Comic book writers = master theologians

I really appreciated Mohammed’s posting of Clifford Lawrence Meth’s “I,Gezeh” masterpiece. I’d been a Meth fan since high school, he wrote some of the best pieces for “The Comic’s Buyers Guide.” When I started reading his “fiction” (alot of it doesn’t sound too much like fiction at all) I was very touched by his relationship to Judaism, which features a kind of tough guy pragmatic fraternal nobility with a vaguly mystical confusion about karma and how and when it pushes or doesn’t. Crib Death (and other bedtime stories), This bastard Planet, Perverts, Pedophiles, and other theologians are some of his story compilations, but striking particularly for this blog’s audience might be Strange Kaddish,his compilation of Jewish Sci fi, featuring Icons like Neil Gaiman, Peter David, Harlan Ellison and others.

But yeah, there have been some insightful, spiritual people involved in the comic book Oilam over the years, and, in addition to the good R’ CL Meth, I wanna showcase one I just discovered.

Peter Gillis wrote this Cuh-ray-zee Dr Strange story in the back of a Marvel Showcase called Strange Tales in the eighties. It’s a very spiritual journey about the surrendering of everything precious to us in the hopes of some higher goal, done through a war with an elder octopus deity coming to eat the Earth. In it, he uses, openly, the languages of a number of different mystical traditions, and really, phew, does somethings that i hadn’t realized had happened in the medium then.

So, curious about who this writer, who i’d never really heard of, was, i found– He blogs!

No Time To Explain is Peter Gillis’s musing board on many topics, and really only one topic: Politics and world events filtered through his moral/philosophical/spiritual eye of insight. Here’s a taste, from a review of Dinesha D’Souza’s book:

There are four reasons to renounce something:
1) You learn it’s bad for you.
2) You find it icky.
3) Law tells you not to.
4) You give it up for something greater.

The first two do not have a spiritual dimension (beyond the fact that everything has a spiritual dimansion); serious mojo lies in the second two.

One can be a vegetarian for any of these four reasons: you’re convinced of the health benefits; meat repels you; you follow a religion such as Hinduism; you give up meat as a sacrifice. The first two are ways that the renunciation won’t be important to you, making it disappear, while the last two enhance the significance of the act and perpetuate it. And the important thing about 3) Lawfulness and 4)Asceticisn is that they are independent of the thing renounced.

Whether the Law is the Torah, the Institutes of Mother Church, or you local zoning regulations, what is important in Lawfulness (or to give it a slightly different name, Morality) is that you choose to obey the law because it is the Law. It is a positive affirmation of adherence–whether to the Will of God, the commun ity of which you are a part, or your own established code of honor. But it is the Law that matters. The Law can be based on divine fiat, on sweet reason, or on community consensus: again, it doesn’t matter. To take a more florid example out of the Torah: If you are an observant Jew, you don’t eat peacocks. Peacocks are not bad things, nor should you hate them–and why you should not eat peacocks is not on the surface obvious. But a commitment to not eating peacocks is important because you bind yourself to the Law.

Asceticism is different: it comes from within. It is a positive act of will. At its deepest level (when it is done right), paradoxically, the central impulse is generosity. Giving up really is giving. But again, the point is that it does not say something negative about what’s given up. One does not fast because eating is hateful–one fasts because eating is a delight and is necessary. And every Catholic kid knows that giving up broccoli for Lent just doesn’t cut it.

These four aspects don’t mix well either. A fast decreed by Law is not asceticism, but lawfulness. (It’s one of the truly inspired moments in the history of the Christian Church when St. Benedict established his Rule. Monastic life, up to that point was the domain of individual enthusiasm, and St. Benedict moved that most independent of acts into the domain of Lawfulness–and thereby fused it securely into the Church.) And the most dangerous thing that can happen to an ascetic is that they grow to despise or devalue what they have given up. At that point, it all becomes broccoli.

Fundamentalist Christianity really is a strange beast. We, looking at it askance, tend to notice its right-wing politics, its intolerance, its hangups about sex–but, for all its authoritarianism, it exists without hierarchy–and for all its intolerance, it has no official dogma. In short, it’s extremely American. Its leaders are not so much leaders as people who get in front of the mob and start waving a flag: James Dobson and Pat Robertson could no more change fundamentalists’ direction than they can make them buy health drinks. Again, this is much like post-Imam Islam–except that there isn’t even a requirement for scriptural learning. All you have to do to gain a place in the ‘clergy’ of Fundamentalist Christianity is to say you belong–and agree with the congregation. All very American.

So when it comes to submission to law, fundies are aware that they have none–not as a cohesive body, with strong definitions, criteria for judgment, and schedules of punishments. Unlike Jewish or Islamic Law, which is filled with qualifications contingencies and distinctions, fundie law is usually at the level of “fire bad”. What’s more germane here is that there’s little or no idea of submission to Law as a guide for everyday life–because there is none. (How else could you explain a President idolized by them who never goes to church? Who doesn’t condemn his daughters’ underage drinking and hot sex with Ashton Kutcher ?) The idea of fundamentalist monastery is just absurd–and they’d be empty if they existed.

And with respect to the real ascetic act, fundies share the same problem as most of Protestantism: while an ascetic act arises from the individual, and is a positive, generous act even though it may look like the opposite, followers of Luther and better, Calvin have brought into being, as I’ve said before, a God who does not reward virtue . And in effect, they deny virtue altogether. The criers of the reformation denied holiness to monks and friars just as they denied it to purple-clad indulgence sellers, and, while they exalted the individual, they denied the individual the freedom to act–or at least denied him the capability to act positively.

The Catholic Church discovered that there’s no need to do marketing for monasteries: if you build them, they will come. It’s only by explicit denial that Protestantism closed the door, and still it erupts in darker and more twisted forms.

Fundie Christianity has no idea of positive asceticism and no good idea of submission to law. Dinesh D’Souza’s construct is that crooked fragile scaffolding without the Jesus or Allahu Akbar in it. The fundies only appeal to reasons 1) or 2): don’t have sex (especially not gay sex!) because of lakies of coiling lead in Hell–and besides, sex (especially gay sex!) is icky. D’Souza doesn’t invoke Hell (substituting demonic terrorists–oooh scary!)–and falls back on ickiness.

Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam, for all their flaws, all give positive reasons for giving up freedom. Fundamentalist Christianity does not–which is one of the reasons for its turbulent anger.

Genius, right? he’s got tons of it, very insightful. Check him out

Thanks Peter Gillis!

—yo