MARCH 2007

ISSUE 9 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Pastoral Care and Counselling: Towards a Post-Metaphysical Theology of Friendship

Glenn Morrison

Abstract:

The article sets out to develop an eschatological ethic of friendship to guide pastoral care and counselling towards a liberating practice. It uses post-metaphysical categories and terms from the ethical metaphysics of Emmanuel Levinas to enrich pastoral theology. The aim is to stretch compassion towards the future world of Isa 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9 in which we can announce a logos of friendship. By having such a sense of transcendence (an experience of a non-experience), compassion as friendship testifies to the Reign of God and to the very hope of encountering Christ in one another.

The power to heal, sustain, guide, reconcile and nurture has been at the heart and centre of pastoral care and counselling.  We know from the Gospels and writers like Henri Nouwen[1] that we can heal with faith and the wounds of loneliness. In crises, we can sustain people with care and consolation.  Further, we can guide with spiritual direction and counselling.  Towards touching the Infinite in faith, we can reconcile with hope, forgiveness, justice and mercy.  Finally, we can nurture people with education and training.  But this is not the last word.  Becoming a shepherd for people, a person who witnesses to Christ’s life in deed and word, remains an enigma.  It is an enigma because the Word of God is a discourse ultimately beyond the drama of our life and senses.  It is not easy becoming a shepherd in this sense.  Too often we live within our crooked lives and bent ways seeking our own experiences for personal salvation. We have journeyed so fast that we have missed the time to encounter the face of our neighbour.  Even as pastoral carers and counsellors, we can often be inhibited my models, principles and practices of pastoral care that keep us safe within worlds of empathy, but being reluctant to enter into pathways of compassion. 

If we dare to live out a natural disposition of compassion that swells out of our body, mind, heart and spirit, then our being-in-the-world must extend itself to a being-in-the-world-for-others.  Admittedly, this is a difficult freedom for it is much easier not to be friends with our neighbour than it is to be friends with him or her. This is even more the case with God. We can know this because to be friends with God is very demanding as John the Baptist states, “He must increase, but I must decrease”.  Furthermore, none of the disciples would dare to call Jesus his friend until the Last Supper. It is Jesus who dares to do the initiating: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything  that I have heard from my Father” (Jn 15:15).[2]  Accordingly, in a like manner, we must also do some initiating.  The world of the poor one in distress, hunger and pain is an overwhelming one which many refuse to envisage and taste.  None the less, given the possibility that we can let ourselves be encountered by the poor one’s loneliness, fear and suffering, we could well imagine the very possibility of friendship and hence, an encounter with God.  We are called and we are charged to make known what God the Father has proclaimed through his Son and Spirit, namely the liberation of humanity, a very be-attitude of friendship.

From a Messianic Era to a Future World

I want to begin a discussion about a theology of friendship that finds its roots more in an eschatological future world (Isa. 64:4; 1 Cor 2:9) rather than economics, politics or utopia.  In addition, I wish to avoid any dogmatic and praxis-laden claims to truth especially based upon idolising experience, objective knowledge, totalising ideals and suspicious fears.  The poor and the suffering are not ‘objects’ of knowledge and nor are they ‘objects’ of mission.  Before all thematisation, everyone has a face beyond the being of self-interest.  It is particularly in friendship that the true and beautiful faces come to mind/consciousness.

What is this eschatological future world?  Isa 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9 explore in a like manner this notion:

From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him (Isa. 64:4).

But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Cor 2:9).

There are also two very interesting ancient Jewish Talmudic texts (from Sanhedrin 99a) that offer a taste of what this future world refers:

R. Hiyaa b. Abba said in R. Johanan’s name: All the prophets prophesied [all the good things] only in respect of the messianic era; but as for the world to come, ‘the eye hath not seen, O Lord, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him’.

R. Joshua b. Levi said: To the wine that has been kept [maturing] with its grapes since the six days of Creation. A famous vintage! An ancient wine that had not been bottled, or even harvested.  A wine not given the least opportunity to become adulterated.  Absolutely unaltered, absolutely pure.  The future world is this wine.  Let us admire the beauty of the image, but none the less question the meaning it might have.[3]

These texts have been quoted by Emmanuel Levinas, a French-Jewish philosopher and Talmudic scholar, whose writings in recent decades have inspired Christian theology to focus on ethical metaphysical categories as opposed to Heideggerian ontology and phenomenology.  Looking at the first Talmudic text, there is an important distinction between the messianic era and the future world.  A messianic era begins with humanity using its moral and/or spiritual power to resolve political, social and economic problems.  It is a return to the good after experiencing the dramatic excess of evil, where, for example, repentant sinners have a greater perfection than the completely righteous.[4]  As a result, we have a vision of an era in which we remain steadfast and vigilant against a history of hatred and evil being reborn in the present.

The Future World and Experience

The eschatological future world, on the other hand, refers to an imagination beyond both history and the present time.  It is a reality that flows over into an immemorial time of transcendence, that is, to the very time or non-time! of God.  Again we can taste such a time through adoring its beauty and glory whilst at the same moment searching for its truth.  Rabbi Joshua ben Levi imagines theologically that this future world is like partaking of the grape, an ancient wine in the garden of Eden that has been maturing since the days of Creation. To drink of this future world, that is to see beyond seeing with the eyes of faith and a spirit of scholarship, is, according to Levinas, to transcend the contamination/adulteration of interpretation.  Accordingly, Levinas writes that we must not remain forgetful of original, ultimate meaning (truth):

Have you never despaired of understanding an ancient text? Have you never been scared by the many interpretations lying between the text and yourself? Have you never been discouraged by the ambiguity in every word, however straight and precise, as it immediately fades into adulteration and interpretation? Isn’t the future world the possibility of rediscovering the first meaning which would be the ultimate meaning, of every word? The magnificent image of wine remaining unaltered in the grape since the six days of Creation offers the original meaning of the Scriptures lying beyond all the commentary and history by which it was subsequently changed.  But it offers the hope of understanding every human language, announcing a new Logos, and with it another humanity.  The image unites the tragic knot of the world’s history.[5]

In theology, we are constantly searching for the logos, for rational ways of speaking of God.  However, usually our discourse of reason falls into confusing, multi-layered phenomenological and ontological categories like experience, objectivity and presence.  Take for example the category of experience.  In German, there are a number of words for experience, namely erlebnis (sense experience), erfahren (experience a journey) and erfahrung (experience as learning along a journey).  There are also a number of German words related to experience, namely er-leben (our feelings and emotions that reveal themes in our life experiences), einfülung (empathy, the experience of other’s experience) and einfahren (the ‘experience of a non-experience’ or a loving renunciation of experience).[6]  Looking at all these words for and related to experience, we can, like in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, The Leaden Echo, “Be beginning to despair, to despair”’[7]! For how might we ever come to an original, ultimate meaning of experience if indeed there are many levels?  Granted that these various understandings of experience are extremely helpful for philosophy, theology and spirituality, for instance, we are none the less challenged to discover not just a meaning of experience, but the very truth of experience.

Looking again at Rabbi Joshua ben Levi’s and Levinas’ reflections on the Garden of Eden where a vintage has been maturing since the six days of Creation, might we suggest an understanding of experience that corresponds with Isa 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9? So with Hopkins in The Golden Echo, we can declare:

       Spare!

There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!),

Only,

Not within the singeing of the strong sun,

Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,

Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! One,

One.  Yes I can tell such a key, I do not know such a place …[8]

In a spirit of silence, contemplation and even an annihilation of the senses, an original and ultimate experience could well be found in an unknown place beyond the gaze of the sun, namely an extreme passivity of einfahren, an experience of a non-experience.  Indeed, if we want to announce a new Logos (the truth of the world), could such a moment of transcendence be encountered in a realm beyond sense experiences and corresponding emotions, actions and reflections?  In life, we may become sick with the experience of facts, without ever uttering a word of truth.  We can also become lost in the idolising experience of facts, especially in lies that have becomes “facts” as we find in nationalistic (mis)-representations of history.  We ask, then, to begin to have the eyes of faith, could we not foresee a possibility to develop our ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing” towards the Infinite in the Other (in the sense of seeing and hearing the Word of God in the face of the Other)?

An Experience of a Non-Experience

For the most part, our world lies “within the seeing of the sun”. We can experience things and one another in the world.  However, we must imagine at least there is one type of experience “not within the seeing of the sun” in which we can encounter, as Hopkins describes, the “beauty-in-the-ghost”. [9]  In such an unknown place and time on the hither side of consciousness, we can “Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”.[10]  We are now coming closer to an understanding of an eschatological future world envisioned by Isa 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9: to a type of consciousness beyond the usual scope of the senses.  Even we must take the notion of experience to its limits, stretch it into paradox, and there where it has been wounded and made vulnerable, we can begin to wait on God. 

Hans Urs von Balthasar touches on this rupture of experience in his description of the apophatic experience of faith.  Distinguishing between experience (erfahrung) and the experience of a non-experience (einfahren), he writes:

As an attitude, faith is the surrender of one’s own experience to the experience of Christ, and Christ’s experience is one of kenotic humiliation and self-renunciation, a reality which, as we have seen, rests on the foundation of Christ’s hypostatic consciousness as Redeemer.  For this reason, in ‘mysticism’ every deeper experience (Erfahrung) of God will be a deeper entering into (Einfahren) the ‘non-experience’ of faith, into the loving renunciation of experience, all the way into the depths of the ‘Dark Nights’ of John of the Cross, which constitute the real mystical training for the ultimate renunciations.  But these ‘nights’ are precisely an ‘experience of non-experience’, or an experience of the negative, private mode of experience, as a participation in the total archetypal experience of the Old and New Testaments.[11]

Accordingly, von Balthasar takes the category of experience (Erfahrung) towards its limits as a loving renunciation of experience.  With this apophatic emphasis, faith is more a self-emptying experience, as it makes space and gives time to participating in the event of God’s revelation.  From this point of view, faith is an attitude of surrendering oneself to Christ’s experience of kenosis and renunciation, that is, to “Christ’s hypostatic consciousness as redeemer”.[12]  And it is this Christ-consciousness that we must concern ourselves with as Christ himself is the archetype of faith who has taken possession of human experience by suffering and learning humanity. This gives humanity the possibility to experience God through suffering.  Hence, once Christ has possessed (conquered) humanity through suffering, we too might share in such victory and thus be able to experience God through our own suffering.

The good news about suffering is that it is the way in which we might experience God.  We can begin to see that in experience we are lead by Christ and are with him through our suffering. In summarising the structure of Christian experience, von Balthasar concludes: (i) that the experience of suffering is the way in which we can have true knowledge of God and of ourselves; and (ii) Christ’s experience is exemplary (archetypal) and thus becomes a law for whoever follows after him.  As result, by coming to know God and oneself through the experience of suffering, we (the followers of Christ) can experience something of Christ’s own experience.[13]  This suggests that there is a level of suffering when our experience deeply enters “into (Einfahren) the ‘non-experience’ of faith, into the loving renunciation of experience”.  Hence we arrive at a notion of experience beyond intentional consciousness, namely to the idea of an “experience of a non-experience”.

We can learn from this, in developing a theology of friendship, that the experience of another must be a deeper entering into a state of uttermost passivity in which everyday sense experience must be renounced in favour of a non-experience (“beauty-in-the-ghost”), namely Christ’s archetypal experience of faith and of being human.  We can appreciate that Christ’s experience of humanity was so profound that it surpassed our everyday experience which for the most part is self-interested and unthinking. 

This may shock you, but Hopkins’ poetic construction of “beauty-in-the-ghost” can allude to something quite profound: when we encounter another in suffering, can we not sense a certain beauty?  Their regard of suffering opens a profound vulnerability that cuts through everyday masks.  For a moment, we perceive a little of their identity, its splendour and beauty in which the word of God is evident and resplendent, however like a spectre or a trace.  We begin to experience something unheard of, that is, their fear, pain and trembling.  For the longest time, our eyes and ears have been tamed to ignore the other’s suffering.  But in this moment when we see and hear the other’s despair, we can renounce our own experience of self-interest, and deeply enter into the realm of non-experience, that is, the other who is in our midst.  It is a moment of beauty (although hidden) because the sacred feelings of the other are given to us.  We have now reached the edge of an eschatological future world.

We can begin by admiring and giving such beauty back to God (such as repenting to God for our lack of responsibility or praying for the other) whilst at the same time seeking to discover its original and ultimate meaning (truth), that is being challenged to engage in friendship with the other who is suffering.  Friendship is a difficult freedom as it involves sacrifice and a ‘super’ type of individuation or Christ-like perfection.  We think of friendship as an encounter of the divine Word who awakes our consciousness to, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived”.  But developing a theology of friendship is no doubt a challenging task as complex categories must be employed.  Once the language has been set out, we can then begin the task of applying it to pastoral care and counselling. This suggests that in theology, we are constantly searching for the logos, for rational ways of speaking of God.  However, we must ever be aware that usually our discourse of reason often falls into confusion and a self-certainty that often again falls into irrationality.  Accordingly, developing any theology must take a path of humility, and an openness to the Spirit and others to respond, encourage and/or challenge.

Developing a Theology of Friendship: a post-metaphysical vision of pastoral care and counselling

Levinas’ ethical metaphysics provide a variety of terms and profound insights to help to construct a theology of friendship.  It is of especial significance as it tries to resist the contamination of onto-theology, that is, the proof and explanation of the word of God in terms of being and objectivity.  Nevertheless, using an ethical metaphysical language that prioritises ethics as first theology and first philosophy will always have the danger of falling back into ontological language.  But it is a risk worth taking so that we can traverse the limits of ontology and thereby, articulate beyond being a theology in which ethical behaviour and language coincide.

A possible starting point to set the context for a post-metaphysical theology of friendship is to enter the world of the Risen Christ’s consciousness. Up until the Resurrection, the disciples experienced Jesus with their sense experience (primarily seeing, hearing and touching) and emotions.  It continued through journeying with Christ and learning along the paschal way.  However, in the Resurrection, the disciples experienced a collision between knowing Jesus as their friend who has died and having faith in their friend who has risen from the dead.  In the Gospel of John (20:19-23) we read:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

We can perhaps perceive that with the reception of the Spirit, the disciples’ eyes and ears were opened to the non-phenomenal or transcendent world of Christ’s mission-consciousness.  They are empowered to forgive and to retain sins.  We have seen from the understanding of the distinction between the messianic era and the eschatological future world that repentance lies between both worlds. The repentant sinner has not only achieved a place in the messianic era of seeking the good in the midst of political, economic and social oppression, but also the possibility of entering a future world and thus attaining a vision of, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9).  Jesus has effectively given to the disciples an in-spirited gift of leading repentant sinners towards a future world of glory and eternity.

We too experience a collision between our sense experiences (including our imagination and corresponding emotions) in regards to Jesus as a God-man who came to be with us and who is now ascended into heaven. But like the disciples who encounter the Risen Christ, we too are challenged to go beyond our everyday consciousness and experiences of life to what is beyond, namely to the good world of the moral conscience and corresponding transcendent emotions (like desire and fear for the other). We may call this realm one of uttermost passivity and openness, an encounter or in enigmatic terms, an ‘experience of a non-experience’.

We must now move on to bringing out new categories to develop a theology of friendship and hence ‘to see beyond seeing’ and ‘to hear beyond hearing’ the encounter with the other in pastoral care and counselling.  Using Levinas’ philosophy, in the first column of the table below, I have developed the following seven categories or modalities of (ethical/eschatological) transcendence: fear, fission, trauma, anarchy, diachrony, persecution and exposure.  The second column develops their meaning further.  Finally, in the third column, I transpose the seven transcendent categories in pastoral theological terms: compassion, the ethics of prayer, conversion (repentance), the encounter with mystery, the proximity of being-for-the-other, suffering/expiation and friendship.  My aim is to suggest a post-metaphysical vision of pastoral care and counselling that ultimately must take the form of friendship.

Category/Modality of Ethical/ Eschatological Transcendence	Ultimate, Original Meaning à Truth	Application to Pastoral Care and Counselling
Fear	Fear is primarily my fear for the other’s death, suffering, loneliness and forsakenness.	Compassion
Fission	The encounter of God’s inward voice calling forth the self’s responsibility for the Other.	The Ethics of Prayer
Trauma	Fission produces a trauma because of the overwhelming surprise in which God’s inward voice comes to mind.	Conversion (repentance)
Anarchy	Anarchy refers to God’s time of eternity without origin. It is the “In” of “In the beginning” (Gen 1:1; Jn 1:1), that is, an immemorial time (of a past that can never be present). From a time beyond our own, beyond representation, explanations, proofs and an all manner of sense experiences, God’s inner word and voice comes from a past without origin and at most can be encountered as a trace within our own time.  This suggests that we are always late to listen to God’s call.	Encounter with Mystery
Diachrony	Diachrony refers to God’s time of entering the present and of our coming to responsibility through the events/goodness of our lives. In a practical sense, it can take our whole life to learn how to be good and loving. Furthermore, the original divine address is marked by diachrony, that is, a past never present to experience (sense experience and everyday emotions) and Being (our reality and everyday existence). Accordingly, the past might only be signified by way of ethical transcendence, namely a life that is an image and likeness of Christ’s incarnate life.  This suggests that the encounter with the word of God is a trace; again we have been late to listen to the word of God.	Proximity, being-for-the-other
Persecution	A certain persecution is entailed, as that the self might awaken to (the diachrony) of transcendence, as egoistic consciousness in inverted to become a moral conscience. The self is subject to a unique form of affliction when it begins to bear the faults of others.	Suffering/ Expiation
Exposure	Exposure signifies a desire for the other.  Such desire leads the self on to a condition of utter passivity to the extent of becoming an other (superindividuation) and therefore in such exposure, bleeding/haemorrhaging for and with him/her.  It is a life of mercy, justice and peace, encountering and testifying to the Reign of God is the hope of glory:  a life of being exposed to Christ and to the Other in Christ (the face of the Other), that is to say, a Eucharistic life.	Friendship

Using the two further notions of the messianic era and the eschatological future world, we can categorise together (in the table below) the Levinasian modalities of fear, fission, trauma, anarchy, diachrony, persecution and exposure with the pastoral theological categories of compassion, the ethics of prayer, conversion (repentance), the encounter with mystery, the proximity of being-for-the-other, suffering/expiation and friendship:

Messianic Era	Future Word
Fear, Compassion	Trauma, Conversion (Repentance)
Fission, The Ethics of Prayer	Anarchy, Encounter with Mystery
Trauma, Conversion (Repentance)	Diachrony, the Proximity of Being-For –The-Other
	Persecution, Suffering/Expiation
	Exposure, Friendship

The two tables above provide a summary and act as a guide and reference point for articulating a post-metaphysical theology of friendship in the context of pastoral care and counselling.  It is a complex task to speak of friendship in the realm of transcendence or ‘the experience of a non-experience’.  Nevertheless, there is a need today to ground pastoral theology in eschatology and phenomenology, and hence to make it more profoundly relevant to the disciples’ non-phenomenal encounter of the Risen Christ and his Spirit.  In the following discussion I will develop a post-metaphysical account of eschatological pastoral practice involving compassion, the ethics of prayer, conversion (repentance), the encounter with mystery, the proximity of being-for-the-other, suffering/expiation and finally, friendship.  I will also speak of relevance of each eschatological practice to the messianic era and/or the future world.

Compassion

In pastoral theology, empathy is often emphasised as an important quality.  It is something which many pastoral carers and counsellors can develop and nurture.  But the problem with empathy, the experience of another person’s experience, is that it can often be reduced to a cold judgement of the other person’s state of being or welfare.  The question remains whether empathy is sufficient enough to be helpful.  I think that empathy is very necessary and a sign of one’s freedom to take on responsibility for another’s welfare.  However, empathy is very much a part of our everyday life.  But in a messianic era in which grave responsibilities lie to bring an end to economic, social and political sufferings, we need a passion to engage the heart and mind together so that it may bear forth hope and a maturity for doing what is seemingly impossible in an age of greed, war and oppression, namely bringing peace, mercy and friendship to people’s lives.

I want to argue that compassion begins when our own fears become a fear for the other’s death, suffering, loneliness and forsakenness.  Death, suffering, loneliness and being forsaken no longer have the character of being “mine,” but are in fact encounters that teach us an ethic of otherness.  We can begin to be conscious of things in life the more we learn to go beyond the limitations of our own personal needs and fears.  In fact, we can find the truth of our personal needs and fears when we invert them by taking responsibility for the other’s needs and fears.  But in order to do this, we must be resolute to the point of hyper-vigilance and hyper-sensitivity to let ourselves be encountered by another’s fear of suffering and death.  This suggests a determination to let our hearts be wounded by the other and so become an integral part of the passion of their lives.  More than getting into another’s shoes (empathy), compassion is getting into another’s skin - a disposition of vulnerability and of truly suffering with and for the other.

The Ethics of Prayer

The neighbour by virtue of his or her face, calls and even orders us to be intimate and connected with him or her.  What does, in effect, our neighbour truly desire?  In a post-metaphysical sense, fission is demanded, whereby – to use a Levinasian deconstruction of Husserlian terms - the noesis (the act of consciousness itself, the cogitatio) has been freed from the noema (the objectifying act, the cogitatum). In this case, the noesis no longer is on the scale of its noema.  But from a Levinasian point of view, a noesis, such as the thought of the mystery of God, even if it is ultimately beyond apprehension, can still be contaminated by the category of Being.  Nevertheless, despite such a risk of falling into onto-theology, fission not only requires a rupture of the object of consciousness from the act itself, but also the possibility for an overwhelming of consciousness.  And it is at this point we can begin to discern the make-up of prayer.

Prayer involves a fission in which the act of consciousness itself has been delivered over to a space and time beyond the present to the very eternity in which God’s word comes to mind.  We must no longer rely on our everyday sense faculties, but indeed a heightened sense of spirit that is passive enough to let itself be encountered by the inner word of God in the face of the other.  Once our consciousness has been released from the pull of objectivity (and knowledge), we are now in a position to permit the act of consciousness itself to coincide with a passivity of prayer.  The effect of listening to God’s word is overwhelming and transforming.  Instead of desiring objective meaning and facts, we have an ethic of prayer taking the form of testimony, kerygma, confession and humility.[14]  These modalities of prayer map out the encounter of God’s inward voice calling forth the self’s responsibility for the Other; they also signify what it required in the messianic era: a spiritual-ethical life operating in the economic, political and social sphere.[15]

Conversion (repentance)

Through fear and fission in the Levinasian sense, the face of the Other provokes a radical turnabout or conversion.  This state signifies absolute surprise and trauma.  The person is turned, we might say, “inside out”, moving from the self-enclosure of being in-oneself and for-oneself, to enter into a relational-mesianic state of prayer (testimony, kerygma, confession and humility). This site of ethical transcendence discloses a surplus of meaning.  It overwhelms and overflows consciousness.  In this fear for another in the face of the Other, a fear which touches on reverence and awe, the word “God” means something in this relational context.  Levinas can say that this is the fear in which we have the birth of the logos, the very discourse that effaces presence and signifies consciousness as passivity and moral conscience.[16]

We can see that conversion itself touches on the very possibility of rationally speaking of God with ethical behaviour.  But this has come at a cost; there has been a trauma where one begins to feel the force of an overwhelming sense of obligation that, until now, has never come to mind.  We can name this obligation one of being inspired and ordered by God to repent. For the longest time, we have had a guilty and bad conscience of forever doing too little and arriving too late for our neighbour.  Repentance can no doubt be traumatic, but none the less is itself a prayerful state of testifying our need for God by proclaiming the joy of the Resurrection in confession and humility.  We have now reached a stage in which the future of world of Isa. 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9 can begin to be savoured and in which we can also begin to give the beauty of our neighbour back to God beyond the temptations of power, status and wealth.  Indeed, conversion becomes the very way towards an encounter with mystery.

The Encounter with Mystery

For Levinas, conversion, touches on transcendence or a situation of “anarchy”, literally, the “unoriginate”.[17]  Levinas explains that anarchy implies the bond between the subject and the Good.[18]  It, rather than the analogy of Being, identifies the Good beyond Being and constitutes ethical transcendence.  This would entail that Levinas uses the idea of anarchy to emphasise that transcendence cannot be reduced to the event of Being and intentional consciousness, but is signified through an immemorial past.

We can therefore learn from this enigmatic Levinasian notion of anarchy, that conversion is also very much an encounter with the very mysterious time of God.  Like the anarchy of the moment in which the disciples received the Spirit from the Risen Christ, so conversion inspires us with a sense that since time immemorial we have been ordered and ordained to love our neighbour.  For reasons of our salvific encounter of grace, our very sense of time immemorial is for the most part veiled from us.  However, the mystery of eternity, of a divine presence and trace, announces a future world that reserves blessings instead of curses and inverts the excess of evil into the waiting on of the good.  How might we be able to hope for such immemorial time to make itself be seen and heard?

The Proximity of Being-for-the-Other

In Levinasian language, diachrony refers to a trace of an immemorial time: the way in which God or the Infinite come to mind. The diachrony at work here is related to the awakening to responsibility in a time beyond sense and everyday experience.[19] This time is the “time” of the other who is suffering, dying, lonely, destitute and/or abandoned.  Could indeed this be the future world of partaking in the vintage that has been maturing since the days of creation? Despite our pondering, we are now beginning to develop a sense of the “beyond Being” in Being. This suggests that there is a way, however, for Being to take on a just meaning, without implying that alterity (otherness, beyond Being) is a function of Being.  In terms of eschatological pastoral practice, it is seeking justice and peace not only for the other, but for all others and even to the extent of assuaging the suffering of God.

If we truly desire to be in proximity of being-for-the-other, we also have to accept that the task is hyperbolic: we are continually called to a proximity of being-for-all-others.  Again, this is witnessing to the glory of God’s eternity, an immemorial time, in which each moment can be an eternity if we let ourselves be truly encountered by the word of God in the face of the other.  But is not this the very (im)-possibility of how a gift might be given?  It is a possibility because our consciousness has been transformed into one of uttermost passivity; but it is an impossibility because ultimately God makes the donation of grace.  Perhaps, only in the incarnation we can imagine a space and time for the gift to take on the form of “being given”.  Nevertheless, the life of Christ is archetypal for us and hence, provides a path to direct our lives.

Suffering/Expiation

When the enigmatic time of anarchy enters into our life (diachrony), an inversion of consciousness from intentionality to passivity occurs. Such anarchy produces an ethical state of persecution: it is “… being called into question prior to questioning, responsibility over and beyond the logos of response.  It is as though persecution by another were at the bottom of solidarity with another”.[20]  To be called into question beyond the logos of response is to find that the self is stretched to the limits of responsibility.   Levinas considers persecution as obsessive, in that, through an infinite passion of responsibility, the passivity of the self turns into expiation.[21]  In all this extreme language, Levinas is attempting to find a language adequate to an ethics responsive to the Good beyond Being.  In short, persecution is the passivity of the self.  Because the self is liberated from any project of mastery on the part of itself or others, it has an openness to what is otherwise than Being, namely the possibility of sacrificing and suffering for the Other.[22]

We can name this an incarnate life in the sense that the more we traverse beyond our self-interested lives, the more we can share in Christ’s incarnate life of suffering and expiation.  In this space and time of otherness, a moment becomes a desire to imagine a future world: partaking of an ancient vintage of love to enlighten the truth of suffering, expiation and death.  Where is the world and how can we arrive there?  At least, we must learn how to laugh, cry, dance and sing with our neighbour.  We must pass through a number of formative events: the inversion of one’s fear, conversion, having our consciousness stretched by developing a sense of transcendence and by willing to allow the word of God to inspire our daily lives with kenosis and expiation.  This sounds like both a litany and a liturgy of responsibility producing a difficult and grave freedom.  Yet our future world is at stake. The sacrifice of our whole lives for the future world may well be worth it.  From time immemorial, the ancient vintage of the future world, namely friendship, is awaiting our communion.

Friendship

We can begin to sense some eucharistic overtones. Friendship involves having a profound sense of compassion or a eucharistic practice of love (a life of being exposed to Christ and to the other in Christ (the face of the other). Moreover, it is a very state of ‘being gifted’. Let us look at the idea of ‘being gifted’ in the space and time of Christ’s passion.  I suggest that to be gifted is not the experience itself of having one’s nature perfected, but to be anarchically affected by the trauma of God’s order to Christ and the world to be responsible.  Let us now extend such a conception to the context of the eucharist.

In the language of alterity, we could say that the eucharist signifies that an order of responsibility has been made through the time of Christ’s death, going to the dead and Resurrection.  This is a time beyond the experience of having one’s nature perfected.  We can say then that eucharistic grace perfects the possibility of expiating like Christ for the other.  But such grace demands a difficult condition.  For, it is the eucharist that surprises the self absolutely with the trauma of Christ’s expiation.  Such trauma inspires devotion to the other’s hunger for the body and blood of Christ, a hunger namely for salvation, justice and mercy.  Hence in the eucharist, it is not my hunger for Christ that matters, but the other’s hunger to such a point where my hunger is the other’s hunger.  We can thus begin to imagine how the eucharist is a site of ethical transcendence in which the self is gifted with the likeness of Christ’s incarnate life.

Eucharistic living deepens and clarifies not the perfection of my nature, but the perfection of my expiation for others.  The self is therefore first a passivity to the other’s hunger.   Further, we can conceive that the eucharist ruptures the experience of one’s nature as perfect.  Or, in other words, just as Christ cannot deny humanity with responsibility, so the eucharist deepens and clarifies the self’s ethical responsibility.  Hence, the eucharistic self exists through and for the other to a point where such passivity coincides with expiation. 

Expiation is a difficult condition, but I want to argue that it is a condition par excellence that gives rise to a theology of friendship.   This is to say that the salvific encounter of Christ’s suffering, death and rising to new life cannot be reduced to an essence or reality or even a meaning in consciousness, but rather it can be discovered in eschatological existence.  Hence, when theology rises above experience and essence, it might just cut through objectivity and articulate the word “God” in the space and time of the future world of Isa 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9.

Conclusion: Friendship, Pastoral Care and Counselling

Developing a post-metaphysical theology of friendship and a preliminary one at that is complex, especially when Levinasian categories and terms are employed.  The vision for pastoral theology must never remain static, but be a living reminder of the Incarnation, paschal mystery and Trinity.  There is much in Levinas’ ethical metaphysics to enhance the vision and imagination of Christian theology. Levinas’ thinking should not just be narrowly limited to fundamental theology,[23] for example, but opened up to the many areas of theology.  Even there is much room to develop many of the Levinasian categories and terms to other areas like psychosis, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.[24]  However my major overriding emphasis in this article has been the very grave responsibility of friendship.  I want to show that friendship, as an eschatological ethic gives rise to the possibility of pastoral care and counselling in the future world of Isa 64: 4 and 1 Cor 2:9.  Accordingly, if we want to be like the disciples, called to a life of superindividuation (expiation), then we have to allow our compassionate lives to be deepened by friendship. Justice, then, could be made glorious with mercy and hope, and hence, the good love of friendship can be deepened by truth and beauty.

People engaged in pastoral care and counselling have a responsibility to proclaim and witness to the Reign of God.  But carers and counsellors should not be content (or be subservient to intense emotions) to just focus on social, economic and political problems.  As people of faith, pastoral carers and counsellors must seek to bring their ministry up a notch to the future world rather than the temptations of one’s own personal world of self-interest and care-for-oneself (caring and fearing only for one’s own death and possibilities).  When our lives are truly rooted in the glory of God’s love and an eschatological ethic of testifying to it, we have then the wisdom to engage the world’s economic, social and political problems with an agapic and ethical love and existence of friendship. 

God has indeed prepared an ancient vintage for us.  It has been maturing since an immemorial time, a time beyond memory.  The more we become Christ-like and hence, in desire to share the Good News of the Reign of God (Luke 16:16), we can realise that the Reign of God is among us (Luke 17:21).  Pastoral carers and counsellors are, by virtue of their vocation and profession, called to a life of compassionate service even to the point of expiation.  The giving of pastoral care and counselling is demanding as it mediates the world of the Spirit and faith to the sufferings and joys of people’s lives.  Compassion itself is an outpouring of mercy; it shows how one has begun to journey into another’s life.  But, with friendship we have something that ruptures and stretches compassion with the demands of the beatitudes (Matt 5:1-12).  We might call this a eucharistic love.  In friendship with the other, pastoral carers and counsellors are chosen to witness to what no eye has seen nor ear heard nor heart conceived, namely the hope of glory to encounter Christ in one another ( Col 1:27).