can’t believe i said this

I’ve been battling a cold for about a week and yesterday afternoon around 3, I lost. A foggy head – where everyone sounds like they’re speaking into a barrel, nasal congestion, that achy feeling, and just a hint stomach-unease. To top it off, I could not sleep last night.

So, I worried, prayed, watched TV, paced, caught up on some emails, worked on my dissertation, got a drink of water, and mostly tried to fall asleep.

My brain started fogging over about an hour before Thinking Theologically 1 (one of the courses I TA). We’ve been exploring theories of the atonement. And had walked through the ten atonement articulations highlighted by Leanne Van Dyk in Believing in Jesus Christ. Dr. Bryan Burton grouped students to reflect on possible contemporary metaphors for the atonement. When Bryan drew the students together eliciting responses from the groups, well… let’s just say that my foggy brain kicked in (or “out” depending how you look at it). As TA I don’t usually contribute in the same way students do, but for some inexplicable reason I started thinking-out-loud. I started yammering about how sexual intercourse (though “love making” would have been better language) maybe one of the better metapors of “at-one-ment” – bear in mind I hadn’t thought this all through when I began “thinking-out-loud” and my foggy mind was less than sharp.

I had enough sense about me not to say that may the Cross could be viewed as humanity’s rape of God. A rape in which humanity takes the Incarnation (God’s grand wooing move toward an intimate I/Thou creation of Us) and satisfies itself and its quest for dominance, treating God like an expendable object. A rape which God, in Christ, receives and submits to – out of love for the rapist – always lovingly seeing the rapist as a person (I/thou) and offering genuine forgiveness and the gift of Self in the midst of the horror.

And since I couldn’t shut-up I went on to mumble, almost incoherently, that maybe atonement is like a sponge, absorbing all the evil, (and yes, the sponge metaphor was connected to the rape metaphor, though I’m not sure I made that clear).

I never got this far in my confused state, but maybe grace would be the absurdity of rapists living into the love ever extended by the Raped One; or something like that.

I think I need sleep – and maybe a upgrade for my internal editor.

peace, dwight