Up till this point we have tried to follow the inner dynamic of the apostolic witness so as to understand something of the imagination that was opened up by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, an imagination which I have called "eschatological." It is above all an imagination which nurtures and empowers life in the midst of the violence and contradictions, our own and others', in which we live. In this way I have tried to fill out something of what the apostolic witness means by calling us to have our mind fixed on the things that are above. We will be coming back to this before we're through. There remains, however, an element which, up until now has not received much emphasis, and which is in a sense the most important thing of all: heaven. We have seen heaven under its active form, so to speak: that is, the creation of stories which are to subsist forever, stories created in hope by improbable people who hope to be recognized in them when all stands revealed. But that is only a part of the matter, and perhaps not the most important part. The apostolic witnesses give us a series of hints about what we might call the "receptive" part of heaven, that is the part which has to do with "being recognized," and which has got to be, by far, the most important part. After all:

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10)

Reputation and Shame

When the apostolic witness speaks of heaven, of the manifestation of God, or of the coming of the Son, there is always a word added, and it is the word "glory." This word has become popularized in phrases like "May God have her in his glory," this being understood as synonymous with "May she rest in peace." Well, I would like to concentrate a little on this word glory, because it is much more interesting and informative than it might seem at first sight. Our word "glory" translates the Greek word doxa, whose basic meaning is opinion or reputation.

Let us see how this works by looking at two different ways of translating some verses from John's Gospel:

I receive not glory from men. But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. How can ye believe, which receive glory one of another, and seek not the glory that cometh from God only? (John 5:41-44)

I do not receive my reputation from other humans, but I know that, at heart, you do not love God. For I have come representing God's person, and you pay no attention to me. If another were to come, with no more authority than his own, you would have no difficulty in receiving what he had to say. How can you believe in the One God if you depend for your reputation on your imitation of each other, and do not seek the reputation which God alone can give?

I think that there are two possibilities: I can depend entirely on my peers, in which case my goodness, my striving to do well, and the sort of life I lead will be a reflection of them, and I'll have to do everything to keep myself well-considered by them, receiving those whom they receive and excluding those whom they exclude, so as not to run the risk of finding myself the excluded one. Not only all these things, which might seem superficial, like the little games of hypocrisy which we all have to play to keep our social life going, but it is also the case, perhaps without my realizing it, that all my "I" is nothing other than a construction forged by the difficult game of keeping my reputation. There is no other "I" at the bottom of it all, behind the "I" which I am acquiring through the little manipulations by which I search to keep my reputation. My "I" and my way of being related to the "other" are the same thing.

The other possibility is that I receive my "I" from God, and here's the rub: God has an awful reputation. Which is nothing other than saying that God's reputation and the reputation of the victim are the same thing. That is what Jesus was suggesting: in order to receive your reputation, your being noticed and recognized, by God, you have to be prepared to lose the reputation which comes from the mutually reinforcing opinion and high regard of those who are bulwarks of public morality and goodness, and find it among those who are held as nothing, of no worth. That is also what Paul says to the Corinthians:

God chose what is weak in this world to put to shame what is strong; God chose what is base and despised, even things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are. (1 Cor 1:27-28)

"Friend, come higher." Thus will you receive glory in the face of the other guests. (cf. Luke 14:8-11)

If someone suffers as a Christian, let them not be ashamed, but let them glorify God in this name. (1 Peter 4:16)

For whosoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and evil generation, of that one will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. (Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26; cf. also Matt. 10:33; Luke 12:9)

If we return to the passage from John with which we began, we can now see exactly how glory works: the order of this world has its own glory, which depends on mutually rivalistic imitation, and is a glory or reputation that is grasped and held onto with difficulty. Being enveloped in the order of this world prevents us from beginning to act in solidarity with those of poor repute, because if we do so we lose our reputation. But those whose minds are fixed on the things that are above, that is, those who have begun to receive their "I" from their non-rivalistic imitation of Jesus, already begin to derive their reputation from the Father and not from their peers. This they do in the degree to which, doubtless with much difficulty, they learn to give little importance to the reputation which people give them, and thus become free to associate with those who have no reputation, just like the one who was numbered among the transgressors.

If they manage not to be ashamed of what the world treats as despicable, then, when the final revelation of the Son of man with angels appears, where it will be established beyond doubt who God really is, that is, the risen victim will be the central axis of all the life stories that are under construction; then, at that moment those who were little concerned about the loss of their reputation will receive an everlasting reputation: they will hear in the midst of a huge public what every little child wants to hear from its parents: "That's right, little one, that's what I wanted; I like what you've done."

This was well understood in antiquity, for St Augustine's definition of glory is: "Clara cum laude notitia," ⁽¹⁾ that is, being publicly pointed out, noticed, with praise. And this is not only to be understood as a public recognition of what has been achieved, as if God were a headmistress distributing end-of-term prizes; rather, that welcoming, peaceable, loving recognition by the "Other" recreates the "I," reconstructs me. Just as my earthly "I" can remain formed by my grasping on to the reputation which comes from others who are, ultimately, in rivalry with me, so being seen and appreciated by the pacific other literally gives me my true "I," a "self" alive even when half-buried beneath the rubble of the many wrong turnings which have been part of my attempt to recreate the celestial counter-story of the victim in the midst of the gossip and the squabbles of this world.

However, all this is not enough; our worldly quest for reputation, for glory, is more complex, and more subtle, than what might be understood if we left the matter here. I have been emphasizing things in a way which is faithful to the apostolic witness, but which doesn't take into account one of the developments in the human quest for reputation which has come to be possible thanks exactly to the slow coming into existence of the notion that the victim might be innocent. Let me explain. What I said might be understood to be suggesting that a good reputation in this world comes from a perverse order of things, and anybody who perceives how hypocritical this order is can very easily leave behind the good reputation, harvesting a bad reputation for oneself, scandalizing people a bit. Then, on being rejected by the guardians of public morality, one has the luxury of feeling that one is a victim, and thus deserving of a special glory all one's own.

I'm talking about the strategy for the self-canonization of the victim, and we can see this at work more or less throughout the whole spectrum of society. One of the ways of making yourself feel "special" is to adopt the rôle of someone with a bad reputation. We see this in the formation of religious sects, where it is their very forging of frontiers "over against" society, their own way of wanting to be "different" which produces a rejection from society. This leads the sect members to feel especially close to the Lord, because they have, after all, managed to get themselves persecuted for being Christians; so they must be the real thing. However, we don't have to look outside the Catholic Church to see similar mechanisms at work: certain groups in the Church, not without influence, proceed in just the same way. By seeking to distinguish themselves from others they provoke a rejection, which confirms them in their notion that they are especially necessary and opportune for the Church: the self-canonization of the self-victim. Rejection is courted so that one be cast as the ill-comprehended prophet and martyr.

It almost goes without saying that the same mechanism is at work in almost all so-called "minority" groups within society. What happened, for example, among gay groups at the time of the beginning of emancipation, traditionally attributed to the uprising against a police raid on the Stonewall bar in 1969, ⁽²⁾ was exactly the same thing: the emphasis of all that seems most bizarre and shocking in gay life was the consolidation of victim-status by buying into a bad reputation. The self-canonization of the self-victim. Thank God there has been no shortage of self-criticism of this tendency within gay culture itself, coming from people who only want to be thought of as just another human being: a pacific part of an "us," and not an "us" defined violently over against an oppressive and hypocritical "them." ⁽³⁾ The same process can be detected in almost all social groups demanding rights, and probably in the relational history of all of us to a greater or lesser extent.

Well, in all the above cases we detect the same mechanism: we have the self-canonization of those who grasp at their reputation as "good," and do everything possible, even with recourse to violence, to paper over the little slips and scandals which might cause them to lose their reputation; and we have the mirror image, the enemy twin, of this: the self-canonization of those who glory in being considered "damned," and reject any attempt to suggest to them that, when all's said and done, they're not very different from anybody else. I hope that it can be seen that, in fact, the same mechanism is at work: we receive glory, reputation, "one of another," be that by rivalistic imitation, be it by a contrast violently provoked.

The fact is this: there is no difference between self-justification as "good" and self-abasement as "wicked." They are two oscillations of the same sort of desire, and, it might be added, two oscillations which typically occur in the lifestory of the same person. With this we have returned to where we were in our discussion of hope. The glory, the reputation, which comes from God must be received and not grabbed. The Father's glory which is to be revealed at the coming of the Son of man with angels will be received by those who are deeply un-preoccupied about their reputation, their glory. The business of having a "good" or a "bad" reputation couldn't matter less, for both human goodness and human evil are social constructions shot through with rivalistic desire, with the desire which forges identity over against the "other." The glory of heaven, the recognition which re-creates, is not given by the mere fact of having garnered for oneself a reputation as a rejectable transgressor in this world, but is given to those who, on account of their unconcern about their reputation according to the glory of this world have been able to stand loose from what is thought of them as they grow in solidarity with things that are not. Loss of reputation is indeed the beginning of a life in accord with the Gospel, but that reputation is lost as in a fit of absence of mind by someone who doesn't really mind very much, not by someone who strives for self-canonization, adopting the rôle of one to be cast out. Heavenly reputation, glory, is given to one who doesn't really understand why she is receiving it, one who considers herself an unprofitable servant (Luke 17:10).

Notes

1. Contra Maximinum 2:13 and 40:22, quoted by J. Pieper in Love (available to me in the Spanish compilation Las Virtudes Fundamentales [Madrid: Rialp 1980], p 458).

2. A police raid on the Stonewall bar, a gay bar in New York, on June 28, 1969, was successfully resisted, to the surprise both of the police and of those resisting. This incident has become the symbolic date for the beginning of the public refusal of gay people to be treated as less than human and is celebrated each year in many countries throughout the world.

3. For two recent and contrasting positions on this matter see B. Bawer, A Place at the Table (New York: Poseidon, 1993), and M. Signorile, Queer in America (New York: Random House, 1993).