Performative Acts

So this week’s song is called “I’ll Fly Away” with a nod to the actual “I’ll Fly Away” at the end. I assume this is not copyright infringement, but as I was once reminded, there is no copyright infringement in the kingdom of God. I plan to get back to my moody, minor-chord-driven writing style soon, but until then, I kind of really like this song in its simplicity.

I’ll Fly Away


Download it: Here

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Nothing too profound, I shaved my beard (which I have weird picture of the “before” to the left). It was a big decision for me for some reason. As a matter of fact, I consulted a number of people with no real consensus. There was something about the grizzly aesthetic that was appealing, but my overall decision was in line with what some of my friends called a “spring renewal,” a kind of “ritual.” In truth, I have a continued sense of the need for a little shake up and refocusing lately. Shaving my beard has become just one of several acts that I have adopted to spur some change.

I am a firm believer that tangible acts, though physical in their nature, are important aspects in the transformation of a life. It is not always in thinking yourself different or transformed that you become transformed. There is a profound power in the performance of an act of renewal. It is in the actual act of enacting a new reality that you become new. Baptism, for instance, is not simply telling others of some heart decision, it is in itself transformational. It is in the performance of personal death and resurrection, the performance of being washed under the seas of complete and utter separation and destruction and being raised into a new existence, that we appropriate a new reality. There is something much more powerful in “doing” than in “thinking.” Performance is not simply the result of thinking right, but the act is in fact one of the profoundest transformational realities.

Often, I think of the story of Abraham and Isaac, which has been the subject of countless reflection (below I put up another Marc Chagall rendition - I kind of love Marc Chagall). In the last 200 years, two notable examples are Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Derrida’s The Gift of Death. These works largely focused upon the ethics of this sacrifice. Kierkegaard, struggling over the universal wrong of commanding one to sacrifice his own son (his own progeny and, in a sense, Abraham’s own life), posited that God is allowed to have a “teleological suspension of the ethical” for his own purposes. There is of course the issue of postulating a “universal” ethic (he gave in far too much to Hegel in his polemic with him). Kierkegaard’s interpretation supposes that the sacrifice itself was simply the outward manifestation of a faith that Abraham had already demonstrated. “Testing” by God being something that demonstrates what we are already internally.

I would suggest (and this can be found elsewhere in the OT) that testing by God is not so much an outward manifestation of the true inward reality (which would be an existentialist error?); instead it is the performative act that is itself creative. It is in Abraham’s sacrifice of the promise that he was given that is in fact transformational. It is in the performance that we truly learn and are transformed by what we thought we knew but never really knew until we have lived that reality. With Abraham, this reality was profound. It is the destruction of the self in self-death in seeming hopelessness leaving only God as hope. In this same way, baptism is meant to be the performance of self-death.

All that to say: we do not know by our intellectual pursuits or our dire determination! Our acts of mental formulation in isolation will never teach us and change us as performative acts will, accompanying a desire for change with tangible acts. We don’t need to constantly rethink. We need to have our thinking changed. It is in fact our being and performing that is prior to our contemplation. It is a myth that our thinking is our primary transformational agent. I am hoping to experience change and transformation by offering a little rupture in my life, a different way of being in the world. Shaving my beard is the least of this, but it is one more performance.