The Trouble with Christ
Aaron Bushnell: No more water. The fire next time.
“I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.”
“It’s possible to imagine that the magic of a miracle has less to do with breaking the laws of physics and more with breaking the laws of society.” Steve Korb Life in Year One
Aaron Bushnell grew up in a religious community in Orleans, Massachusetts near Cape Cod called The Community Of Jesus. They are an ecumenical (non denominational) community in the Benedictine tradition, which basically means they prioritize a rigid daily structure of prayer, work, and contemplation. Laymen, including children, live together with celibate communities. The BBC has listed them as a cult and there have been many accounts of their abuse and maltreatment.
These abusive accounts have been brought up in relation to Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation for Palestinian liberation outside the Israeli embassy in DC.
But we say this as if abuse and maltreatment is unusual in Christian communities, which it is not.
We see the act of this US air force soldier, who allegedly was to be deployed to Israel, choosing to self-immolate as an act of disobedience as abnormal while murdering and starving thousands of people is not.
Christians have a religion based around a radical who, as the story goes, chose to die publicly, in obedience to his father, who is God. Christians forget that the historical nature of this radical was to fight the Roman occupation of Palestine.
We deny death for ourselves and we are able to do that because we sanction it for others. The empire plays God and puts Christ wherever it is convenient.
These are your holes, daddy.
My mom kept tender photos of Jesus around the house: cuddling a sheep, or her favorite, one where his head was thrown back laughing. So alive and joyful and so different from the images I saw in church or in my school, every few feet a suffering, bloody, lean and muscle cut Christ looking up towards God.
Jesus scared me for all of this, for how difficult he was to understand, for the fact that he made this sacrifice I didn’t totally get and that no one had really asked him too, from my perspective, except his dad. Abba, my mom told me he called God, meaning daddy or papa in Aramaic. He was erotically potent and I feared that, because I recognized my own desire to fuck Jesus, or at least someone in the shape of Jesus. I was a nine year old in my room fantasizing of someone hanging on what I now know is a St. Andrew’s Cross while I rubbed on them. There was something dangerous about Jesus being so close to death, so visible in gore. His eyes up to heaven like “these are your holes, Daddy.”
For a young white man to choose to die to bring attention to a genocide is considered “insane” by our society. And of course his mental health has been brought into question, and of course they are highlighting the abusive nature of the religious community that raised him.
It strikes me that Christians find this all unusual, especially since they have put all their values into an erotically potent historical figure instead of putting those values and that powerful eroticism into humanity. Or maybe they have.
During sex I love authority and obedience. I tell a lover whose body is sometimes too sensitive for touch to turn their sensitivity into authority. Tell me I don’t deserve to touch you. Then when I try to touch you, smack me, I say, my eyes bright with delight.
Christianity values authority and obedience. The fact that there is a chapter on this in the Community of Jesus book Rule of Life, is really not a surprise because we live in a society based on authority and obedience.
Law and order.
It is old news to say that this is how Europeans colonize through mass murder, humiliation, and instituting authority and obedience. Create a horror and then offer a way to disassociate from the horror: the merciful Christ, the ultimate submissive.
My mom was a theologian. I went to Catholic school and each day she would ask me what I learned and then tell me how I was instructed wrong and re-teach me. My mom subscribed to The Catholic Worker and believed in liberation theology which attempts to position Christ into a radical historical context.
When Jesus says to turn the other cheek, He wasn’t being submissive. He wasn’t saying here, hit this one too. I was memorizing Biblical facts for a test. Oprah was on TV. My mom was tired from teaching and in her usual at home manner, had her pants unbuttoned in order to relax. Her belly bloomed. A Roman soldier would beat someone with the back of his hand. If you turn your cheek as they are about to hit you they will miss and graze your nose. It is meant to humiliate the soldier.
In February 2024 by the Gregorian calendar we have a soldier who humiliated the military. While Aaron burned and screamed Free Palestine, a police officer aimed a gun at him. Defiance will continue to be the closest thing we have to miracles.
I love you so of course I love your mind which is showing it's fine abilities here. Thank you.