of totality. People desire to raise their flags, they desire to show their humility, they desire that their wounds which are their proofs do not heal, and their angry self-justifications are emblazoned upon cloths fluttering against the sky. With Jesus as our oculus, the alabaster box that you brought amongst us is become the vanishing point included by the line of all history. All giving passes through it and widens from it on the other side. And the ointment is our movement that moves away from the movement. The woman raises her hand and denies the praise. She said, Judas also moves against the conventional moves of the movement. Thomas said, you have set the problem of the riches that are found in another way of speaking , whilst Judas narrows all life to a vow, he is impoverished by his giving to the poor because it is a rule for him. He ends by not giving but exalts in the observance of giving of himself in the name of the poor, his self-sacrifice is also his self worship. And Salome said, but in the ascetic narrowing of his language, and the reduction of his being, to the simple vow of giving there is also a way to riches, there is another vanishing point in his poverty beyond which opens another realm. Thomas said, my friend you are right, there are two movements moving away from the movement. The first as praise, the second as prayer, the first as riches, the second as poverty. The first has Jesus as its oculus and the alabaster box as its vanishing point. The second has self-denial as its vanishing point and the chief priests as its oculus. The woman says, there is not a choice between them, we do not choose the straits through which we must pass and I now wonder if it is the way of the alabaster box to recognise the way of asceticism just as the woman cares even for those who transgress against her. There are those who must test love with their betrayal, inconstancy, disavowal and transgression which they then justify in the name of their righteousness. They ask of the woman, will you still love me if I deny you? Didn’t Jesus act against his mother and father, denying them, as Judas then acted against Jesus, denouncing him? A woman’s acts of care are to be found in the pouring of the ointment, which is nothing by itself. And she said, in a woman’s acts of care is the sense of forgiveness which is the riches she draws out even from the one who took the unforgivable path of denial and righteousness. As she gives so she will receive. Salome said, then Judas is the very precious ointment contained in the alabaster box. And Thomas was amazed.
2
Children play freely within the tribe’s domain but their freedom has to be fixed to its territory so that the expanding ripples of play do not pass beyond the tribal boundary. The tribe’s identity is inseparable from its infliction of a deep foundational wound upon every individual child’s psyche, so that the child can come to recognise, and be recognised by, the world to which it belongs. A warrior secretly dressed in unfamiliar mask and costume hides in the undergrowth and ambushes the children where they gather together. He terrifies them with his unearthly cries and gestures, he brandishes a ritual weapon, then he disappears without explanation or lesson. The children later begin to recognise a recurrence of the mask’s motif as they go about the tribal space. The motif reappears at significant thresholds in tribal life, in the crisis of war, fixed to stakes at the edge of the tribal territory, in moments of individual maturation, accompanying family losses, and attached to seasonal occurrences. For every individual, the capacity of the mask to terrify diminishes but the initial sense of threat is later transformed into the organisational principle of the individual’s awareness as he begins to recognise what belongs and what does not belong to his world. Social conditioning through the symbolism of threat is retained in all human societies, and is always organised around, drawing its energy from, an initial traumatic event fixed to a repeating motif. The motif is conventionally a mask or hat, or an animal character, but also could be a weapon of torture or execution such as the cross, sword or spear, and which is endlessly rewoven into the culture’s pourquoi story with a corresponding counter-motif of ceremonial renewal, often a cauldron or cup.
3
The banished, or offered up, portion of a community is always already assigned. It constitutes that repertoire of images which the community is emphatically not and yet which inevitably, it is impelled to uncover within itself as if for the first time. The relinquished and the retained portions are expressed in the form of two goats. The first goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness. The other goat, the second goat, is consumed by the community itself as a symbolic return from its era of misdemeanours to its own sense of purpose or righteousness - the second goat, the non-scapegoated goat, expresses to the community an interiorising movement of the exterior’s approval of the measures it has taken. If the community is to continue it has to regulate itself at the level of such inputs and outputs, it cannot persist in isolation and nor should it be swallowed. How is it to behave before disaster and judgment, and strangers and messengers, and signs and portents? At what point in its everyday processes, that pass without any thought of their cosmic scale, was our world thrown off-kilter, and how might we return it to that point so as to set things right with providence? The precipitant of the eternal return to every Great Reset will always appear like an unwelcome stranger, dressed in goatskin, returning from the wilderness, bearing disease in one hand, and its cure in the other.
