Absolute Demons

The failing of being better than Sybil Van Antwerp, the San Francisco Giants, and My Mom

You may have heard about the Pride Night protest taken up by some players on the San Francisco Giants baseball team.

If you have not, here is, briefly, what happened. It has been a practice over the last number of years for professional sports teams and leagues to have a day or night when they recognize Pride in support of LGBTQ+ people and groups. This practice, while common, has, in some leagues, been curtailed recently in response or reaction to conservative cultural and political backlash. Some athletes have also felt emboldened to take a stands against the stance that they feel they are being forced to take. Amidst this tension, there have been stories, some real and some clearly internet driven fabrications, of players on teams pushing against one side or the other in some kind of claim of personal expression of personal belief.

Recently, three players on the San Francisco Giants, during Pride Night, protested. Pride is only one thing that Major League Baseball recognizes. There are also days to highlight military sacrifice or to recognize the contribution of players in the struggle for integration. There are days when every player on the field wears the number of Jackie Robinson. For Pride Night, the team logos on the players hats were stylized with a rainbow design. The protest of the players, who, I assume, felt that Pride Night was some kind of insult to their belief, was to add to their hats the chapter and verse marking of a Bible passage. This particular passage was Genesis 9:12-16.

If you are wondering, this passage comes after the famous Noah’s ark flood account.
It describes God issuing a covenant to never again wipe out the people of the earth by way of a flood. As a symbol of this covenant, God points to a rainbow in the sky. When people see the rainbow, they are to remember that there will not be another cataclysmic flood ever again.

I won’t go into detail about what the passage might be saying about God and about humanity in the context of Jewish and of Christian religious texts. The observation that I want to consider is a practice, a kind of tactic of cultural battle that has been taken up by evangelical culture lately. The tactic is a kind of “That’s not yours - it’s OURS!” It is attack and hatred masquerading as insight and understanding.
It’s also worth considering that Christians have had zero problem through history in co-opting the symbols of other faiths or worldviews. Do you put up a Christmas tree in December?

Consider that the passage is not one of those normally cited by people who, for one reason or another, think that it is Christian to oppose rights for gay people. Rather, it is a passage that gives a particular religious consideration of an exceptional and beautiful phenomenon. It is lovely for that. We could give the meteorological answer to the question, “Why rainbows?” or we could give a reason that speaks to concepts of the relationship of God and humanity.

Of course, the explanation for the symbolic act of writing a verse in protest of a symbolic act is simply some form of saying, “I am a Christian and as a Christian…”, but what is actually happening is “That is not yours - it’s MINE!” It’s a well worn tactic of myopic religion or cultural exclusion cast as an innocent or even loving gesture.

Consider the backlash to the words, “Black Lives Matter”. What was it that fueled the quick, and somewhat belligerent, responses to issue some kind of play on the words, seeking to neutralize them while claiming to simply be expressing the same kind of sentiment? “You say black lives matter, well I SAY ___ lives matter!” It’s a way of sanctifying prejudice or bigotry. “You say that the rainbow is a symbol of acceptance and love that has been part of your emancipation from fear and judgment? Well I say that it is mine! It is a symbol of MY FAITH (even though it was clearly Jewish before it was in any way Christian) and indeed a symbol of my particular view of faith that I believe says you are less than fully acceptable.”

I am part of a book club this spring/summer that is reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. The book is a narrative written in letters and emails to various people. By way of these letters, we learn about the life and character of one particular person. Sybil Van Antwerp is older, opinionated, often gratingly aggressive and judgmental, prone to say wildly inappropriate things. It’s a great book that has become a bit of an “it” read for individuals and for book clubs.

In an interview with the New York Times, Virginia Evans fields a question that is frequently posed to her. The question is along the lines of what she thinks about Sybil Van Antwerp. The character is upsetting and offensive in many ways, but she is written in a way that invites sympathy or understanding. In response to the question, the author said, “I met her, when she arrived, I thought, okay, this is the way she is, everybody’s the way they are for a reason.” The book finds its energy, largely, in the invitation to the reader to consider why Sybil Van Antwerp is the way she is. The larger hope is that we might do the same for one another.

So, back to the baseball players who protested Pride Night. Why are they the way they are? Why do they think that what they are doing is particularly Christian? As a Christian myself, I happen to think that what they are doing is particularly un-Christian. So, who gets to say?

In the first session of our book club, my contributions took a turn that I was not really expecting. I mentioned a few times that what I felt when I was reading the book brought up feelings of what I felt when I was a child and young adult. That is, in many ways, especially the offensive ways, Sybil Van Antwerp was like my mom. My mom would have (and did) said many of the offensive things that Sybil Van Antwerp said. My mom was able to charm people all through her life and she was often generous and helpful like Sybil Van Antwerp could be. Also, like Sybil Van Antwerp, my mom had a very troubled relationship with her own children, including me.

I shared a couple of examples with the book club of incidents that could have been in the book. One that I did not share was of a day when my mom demanded that I, in my late teens at the time, obey her by inconveniencing another person.

It had snowed a lot that winter and the street we were living on had steep driveways that became mostly useless and somewhat dangerous by the cold and ice and snow. People in the neighbourhood thus dug out parking spots on the street and parked there, but there was not quite enough room for all the cars.

One of my chores (is that still a word?) was to shovel the snow on the front stairs and to shovel out parking spots for my mom and step-dad’s cars. Much to my mom’s consternation, a neighbour (somewhat elderly and therefore unable to clear a parking spot for themselves) had parked in one of “our spots”. When my mom arrived home she was livid, first assuming that I had not done my job and then, when I protested, turning her angst to the neighbour. She told me that I had to get a snow shovel and move some snow, clear another spot. Further, and clearly more important in her mind, I was to take the snow I shovelled and pack it around and onto the neighbour’s car so that they could not get out of the spot. I refused. My mom was now angry at the neighbour and at me. She complained to my step-dad next and he wound up shovelling snow to encase the neighbour’s car. Though my recollection is that he moved just enough snow to tell my mom he had done what she said, but not enough to in any way block the neighbour’s car.

I don’t recall my Mom ever asking me to be good. What I mean is, my mom, I think, did not think that people were good so why would she ask me to be a good person in the world? She did ask me to behave. That is different than being good, and a child will grow up with some kind of confusion to overcome when these things are put at odds.

There was a kind of opposition to the world that my mom carried, even as she could be engaging and friendly. I often wonder at what abuse or tragedy led her to see the world as she did. Laden down, somewhat, by the misogyny of the era, like so many women from her time, she used her looks to get her through the world. As she got older this became more and more difficult though she never stopped trying. She fought. She fought misogyny, often, by taking up the very tools it employed. She became powerful in many ways, fighting for her children, myself included, always making sure that we were provided for. It is clear to me now that the fight she took up on our behalf wound up costing us so much more than we could imagine.

Who told my mom that this was the way to be in the world, that this is what it meant to be human? Who told the protesting baseball players what it means to be Christian?

I hear the words of Virginia Evans, “Everybody’s the way they are for a reason.”

And now, even though I wince at what Sybil says or what my mom said and did, I begin to be able to see their humanity. I can see the humanity of the baseball players, even though I will say that I feel what they are doing is un-Christian.

I happen to be taking a course right now on Evagrius Ponticus. It’s been a while since Evagrius has been around, he died in 399 AD.

You are likely familiar, however, with some of his writing and thinking. He was key in conceptualizing what eventually became known as the Seven Deadly Sins. Be careful about casting him as a religious bigot, however. His talk of passions and demons is not an “us and them” talk. Rather, he outlines some early understanding of emotional and psychological thoughts that can assault us and distort how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we find our humanity. Evagrius calls these assaulting thoughts demons. This is a very different idea than what the word demon conjures for most people today.

Amidst the fascinating thoughts occasioned by Evagrius, is a warning about absolutes in life and faith. Absolutes become seen as important in religion when we misunderstand the nature of Christian faith. That which we declare as absolute becomes unholy, an idol. The purity culture of 1990’s evangelicalism is a clear example of this. Stay with me for a minute. As David Goa, the instructor in the course, re-iterates, Christian faith is not about morality, it is about epistemology, the theory of knowledge. That is, it is not about right and wrong, it is about how we know. You can hear this in biblical references to a “depraved mind” or to the “renewal of the mind”. Further, we only know in and through love. Love is what renews our minds. Moralism is, thus, a form of anti-Christ. We become unable to encounter the other, unable to encounter God, unable to know God or one another because we hold onto our precious absolutes. As David Goa says, “All sin should lead us to tears. It is not a misdemeanor requiring judgment, but a tragedy requiring healing.”

I don’t know the protesting baseball players. I assume that they think they are “standing up for Jesus” because some pastor or leader told them this is what it looks like. I assume, also, that there are many Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, who have celebrated their protest and congratulated them for their supposedly faithful action.

I see what they are doing as tragic. It reminds me of the healing that we need in order to see one another. My reactive self sees their faith as a juvenile faith of absolutes, an “us and them” that sanctifies division and fear and tells people that being Christian means standing against other people. However, I hope to check myself. My self-righteousness is easily ignited and my insistence on what I consider holy and Christian can wind up cutting me off from others and from myself.

So I pray - Dear God, show us your mercy. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Post-Script:
In a class session subsequent to when the above was written, we were directed as students to some words of Macarius the Egyptian spoken to Evagrius Ponticus in the 4th Century.
Macarius said that when we keep in mind injury done to us by people we destroy the faculty of memory in our souls. When we remember the injury done to us by demons (negative thoughts pressing on people) the faculty of memory remains intact.
This is a concept that helps me to love my Mom. Macarius’ words might have an ancient, almost scary sound, but in contemporary terms they mean this.
If we recall over and again how a person has hurt us our memory and our mind become distorted. If we recall the hurt done to us by someone who has themselves been assaulted by negative even evil outside thoughts and trauma, then we can acknowledge the hurt while hoping for freedom and redemption both for ourselves and for the one who has hurt us.
Not bad for people who had no phones, or internet or AI or Substack or church as we know it.