Our Need for Roots and Its Connection to the Bible

Simone Weil on the Human Need for Roots

Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

(a quote)

The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable".

Cf: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/#! . Accessed 2019-08-28

***

 (another quote)

And yet, as the French thinker Simone Weil indicates, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define.” Weil rightly notes that we feed these roots through “real, active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future” (The Need for Roots, p. 41).

Cf: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/deuteronomy-16-18-21-9-quest-for-rootedness_b_1813589

Some Thoughts of Mine Related with 'Roots' and the Bible

Simone Weil's assertion of the "need for roots" is a foundational idea for the book that I'm writing at present (during this sabbatical year). The work is about ... of course... the Bible and how we could ... better yet, how we should relate to it as something like "the village that raised us." In other words, for many of us, for better or worse, Christianity and its heart (which is the Bible) acts (in an abstract sense) like the Tradition in which many of us were raised. Put in a more concrete image, the Bible, I would like to suggest, is something like the village which raised us. This image is rooted in my Asian-North American identity... (This would especially resonate with you if you come from Asia, from a context like the Philippines where family and its extended network of so many people such as uncles and aunts [tito and tita], cousins [pinsan], god-fathers/mothers [ninong and ninang], "extended" siblings [kapatid] and so on and so forth, virtually form a whole village that raised you and continually supports you and interacts with you through all the vicissitudes of life.)

However, at present, many of us who are located in secularized, Western(ized) contexts can be said to feel estranged and alienated from our religious, particularly, biblical roots because we are either not familiar anymore with the Bible and its main stories, characters, concepts, and messages or we have acquired the idea somewhere along the way that all that religious and biblical stuff is no longer relevant to us today, maybe even detrimental for us today.

I strongly feel that this kind of alienation from our religious roots, in short, this kind of "rootlessness" has quite a negative effect on us in the sense that philosopher Simone Weil pointed out. Many of us don't know where we came from; for this reason, we likewise don't know where we're going. 

We have to tap into our roots (a significant portion of which are religious ones) in order to know where we came from, where our traditions lie, where/what our original village was. By doing this, maybe we would know better what direction we're supposed to go. 

This village image is not meant only for people like me who come from an original context in which the 'village ties among people' are really strong. The village image is meant for everyone, even in this Western context where the emphasis is on rugged individualism. I contend that if we dig deeply enough into our traditions and, dare I say, into our common humanity itself, we all come from a place like a village because, as philosopher Simone Weil argues, we all need roots! Hence, I would like everyone to discover their roots and when they do, they will find out that religion has been and is an important part thereof, something that each one will have to accept in order to find out more deeply who they really are.

By "re-rooting" ourselves in our biblical traditions and relating with them as if they were vital members of the village in which we were raised, I don't really mean to say that we have to be "religious" in a way that is childish - that is, uncritically accepting of any or all of our religious traditions. By religious "re-rooting", I mean instead, we become, first, familiar once again with the big plots and the important stories (and the ideas behind them) that comprise our religious traditions. Next, because we ourselves are now grown-ups, we can have a critical sense toward the village that raised us, a village which we didn't choose but we're just simply born into! That means (put in technical language) applying both a hermeneutic of trust-retrieval as well as a hermeneutic of suspicion; put more simply, we ought to have both an attitude of trust and openness to rediscovering whatever is life-giving in our traditions but, at the same time, also have a healthy dose of suspicion, of wariness to spot and call out the things that are inimical to our holistic flourishing today. This even entails rejection of parts of our religious traditions that are not beneficial to the wholesome development of our common humanity today. 

Biblical Studies - Should it End? (Hector Avalos)

Hector Avalos ‘The End of Biblical Studies’

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGKzbfEEPo&t=1607s

The following notes are based on the youtube interview cited above originally created in 2007. Parts of this blog in-between parentheses are my own comments.

Violence (also Religious Violence) is Caused by Scarcity

All violence, according to Avalos, has "scarcity" at its core. If people perceive that there's not enough of something, they will compete in order to get a share of that and that struggle frequently results in conflict and violence. Religious violence is similar in cause and structure. At the national level, things such as water, political power, energy ... all of these could be scarce resources. 

Religion works in the same way. Religion creates scarcity. Avalos points out four religious scarcities:  1) Access to divine communication=only some people get divine revelation or more divine revelation than others; 2) Sacred Space such as the Holy Land=Israel as a physical-geographical location is not so valuable. It is very valuable though in terms of what it means for the religious identity of certain religious groups; 3) Group privileging on the basis of religion; 4) Salvation - long-term commodity such as eternal life. If only some are saved or if only one can be saved because of practicing or following a certain religion, then salvation itself becomes a “scarce resource.” Because of these religious scarcities, religion becomes an ingredient in causing violence.

The big problem here is: Religious scarcities can never be proven to exist or they may not exist at all. 

The End of Biblical Studies (2007 book)

Avalos’ main contention in the book is: Biblical Studies as it is currently practiced should end. Why? As the discipline stands now, it still functions as an arm of the church. It is founded on and permeated by religious and theological assumptions (that can never be proven). It is not yet completely secular. (By this he means, objective and free of vested theological interests. For Avalos, only if biblical studies becomes truly secular can it become also truly objective.) 

In biblical studies, there is always some apologetic aim, e.g., to defend the validity of the Bible for the current world. In all sub-fields of biblical studies, scholars try to prove that their disciplines are important even though the results have proven that they are not. (By that he means: many things contained in the Bible such as its laws and principles are so irrelevant to the world today. But biblical scholars try to show that they are still relevant.)

Why is the Bible not relevant to current life? Many Christians simply don't read the Bible. According to him, 21% of Protestants, 33% of Catholics do not read the Bible. What about those who do read the bible in some way? They actually do not read much of it. (Frequently, the reading style of many Christians is very selective, hence, many Christians only have a sketchy knowledge of the Bible.) Many Christians, even if they try to apply the Bible to their lives, apply very little of it. (The reason for this, I think, is that it is so difficult to apply many parts of the Bible as they stand!)

Promoting the relevance of the Bible today can be described as a mere marketing strategy. They try to say: you really need this book. The whole enterprise of biblical publishing is based on the message that this book is so important, you've got to have it!

Biblical translations often hide what the Bible really says in order to make it relevant and palatable to modern sensibilities. But if you take the Bible at face value, many of its injunctions are downright absurd or distasteful (bizarre, unacceptable or offensive) to modern people. E.g., Lk 14:27 "You must hate your parents to follow me." The Good News Translation says

²⁶ “Those who come to me cannot be my disciples unless they love me more than they love father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and themselves as well. 

(“love me more than your parents” is not really the same as the original word “hate”.)

The book's title ‘The End of Biblical Studies’ is meant as a double entendre. There are three possible scenarios for biblical studies for Avalos:

• End it completely - not Avalos’ position
• Keep it going as it is - not completely objective. Obviously, this is what Avalos is struggling against.
• Keep biblical studies but expose the way in which biblical studies has been hiding what the Bible really says. No to a "doctored" (palatable to moderns) image of Bible. This is what Avalos wants!

My Reactions to Avalos’ Points

I am very sympathetic to the concerns that he raises about biblical studies being in many ways duplicitous and I agree to a certain extent that it is because the field is, as he says, meant to be an arm of the church in promoting Christianity’s message.

I’ve had the same dilemma for many years now. This is one of the major reasons why I became convinced that I could not remain a member of the clergy class anymore.

However, my position on this question is: I consider the Bible as an integral (hence, unabandonable and, yes, indispensable) part of the tradition (even the “Tradition”) to which many of us belong. In short, it is like letters, journals, documents that our family (ancestors) wrote and/or considered (even canonized as) sacred and foundational. The right relationship with the Bible therefore is not completely abandoning it but considering it thus (a family heirloom that still tells us where we came from and thus who we are [according to the tradition]).

Armed with that, we apply both a hermeneutic of trust-retrieval (positive) as well as a hermeneutic of suspicion. In short, we relate to it with love and a critical sense. Often we’ll have to struggle with it even by correcting and revising it in order to forge a better future.

All of these things are going into the book that I’m currently writing (while on sabbatical).