The Weirder Side of Evangelizing: A Journey Through a Jack Chick Comic Book

Late last week, while making my commute to class, I stopped at a gas station and found a Jack Chick comic stuck in a crack in the gas pump. If you haven't heard of Chick before, you very well may have seen his work, as he and his company create comic book tracts for Evangelical Christians that are:

a.) commonly handed out or left in public areas by, I'm sure, well-meaning people; and
b.) crazier than a sloth with syphilis.

Some of my personal favorites in his oeuvre include a scathing denunciation of that great abomination of the 20th century, Dungeons and Dragons; the classic "This Was Your Life," in which all of a man's sins are shown on a theater screen in heaven, including that time he checked his watch during church; and the ominously titled "The Visitors," in which a brave Christian girl tells her maiden aunt/strict librarian/Sarah Palin? that Mormonism is...well, take a look for yourself:

I am so looking forward to LDS.org's upcoming Gospel Topics essay on Baal worship.

Seeing this comic book gave me two immediate thoughts. One, leaving a tracting pamphlet in a gas pump is only one passive-aggressive step removed from leaving an anonymous note on your neighbor's windshield saying, "Hey friend, heard you weren't baptized! That's cool, nothing wrong with that, but you're totally going to hell. I love what you did with your yard!" Two, that I must take this pamphlet, read it, and share it with all of you, for the good of all the Internet.

Strange, Conspiracy Theory-Laden, Vaguely Biblical Pictures (with hilarious captions!)

There are many things I wish I had time to write about: politics, economics, pop culture, religion....Actually, that kind of sums up my repertoire, so, let me amend my introductory statement to be, "There are four things I wish I had time to write about." Now, I would like to talk about these things, but I would also like to pass my university classes and graduate sometime this decade, so I'm afraid that today, I'm going to shoot for something a little lower: witty picture captions.

Specifically, I want to comment upon pictures from a Facebook group I've noticed called Last Days Bible.

So far, I haven't been able to track down which non-English-speaking country the creator of this group is from, but it's not for a lack of intriguing (if contradictory) hints: for example, the accompanying blog has a news ticker...for Saudi Arabia. The author of all blog posts on the front page (and, quite possibly, all blog posts) has his or her name written...in Chinese characters ('Traditional Han' characters, as Google Chrome tells me, when it offers to translate it for me). The supporters of the Facebook group are from all over, including a Baptist minister in Florida.

However, it's not these somewhat mysterious details that drew me in; no, I think that can best be explained by the opening text on its accompanying blog:

You have convinced me, random mish-mash of words. I wanna rapture. I no wanna left-behind.

Oh, yes. It's one of those blogs.

What IS in a Name: Countless Caravans for a Mormon Boy

This is the final chapter in a three part series. For the previous sections, I suggest you click on the links provided for Part 1 and Part 2.

When I think about how I can harmonize these various versions of Allan—my grandfather’s kindness and his cruelty; my grandfather and me; my zealous missionary self and my uncorrelated, intellectual spirit—I am left with an understanding that this is the kind of story that has already been written and, at the same time, it is the story no one has written at all. I’m not the first person this has happened to, but it is new because it is involves me. I am reminded of one of the final lines from Tony Kushner’s remarkable epic Angels in America. The character Harper, a possibly-recovering valium addict who never made for a very good Mormon, reflects, “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world there’s a type of painful progress—longing for what we’ve left behind and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

So I look back. I turn to the faith of my fathers, the faith that took Davis-es across foreign lands on trains. I look to the legacy of pioneers who did not know what it meant to be Mormon but created for themselves what it meant in their move. I look to the faith of prophets who proclaimed that this faith is both an inheritance we are given and a gift extended that we claim. Allan Nathan Davis is a name that comes with honor and sin, an inspiring history and mistakes in need of repentance.

I hear a voice from the dust made of the bones of my ancestors. The words of a prophet-king reverberate in my ear and settle in my heart: “I would that ye should remember also, that this is the name that I said I should give unto you [. . .] I say unto you , I would that ye should remember to retain the name written in your heart [. . .] that ye hear and know the voice by which ye shall be called.” Allan Nathan Davis is a name complete on its own but given unto me. It is thick in legacy but mine to shape and command. Like a master gardener employed by nobility, I craft and sculpt knowing such art never fully belongs to me. The art of my name belongs to others. But it is my responsibility, my inheritance. It is my talent to add surplus to. I look back to take my step forwards.

What IS in a Name: Cruelty in the Character of Kindness

The following is a continuation of my previous post entitled "What IS in a Name: Faith of My Fathers." If you have not already read that piece, I suggest you start there and then come back to this one. If you have read it already, enjoy this, the second entry of a three part series.

If we were to stop in the ecstasy of elegy, only honoring the man and the faith of the man that shaped the name, it would be a disservice to the man and the faith. In moments of hopeful though perhaps delusional optimism, we like to think we are defined by our best attributes, our greatest triumphs, our perfect days. Mistakes are the aberrations, the exceptions to the general rule of our being. In darker days of despair, we convince ourselves that we are our failures, our errors, our defects and disorders. Occasional elevated behavior makes for miracles: phenomena which do not reflect our true natures. Often, we compromise, finding the grey between the extremes, understanding ourselves in a space created by these black and white poles.

While helpful, there is another way to think about this interaction: rather than black and white creating the grey that is us, black and white might remain undiluted in us. We are not an amalgamation or soup; we are a quixotic Mobius strip—convoluted and paradoxical, always-already within and without ourselves. Good and evil; light and dark—these are not diametrically opposed in an either/or relationship external to us but rather live within us far more intimately than the colorful black/white/grey metaphor permits us to imagine. The best in us exists within our worst traits, and our worst qualities nourish the strongest parts about ourselves.

Mobius Strip

I could balance the elegy of Allan Davis with stories of emotional explosions, cataloging instances when my grandfather did not live up to the name he himself made; but, that would perpetuate the idea that such actions were either aberrations from or fulfillments of some sort of static “Allan” identity. Instead, Allan Davis can be understood in an instance where cruelty worked under the character of kindness.

That's Right, I'm Posting . . . My Homework

So Casey has asked me to contribute. I have about three different topics I have wanted to tease out in an essay format as I am wont to do; however time has not permitted such an exercise. As a compromise between time and abstention, I have decided to share something I worked on this semester: a review of a book I read for my Latin American history class. I think this should prove interesting.

“Race as Religion”: Martínez’s Genealogical Fictions as an Historicized Abstraction of Race in the Early Modern Era

In Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, María Elena Martínez traces how the Iberian beliefs and practices surrounding limpieza de sangre contributed to the formation of the colonial sistema de castas. Martínez argues that when the religious discourses surrounding the notion of blood purity transferred to the American colonies, they shaped how a racial and caste system was perceived and experienced. At the heart of her project is the contested historical use of the term “race.” Because racial discourses took on a definitive shape connected to biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, efforts to describe identities prior to that century as racial have been criticized as either anachronistic or teleological. Using the term in alternate ways also threatens to leave the term bereft of meaning. Basically, if “race” is not recognized in its eighteenth and nineteenth-century particularities, the term becomes meaningless. The definitive contribution of Genealogical Fictions is its response to this criticism, demonstrating how “race” can be used if diligently framed within the specific dynamics and circumstances of an historical moment.[1]Ultimately, rather than furthering the Black Legend by contending that Iberian colonialism in the Americas created race and racism, Martínez offers a measured way to conceptualize one specific form of racism forged in the colonies.

When addressing former arguments from historians who “fear equating notions of lineage, blood, and descent with race,”[2] Martínez references a number of essays and articles including one by Verena Stolcke.[3] In “A New World Engendered,” Stolcke also looks at the issue of blood purity and blood proofing, but she indicates the two main objections to discussinglimpieza de sangre in terms of race: (1) anachronistic misusage of the term which actually “sidesteps the fundamental question of how American peoples understood social and identity and exclusion in their own time;” and (2) the risk that interpreting any ideology connected with descent along racialist terms would lead to “the untenable conclusion that all premodern societies were organized along racial lines.”[4] Specifically on the first point, Stolke concludes that the social hierarchy shaped by a cultural-religious form of social placement and discrimination was no better or worse than modern racism, but still it cannot be discussed as racism.

Martínez, while acknowledging the necessity of historical specificity, disagrees. By arguing that singling nineteenth-century constructions of race as biological ignores the flexibility of racial discourse, she builds on Stuart Hall’s call for “a more concrete, historicized level of abstraction” in regard to racisms. Racial discourses have what Hall calls “general features” which are “modified and transformed by historical specificity.”[5] Genealogical Fictionsindicates a well-defined and excellently researched effort to propose that racial discourse operated on a “grid of knowledge” that was not constituted by scientific but rather religious discourses.[6] “Race as religion,” as it was manifested in the Spanish American colonies, had its beginnings in the Iberian peninsula; however, Martínez documents that while the transatlantic process altered the implementation of limpieza de sangre, the use of specific terms like razaand casta perpetuated a religious-racial discourse in the colonies.

One of Martínez’s strengths is the detail she subscribes to the terms she investigates and uses. In her Introduction, after mentioning debates concerning anachronistic usage of the term race, she writes,

The debate is important but frankly less pressing than analyzing the historical significance of those concerns—the social tensions that produced them, the terms people used to express them, and the ways in which they were reproduced or rearticulated over time and across geocultural contexts.[7]

At first, it appears that she avoids the implications of the debate and the use of “race” to describe early modern practices, sidestepping the debate. However, her emphasis on “terms people used” is central to her recognition of “race as religion” and it directly addresses critics opposed to this approach, like Stuart Schwartz whose work informed Stolcke’s essay.

The first endnote in the book not only defines “sistema de castas,” but clarifies why Martínez uses that term rather than an equivalent term Latin American historians have often used to draw attentions to the social dimensions of race: “sociedad de castas.” In an article entitled “Colonial Identities and the Sociedad de Castas,” Stuart Schwartz makes a case that the term race should not be used to describe identities and practices during the early modern era. More importantly, however, he also asserts that due to the convention of social categories, subjects (especially people of color living between categories) intent on manipulating identity constructs could. [8] According to Martínez, “the phrase sistema de castas is preferred [inGenealogical Fictions] because, although the system was fluid, it was constituted by underlying principles that gave colonial Mexican racial ideology a measure of coherency.”[9] Furthermore, in describing how classification occurred in the operation of the sistema de castas, she notes that while it “tended to be anything but systematic, [it] was nonetheless a system, an ideological complex constituted by a set of underlying principles about generation, regeneration, and degradation.”[10] Martínez negates characterizations of the sistema de castas and limpieza de sangre as “fluidic.” Race is an appropriate term because while the early modern era did not employ racial discourses informed by biology, its connection to religion still provided an essentializing element which resisted fluidity. Sistema de castas and the religious concept embedded in it can be discussed in terms of racialization because while particular moments of identification were challenged, the principles organizing the entire system remained strict and quite definite.

Genealogical Fictions treats terms related to Spanish colonial languages of race like “raza” and “casta” with equal particularity because their use reflected and reinforced a specific cultural production of race. Martínez explains that these terms, while similar in use and connotation (especially in their relation to blood), were not identical. Raza, because of its connection to raça (a Castillian term for defected), became associated with individuals descended from Jews and Muslims. That association gave it a negative connotation that casta did not carry. In this way, race operated as a marked identity—a marking that indicated impurity and infidelity. This marking was not biological but religious. Because casta referred primarily to Old Christians, it remained a neutral term, while sometimes indicating good breeding. In the colonies, casta started to apply to people of mixed ancestry; at which point it began to take on negative connotations. Cases of mixed ancestry developed new social categories like castizo and morisco. Morisco, a term which had been related to Islamic converts to Christianity, came to describe the children of Spaniards and mulattos. The impurity of an unfaithful religious identity marked black slaves seen as a race not based on biology but on a grid of knowledge informed by a religious discourse that explained their connection to Ham and Canaan.

The transatlantic process that brought Spaniards, Indians, and blacks together resulted in a number of social categories and a systematic hierarchy. While there were cases of people challenging their classification into particular categories, Martínez evidences that neither the identities nor the system was fluidic. The castas in colonial Spanish America can be discussed as part of a colonial racial discourse because while not every casta was a race, a number of the castas were racialized. In the specific historical moment and space of colonial Spanish America, race operated on knowledge informed by religious discourses that marked particular identities as impure and unfaithful. Some castas like the moriscos mentioned above were more like a raza because they were marked. Genealogical Fictions does not open the floodgates of an untenable conclusion that all premodern societies were organized along racial lines. Nor does it employ the use of race in a way that is either anachronistic or sidestepping how American peoples understood exclusion in their own time. María Elena Martínez’s work demonstrates how the Iberian beliefs and practices surrounding limpieza de sangre shaped the colonial sistema de castas. More importantly, however, she exhibits how racial discourses in periods prior to the nineteenth-century can be examined and discussed.

---

[1] María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 11.

[2] Ibid., 11.

[3] Stuart B. Schwartz, “Colonial Identities and the Sociedad de Castas,” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 1 (1995), 185–201; Stuart B. Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and new Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (colonial era),” The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas III (2): South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–501.

[4] Verena Stolcke, “A New World Engendered: The Making of the Iberian Transatlantic Empires,” A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A Meade and Merry E. Weisner-Hanks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 378.

[5] Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 411–440.

[6] Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 13.

[7] Ibid., 12.

[8] Start B. Schwartz, “Colonial Identities and the Sociedad de Castas,” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 1 (1995), 188.

[9] Ibid., 287.

[10] Ibid., 166.

On Rejection

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.” ― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

I was remembering a scene from an episode of Angel, the harrowing spin-off series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both shows aired on the late WB, may it rest in peace. Angel’s your basic story of a vampire cursed with a soul who moves to Los Angeles in order to help the helpless. In a Sisyphus-as-existential-hero attempt, he seeks to amend the horrific atrocities he committed and the lives he destroyed in his one hundred and fifty years as a remorseless demon. I mean seriously, like, who hasn’t been there? In the scene I was remembering, Angel, confronting the woman who turned him into a monster, pleads that she consider redemption—it’s not too late for her to change. Grabbing a crucifix and chucking the emblem of hope at her would-be-savior, Darla (that’s her name by the way) resigns herself to damnation. But beyond that, in that act—since she knows as well as anyone that vampires in the Buffyverse growl and experience some serious flesh burnage when they come in close contact with a crucifix—Darla hurt Angel, violating his composed veneer, reminding him of the ever-present devil that set up shop in his body. His hope recoiled when he could not prevent his body from instinctually doing the same. She wounds: “You see, no matter how good a boy you are, God still doesn’t want you.” It’s just so hard to find good television like that anymore.

Perhaps the previous paragraph fails to properly convey the sheer poetry of the scene, but to me it’s a beautiful staging of basic Judeo-Christian philosophy. Think of it: A woman communed with the beast, resulting in an expulsion from paradise and purity not only for her but also for her male counterpart. But the fall from grace for one does not automatically indict the other. In the Buffyverse, penetrating bites alone do not transform men into vampires. Oh no, at the point of the prey’s death, the moment right before the heart’s last beat, the beast must break his or her own flesh, inviting the victim to drink the vampire’s demonic blood. Despite the compromising circumstances—you know, like his or her own impending death—choice resides in the individual, not the beast. Eve’s disobedience tempted Adam, but he chose to partake of the sweet forbidden fruit. She broke the rind; he imbibed the juice.

Consequently, cast from the presence of Providence, man strives to prove himself to the God he betrayed. But it doesn’t matter—the sons of Adam, just like Angel, suffer from the reality that their very nature has changed. Vampiric transition between humanity and life as the undead mirrors mankind’s descent from creatures of Eden to children of earth: both shifts evidence radical alterations occurring on a physical level. I suppose they’re both rather thinly veiled metaphors for puberty and adolescence—that would explain my fanatical fascination with Buffy and the Bible in high school. But anyway, ironically enough, the memorable abilities of vampires, like superhuman strength and the standardized extendable-teeth, emphasize their similarities not their differences with mortal men.

These folk-lored facets mimic man’s punishment to taste death and experience pain. God did not create man as the abomination he is: he is the product of his own volition to violate the Almighty’s designs. Apparently, my body bears the mark of disobedience. I don’t even remember doing anything wrong . . . but let’s be honest: either I did or I probably will. So, alterations in physical characteristics simply serve to outwardly manifest the unnatural character inside. Mortality flows through mankind’s degenerating veins. We yearn to taste carnality, a desire that decimates devotion. A Grand Creator extends covenants and a Christ, laws and promises of reconciliation, but the weak flesh denies the hopes of the willing spirit. God remains distant, removed; we still live east of Eden. Neither mankind’s displays of goodness nor the designs of deity prove efficacious in conquering the divide. Seeing and knowing the inclination of mankind’s bodies and dispositions to sin, is it any wonder why God sits silent, why He wouldn’t want us anymore?

Such a compelling philosophy! So dark in its cloak of hope, so dismal in its aspirations for obedience. And the entire epistemology hinges on the principle of rejection. The doctrines and dogma of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Judeo-Christian faiths certainly invest a lot of energy and focus in the idea in terms of the flesh. Most of us do. Rejection encompasses the frustrating failures of romantic or carnal encounters; however, it is not limited to that scope. I wonder how one reads and responds to the everyday rejections like that, like the denial of sexual hope, when one functions within a frame of mind which posits rejection as the universal relationship between deity and man. The narrative of the faith establishes a God so perfect that He houses the purity of every valued principle; He embodies our vision of our own potential. However, Judeo-Christians in the recognition and worship of the ideal supremacy also implicate their own disconnect from the exalted. Thus, there is a gap between God and Man. The Father expels Adam and Eve from the garden of bliss; the Lawgiver prevents the Children of Israel from entering the land of promise; the Christ warns that not all those who cry ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. The garden, the land, the kingdom—these are the temples of God, kept holy and pure upon condition of rejection.

It is an interesting word: reject. Like plenty of other words, it can operate as both a verb and noun. Without referring to the OED, my initial reaction compares and contrasts it to the words subject, object, and abject. Obviously, my mind has wandered into the realms of Julia Kristeva. And honestly, whose wouldn’t? She theorized the subject as the Self; the object as the Other that is similar to the subject in a number of ways but ultimately different in significant areas; and the abject as that which exists but does so without recognition or name, though it ultimately lies within and outside of both subject and object. It’s French linguistic theory—do with it what you will. The point is that the abject comprises all that lies outside the space of the subject and object. But where exactly does that leave the reject? Where is the space where it can exist? Where can it go? Perhaps into a lake of fire to be consumed in an everlasting flame?

But I guess it is also important to keep in mind, there are more ject words in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Kristeva’s philosophy: project, inject, eject, deject, interject. Apparently, there is a larger community of ject words. Which makes me wonder, what exactly is a ject? Is the re- operating as a prefix, performing the function it usually does? How does one ject again if he or she never knew how to ject in the first place? . . . Well, apparently, the OED supports some of these half-thoughts. The Latin reject stems from rejicĕre, which means “to throw back.” Jecting implies throwing. Throwing between, throwing down, throwing out, throwing in, throwing forward. Indeterminacy determines the essence of ject. Its nature is nomadic, granted direction only in the prefix it latches onto for a time. The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but ject has no concept of rest. And the thing about throwing—it establishes distances and necessitates force. Points of origin, points of destination, factions and individuals binarized between the two spaces. In addition to homelessness, jecting requires separation. Jection expends energy. Any form of the word, even inclusive sounding terms like injection and interjection, relies on these realities, these politics. However, none of these words carry the phonetic and social impact of reject. We do not use the word ject regularly, but reject seems to be its purest permutation, representing its most deeply rooted qualities. Rejection pushes a soul into a liminal space. Man exists in limbo. Like the vampire who is neither living nor dead, humans go on neither fully damned nor saved. Mortality constricts the spirit, throwing back the soul into the state of disobedience it chose.

Suddenly, it all feels more complicated than Kristeva led me to believe. However, finding the etymology of reject made me think about how fishermen throwing fish back into the ocean acts as stunning symbolism for God rejecting men from the kingdom of heaven—especially if you consider how the “ocean” in Jewish tradition served as a symbol of chaos. Isaiah once prophesied (well at least in my Protestant translation he did), declaring God’s definitive victory over Rahab, “the leviathan” which the Almighty destroyed in order to create order and the earth. This serpent beast resided in and effectively ruled the ocean. Slaying this serpent, God claimed possession of the waters and divided them that He might pull out the firmament of heavens and the dry land of earth. The turbulence of seas acts as a type for disorder which still remains—a space where God’s order has not come. So the ocean is actually a type of Sheol or Hell, where we the fish come from in the metaphor. If rejects are indeed “thrown back,” is that where part of them may they go?

As I said, man lives liminally, neither fully saved nor damned. But what if the shift in one direction or the other occurs only in degrees? When a literary or an academic journal returns my writing or research with expressions of gratitude-for-my-submission and regret-at-this-time, is that why I taste soot and ash? Maybe demons wrench organs like our stomachs, dancing on the graves of hope, when a graduate school envelope returns too thin. They take a fallen body and drag a piece back down, further than before. For anyone, caught in a space, the one between seeing others obtain what we desire and knowing we will never similarly attain it, the barriers fencing off our potential—be they glass ceilings or common prejudices—eventually, their shape just doesn’t really matter anymore. I think that’s what happens to a dream deferred: no withering, no festering, no explosions—it just dies; and its dreamer, once possessed by light, slithers back to Babylon. Maybe Dante had it right: in the ninth circle, he met politicians and lawyers who were not dead yet. They had betrayed family, friends, country, and god, locking their hearts to any warmth, denying the divine capacity to love. Their souls slid into a crowded, frozen lake. Demons set up shop in what remained of their carnal shell. On the other hand, when a willing body receives blood, tissue, organs—the elements of a new life—but rejects them, is that a test from Heaven, or simply God’s will? In the moment when the boy refuses to call or the girl declines the invitation, he or she, merely pawning sentinels, wield the flaming sword to keep one from the tree of life. Rejection is the psychological term employed to describe an individual who refuses to accept or is emotionally incapable of accepting the fact of being a parent to his or her own child. Can the bliss or promise of relief in paradise ever exist without the barraging pangs of perdition?

Yet even in this theological mire, a ray of light invigorates, perhaps even ignites, the soul. For as the great philosopher of our time, Madonna, once said: “Rejection . . . is the greatest aphrodisiac.” And I have a feeling given her reputation and line of work, she’s a fairly reliable authority on the subject. Certainly, this queen of queens sang these words to instruct her disciples in matters of romantic endeavors; however, Our Lady of Rejection whispers holy words of wisdom like the Virgin who she effectively dragged. An aphrodisiac, by the strictest definitions, is a substance which arouses one’s physical sexuality. Lady Madonna, aware of the acolytes and children at her feet, employs a broader usage of the term to include not only substances but obviously concepts and interactions. Quite simply, rejection arouses more than flesh. Digging past the bone and the sinews, rejection brushes by paltry flames of desire and focuses on burning the intangibles of our personalities. Rejection affronts the ego, but sometimes it spurs evolution as often as it demolishes possibility. Rejection awakens one to the reality of a lack: he or she is not complete, he or she (despite any intentions) lies outside his or her aspirations. Rejection kindles desire because it denies it. Satiation squelches momentum. Rejection, not accomplishment, propels us towards Eden . . . Right? It is the obliteration of hope that permits God’s true mercy to shine through, isn’t it? Don’t we tend to tell ourselves (and others) that everything happens for a reason? that maybe the Hells we each pass through are tests meant just for us? Lady Madonna, with a baby no longer at your breast, what do you say when the key to salvation turns on the lock of Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Abandonment. Denial. Forsaking. God’s rejection of mankind is the soul’s desire, its aphrodisiac.

Months before his death and about sixty-five miles to the north, in what is now called Jordan, Christ rejected Legion. He cast the dark spirits into the ill-fated pigs. The unclean beasts of the field defied the designs of this compromise, opting for the chaos of the sea, the spirits thrown back from whence they came. But what of the man afflicted with Legion? I have a tendency to forget about him. Christ healed him; what else is necessary for me to know? Apparently, he sought discipleship. He desired communion with the growing body of itinerant saints. But Mark records, “Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” The man went home, published peace, and marveled men towards faith. His plans changed. He stayed home when Jesus turned him away.