Black Bodies as Sacraments of Disruption: Reimagining the Human Person in an Era of Marginalization

Abstract

The centrality of disruption as a graced moment of awakening social imagination to a new dawn where human flourishing becomes a possibility ought to be the focus of the church’s praxes of sacramental rituals. In fact, Christianity is itself a religion of disruption. The God–human reality that manifests itself in Jesus Christ is itself a graced disruption. God chooses to disrupt the familiar world of fallenness and thus offers God-self as a mediating gift that reorients creation to a new way of being that transcends the familiar orientation towards sin. Disruption, as an existential phenomenon, is not alien to the human condition. In fact, all aspects of human life are saturated with disruption. In fact, grace is itself God’s disruptive intervention in human history. Since creation embodies the goodness of God, creation can be said to be a sacramental symbol of disruption. In a social world where racism and other structures of marginality operate, victims of such marginalities embody in their existence the disruptive grace that can transform such a society. Black bodies are loci for encountering the disruptive grace intended to end the vice of racism. They also serve as the loci for the church to imagine a new way of being a sacrament of disruption in the world because of their existential proximity to the historical realities defining the life of Jesus Christ as a victim of the hegemony of empire. This work shows how black bodies can help foster a new imagination of the human in our contemporary world where systems of marginalization continue to shape human life in general. It attempts to address the following question: how can one conceive of black bodies in a world defined by systems of erasure that directly affect black persons and their embodied agencies? To do this effectively, this work appropriates a constructive theological approach that grounds itself in an interdisciplinary discourse with the intent to argue that to speak of the human person is to instantiate a polyphony of insights: insights that appeal to an ethical consciousness that is defined by altruism.

1. Introduction

In a world where structures of marginality and oppression reign supreme, a turn to the sacrament of baptism offers a place of solace. However, such comfort is itself a turn to the Spirit, who makes baptism a ritual of disruption that causes the enslavement to sin and evil to be invalidated. Black bodies, in the world of structural and individual racism, are an embodiment of the grace of disruption. The centrality of disruption as a graced moment of awakening social imagination to a new dawn where human flourishing becomes a possibility ought to be the focus of the church’s praxes of sacramental rituals. In fact, Christianity is itself a religion of disruption. The God–human reality that manifests itself in Jesus Christ is itself a graced disruption. God chooses to disrupt the familiar world of fallenness and thus offers God-self as a mediating gift that reorients creation to a new way of being that transcends the familiar orientation towards sin. It is on this ground that one can even argue that only a God of disruption can mediate a reorientation towards a world and an embodiment that constantly disrupts the familiar world of sin.

This work explores the contours of an understanding of human reality that takes seriously the sacredness of black bodies. In doing this, this work attempts to address the following question: how can one conceive of black bodies in a world defined by systems of erasure that directly affect black persons and their embodied agencies? To do this effectively, this work appropriates a constructive theological approach that grounds itself in an interdisciplinary discourse with the intent to show that to speak of the human person is to instantiate a polyphonic consciousness and insights that are further grounded in an altruistic awakening. Hence, this work explores the motif of the church as a sacramental praxis of belonging that is mediated by the Holy Spirit through the sacraments that are ritualized in such praxes that constitute church. This work aims to shed light on the sacramental nature of black bodies and the prophetic awakening possibilities for the church and the world when black bodies become viewed as sacramental symbols that mediate and participate in the disruptive grace of transformation. A deliberate engagement is made with philosophical luminaries like Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas to unpack the contours of meaning making that disruption, understood as the possibility for encounter, helps to mediate. I am intentionally turning to relational philosophy to ensure that the claim to encounter and an awakening to a new awareness of what it means to be human in a social world is properly unpacked. A turn to the philosophical is intended to aid the theological turn that is grounded in an ethical consciousness.

2. Research Question and Methodology

Global realities defining black persons portray a consistency of marginalization, erasures, and outright discrimination. In a 2023 report titled Being Black in the EU: Experiences of People of African Descent, by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), it was noted by Michael O’Flaherty that “People of African descent are routinely met with unfair treatment and bias when seeking jobs or homes. Racial discrimination, harassment and violence continues to haunt their daily lives” (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2024, p. 1). Writing for the Gallup Blog, Camille Lloyd notes that

Not only are Black Americans much less likely to feel confident that they would be treated with courtesy and respect, but they are far more likely to say they know people who were treated unfairly by the police, unfairly sent to jail or stayed in jail because they didn’t have enough bond money. Young Black adults are even more likely to know people who have experienced mistreatment from the police and the justice system—and are more likely to know someone who remained in jail because they could not afford bail

(Lloyd 2021).

A survey report by Cary Funk carried out on behalf of the Pew Research Center noted that “the relative lack of visible examples of Black achievement in science and the allied fields of technology, engineering and math is one factor that could deter Black people from deciding to pursue STEM education and careers” (Funk 2022). In work focusing on black experiences in Latin America, Ben Vinson and Greg Graves III shed light on the paradoxical realities defining the experiences of Afro-Latinos in Latin America. They argue that attempts made by Latin Americans to embrace their multi-racial identities led to an unfortunate bias for “whitening as a goal: Hence, Afro-Latin America was placed in the unique position of being able to thrive in circumstances that affirmed black social mobility, while at the same time constraining and disdaining blackness in favor of upholding an idealized, white somatic type” (Vinson and Graves 2018).

Also, in a report sponsored by the World Bank, it was noted that “about one in four Latin Americans self-identify as Afro-descendants today. They comprise a highly heterogenous population and are unevenly distributed across the region, but share a common history of displacement and exclusion. Despite significant gains over the past decade, Afro-descendants still are overrepresented among the poor and are underrepresented in decision-making positions, both in the private and the public sector” (Freire et al. 2018, p. 12). Asia has its own narratives of exclusion of black bodies and experiences. In an anthology of black voices, Tiffany Huang traces the experiences of black voices and the instantiation exclusion defining the social systems where black Asians live out their lives in the Asian continent (Huang 2020). Post-colonial Africa struggles to make sense of the word “post” because of the enduring vestiges of colonialism and generational traumas defining the African lived experiences. As Swati Parashar and Michael Schulz rightly note,

Our point of reflection is that if colonialism was a violent project, postcolonial and decolonial encounters also unleash multiple forms of violence. We have indicated that the Western-style, modern nation-state formula remains aspirational for many counter-hegemonic groups, and for regimes that want to consolidate power. The process of ‘becoming’ has unleashed its own structures of violence. … Crime cascades to war, war cascades to more war and to crime, and crime and war both cascade to state violence such as torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial execution

(Parashar and Schulz 2021, pp. 872–73).

It is these realities defining black bodies and experiences in our contemporary world that compel the research question to arise, i.e., how can one conceive of black bodies in a world defined by systems of erasure that directly affect black persons and their embodied agencies to allow for their flourishing while serving as a saturated media for the grace of flourishing for all persons, irrespective of their racial identities? Since the forces that define black experiences in the contemporary world are multiple, this work embraces a constructive theological approach that is in dialogue with other disciplines. It appropriates a theoretical and dialogical engagement with relevant dialogical partners that help to articulate a vision of the human person that black bodies can help mediate for a diverse world. In doing this, it takes a stance of critical engagement with some scholarly voices in relational philosophy; Roman Catholic ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and theological anthropology; insights from linguistics and the politics of meaning; social justice consciousness as articulated in some documents of the Second Vatican Council; insights from the discipline of semiotics; some insights from race studies and their relevance to black embodiment and black liberation; and insights from phenomenology.

Since this work aims to articulate disruption as a graced possibility for transformation of the content and ways of imagining the human person through the existential realities defining black bodies, a close engagement with insights from Martin Heidegger that help to articulate the ways a new imagination of the human person can be addressed is appropriated. Such appropriation allows for a distinction between sense-making, which can sometimes reify biased pathologies, and meaning-making that allows for a saturated possibility for what ought to be the human condition for the unfolding world of now and beyond. A close reading of such work as Being and Time, along with other dialogical voices who engage Heidegger from multiple fronts, is centered in this work. Other relevant Heideggerian insights that are relevant to this work include notions of temporality, authenticity, and inauthenticity. These serve the purpose of arguing for disruption as a mode of awakening to oneself through an encounter with otherness. In this case, the other is the embodiment of blackness that helps to mediate the attainment of subjectivity/identity.

An intentionality is given to ethics as the locus for the articulation of being human through the existential realities defining black bodies in a world defined by erasures and injustice. Consequently, the relational philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber are given primacy of place, especially that of Levinas because of its inherent altruistic turn. To do this well, other major voices in such disciplines as phenomenology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, race studies, semiotics, Christology, and liberation theology are engaged with in a dialogical manner to allow for a deeper probing into the research question. For example, the following question is addressed: how can black bodies help to disrupt the Christian imagination of church as a ritualized koinonia of belonging and flourishing? To address this question, insights from the scholarships of John Zizioulas, Hans Kung, Michael Lawler, Joseph Martos, and Louis-Marie Chauvet are engaged with.

Furthermore, the motif of grace as a disruptive gift that upends biased modes of being is brought to bear on the discourse on the sacramentality of black bodies. Consequently, insights from Jean-Luc Marion, Stephen Duffy, and Philip A. Rolnick are engaged with. In doing this, grace is further engaged with through a critical lens to allow for the possibility of new imagination that makes for a disruptive hermeneutic to arise: one that makes space for the agency of black bodies as media of the grace of transformation and conversion of all who uphold ideologies of hate. To ensure that this work does not remain in the domain of the abstract, a turn to phenomenology as an embodied engagement is instantiated. In doing this, blackness, as an embodied marker, is explored through the motif of place. Some works from the Second Vatican Council are engaged with, along with works from John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Edward S. Casey helps to shed light on the politics of place and how such realities defining place tend to define our embodiments. With this in mind, a constructive engagement is appropriated to showcase ways place can become the possibility for the instantiation of surplus meanings that mediate dignity, not just for black bodies, but for all who locate themselves in such places. The Church is one of such realities where bodies are defined through their sacramental mediations and participation as well. To ground the work in a Christological consciousness, insights from scholars like Marc Cortez, James H. Cone, Edward Schillebeeckx, and John Zizioulas are appropriated.

Finally, some terms that help to unpack the argument of the work—that black bodies can and ought to mediate ways of imagining the human person—are introduced to allow for the upending of structural and systemic biases against black bodies. These terms include disruption as a graced medium for bringing forth new imaginations of the human person, sense-making, meaning-making, awakening, strangeness, otherness, aloneness, difference, and blackness as a medium for saturated relationality. To maintain the style of writing by the author, the work explains each term when it is used the first time or delves deeper into it when the argument being articulated in the work is being expressed.

3. Disruption as Constituent Marker of Encounter and Meaning Making

Disruption, as an existential phenomenon, is not alien to the human condition. In fact, all aspects of human life are saturated with disruption. The cry of a child that disrupts the serene silence of the night awakens the sleeping parents who must address the needs of the child. Similarly, the example of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 offers another type of disruption that occurs in our social world. Seeing a person suffer offers the possibility of an experience of disruption in the cognitive abilities of the one who has experienced the vision. Thus, disruption is itself a human condition in a social world as it is the essence of encounter between one and another. The Good Samaritan derives his ethical identity—Good Samaritan—not on his own. Rather, it is only through the instantiation of an invitation that mediates an ethical consciousness on the part of the victim on the side of the road. Only through this ethical invitation that exudes from the helplessness of the victim does God extend to the Samaritan the gift of fellowship, both with God as a helpless God who desires fellowship and solidarity in and through the victim, and the victim who instantiates all of humanity who experience helplessness or who are victims of injustice in the world. The response of the Samaritan offers him his ethical identity and a link with other humans and God himself, who is present in all the helpless ones. Only when the Samaritan offers his fiat (consent to help) and also instantiates the fiat through acts of care for the victim does he become a Good Samaritan. He distinguishes his subjectivity as one that is ethically grounded from the multitude of nameless Samaritans. In other words, one only becomes a unique subject when one responds to the other in a manner that instantiates care and support. And this attainment of subjectivity is an instantiation of disruption as a horizon that leads to full humanity. Knub Ejler Løgstrup states this well when he writes that “Unselfishness means that in whatever concerns us, in whatever we do, in whatever stand we take, we think not of ourselves but of the other person—in spite of the fact that it would be quite natural to think of ourselves… Strictly speaking, unselfishness means that although we have every right to think of ourselves, we do not do so” (Løgstrup 1997, p. 129). When we reject selfishness, we become fully what we ought to become—persons that are fully alive through their fellowships with God in and through others.

In work focused on the phenomenon of disruption, Frédéric Godart and Luca Pistilli attempt to offer a systematic presentation of how this phenomenon is addressed in several disciplines. In their work, they offer four categories that define how this plays out: “technological, business model, regulatory, and social movements” (Godart and Pistilli 2024). They also note the following, that the phenomenon of disruption attempts to stress two polarities—“whether a disruption is ‘constraining’ vs. ‘unconstraining’, and whether it has an insider-driven vs. outsider-driven origin”. However, they fail to account for the philosophical and the religious that help to address the construction of identity and subjectivity that arises in the complexities defining the social world. To better understand how the phenomenon of disruption ought to be inclusive of the philosophical and religious turns, a working definition is needed. The term “disruption” points to an awakening, a consciousness that opens one to the world that is beyond, but which instantiates itself within the nowness experience. What do I mean by this? What one awakens to, though may have been there before one has the experience, the content of consciousness that one is exposed to, is something that evokes in one a turn to encounter. This encounter plays out in the continuum of experience that makes one to grow in awareness. One does not know the content itself as though it were in a moment. It is in that continuum that encounter evokes that one becomes more aware of what has been awakened to. In other words, it evokes in one an invitation to move from the familiar into the domain of the unfamiliar. This entrance into the unfamiliar offers one the opportunity to respond by asking questions that are intended to help one to make sense of that which is being encountered—the unfamiliar that evokes a response or an attempt to make sense of that which is being encountered as unfamiliar.

This moving from the familiar into the domain of the unfamiliar is itself grounded in temporality, which is an expression of the human condition. Martin Heidegger defines temporality as “the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having-been” (Heidegger 1962, p. 374). I should note the caution made by Edward S. Casey that “temporality is not be confused with time (Zeit), which in its ordinariness and inner-worldly character is merely the leveled-down, homogenized residuum of temporality” (Casey 1997, p. 442). For Heidegger, temporality offers the basic possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence (Heidegger 1962, p. 377). This is because temporality, understood as the possibility for linking the present to the future, is itself disruptive of the monotony of human consciousness. This disruption awakens the subject to their responsibility for the other—a point that would define the relational philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Thus, if disruption is the grounding of awareness, then a legitimate response is to go beyond the comfort of the insular self and be there for the other, whose mediation has brought about awareness in the would-be subject. It may also be a response of flight from otherness, should the other be a source of erasure of one’s existence. To respond adequately, one has to embrace discernment as a pathway to attaining authenticity. Stated differently, disruption opens one up to an awareness of connections or disconnections. But I argue that however one may perceive it, that which evokes disruption has already instantiated a sense of connection with one who experiences the disruption. Without this connection, there can be no talk of disruption. An example would suffice here. Let us assume that I am walking in a forest path, and suddenly, I look up to see a lion coming my way. My walk has been disrupted not only by my gaze of the lion, but by the gaze from the lion as well. Though my focus has been disrupted, there is a phenomenological connection that is mediated by the gaze from me of the lion and from the lion of me. The connection is not from abstract consciousness; rather, it is corporeal. Through my sight, I encounter that which disrupts my focus (Carman 2014, p. xiii). Or, as stated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the sight of the other is an invitation “to enter into a universe of beings that show themselves, and they could not show themselves if they could not also be hidden behind each other…” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, pp. 70–71). Consequently, one can argue that disruption is closely linked to sight. Here, I am using sight to include all of our senses and ways of encountering otherness. Cognition is also linked to this sense of sight. However, it is not the primordial means of encounter. What is primordial is an embodiment of sociality. To be is to be a social being. Heidegger states this well when he writes the following: “Being with Others belong to the Being of Dasein” (Heidegger 1962, p. 160). This “Being-with [is] a constitutive element of human existence” (Mansbach 1991, p. 74). Cognition works closely with the senses to make sense of that which is apprehended through the senses. But in its making sense, it instantiates biases or stereotypes. But if humans are truly creatures grounded in temporality, these instantiated biases or stereotypes will be disrupted by an encounter with that which embodies disruption. This process is a continuum. Hence, Heidegger’s notion of temporality as a linking of the future to the present is correct. This is because the linking propels the human person who is involved in this process of meaning making and experiencing an awakening into the world of the unfamiliar in which the person comes into a realization of an awareness that is not static but is itself a continuum. Thus, to embody authenticity is to live into the future that is being linked to the present by the other who embodies disruption and brings its effect to bear on the one who encounters them. I would argue that inauthenticity will be a refusal to journey into the future that opens up and insisting on remaining in the world of biases. It is worth noting that even if the awakening demands a rejection of the other who embodies disruption because their disruptive gift is a threat to the existence of the subject, the subject, in their flight, is also living into authenticity because their flight evokes an awakening and a movement away from the old way of being that has become stagnant or stale. Simply stated, flight from or a turn to the source of disruption is itself an expression of authenticity, if, and only if, the following condition is present: a response that evokes abundant life for all.

The existential expression of disruption as a human condition that mediates an experience of awakening or a consciousness of otherness as a connector to one is best expressed in the following insights of Heidegger:

The structure of the Being of what is ready-to-hand as equipment is determined by references or assignments. In a peculiar and obvious manner, the ‘Things’ which are closest to us are ‘in themselves’ [“Ansich”]; and they are encountered as ‘in themselves’ in the concern which makes use of them without noticing them explicitly-the concern which can come up against something unusable. When equipment cannot be used, this implies that the constitutive assignment of the “in-order-to” to a “towards-this” has been disturbed. The assignments themselves are not observed; they are rather ‘there’ when we concernfully submit ourselves to them [Sichstellen unter sie]. But when an assignment has been disturbed-when something is unusable for some purpose-then the assignment becomes explicit. Even now, of course, it has not become explicit as an ontological structure; but it has become explicit ontically for the circumspection which comes up against the damaging of the tool. When an assignment to some particular “towards-this” has been thus circumspectively aroused, we catch sight of the “towards-this” itself, and along with it everything connected with the work-the whole ‘workshop’- as that wherein concern always dwells. The context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself.

Similarly, when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its everyday presence [Zugegensein] has been so obvious that we have never taken any notice of it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the first time what the missing article was ready-to-hand with, and what it was ready-to-hand for. The environment announces itself afresh. What is thus lit up is not itself just one thing ready-to-hand among others; still less is it something present-at-hand upon which equipment ready-to-hand is somehow founded: it is in the ‘there’ before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection, so far as circumspection is always directed towards entities; but in each case it has already been disclosed for circumspection

(Heidegger 1962, pp. 74–75).

Daniel Kahneman and Sacha Golob offer a reading of the Heideggerian notion of disruption as the breakdown of equipment that is itself an embrace of a pedagogical turn. Though this work is not itself one on pedagogy, it has a close link to knowing and unknowing, which is in the domain of the pedagogical turn. For Kahneman, “some stereotypes are perniciously wrong, and hostile stereotyping can have dreadful consequences, but the psychological facts cannot be avoided: stereotypes, both correct and false, are how we think of categories” (Kahneman 2013, p. 165). Golob adds to this claim by noting the fact that “stereotypes are the ‘go to’ tools of much of our social processing” (Golob 2022, p. 196). To buttress this claim of both Kahneman and Golob on stereotypes, Daniel Todd Gilbert and J. Gregory Hixon argue that stereotypes are the “tools that jump out” of our cognitive bag of meaning making in a social world (Gilbert and Hixon 1991, p. 510). How, then, can stereotypes be transcended to allow for new stereotypes, since stereotypes are themselves a reality of the human condition?

Heidegger offers a glimpse into a legitimate response to this question when he offers insights into the modes of existence for Dasein that are modes of inauthenticity and authenticity. Inauthenticity is to live without awakening to difference or, what Abraham Mansbach refers to in his close reading of Heidegger, as “the anonymous crowd to which every human being belongs, any member of which can be substituted for or represented by any other” (Mansbach 1991, p. 75; Heidegger 1962, p. 154). It is to be held captive by a generalization that does not allow for an encounter that allows one to experience the other in the embodiment that is grounded in their historicities, even if such historicities challenge or disrupt one’s comfort. This inauthentic mode of existence promotes biases or stereotypes and cannot free the human person from the world of generalizations. A turn to authenticity is the path of escape. However, the primordial condition for a turn to authenticity already lies within the human person as a constituent marker of the human condition, argues Heidegger. In his words,

Dasein harbors the intrinsic possibility for being factically dispersed… ‘Dispersion, ‘disunity’ sounds negative at first… But here we are dealing with something else, with a description of the multiplication (not ‘multiplicity’) which is present in every factically individuated Dasein as such… multiplicity [which] belongs to Being itself. In its metaphysical neutral concept, Dasein’s essence already contains primordial bestrewal [Streuung], which is in quite a definite respect a dissemination [Zerstreuung]

(Heidegger 1984, pp. 137–38).

Disruption is itself the awakening of being to allow for the embrace of selfhood. But this selfhood that arises from disruption is conditioned by “‘acing death’, ‘anxiety’ (Angst) and the ‘voice of conscience’ (Stimme des Gewissens) as ‘moments’ which make the world and everyday familiarity fade away. Through them human existence is differentiated from the mass of the people and things, bringing Dasein’s potential for authentic existence, for being an authentic Self, to the core” (Mansbach 1991, p. 77). This awakening that being experiences in the face of anxiety allows for being to be “the only kind of thing which it can be of its own accord as something individualized in individualization” (Heidegger 1962, p. 232). But a question ought to be posed, as noted by Mansbach: does anxiety always propel one into the domain of authenticity? What if it reinstates a flight into the solipsistic world? Charles Burke Guignon and Jay A. Ciaffa offer a response by reading Heidegger closely. For them, Heidegger makes a distinction between the levels of existential and the level of existentiell (Guignon 1984; Ciaffa 1987). The former and the latter are always in close proximity. In Heidegger’s words, “Authentic-Being-one’s Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘they’; it is rather an existential modification of the ‘they’ [das Man] as essential existentialle” (Heidegger 1962, p. 168). However, “proximally and for the most part Dasein is not itself but is lost in the they-self, which is an existentiell modification of the authentic Self” (Heidegger 1962, p. 365). In other words, there can be no “possibility of any mode of existence that altogether circumvents inauthenticity” (Ciaffa 1987, p. 56). To sum this point, I argue that the fact that disruption awakens one into an awareness of the other, and the discovery of oneself as a being oriented towards otherness through encounters that instantiate abundant life for all does not mean that one constantly lives in this awakening. Hence, one is thrown into a world of disruptive encounters. Only through this continuum of disruptive awakening and awareness can one be able to escape the biases or stereotypes that are formed when the disruptive encounters have been given the stamp of cognition where the ritual of making sense tends to occur. This is because all sense making tends to legitimize biases or stereotypes. But sense making is not closed to the horizon that opens up through disruptive encounters. Consequently, sense making and disruptions are always grounded in a continuum of linking the present to the future for humans who are themselves conditioned by temporality. Even when sense making is oriented towards the past, the ability to move beyond the past and orient oneself towards the future is also one of the possibilities that open up through encounters when one embraces encounter with openness through the praxis of suspension of judgment. Stated differently, the awakening that disruption produces in one is itself the summon of the conscience. The conscience never summons one to embrace the good unless one is not at that moment embracing the good. Thus, without the presence of inauthenticity in us, there is no summon by the voice of the conscience to awaken to the needs of the other (Mansbach 1991, p. 83). But the summoning of conscience is not something we deliberately choose. Rather, conscience chooses us by holding us hostage. It is a disruptive entrance into our world of comfort where hegemonies reign supreme. In Heidegger’s words, “The call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have ever done so. ‘It’ calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me” (Heidegger 1962, p. 320). Does this mean that one becomes ethical in an insular existence? The answer is no. Heidegger is arguing that to be human is to be oriented towards an ethical summon. It is to embody a summon to transcend inauthenticity and live in authenticity. Both inauthenticity and authenticity are grounded in the human condition. For being to embody its purpose in the world, it must open up to the disruption that otherness sparks in them so that the voice of conscience can be the guide to an attainment of authenticity. Yet, authenticity transcends the particularity of being itself. It is the link to otherness that is ritualized in the concrete places that are the condition for the actualization of temporality. In other worlds, the voice of conscience awakens us from the slumber of inauthenticity where generalizations and negative biases prevail. This awakening leads us into a new horizon that is linked to the present. This linking grounds us as beings conditioned to encounter others in their embodiments and to respond to their needs when needed. When we respond accordingly, we are reifying our condition as beings crafted for temporality—a linking of the present to the future to allow for surplus possibilities to manifest.

At this point of this work, a question needs to be posed. Is there a difference between sense making and meaning making? To address this question, I turn to the motif of disruption. Disruption allows for two possibilities to arise that define the human condition—a turn to sense making and a turn to meaning making. For the former, is grounded in a turn to the familiar: the predictable or the familiar. As Sally Maitlis and Marlys K. Christianson note, sense making is “a process, prompted by violated expectations, that involves attending to and bracketing cues in the environment, creating intersubjective meaning through cycles of interpretation and action, and thereby enacting a more ordered environment from which further cues can be drawn” (Maitlis and Christianson 2014, p. 67). Thus, sense making is itself oriented towards the reification of existing social biases or stereotypes that serve as the grounds for knowing the world and notions of the self as well. If one is to appropriate a Heideggerian language, it is the grounding for inauthenticity. However, the content of comparison by which the disruptive experience is evaluated was first and foremost the grounds for a movement into the domain of authenticity. But once that new horizon is accepted and becomes the social norm, it serves as the grounds for the reification of inauthenticity—a slip into the familiar and predictable. It becomes the grounds for legitimizing an accepted identity. Consequently, sense making is always oriented towards the preservation of an existing identity, be it personal or social. Because this is the case, all sense making processes involve a turn to the past as the grounds for the validation or rejection of the new experience. An example would suffice here. Imagine a young man from Portland, Oregon, in the United States of America grew up being told that women are not able to excel in Mathematics, and that Mathematics, as a discipline, was the discipline for men only. Then, he goes to Paris to further his studies in Mathematics. While in Paris, he has female classmates studying Mathematics with him. This is his first time experiencing female students as classmates studying Mathematics. At the end of his first year in college, he achieves a C grade while his female classmates all achieve As. Over the years, he has built an identity of being a superior student of Mathematics, relative to his female counterparts; his identity as a person with superior intelligence hinges on the narrative surrounding women as being unable to study Mathematics. Now, his identity and the worldview shaping that identity are now in crisis. What should he do? Should he accept the fact that he grew up embracing a false worldview and an identity that is crafted in falsehood, or should he allow this experience to be the stimulus for crafting a new worldview and a new identity? These questions define his positionality that is grounded in a crossroad where his choice will define whether he is in the domain of sense making or that of meaning making. Should he decide to interpret this experience in a manner that reifies his previously held beliefs of himself as one who possesses a superior intelligence, then he has entered into the domain of sense making. Sense making allows for either the invalidation of a disruptive experience or the reinterpretation of the experience through the projection of previously held stereotypes or biases that soften or mitigate the effect of the disruptive experience. In the example given above, the student from Portland may either conclude that the female students obtained better grades because the instructor has an anti-American sentiment in him (invalidation of the experience) or he may conclude that he achieved a C because he was under stress trying to acclimatize into the Parisian environment (reinterpretation of the experience to mitigate its effect on his previously constructed identity). It should be noted as well that sense making is not only in the domain of the personal (individual) world. It is also grounded in sociality. A society can make sense making a source for validating their social biases and stereotypes that reify their identity and worldview. The same can be said of organizations as well. In all of these cases, there is the demand to uphold a value system (Beverland et al. 2024, p. 300; Dolbec et al. 2022). Again, sense making is about retrospection. It “is necessarily about an action that has occurred and you are trying to justify it” (Shukla 2023).

What, then, is meaning making? Unlike sense making, which is more about going to the past and using that past to interpret an event or an experience, meaning making involves a continuum that links the present to the future. As Aditya Shukla rightly notes, “meaning-making is a process that attempts to makes sense of the now and the future in ways it gives you purpose and a desirable existential context. Meaning making cultivates hopes and a life-trajectory you can look forward to” (Shukla 2023). Though a distinction can be made between sense making and meaning making, they occur in close proximity. To explain this point, I return to the example given above about the young man from Portland, Oregon. His turn to sense making can also be the springboard for meaning making. That one has made sense of an experience does not mean that the same experience cannot be reinterpreted to lead one into the domain of meaning making.

For the young man from Portland, the shift from sense making to meaning making can allow him to open himself up to a new understanding of his identity that breaks away from the restrictive embrace of toxic masculinity, which prevented him from appreciating the intelligence of women. It can also be the springboard for him to critique his social world where the toxic identity had been crafted. By doing this, one can see how meaning making is grounded in progress and an embrace of a future that is saturated with many possibilities. What do I mean by this? All biases or stereotypes are always grounded in the domain of disruptive encounters that shattered previously held biases and stereotypes. Once they have been accepted, they are reformulated to fit into the previously held knowledge of what may be a similar past experience. Hence, they become a pathway for making sense. However, this can also lead to new questions that allow for authenticity to be attained. Such authenticity is grounded not in the negation of the past, but in a turn to the future as the locus of the summon to embrace progress. In this case, such progress links the past, present, and future. This linking reveals the fact that the past does not exhaust the content of meaning that one is exposed to via an experience. The present is not complete because it is transient. The fact that the present is transient, the future must be expected, and this expectation means that it is a future that invites one into the domain of encounter. Consequently, this invitation also demands that one embrace openness to the unfamiliar as a pathway for growth and the asking of new questions that allow for the formulation of new identities that speak to concrete realities of the times and not of the past that has gone. This is where Heidegger’s call for authenticity becomes most relevant. For being to be authentic in its individuation as self, it must face the concrete world of the here and now, which is itself open to the invitation of the future and all its possibilities as well. Also, for being to be authentic, it must be understood that “inauthenticity is based on the possibility of authenticity” argues Heidegger (Heidegger 1962, p. 259). In other words, a turn to the past and the refusal to face the reality—in this case, that female students also have the cognitive ability to excel in Mathematics—reveals a pathway of other options: the call to be authentic by accepting this truth and using it to articulate a new identity that is not stuck in the hegemony of maleness. One can thus say that all disruptions evoke in us a summon to be inauthentic by holding on to the familiar world of sense making or to embrace the multiple possibilities that are present in a turn to meaning making. Because the human person is a being on a journey towards full realization in its praxis of ethics, it is not always able to live authentically. A slip into inauthenticity is also a summon to awaken to the possibilities inherent in the domain of authenticity. Living in the authentic mode is a prophetic reminder to remain there and not slip backwards into the domain of inauthenticity.

Disruption does not only manifest the unfamiliar within the world of the familiar. It also makes for the possibility of new imagination to arise in the world of meaning making. In other words, without disruption, a turn to meaning will not arise. To be more radical, without disruption, subjectivity, as a claim to meaning making, never occurs. As Heidegger notes, Dasein’s turn to authenticity is itself the claiming of its selfhood that has a face or an individuation in the concreteness of existence (Heidegger 1962, p. 130). At is ontological state, Dasein is always a “Being-relation”. Thus, “in its Being, it has a Being-relation to this Being” (Heidegger 1962, p. 12). In other words, “Dasein is characterized as having two aspects which are called ‘essence’ and ‘existence’” (Guignon 1984, p. 331). In its essence, Dasein (Being) embodies a summon to living that is not grounded in insularity. In fact, in its essence, Dasein is socially grounded. Hence, Heidegger argues that in its essence, Dasein “has its being as its own to be” (Heidegger 1962, p. 12), which means that, in Dasein, “there is always something still outstanding which, as an ability-to-be of Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’” (Heidegger 1962, p. 236). This seeking-to-be-complete that defines Dasein cannot be realized in the insularity of being. Rather, it is in a turn to relationality that this seeking-to-be-complete is realized.

Disruption evokes an encounter with the other and, as such, becomes the possibility for one to speak of proximity that is itself the grounds for subjectivity to be claimed in the social world. But how is this possible? Disruption points to strangeness—that which is beyond the familiar and cognitive control. To encounter a stranger is to be forced to ask a question that opens up into two connected horizons. The encounter forces one to ask, who are you? But this question is also the home of the unasked question, who am I? This latter question is itself not insular. It is not a solitary one that can be answered within the domain of insular existence. Rather, it is only within the encounter itself that the content of the latter question, along with the revelation that exudes from taking it seriously, can be expressed. Consequently, the embrace of subjectivity is preceded by the truth of utmost vulnerability and meaninglessness. The one who claims to be a subject only derives this turn to meaning through the gift of proximity that the disruptive encounter with the other evokes. In other words, to ask the question of the stranger, who are you, is to instantiate a journey of awareness and of differentiation. Only through differentiation can subjectivity arise. Consequently, to ask the question is to also open the door of self-revelation and the reception of the gift of identity. Emmanuel Levinas captures this point very well when he writes that “[This] questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness… [it] is itself a manifestation of the relationship with Being [before this relationship takes on an intentional structure]. Being [coming to us as a question] is essentially alien and strikes against us” (Levinas 2001, p. 9). This question that disrupts the world of the one who lays claim to subjectivity as its turn to meaning draws it into an ethical world of responsibility for the question itself—a question that is saturated with possibilities and that opens up a horizon of saturated meanings that the subject must respond to in its quest for meaning and identity. This dynamic makes the subject an embodiment of vulnerability if it is to embrace its authenticity as a creature of care for the other. Levinas states this well when he writes that “… in vulnerability lies a relation to the other what is not exhausted by causality, a relation prior to all affection by the stimulus. The identity of the self does not set limits to submission, not even the last resistance that matter ‘in potential’ opposes to the form that invests it” (Levinas 2003, p. 64).

Is the response to the question posed at the stranger limited to a summon to be ethical as the one who poses the question is awaken to who they are through the process of differentiation? The question is a key to a door leading to a horizon of many possibilities. Such possibilities can be grounded in biases or stereotypes or lead to a new awareness of meaning making that was not previously the case. Should the former be the preferred option, then the question is posed not to receive a response, but rather to mimic a dialogue that is itself a monologue. This is one that Walter Kaufmann, in his prologue to Martin Buber’s I and Thou, perfectly describes in the following lines: “Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste of truth is an acquired taste that few acquire” (Kaufmann 1996, p. 9). Buttressing this point of deception that biases and stereotypes instantiate in simplifying the encounter with the other who is, at its core, a complex being, I turn to Gordon W. Allport. For Allport, “We like to solve problems easily. We can do so best if we can fit them rapidly into a satisfactory category and use this category as a means of prejudging the solution…. So long as we can get away with coarse overgeneralizations we tend to do so. Why? Well, it takes less effort, and effort, except in the area of our most intense interests, is disagreeable” (Allport 1954, pp. 20–21). Again, I should note here that the use of stereotypes is not alien to the human condition. Rather, what makes it problematic is when it is ossified in such a manner that there is a refusal to open up to new information that also allow for new awakening to that which confronts one.

Returning to the possibility of awakening to a new awareness where the question posed becomes the revelatory moment of self-differentiations, I am intentional in my usage of self-differentiations because of the fact that the attainment of self is not a one-time reality. Rather, it is continuous and plays out as one moves from one social world to another. For example, self-differentiation occurs in the family as the baby encounters the caregiver and probes into the world of the caregiver. We see this play out in the ways that babies use their senses to explore their surroundings. They touch, smell, taste, and look at things. Though not yet verbal, their use of the senses is itself the posing of the question “who are you?” to those things they are encountering. This question is also an attempt to awaken to themselves. Realizing that the things encountered are different is itself the awakening to the question “who am I?”. When that child grows up and begins school, they also go through the process of self-differentiation by encountering those who are different from them and who come from different social worlds. Should that child eventually migrate to another country, the same process of self-differentiation plays out. By wanting to know the host culture and community, they become more aware of who they are. But this entire process is not a reification of a dualism as though the gap between the other and the self is unbridgeable. While the gap is not completely eradicated, self-differentiation is itself the possibility for meaning making, which allows for relationality that is itself the instantiation of filiality between the migrant and host community. Relationality is itself in the domain of continuum. By this, I mean that the multiple levels of awareness that occur for one who is encountering the other and thus being thrown into the self-differentiating process is a process that is always ongoing (Svensson and Syed 2019). Again, the integration of the multiple levels of awareness that occur through the process of self-differentiation instantiates a link to otherness. Hence, Buber articulates two relations defining being—I–It and I–Thou. Even when the relation is itself defined by self-centeredness, the other, who is reduced to an It, is also a source for relationality. However, such relationality does not evoke distancing that the “I” is expected to honor. In fact, “the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the basic word I-You is different from that in the basic word I-It. Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence” (Buber 1996, p. 53). To posit the question “who are you?” is to make present the question “who am I?”. To resolve the former is to attend to the latter. To attend to the latter is to first engage the former. In fact, the latter can never be resolved unless the former is first encountered. This is the grounds for envisioning subjectivity. It is itself the ritualization of connections even though it is crafted in the domain of self-differentiation. To unpack this truth more, I turn to Levinas.

For Levinas, subjectivity only arises in the world of proximity that is itself a turn to strangeness, one that he depicts as the fleeting face of the other that comes as a trace escaping the conceptual gaze of the one who embraces subjectivity. It is this transcendence of otherness that forces the subject to ask the question “who am I?”. Levinas cleverly notes the “strangeness of the other, in that it is precisely by that strangeness that he or she puts me in question by demanding of me with a demand that comes to me I know not whence, of from an unknown God who loves the stranger” (Levinas 1993, p. 94). Consequently, the answer to the question is never absolute. If there is absolutization in the answer to the question a all, it is one of responsibility for the other. In other words, the only absolutization occurs as a summon to be ethical.

Strangeness evokes a dissonance in the one who utters the word itself. It serves two ways: one is that of cognition, and the other is that of encounter, which is itself an instantiation of transcendence and, I dare to say, of freedom. These two ways need further engagement. The one who is called a stranger or who embodies what has been categorized as strange is given an identity to help reduce cognitive dissonance on the part of the knower. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills, while reading Leon Festinger’s A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance closely, argue that “the existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, motivates the person to reduce the dissonance and leads to avoidance of information likely to increase the dissonance. The greater the magnitude of the dissonance, the greater is the pressure to reduce dissonance” (Harmon-Jones and Mills 2019, p. 3). Thus, the label “stranger” is itself an utterance of frustration that is intended to reduce the dissonance that the knower experiences by encountering the other who has not a name or a marker of knowing that can be used to define them in the world of the familiar. Yet, the label itself serves not just as a label of knowing, but also as a label of freedom that the other who is given such a label uses to transcend the world of the familiar. The transcendence of the other who can only be labeled as strange and who embodies the markers of strangeness reveals the limits of the boundaries of the worldview of the knower. After all, the familiar world of the knower has all the markers that have been given validation of civilization. Here comes the intrusion of the other who dares to put to question the civilized world. To ensure that the other does not prevail, the knower or the host must project an identity unto the other. Hence, the word is uttered—stranger! Though Jacques Derrida articulates the dilemma of hospitality that is faced by the stranger and host in the context of migration that is conditioned by the sense of indebtedness and the laws of civility inherent in the domain of the host and their social world, there need to be a phenomenology of the stranger that is inherently a form of identity in need of unpacking (Derrida 2005, p. 68). I intend to do that briefly.

The word “stranger” or “foreigner” is itself an identity that exudes dissonance. On one hand, it evokes a type of knowing the other in a manner that projects a being-beyond-the-familiar in the sense that the one being encountered is alien to the familiar world of the one who insists on projecting an identity unto them. It is an identity that cannot exhaust the content of that which it is given, hence the dissonance. The host wants to exhaust the content of meaning that an identity contains. But in an encounter with one who embodies transcendence, the label, stranger, as an identity reveals the limits of knowing. Beyond the limits is mystery or transcendence. It also reveals the limits of cognition and of language itself. Here, language is being understood as discourse. How can discourse proceed with one who embodies that which is beyond limits? The stranger speaks a foreign language. They dress in a manner that is beyond the familiar world of the host. They project a social world that is outside of the reach of the host. What do these evoke in the host? For Levinas, the stranger, as a being-beyond-the-familiar summons, provokes within the subject a turn to admiration of “the Infinite, which, as illeity, does not appear, is not present, has always already past, is neither theme, telos nor interlocutor. It is glorified in the glory that manifests a subject, is glorified already in the glorification of its glory by the subject, thus undoing all the structures of correlation. Glorification is saying, that is, a sign given to the other, peace announced to the other, responsibility for the other, to the extent of substitution” (Levinas 1997, p. 148). This is because “the way the Infinite passes the finite and passes itself has an ethical meaning is not something that results from a project to construct the ‘transcendental foundation’ of ethical experience.’ The ethical is the field outlined by the paradox [dissonance] of an Infinite relationship with the finite without being belied in this relationship. Ethics is the breakup of the originary unity of transcendental apperception, that is, it is the beyond of experience” (Levinas 1997, p. 148). Again, for Levinas, the other, who is a stranger, evokes in the host a turn to ethical responsibility even to the limits of substitution. Levinas links this response to the identity of the host. In the encounter with the other who comes in the full expression of a demand for care, the host, in their response to the summon, attains their subjectivity. But it is one that grounds itself in ethics. Hence, Levinas writes, “I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility. I understand responsibility as responsibility for the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face” (Levinas 1985, p. 95). Again, the stranger who is a being-beyond-the-familiar is not present. Rather, it appears only as a trace of the face that summons the host to be responsible. Because this form of appearing that is itself unsettling offers an experience of awakening in the subject whose awakening is itself a desire to find itself; only by responding ethically before the transcendental other does the host claim its identity as a subject for the other (Levinas 1997, pp. 148–49). In this case, there is an asymmetrical relationship in the encounter with the other. The subject only attains their subjectivity in being ethical towards their relationship with the other without the need for reciprocity. Consequently, while the host labels the other as stranger, in this labeling, the one who seeks an identity is not the other as stranger. Rather, it is the host who, in their fidelity to be ethical and live for the good and wellbeing of the other even when the other is absent, derives their identity as subjects for the other (Levinas 1993, pp. 94–95).

Furthermore, though the label “stranger” is intended to be an identity of alienation that reveals frustration on the part of the host who insists on reducing the other to meet the categories of their familiar world, this label serves as the moment of grace to disrupt the world and cognition of the host. The label becomes a source of summon that invites the host to journey into a world of encounter that is beyond the limits of cognition. Through journeying, the host does not come to know the other as this or that. Rather, the host comes to know himself as a subject who must live in a manner that supports the flourishing and desires of the other. Only through the label “stranger” is the host’s social and cognitive world upended. But they are upended to allow for authentic encounter that is grounded in an altruistic turn. This way, the host loses his power and is given vulnerability as an authentic mode of being before the other who embodies transcendence—freedom. Thus, the label “stranger” is itself a label that reveals not the other, but the subject to an awakening that is needed to allow for the attainment of their subjectivity. It is thus an epiphany made possible by the encounter with the other. Like a mirror, the host sees the other as a stranger, but in reality, it is he who is a stranger unto himself and in need of an identity. Derrida articulates this well in the following quote from Of Hospitality:

Awaiting his guest as a liberator, his emancipator … this is always the situation of the foreigner, in politics too, that of coming as a legislator to lay down the law and liberate the people or the nation by coming from outside, by entering into the nation or the house … [It is] as if, then, the stranger could save the master and liberate the power of his host; it’s as if the master, qua master, were prisoner of his place and his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage)

(Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, p. 123; See also Derrida 2002, p. 372; Kearns 2005, pp. 73–94).

Stated succinctly, “the host is hostage even as the guest now hosts the host/age’s salvation, redemption, and liberation” (Young 2008, p. 121; Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, p. 124). The following question thus arises: if the host is held hostage by the guest and only through a turn to responsibility for the other as guest is the host liberated to attain their awakening into their identity as subject for the other’s wellbeing, is not the gift of subjectivity then reduced to an exchange? To respond to this question, I turn to insights from Levinas and Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. For Levinas, for the gift to remain a gift, it must retain its freedom. In other words, it is saturated in the domain of altruism. Consequently, the host must respond to the ethical summon of the guest with all their being and without any expectations of reciprocity. In doing this, the one who discovers their subjectivity as a turn to ethics if given the gift of transcendence itself in their embrace of care for the other. As Levinas notes, this is because the subject is liberated from the finitude and imprisonment of egoism and led into the domain of unconditional desire for the other (Levinas 1969, p. 236). This linking of desire to freedom is because of the following: “The Desire into which the threatened will dissolves no longer defends the powers of a will, but, as the goodness whose meaning death cannot efface, has its center outside of itself” (Levinas 1969, p. 236). This center where the freedom of the subject resides is itself the fixation on the other and its wellbeing by the subject who continues to find its identity as a subject only in its commitment to care for the other always. Levinas warns that this cannot be an empty promise. It must define the entire existence of the subject/host (Levinas 1969, p. 225).

For Jennings, the gift and the reception of it must be conditioned by “excess and abundance” (Young 2008, p. 121). Appropriating Pauline insights in the Letter to the Romans, Jennings argues that “What Paul was attempting in his own time was the creation of something like a new politics that stood in contrast to the dominant political orders within which he worked as both a Pharisee and as a citizen of Rome … Paul was concerned to foster the emergence of a new kind of society or sociality that would instantiate justice outside the law and so bring to expression the duty beyond debt that he called love” (Jennings 2006, pp. 88–91, 126; Young 2008, pp. 121–22). Consequently, the holding hostage of the host by the guest is a total disruption of the world of the host, one that must lead to an embrace of a new worldview by the host. This is because the gift itself is an invitation to embrace a new worldview, one that must reject the vestiges of power and hegemonic othering of the other. Another question arises, one that needs a brief response: how does one discern the other from the devil pretending to be an “other” in need of care? The key word here is discernment. In the response to the demands of the other, is abundant life experienced by all? By all, I do not intend to instantiate reciprocity. Rather, I am inclusive of the third person, who represents all that is beyond the direct other whose absence one encounters as the trace of the face. In the words of Jesus, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10: 10). Care for the other must always instantiate abundant life for all. This understanding transcends the limited dualism that defines a closed relationship. But again, the other is not another I. The other is transcendence in a manner that it rejects an attempt to reduce it to an object or a tool that is there. It is open and, in its openness, it is elusive of totalization (Levinas 1969, pp. 256–57). This elusiveness makes it a voice of summon from which the one who seeks subjectivity hears the polyphonic summons of all that is not I. But the response to this summon cannot be an abstract idea. It must instead manifest in the concrete acts of love and care towards the other wherever the subject encounters otherness.

It is worth noting that Levinas’ introduction of the face of the other as the condition for the possibility of subjectivity as an identity of summon for care for the other is not intended to define otherness as though it is an object that makes itself present for the subject to cognitively define its contours and markers of familiarity. Far from it! Levinas introduces the notion of otherness as itself a phenomenology of disruption that transcends conceptualization. In fact, this transcendence that otherness evokes in its embodiment of proximity disrupts the world of the subject and throws it into a crisis of solitude that is not the same as a self-sufficient being. Rather, it is a solitude of longing and yearning for meaning—a turn to meaning making that instantiates a continuum of desire to encounter because it is only in that world of encounter that one arrives at one’s own subjectivity. But there is no definitive arrival as though it is a telos. It is more a journey—one that keeps unfolding and giving meaning to subjectivity as an icon of saturated meaning and not an idol of anemia of meaning that cognition tends to produce. By this, I mean that cognition is only about making sense of the past and not of the present (Shukla 2023). The present, as an unfolding present, is itself saturated with meaning and surprises, which are the instantiation of disruption. Kris Sealey notes this well in their engagement with Levinas when they write that

For Levinas, alterity signifies as that which is ‘never there’, either because it is yet to arrive or has already gone by. Ultimately, this leaves the subject alone and open onto a perpetual absence. … The Other is an absence, signifying precisely as that which leaves us alone. Its disruption operates as an agony, through which I find no one, or no way, to bring justification or wholeness to bear upon my existence. It is as such that we find yet another aporetic modulation of transcendence; the disturbance of that which is Other performs solely in the midst of radical aloneness

(Sealey 2010, p. 365).

The disruption that is experienced by the one who seeks meaning and identity is itself an invitation to encounter, to give meaning to that which it gives voice to as the self. As it speaks meaning to its existence as self, it instantiates “a relationship with the Other, the face-to-face with the Other, the encounter with a face that at once gives and conceals the Other…” (Levinas 1987, pp. 78–79). This transcendental nature of otherness as reflected in being immanent and yet absent disorients the subject. Yet, it is this disorientation, this disruption that makes possible for encounter to occur. In this case, encounter must be understood as embodying the paradoxical. It makes it impossible for the subject to reduce the relationship that encounter mediates to one of idolatry. By idolatry I mean a relationship of manipulation, control, and absolutization where the subject has power over the other. In encounter, power is absent. It is trans-power because the subject is thrown into a crisis, one that transforms it into a creature of wonder and saturated possibilities. This saturated possibility makes the subject a being that defines its meaning only through care for the other and an embodiment of humility and openness to transformation. The crisis of aloneness serves as the spark for wonder and curiosity to go beyond the domain of insularity and self-sufficiency and enter into the domain of possibilities that are mediated through encounters where disruptions are not seen as problematic. Rather, they are the graced possibilities for encountering new horizons of meaning and self-realization that are tied intimately to the wellbeing of otherness as well. This existential aloneness propels one to extend themselves to the other whose face conditions one to embody responsibility for their flourishing as their neighbor. In the words of Levinas, “it is precisely in that recalling of me to my responsibility by the face that summons me, that demands me, that requires me—it is in that calling into question—that the other is my neighbour” (Levinas 1999, p. 25). The face itself, as that which is beyond a mask, is itself grounded in surplus of meanings that a turn to cognition cannot exhaust (Levinas 1999, p. 33). Thus, only through encounter and the actual embrace of suspension of judgment can the multitude of possibilities that the face of the other evokes be experienced by the one who encounters it. And through this encounter, they attain their subjectivity—one that is held hostage by the transcendence of the transient face of the other. Yet, it is because of the ethical content within the other as neighbor that one’s subjectivity arises. Since this is the case, neighborliness is itself grounded in an ethical consciousness. The other, as neighbor, becomes the source of ethical consciousness that helps the subject to do two things: first, to not slip into insularity or individualism in their identity as subjects, and second, to go beyond their subjectivity, to encounter the other and through them, the God of all encounters who resides in the other in a saturated manner waiting to be encountered. Løgstrup notes this well when he writes that Jesus’ command to us to embrace the other as a neighbor “must also be doing something decisive with respect to the neighbor. … if this were not true, my relation to God would be an exclusive and religious relationship, and my relation to the neighbor would be reduced to the status of a mere means to this end” (Løgstrup 1997, p. 4).

In the context of the religious, Christianity grounds its imagination of the divine within the domain of disruption as the possibility for speaking of the transcendental God. Here, disruption must not be seen as chaos. In fact, disruption is only chaotic to unjust structures and modes of being. At its core, disruption is order that is gratuitous in relation to the chaos of sin. One finds this understanding of disruption at play in the creation account in Genesis 1:1–2. The creating word of God disrupts the chaos of lifelessness that preexisted the created order that God brings about (Arbez and Weisengoff 1948, pp. 14–150; Anderson 1990, pp. 21–29). Furthermore, understanding disruption as the possibility of speaking of the transcendental God means that speech cannot be absolute or be grounded in cognition as though the divine is a static being that can be studied and defined exhaustively. To avoid this temptation, the Second Council of Nicaea (787 C.E.) “prohibited the depiction of God, Jesus or the saints as statues, but allowed a depiction on a flat surface” (Houtepen 2002, p. 270), though “at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, Charlemagne decreed that statues in relief were also legitimate” (Houtepen 2002, p. 270). Jean-Luc Marion builds on this by making a distinction between idols and icons. The former is limited in meaning because it has nothing new to offer. Its meaning is self-contained and cannot open up a new horizon of meaning or making sense. The senses exhaust its content. “The free-standing statue attracts attention, is the focus of attention” (Houtepen 2002, p. 271). The latter is different. “The icon gives the viewer attentiveness and points to something else, a higher quality of being. It discloses and at the same time conceals the mystery to which it points”. It is in light of this fact that Paul refers to Jesus in the following manner: “He is the image of the invisible God” (The New American Bible 1998, Col. 1:15). Anton Houtepen would thus conclude in his exegetical reading of Paul’s statement that “God never makes an appearance in Jesus. However, Jesus constantly invites those who look at it to direct their view to something beyond the representation. The idea is that of a symbol which constantly transmits” (Houtepen 2002, p. 271). For Marion, this ability of the icon to constantly mediate and participate in the meaning making process as a pointer to that which is beyond itself is referred to as “a hermeneutic of an icon.” In his words, “Hermeneutic of the icon means that the visible becomes the visibility of the invisible only if it receives the intention, in short if it returns in intention to the invisible” (Marion 1982, p. 36; Houtepen 2002, p. 374).

Just as disruption defines the entire process from which subjectivity as a turn to relationality arises in the world of meaning making, so is the case with the divine.

Thus, the concept of God is also a transitional concept: it produces distance and proximity at the same time; it transfigures thought, it identifies nothing or no one; the image is not God, God is not the image. The name ‘God’ is not God, but brings us to the thought of God; more, it takes our thought to God; it brings us, depending on our intention, to God, or rather it add our intention to the intentions of God. A loving relationship does the same thing between two human beings. Their bodies, their loving looks, their kisses, their intercourse, are not their love, but point constantly to their love; or rather, they drive them further on the way of their love. Now God is something like love: a movement to and fro between creator and created, with an eye to further love

(Houtepen 2002, p. 271).

This constant movement that the name God evokes and mediates between God and the created is itself a disruption because it escapes the bias to totalize the hermeneutic possibilities into one predictive understanding of the divine. It is disruption itself because it delinks the subject from a totalizing world of meaning making that is intended to control otherness as though it is a mere object at the service of the all-knowing subject. This disruption produces in the believer an angst, a restlessness, a frustration, and yet the possibility for embracing curiosity and wonder that lead to a journey of faith and encounter with the inviting love of God, which plays itself out as a continuum and not as a static moment of finality.

One can also further this argument by applying it to the tri-relationalities that exist among the three persons of the Trinity. The generous giving of the Father to the Son and to the Spirit in total reciprocity does not mean that each one loses themselves in the process. Rather, the fact that the Father cannot be the Son, or the Spirit cannot be the Son, and so on, points to the fact that difference is an essential marker in the inner life of God as Trinity. However, this difference is not a sign of lack in the inner life of God as Trinity, rather, difference serves as the grounds of Trinitarian disruption and openness to it as the pathway of expressing hospitality among each person. In other words, the disruptive presence of the Father and the Spirit in the life of the Son and vice versa is what sustains and preserves their uniqueness in their personhood. Similarly, their uniqueness in their personhood allows for the possibility of disruption and openness to it as each of them enters into a fellowship of love. Stated differently, “As the eternal gift of the Father, the Son is grace. The Father gives the Son what is of infinite worth, i.e., he gives himself” (Rolnick 2007, p. 190). This total giving of himself to the Son is how the disruptive movement away from selfishness or insularity of the self is overcome to allow for a self-for the other relationality and subjectivity to arise in the Trinity. A metaphor is needed here to explain what I am alluding to. The three persons in God are like three rivers that meet in a confluence. In their encounter, one is not consumed by the other. Rather, the persistent uniqueness of each of the rivers makes their presence before the other a disruptive presence. But it is not to be understood in a negative manner because whatever they all become in their confluences is only possible due to their enduring uniqueness. Thus, each river must hold in place all of the complexities that the other rivers embody and bring to the points of encounter through their receptive openness towards the other rivers. In a Derridarian language, “there is a trace of the other as other in the same” (Itzkowitz 1978, p. 129). On the level of divine consciousness, these complexities that are embodied by each of the persons serve as the media of conscious presence and recognition. Thus, when the Father proclaims His Son as His beloved, the Father speaks this with all the active presence and awareness that He embodies as Father. The same goes for the Son and the Spirit. In this case, the disruptive uniqueness of each person in that Trinitarian relationship makes each one to be held spellbound by the other in a gaze or embrace of total affection. Disruptive difference does not repulse; rather, it brings each one into an encounter that is grounded in intimacy.

If difference mediates disruption in the inner life of God as Trinity, then disruption makes for the possibility of awareness of each other in the here and now. Thus, since God exists only in the present, then the awareness of each other as tri-persons is always one that is active in a continuum of the presence (Kairos). Furthermore, the significance of difference as the inherent grounds of the distinctive tri-personhood in God points to the ritualization of divine freedom. In other words, divine freedom in God is ritualized in the different persons’ radical openness to otherness. In the words of Philip A. Rolnick:

When the Father gives all that he is to the Son, freedom is in no way lacking; for this divine event is the event of freedom—pure grace and the living pattern of love. The original greatness of the Father is in this total giving, and the original greatness of the Son is in the complete acceptance of the personal being of the Father—a willed, intelligently chosen, wholehearted receptivity. Every gift has both gift giver and gift receiver, for every act of grace involves someone’s will to give and an other’s will to accept. As the Father gives himself to the Son and these two give themselves to the Sprit, the most basic sense of person is located in this originating and eternal grace

(Rolnick 2007, p. 198).

Consequently, personhood instantiates two ethical possibilities—the ability to give of oneself completely to the other, and the ability to be open to receive freely that which comes from the other as a gift. Without these ethical possibilities, personhood, whether divine or human, would be trapped in the world insular existence. On the part of humans, the attainment of subjectivity is only possible through “relationships to other persons” (Duffy 1993, p. 282); in fact, “love for another is freedom’s fulfillment” (Duffy 1993, p. 282). This notion of love is not to be understood as a propositional claim. It is an embodied expression of care for the other, who is one’s neighbor. To be a neighbor is to be embodied and defined by historicities along with the contextual conditions inherent in the world in which one lives in proximity to the subject. There is no abstract identity of being a neighbor. For the subject to respond to the neighbor through acts of love is to take seriously the conditions defining the embodied other who stands before them in their demand for care.

With this in mind, let us explore what difference is as a mediation of disruption in the encounters that exist among humans as embodied creatures. Disruption awakens one to be present to that which dislocates one from the familiar world. This awakening is not simply a cognitive one. Rather, it opens up the senses in the encounter that is brought about between the parties involved. For example, I am driving through a lonely road and at an intersection, I encounter another driver who did not obey the traffic laws and almost hit my car. My awakening to that experience makes all my senses engage with the experience. I look closely at the other car and the driver to understand who they are and what type of car they are driving. I pay attention to what I am hearing from their end. I am aware of how I feel, touch-wise, as my body gyrates from the sudden stop of my car as I apply the brakes. I may even be aware of my taste to ensure that I did not bite my tongue or lips due to any impact. None of these is being carried out in the past. They are reactions of the present. They are also the links to ensuring the continuity of my link to the experience. By this, I mean that through my senses, I experience a proximity to the other driver and the experience they mediate. There can be no meaning making of the experience I have had with the other driver unless through the mediating role of all my senses. In other words, the meaning making process is not simply abstract or limited to cognition. It involves all of the senses as well. And because the senses are involved, the new meaning that arises for me, which calls me to be more vigilant, pulls me into a new perspective of safe driving. Furthermore, the other driver is different from me. Their style of driving is also different, which brings about a disruption in the familiar world of driving that I am in. This disruption awakens me to an awareness of the other that may not have been possible without the incident that occurred. Consequently, disruption awakens one to an awareness of the other, and through this awareness of the other, there is an awareness of the self—the enactment of subjectivity. Kenneth Itzkowitz’s close reading of Derridarian thought can be helpful here. In his words, “Difference signifies the impossibility of identity as pure sameness without difference… Identity, which at first signifies sameness, in the end represents the self-differentiation within thought, and is but the trace of the (pure) movement of the difference prior to all identity and difference: It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is difference” (Itzkowitz 1978, p. 130).

I must ask two questions that need engagement. First, how can the grace of disruption be understood within the fellowship of love that is enacted by discipleship in Christ within the context of the Church? Second, in what ways can black bodies be seen as a mediative source of grace understood as disruption in a world defined by marginalities and erasures? These two questions instantiate the relevance of disruption as a source for opening up a new horizon of meaning for a faith people. In this case, I am particularly interested in the world of Christianity. In the next two sections, I will attempt to offer responses to the two questions mentioned above.

4. The Church as a Sacramental Grace of Disruption in a Fallen World

Hans Küng, in his work, The Church, calls attention to the many social and ecclesial issues that the Catholic Church must address as it moves beyond its self-imposed isolation that has lasted for centuries since the Counter Reformation. In doing this, Küng argues that “the Church cannot face these problems and use these opportunities if it is a prisoner of its own theories and prejudices, its own forms and laws, rather than being a prisoner of its Lord. As the prisoner of the Lord, it is truly free, ready and willing to serve the constantly new requirements, needs and aspirations of mankind” (Küng 1967, p. 4). To attain authenticity as the vehicle of God’s grace in the world, the Church, Küng argues, ought to resist the temptation of holding firmly to a particular image of itself. In each historical epoch, the Church articulates an image of itself that is brought to be by its response to the signs of the times. But such an image cannot exhaust the dynamic nature of the Church. Is there an essential identity of the Church? This is the wrong question. If there is an essence at all, it is “expressed in historical form” (Küng 1967, p. 5). Küng makes a case that I intend to appropriate here. He argues that the essence of the Church is not something separate from the historical form of the Church. Though distinct, one does not exist without the other. In other words, the essence of the Church is only experienced within the historical form of the Church through its responses to the signs of the times (Küng 1967, pp. 5–6). Understanding the Church as one that is called to open itself up to the realities of the epoch while also called to transcend the epoch itself speaks of the two realities defining sacramentality. As Joseph Martos rightly notes, in the historical understanding of sacraments, there is the pull to reducing what is symbolized to the domain of total human comprehension and there is the pull to want to locate what is symbolized to the domain of the transcendental (Martos 2014, p. 4). In other words, sacraments are themselves paradoxical in the sense that they instantiate two opposing hermeneutical pulls.

The Church, as a sacrament, embodies the two hermeneutical pulls that define sacraments themselves. On one hand, the Church is constituted of persons who are themselves rooted in historicities (in a sense making world). The Church can be studied, and some definite statements can be made about it. Küng notes this well when he reflects on the following statement: “To say that we do not believe in the Church” (Küng 1967, p. 32). This means that “the Church is not God…” (Küng 1967, p. 32). It also “means that we are the Church. As the followship of believers the Church is in no way different from us. It is not a gnostic collective person, whom we can see to be separate from us. We are the Church, and we are the Church. And if we are the Church, then the Church is a fellowship of those who seek, journey and lose their way, of the helpless, the anguished and the suffering, of sinners and pilgrims….” (Küng 1967, p. 33). Even though the Church can be studied as a sacramental symbol that mediates God’s grace to its members, it exudes a trans-cognitive hermeneutic. By this, I mean it is a sacramental symbol of transcendence (it orients us to a world of possibilities grounded in the hope of the resurrection, which is itself rooted in the world of meaning making—going beyond the past, and present, and into the future). Again, Küng articulates this well in the following proposition: “To say that we believe the Church, however, means that it is from God’s grace and through faith that the Church lives. … To say that we believe the Church, however, means that faith comes from God’s grace through the Church” (Küng 1967, p. 33). This latter proposition on the Church opens up a horizon of transcendence, one that perpetuates new life for its members. “For God’s grace makes [the human person] a truly ‘newborn being’ …” (Schillebeeckx 1980, p. 531). This new person in Christ embodies transcendence. As an embodiment of grace, this new person embodies a multitude of meanings that grace itself helps to instantiate. Reflecting on the many modes of the instantiation of grace, Stephen J. Duffy notes the following: “While there is one grace common to all … who share the same Spirit (1 Cor 12:4), both individuals and communities are blessed with a variety of special graces (charismata) for the service and good of all (e.g., 1 Cor 12:4–31; Rom 12:6)” (Duffy 1993, p. 37). The Church is the grace of transcendence that instantiates itself as different modes of being in light of the signs of the times that define each epoch. This fluid and yet transcendental nature of the Church makes the Church an instrument of God that is relevant to the unfolding concrete historicities defining an era or a geopolitical context. In other words, the Church is thus God’s grace in cosmic history that helps to create rituals of life and hope for all who experience scarcities of life and temptations of hopelessness so that they can be oriented to the world of meaning making.

Again, the Church, as God’s transcendental grace, is not abstract. As Küng notes, “God calls each [person] personally to believe. But without the community which believes, the individual would not attain faith. … They have their faith through the community, which as a believing community proclaims the message to them and provokes the response of faith in them” (Küng 1967, p. 33). This provocation of faith in the members of the Church is intended to bring about the reign of God. For this to happen, such a provocation ought to bring about a “summons to metanoia, which will turn small worlds topsy-turvy (Mark 1:14f.; 2 Cor 7:10, etc.)” (Duffy 1993, p. 39). In other words, grace serves as a disruptive force that awakens the Church to repentance and serves also as a summon to the Church to engage the concrete world in the here and now.

Again, the Church as sacramental grace implies a two-fold phenomenological turn. First, there is the concrete and descriptive dimension of the Church. It has a historical origin. It has socio-political markers. It is a human construct that brings together human beings from several social worlds to form a new social world. One can describe the historical markers and cultural appropriations playing out in such an institution. There is a cognitive dimension to speaking of the Church in such a manner that can be exhaustive. By this, I mean that meaning is limited. However, there is another phenomenological turn, which Küng and Duffy have both described in different ways. This can best be articulated in the words of Âke Sander, even though his focus is on a comparative engagement with religious experience. The Church, as a religious reality, “is an ordinary object through which one experiences the revelation of a transcendent, sacred and normally invisible dimension of reality, the apprehension of which has a profound impact on how that person live life, occupies times and thinks or opines about him-/herself, other people and the world” (Sander 2014, p. 17). The ordinariness of the Church makes it a disruptive vehicle for an encounter with the world that is beyond the ordinary from which and to which God invites the members of the Church and world to journey towards. Again, this ordinariness of the Church grounds it as a graced instantiation of saturated meaning that is located within the messiness of human life in the here and now. In other words, the Church is not a vehicle of flight from the real world. Rather, it is the locus of God’s disruptive rituals of life for all that upends the status quo. Its ordinariness allows God to be the source of the gift itself and to whom the gift leads all towards. It prevents the Church from being a Church for its own sake. Also, it prevents the Church from being a reality separate from its members. The Church as God’s grace is its members. In the actions and omissions of its members, the two phenomenological turns manifest. The sinfulness of the members is manifest before the eyes of the members themselves. The saintly aura of its members reveals itself in the lives of its members. But this does not mean that the Church is simply human. Since grace works with nature, the saintly aura of the Church is produced by divine grace that summons the Church to repentance and only through a turn to repentance that the grace of disruption of the life of the Church and of the world is achieved (Duffy 1993, p. 39). Consequently, the grace to transcend sinfulness and to embody the disruptive witness to new life is made possible by the Holy Spirit.

The Church is itself a sacrament of disruption that is a gift from a disruptive God to a world that is in need of disruptive awakening from sin. It is in light of this understanding that the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium (LG) begins with the following paragraph:

Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, to bring the light of Christ to all men, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church. Since the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race, it desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission. This it intends to do following faithfully the teaching of previous councils. The present-day conditions of the world add greater urgency to this work of the Church so that all men, joined more closely today by various social, technical and cultural ties, might also attain fuller unity in Christ

(Second Vatican Council 1964, par. 1).

Light dispels darkness in a manner that is disruptive of the reign of darkness itself. Thus, if Christ is the light of the nations, then creation is itself held captive by the darkness of sin. But this is not where it ends. Christ, as light itself that disrupts the reign of darkness, is constitutive of disruption as a mode of being. Thus, the gift of the incarnation that constitutes the God–human reality that we call Christ in its salvific role of restoring creation back to God from their fallen condition is itself a disruptive gift. Christ is God’s disruptive presence in a fallen world that awakens creation to encounter God in a new horizon of meaning and living abundantly in God. This awakening of creation by Christ is brought about both in a communal and personal manner. The communal constitutes creation as a people. The personal makes the constitutive people a relational community where individual traits, talents, gifts are brought together at the service of Christ to help address the needs, sorrows, anxieties, and fears of the different parts that make up this collective. This point is beautifully expressed in the following word of the conciliar document, Gaudium et Spes:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds

(Second Vatican Council 1965b, par. 1).

Christ makes for the possibility for the realization of a disruptive moment from which the markers of identity of that which constitutes the church emerges. In other words, without Christ, there can be no church or Christianity. But this identity that arises for the Church is not a passive one. It is a disruptive identity that awakens that which is constituted into the Church to participate in the disruptive process that the Christ-moment makes possible in the world of fallenness. The Church, in its participatory response to the disruption of the Christ-event in the fallen world, instantiates rituals of disruption themselves that further awaken the sinful world to the encounter that Christ makes possible as well as invites fallen creation to embrace. This participation of the Church within the disruption that Christ makes possible is realized in and through the sacramental rituals that play out in the Church. Without Christ, there can be no church. And without the Church, there can be no sacraments. And without the sacraments, the mediative grace of disruption that is brought about in the Christ-human reality, which in turn is intended to awaken the fallen world from the slumber of sin, is not possible. Articulated differently, the sacraments are not just rituals playing out in the Church among believers in Christ. Rather, the sacraments give the Church its identity, one that links it to the God–human disruptive presence in the fallen world. Consequently, the Church, in its fidelity to Christ the light of the nations, is itself a disruptive grace. Also, since the Church attains its identity only through its sacramental rituals that are themselves open to two spheres—ad intra (the faith community) and ad extra (the world)—all sacraments are an embodiment of disruption that make accessible the grace of awakening from sin and a turn to encounter and relationality. Thus, the sacraments are pathways for having an identity that links the Church to a relationship not just with Christ but with the Trinity itself. This is because only a disruptive God can bring about grace that is disruptive to allow for the embrace of graced rituals of disruption that foster disruptive identities, which all come back to God. Stated succinctly, the Trinity as disruption gifts creation with the grace of disruption in Christ to allow for disruption (the Church) to be the pathway for relationships (sacraments) that are saturated with disruption (God) that lead back to God who is disruption itself.

Marion articulates this well when he writes that “that which gives itself gives itself only to the one who gives himself over to the call and only in the pure form of a confirmation of the call, which is repeated because received” (Marion 1998, pp. 197–98). Though the Church is God’s sacramental grace in the world, the Church, as a concrete reality of human beings, must respond to the gift itself by answering the call to repentance and allowing themselves to be vehicles of grace in the world. This response to the gift itself is the constitutive gift of the new humanity in Christ that the Church, consisting of baptized followers of Christ, is called to embody. Grounding this in Heideggerian discourse, the response of the Church to embrace repentance that allows for the Church to be an embodiment of God’s grace to the world and to itself is the constitutive marker of the Christlike humanity. It is a summon that “calls Dasein [the Church as being itself] to itself, a call that comes from me [the Church] yet it calls from beyond me [the Church]” (Manoussakis 2015a, p. 25). The call to repentance and the summons to be a media of God’s grace in the world are the source of the identity of the Church. In other words, there is no Church as an embodiment of the new humanity in Christ without a response to the call to repentance that leads to actual repentance itself and without the actual response to the needs, aspirations, pains, struggles, joys, and hopes of the world. As Marion and John Panteleimon Manoussakis would note, the subject, in this case, it is the Church, does not exist “prior to the call, for ‘giving himself over to the call’ means that, first and foremost, to ‘be given a self by the call.’ The self that gives himself over to the call does not have even himself; in order, then, to give himself over to the call he has to be given that self. In fact, this is not about a sequence, logical or chronological: the self is not first given in order to be later given up, but rather the self is given as much and insofar as it is given up. For the self too, or rather the self above all, must be given” (Manoussakis 2015b, pp. 8–9). In other words, “the gifted (l’adonné) is called to existence as a response to a call (l’ interloqué) that calls it to being. ‘Thus is born the gifted whom the call makes the successor to the ‘subject,’ as what receives itself entirely from what it receives” (Manoussakis 2015b, p. 9; Marion 2002, p. 268). Hence, Küng would argue that “a community that does not believe is not the Church. The Church does not exist of itself but in the actual men [persons] who believe. … The Church does not spring simply from God’s ordinance but from the decision which is required of the men [persons] who must form the Church, the radical decision for God and his reign. This decision is faith” (Küng 1967, p. 33). But faith is not abstract. It is ritualized in the concrete acts of life that the Church mediates in the world (James 2:14–26). There can be no summon unless there is the one who is capable of responding and through the response derives its identity. Also, there can be no response unless there is a summon from that which is beyond the one responding. But none of these can be separated. God calls because God knows that there is that which can respond. Similarly, the Church is not yet church but a bunch of individuals Only through the summon of Christ do these individuals respond as a community, one that is constituted by a fellowship of love in Christ (koinonia). In this response, which is one of faith in action is the instantiation of the Church as the body of Christ. Consequently, to embody the new humanity in Christ is not something that is separate from being a human in Christ for the world. In other words, as noted by Marion, “individualized essence (ousia prote) no longer precedes relation (pros ti) and no longer excludes it from its ontic perfection. In contrast, relation precedes individuality” (Marion 2002, p. 268). To say Church is to instantiate relationality before there is an identity. Stated differently, the identity of the Church is derived from the relational summon that comes from Christ in the world. As Manoussakis notes:

“To be given a name indicates one’s beginning, in my name I acknowledge that I am generated, derived and depended; the fact that I have a name by which the Other can call me implies that the Other has laid a claim over me, that I belong not to myself but to the Other from whom I received not only my name—my name, after all, is a constant confession of this debt—but also myself. A name is always given and therefore it can be never a proper name—for my name does not belong to me, not only insofar as it is given to me but also insofar as it has named others before me and it will name others after me. However, ‘in this way, the baptismal given name, the ‘proper’ name par excellence, results from a call (one calls me with the name of such a saint) because, more essentially, this name constitutes a call in itself—I would not be called simply by this name, but indeed to this name’”

(Manoussakis 2015b, pp. 9–10; Marion 2002, p. 292).

A point worth stressing here is this: whatever identity that is enacted through the embodied grace of disruption that is Christ initiates saturated participation in the identity by those who uphold that identity. In other words, such an identity is not passive. It is active. To say one is a Christian, the identity itself evokes an existential participation in the markers shaping the identity by the one who claims the identity. To explain this further, I turn to Louis-Marie Chauvet. Chauvet argues that “Christian identity entails a personal commitment. However, this identity does not bypass the church as institution. Christian identity is not self-administered; to obtain it, one must receive baptism, and one does not baptize oneself; one is baptized by another person acting as the minister of the church in the name of Christ” (Chauvet 2001, pp. 19–20).

To be a Christian is to embrace and participate in the identity that the embodied word “Christian” evokes. This embodied word is itself the Church, whose countenance shines brightly with the light that is itself Christ. Consequently, to be a Christian is to become a sacramental presence of light that disrupts the world of sin for which darkness is being used here as a metaphoric signification. As an embodiment of Christ, the light that constitutes the Church through its sacramental rituals, the Christian, as an embodiment of the disruptive light that ushers itself into the dark world of sin, is drawn into the enduring flicker of light in that dark world. Earlier, I mentioned that there are two spheres that the sacramental rituals that constitute the Church open up and summons the Church into a relational encounter both with itself as baptized persons and with the world where the enduring word of God continues to resist the darkness of sin when God first proclaimed at the beginning of creation—“God looked at everything [God] had made, and [God] found it very good” (The New American Bible 1998, Gen. 1:31). The Christian is not a sufferer of the savior complex simply because of the fact that God’s enduring word of goodness proclaimed over creation is still present. Consequently, as an embodiment of the disruptive graced identity, the Christian becomes a sacrament of an encounter with the light of God in a fallen world. In this case, the Christian is not saving the world or those they encounter. Rather, they are enacting a relationship that awakens both themselves and the one being encountered to a consciousness of the demands of their participatory identities. In this case, the Christian awakens to their responsibility for their neighbor who is also a creature of God and who has within them the light of God. Simply stated, the Christian is drawn to a disruptive consciousness that is praxis oriented towards the need to link themselves to the other as creatures in proximity brought about by the disruptive God. God initiates the encounter through the sacramental process of disruption that both parties embody because their existence, as a form of identity—creatures of God—is a participation in the sacramental grace of disruption. This is exactly what is being stressed in Gaudium et Spes. To be church is to be a sacrament of disruption in a world held captive by systems and structures of erasures. It is also to enter into solidarity with those who are marginalized. This solidarity is itself a sacramental because through it, the Church discovers its identity as church—an embodiment of the light of Christ in a fallen world. Also, in this sacramentality, the world also discovers itself as an embodiment of a disruptive grace that God first brought to be when God disrupted the disordered world by proclaiming over the formless void, “Let there be … and there was … (The New American Bible 1998, Gen 1:1–3).

Stating this differently, this grace of disruption awakens the Church into its own experience of disruption from a mode of being without an ecclesial identity in Christ, which is a group of individuals who embody the markers of Adamic humanity that is held captive by death. This awakening leads to a response of repentance, which is the rejection of the modes of being that are defined by sin and death and a turn to an embrace of the new humanity in Christ that can only be found in and through actions and omissions that bring forth God’s life in the world. In other words, the grace of disruption evokes the surrender of the ego so that the subjectivity in Christ can be claimed by that which is called church. Since this is not an abstract reality, it means that the subjects that constitute the Church must surrender their narcissistic desires for insular existence in the world and turn to relationality by being their neighbor’s keeper in the concreteness of the world they find themselves. All of these must be carried out with the intentionality and fidelity to the voice and summon of Christ who is in the world and who calls them to respond to the need of the poor, the sick, the orphaned, and all in need in whom Christ has disguised himself. In the response to the cries of the needy, the individuals are transformed into ecclesial subjects and a koinonia of love and life in Christ, which is itself the Church as a reality that is active in the world. The liturgy, whether of any of the sacraments or the communal prayers of the Church, reflects this turn to an awakening to the call and summon in Christ that the baptized are oriented towards. It is a type of “eucharistic consciousness” through which “the church [experiences] the reality that it [is] the eschatological body of Christ, united to him through the Spirit” (Zizioulas 2001; Papanikolaou 2003, pp. 357–85; Cortez 2016, pp. 166–67). The eucharistic consciousness is itself a disruptive experience that awakens the Christian to the mission of Christ. In the words of Roger Haight, “the church is most fully itself when it becomes a community shaped by the values of Jesus which it displays to the world by working for their realization” (Haight 2008, p. 112).

Furthermore, the turn to a eucharistic consciousness is ritualized by the sacramental enactment of exorcism in the celebration of the Sacrament of Baptism to bring about the disruption of the reign of Satan over the Adamic body in order to claim the gift of the Christlike humanity. As noted in a letter by John the Deacon to Senarius, a Roman nobleman around 500 C.E.,

“He [the catechumen] is instructed through the Church’s ministry, by the blessing of one laying his hand [upon his head], that he may know who he is and who he shall be: in other words, that from being one of the damned he becomes holy, from unrighteousness he appears as righteous, and finally, from being a servant he becomes a son: so that a man [person] whose first parentage brought him perdition is restored by the gift of a second parentage, and becomes the possessor of a father’s inheritance. He receives therefore exsufflation and exorcism, in order that the devil may be put to flight and an entrance prepared for Christ our God: so that being delivered from the power of darkness he may be translated to the kingdom [Col. 1.13] of the glory of love of God: so that a man [person] who till recently had been a vessel of Satan becomes now a dwelling of the Saviour. And so he receives exsufflation, because the old deceiver merits such ignominy. …”

(Whitaker 1970, pp. 155–58).

The point for carrying out exorcism in the liturgical celebration of the Sacrament of Baptism is to bring about a break from the Adamic humanity and the propensity towards death to allow for a turn towards, and an embrace of, the gift of the new humanity in Christ. But this new humanity in Christ is a relational humanity. As Marc Cortez and John Zizioulas argue, “a person is something that can only emerge through relationship, ‘it is an ‘I’ that can exist only as long as it relates to a ‘thou’ which affirms its existence and its otherness’” (Cortez 2016, p. 169; Zizioulas 2006, p. 9). This relational orientation to the other is also constituted in freedom. This is because, the Adamic humanity is held captive by sin and the will of the devil to bring about the reign of evil both in the world and in the heart of the individual. On the other hand, the gift of the new humanity in Christ is itself constituted in freedom to allow for God’s gift to be fully realized. Only a free God can bring about the gift that instantiates freedom. Consequently, the gift of the new humanity in Christ is itself a personhood crafted in freedom (Cortez 2016, p. 169). Also, if this crafting of the new humanity in Christ occurs in the domain of the koinonia that exists within the body of Christ as church, then the Church itself is a sacrament of the ritualization of freedom that is instantiated in the new humanity one receives through the rituals of baptism. If this is the case, then, the Church serves as a disruptive grace that brings about a break from the trappings of Adamic humanity to allow for the reception and the nurturing of the Christlike humanity gifted to its members by Christ himself. As noted by Küng, “… the Church as the fellowship of believers is not just the object of faith: it is at the same time the sphere, the home of faith. The faith of the individual is stimulated and developed, is constantly embraced and supported by the faith of the community. In this way the individual’s faith shares in the community’s faith and in the common truth” (Küng 1967, p. 34). Again, it is important to note here that if the baptized shares in the faith of the Church, then the baptized, who embodies the Christlike humanity is also a vehicle of disruptive grace in the world. Here, Küng is again relevant. By noting that “the Church does not exist as an objective entity independently of the individual’s act of faith”, the Church in the world as a disruptive vehicle that instantiates God’s life for all is realized through the active works of life for all (Küng 1967, p. 34). In other words, the baptized is the Church in the world bringing about, and announcing the Good News to all in the world. This perspective is clearly enunciated in the Decree on the Apostolate of the Lay People by the Second Vatican Council, when it teaches that “the church was founded so that by spreading Christ’s kingdom throughout the world to the glory of God the Father, every man and woman may share in the saving work of redemption, and so that through them the entire world may be truly directed towards Christ” (Second Vatican Council 1965a, #2).

Again, if the Church is an embodiment of the grace of disruption that is enacted in and through the sacraments, then the sacraments are meant to produce disruptive humanities in Christ in fidelity to the incarnated Christ who is God’s disruptive grace of intimacy with creation. This is where the sacramental humanity that the word “Christian” that is instantiated in a believer is meant to orient the one who embodies such an identity towards a social justice consciousness. Hence, Gaudium et Spes stresses the social responsibility of the Church in the world, and by default of all who embrace Christianity in the world. After all, as recipients of the new humanity in Christ, a Christian, in fidelity to Christ’s mission in the world, must also affirm the following words of Christ defining his earthly ministry—“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord” (The New American Bible 1998, Lk. 4:18-19). As Isaac S. Villegas rightly notes, “the incarnation is a call to notice where the Spirit surprises us with God’s presence” (Villegas 2021). This surprise is found in us being “in solidarity with and to become conspirators with the One whose justice is liberation from the economic, political, and social patterns that are destroying life” (Villegas 2021).

The incarnation is itself an affirmation of a social justice consciousness. This truth is not lost in the accounts of the angelic visits to Mary by Angel Gabriel (The New American Bible 1998, Lk. 1:26–38). Finding favor with God is how God uses the powerless ones of history to instantiate the disruptive grace of salvation. In fact, powerlessness is itself a disruptive mode of being in the world, which becomes the source and means by which God’s disruptive grace is encountered and experienced in a world of injustices and marginalities. The existence of Jesus Christ in a social world points to a disruptive consciousness that evokes an awakening to social justice. Nathaniel’s comment to Philip stating the obvious that Jesus is a nobody and from a nobody place is telling. “Can anything good come from Nazareth” (The New American Bible 1998, Jn. 1:46) becomes the sacramental link into the mystery of encounter and surprise that God instantiates in the life and ministry of Jesus. Hence, Philip’s response—“Come and see” (1:47). The one whom Nathaniel has reduced to being a nobody is himself the one who has the gift of recognition of the dignity inherent in a person, a gift that Nathaniel is unable to embody yet. Hence, the Johannine gospel notes that “Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him and said of him, ‘Here is a true Israelite. …” (The New American Bible 1998, Jn. 1:47). Shocked by the knowledge of Jesus and the fact that Jesus whom he has reduced to being a nobody knows him, Nathaniel probes Jesus to inquire into how Jesus got to know him. “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree. … You will see greater things than this… (The New American Bible 1998, 1:48–51).

In the world where inequality prevails, those without power are reduced to nobodies and are without recognition. They are reduced to living in the shadows that erasing hegemonies of power produce. In the discourse among Nathaniel, Philip, and Jesus, one notices that God locates the antidote of the unethical hegemony of power within the existence of those who have been reduced to being nobodies. Thus, being a nobody is itself a graced disruption in a world of power matrix. It is also the way by which God ritualizes the sacramental mediation of salvation for those held captive by the matrix operating in such a world that produces marginalities and inequalities. In opposition to the world of unhealthy use of power, the new humanity in Christ is itself an embrace of being a nobody. This unassuming state of being at the margins is where the saturated response to hegemonies plays out and it is the antidote for injustice, pride, and inequality. Thus, the Church is the home of the God–human and his followers who are called to be nobodies as an ethical response to a culture of erasures and marginalities playing out in the world or wherever such a system operates, even within the Church itself as a community of saints and sinners. In the next section of this work, I intend to show how black bodies are themselves sacramental reflections of the grace of disruption that can awaken those living under the influence of unethical expressions of power.

5. Black Bodies as Saturated Grace of Disruption: Towards a Prophetic Turn for New Imaginations

Black bodies are sacramental icons that serve as epiphanic channels of encounter with the apophatic God who desires to encounter humanity. It is this desire of the hidden God that makes for the possibility for black bodies to serve as God’s immanence of proximity in a world that is in need of divine encounters. Do black bodies have a monopoly of making immanent the apophatic God in our world? I respond with a strong no. In fact, in a world that is in need of encounter with God, those who are reduced to the peripheries of our world are themselves the icons of epiphanic encounters that God uses to mediate the gap between God’s hiddenness or transcendence and God’s desire to encounter and make right that which is alienating and reducing of the flourishing of human or non-human life in the world. That said, in today’s world, blackness has been reduced to a synonym of marginalities and peripheries. Whether it is in the social world where race and its weaponization are embraced, or in a world where gender is given a hierarchy of having the capacity to embody full humanity, or even in the domain of producing social wealth, blackness and all that constitutes its embodiment are reduced to the footnotes of social life. It is because of this reality that one can insist that a turn to blackness is itself a form of anamnesis—a kenotic re-membering—that mediates the centering of the fullness of God’s desire for humanity when God first proclaimed humanity to be good!

To speak of black bodies as sacramental icons mediating revelations of God that serve as divine summon to encounter is to call attention to the role of sacraments in the imagination of a faith people. Just as the Christian sacraments are themselves symbols that participate in the encounters they mediate between God and humans, black bodies participate in the gift of wholeness that their embodiment reveals for humanity. This point needs some engagement.

The production of meaning surrounding blackness in a racialized world points to inherent contradictions. First, to speak of blackness as that which is not fully human as the racial project of the western world has defined is to produce a vision of the human that is reactive always, and thus embodies all of the inherent pathologies that fear produces. For example, the othering of those given the label “black” in the world where whiteness is fully embraced as the locus of full humanity is to instantiate a humanity that is always reacting to or shaped by the fear of not slipping into the world of otherness to which blackness has been relegated. Consequently, the racial project diminishes all persons, whether they are the ones articulating the contours of the project or those who are relegated to the domain of otherness as intended by the project. Second, if white bodies are themselves recipients of full humanity and the meaning of whiteness must always point to a referential being or object that is not white, then whiteness is never complete without its referential contradictions. Thus, in no way can white bodies embody full humanity when what is meant to be white instantiates blackness as its kryptonite reality. In this case, freedom is not freedom to be, but freedom to work towards not being black. It makes anxiety an existential condition for being human because all that the human can hope to become is to work at not being the other instead of working to be the fullness of the self that is not defined by existential psychoses, in the different ways they manifest themselves. Third, if blackness is to be salvaged and recognized as human, it must not follow the same logical process that produced it and its binary opposite—whiteness. This point is not lost in how the black church has mostly failed in its attempt to rearticulate the sense of the human when it locates its preference for heterosexuality and maleness as the symbols of moral authority in the social world of black persons. To address this weakness in the black church’s imagination, black women rose up to articulate a womanist theology that attempts to disrupt black imagination to allow for difference and a rainbow tapestry of what it means to be human. A similar approach has also occurred in the world of queerness that insists on making further room for a rich imagination of the human condition that goes beyond the binaries of male and female or heterosexuality and homosexuality.

To speak of black bodies as sacramental icons mediating an epiphanic encounter with God is to turn to a new language and a new imaginative field where new meanings must be constructed. It means that blackness must be constructed in a new horizon that is trans-binary and that allows for a type of kenotic hermeneutic in order for a new vision of the human to be birthed. By this, I mean that blackness must not be seen as opposed to whiteness. Both of them, in their current states of sense making are deficient. They both serve as sources of limitation to each other. Blackness is a rebellious mode of being that brings violence to the psyche of whiteness. Whiteness also does the same to blackness. These are not healthy modes of being in the world. It should be noted also that both whiteness and blackness produce not just identities but cultural worlds that are themselves rooted in social pathologies. All that is used in those social worlds help to instantiate the inherent pathologies that blackness and whiteness embody. Though Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki shed light on how white persons see black persons in America’s social spaces as embodying cultural signifiers that point to an embodiment of “contradictory mixture of danger/pollution and acceptability”, the same can be said of how black persons who do not interrogate the label, blackness, see or encounter white persons (Entman and Rojecki 2000, p. 51). The vision of the other in a racialized society is always depicted by scarcity. The other is seen as a threat to the humanity that the subject embodies. The other is defined as a source of distraction and waste, which prevents the subject from experiencing a sense of abundance and flourishing. When the one being otherized internalizes the stereotypes given to her as a social group or as individuals, their vision of self or of the social group they belong to will essentially replicate the pathologies inherent in those stereotypes. This is the point Howard W. French clearly expresses when she writes about the relationship that exists between African Americans and Africans in the social psyche of the United States. In his words,

For a very long time in the twentieth century, during the Jim Crow years in particular, African Americans were encouraged to shun the idea of a connection to Africa, to think poorly of Africa—to celebrate traits in themselves, which supposedly distanced themselves from Africa, in other words, to think of themselves as more cultured, more Christian, more White, more civilized than Africans and therefore to look at ‘Africanness’ as a matter of shame or a kind of taint that needed to be avoided (Amaize 2021).

In an insightful work written by Alden Young, attention is given to how “contemporary Afro-pessimist intellectuals argue that the Middle Passage means Africans and members of the African diaspora have forgotten one another”. Young argues that this view is grounded in the fact that “Black American intellectuals in the 1990s, fueled by disappointment in the performance of postcolonial states and a growing sense that slavery and colonialism were not analogous to one another” argued for a distancing from allying themselves with their African counterparts (Young 2022). Could Afro-pessimism be a marginal view defining how African Americans see Africans? I ask this question because of the recent findings of the Pew Research. Based on its findings, it concludes the following:

A significant share of Black Americans also say that when something happens to Black people in their local communities, across the nation or around the globe, it affects what happens in their own lives, highlighting a sense of connectedness. Black Americans say this even as they have diverse experiences and come from an array of backgrounds.

Even so, Black adults who say being Black is important to their sense of self are more likely than other Black adults to feel connected to other groups of Black people. They are also more likely to feel that what happens to Black people inside and outside the United States affects what happens in their own lives. These findings emerge from an extensive new survey of Black U.S. adults conducted by Pew Research Center

(Cox and Tamir 2022).

Furthermore, African perspectives of African Americans embody scarce historicities and incomplete narratives. The fact that many African nations have not taken seriously the realities defining all the major slave trades that occurred in Africa (Trans-Nile; Trans-Sahara; Trans-Mediterranean; and Trans-Atlantic) has led to a bankrupt consciousness of what it means to be Black or of African descent outside of the borders of Africa and being a descendant of victims of these slave trades. Jennifer Ludden and Michel Martin put this well in their interrogation of Ghanaians and their attitude towards African Americans. In their words: “One castle director said Ghanaians are taught about slavery through an economic prism, as part of the 18th and 19th century ‘triangle trade’ across the Atlantic. He said Ghanaians’ view of blacks in America came mostly through the media—they saw rich movie and music stars, and had little understanding of the daily racism many African Americans endure—and so, they just did not get why these Americans felt so bad about these slave castles” (Ludden and Martin 2009). The blame cannot be placed solely on United States media outlets. Africans also need to educate themselves on the complex realities defining the enslavement of Africans for economic gains in other parts of the world. Such education is not intended to shame the descendants of the those who profited from such trades. Rather, it ought to help Africans to understand how socially, such events became an accepted venture and to ensure that it does not repeat itself again in the future.

Whether as black persons living in the Americas, other continents, or even in Africa, blackness must be reimagined to allow for its possibility to embody an iconic pathway for mediating the sacramental grace of encounters with God in the self and with God who is present in others as well. This reimagination must address the following as it grounds itself in a new language and a new sphere of meaning making in our social world. First, black bodies evoke a turn to the concrete and away from the intangible abstract that does nothing to improve the human condition except for a form of intellectual escape from the real world. As Lawler notes, “a sign communicates abstract, objective meaning, whereas a symbol communicates living, subjective meaning. A symbol has a subjective dynamism that exerts a powerful attraction and fascination on the individual” (Lawler 1987, p. 19). Furthermore, besides making present what they symbolize, symbols are also multivocal. A symbol “‘is characterized not by its un[i]formity but by its versatility. It is not rigid or inflexible but mobile.’ The single, fixed meaning of a simple sign is communicated clearly and distinctly and predominantly intellectually. The many, fluid meanings of a symbol are communicated confusedly, that is, fused together, not only intellectually but also affectively. It is for this reason that symbols are infinitely richer, both in meanings and in power, than simple signs” (Lawler 1987, p. 18).

Keeping the insightful distinction made by Lawler between sign and symbol in mind, one can conclude that the vision of the human that has been constructed in a racialized social world like the West has these realities playing out. While white bodies are seen to be an embodiment of clarity and meaning, the same cannot be said of black bodies in such a social world. Where whiteness evokes a turn to the intellectual and a preference for the abstract, blackness evokes the messiness of the mundane. It is an embodiment of the absurd, or the confusion that exists in the polyphonic domain of speech. By this, I mean that blackness is seen as the instantiation of a polyglottic embodiment that at best leads to confusion. This is best validated by the British and Portuguese explorers who reduced the rich social encounters for peacebuilding and social harmony among precolonial African societies as palaver—a term that evokes linguistic gibberish and meaninglessness (Aihiokhai 2023, p. 235). In this case, what cannot be reduced to a simple narrative or cognitive closure is condemned to the domain of confusion, a disorder, and outside of the borders of civilization. But palaver itself speaks to the complexities defining the human condition as a being not made to be a sign that is anemic and scarce of meanings. Rather, to be human is to be an embodiment of meanings—a saturated symbol that must also be encountered for exactly that—a being that escapes all attempts of reductions whether in relationality or in the art of knowledge production (Aihiokhai 2023, p. 224).

Even though black bodies are defined as messy or as imbibed with paradoxes, one can conclude that it is because of this reality that they serve as symbolic mediators of sacramental grace of encounter with God both in the self and in proximity to others. For this to be the case, a deliberate delinking of black bodies from the intended meaning given to it in a racialized social world must first occur. This means that new grounds of meaning must be the norm. How can this be done? I argue that a deliberate shift from an abstract engagement with the question of what it means to be human must be the starting place. Rather than speak in abstract terms of how we are humans and what constitutes our humanity, the focus must be existential. How we experience our bodies in the concrete historicities defining the social worlds where we exist as embodied creatures must be the locus of inquiry. By doing this, the retrieval of the symbolic as a turn to the subjective, which, in turn, evokes relationality, will be realized. As James Cone noted, this retrieval of a rich hermeneutic on blackness is possible within a rich theological reflection that is intentional at claiming a broader vision of the omnipotent power of God who can free both black bodies and white bodies from the dominating narratives of racism (Cone 2010, p. 86). In other words, as creatures of God, God’s covenantal relationship with humanity is the grounds for reimagining the content of blackness and the upending of all structures of marginality, racism included.

Symbols are not just about being able to exude saturated meanings, they instantiate a turn to solidarity as well. If the incarnate Christ is God’s symbol in the world, then Christ is a source of solidarity between God and creation. This sense of solidarity is itself a bridgebuilding venture that brings about proximity among all parties—the symbolic object or body and the referential point it is linked to in order to allow for those who embrace or use that symbol to enter into a relationship with the referential being. Thus, black bodies, as symbolic bodies, are themselves loci of divine-human solidarity both in the social world of encounters and in the locus of the self as a subjective person who is oriented towards relationality. This understanding of black bodies as symbols of solidarity frees blackness from the pathologies inherent in its construction in a racialized world. Where insularity defines existence in a racialized world, in the sacramental understanding of black bodies as mediative symbols of God’s grace for themselves and for others, a new understanding of the human condition is realized: one that opens up the human person to encounter otherness in all its manifestations and summons.

In the words of Emile Benveniste, “we never see human beings separate from language and we never see them inventing it. We never encounter human beings reduced to themselves and contriving to conceive the existence of other human beings. What we find in the world are speaking human beings speaking to other human beings, and language teaches us the very definition of human being” (Benveniste 1971, p. 259). To buttress this point, Chauvet concludes that “one cannot be a human being without language” (Chauvet 2001, p. 7). To think is to think within the world of language. But I must warn here that my engagement with language as the locus of understanding the human person must never be understood within the western need for clarity. Thus, language is not simply a medium for attaining clarity. It can also be a path for holding in place the complexities inherent in meaning making. For example, while a prose may generally be understood in a particular manner, poetic expressions validate the complexities and diverse retrievals of meaning by the reader. This said, symbols are also like language. To be human is to be crafted in the world of the symbolic. Christ is God’s symbol in the world that mediates a plenitude of meaning and revelation for the world. Since humans, through Baptism, are themselves icons of the incarnate Christ, they are also symbols that mediate a plenitude of meaning and revelation for themselves and for others. In relation to black bodies, as symbols that instantiate sacramental life of God in the social world, they serve as linguistic encounters and bridges of sociality. In other words, black bodies invalidate insularity as a mode of being to allow for a people consciousness. In the religious context, it is to facilitate the grace of koinonia for all where the fullness of the gift of life is experienced.

Just as language not only creates the human condition as a being oriented towards sociality, it can also be argued that language serves as a pathway for knowing. Again, I am conscious of the temptation to slip into the domain of knowing as a linear process that leads to clarity. This is false and misleading. Rather, I am appropriating the polyphonic consciousness that accounts for complexities and holding in place the complexities themselves. Similarly, symbols serve not only as the loci for articulating the human condition but as the way of being human and mediating all that opens up when one probes into what constitutes the human condition. This said, I appropriate the caution expressed by Lawler who argues that “Symbol, then is a way of knowing. But it is not a way of knowing in clear and distinct Cartesian ideas. The meanings mediated in symbols are not objectively defined and detailed. Rather they are subjectively and confusedly grasped, so that the knowledge resulting from them seems vague and opaque. But it is vague and opaque not in the sense that its meaning is obscure or that it is empty of meaning, but rather in the sense that its depth of meaning is unfathomable” (Lawler 1987, p. 19). The fact that black bodies are themselves symbols saturated with meaning points to the truth that any attempt to reduce them to a single narrative that also evokes social predictabilities will lead to a false outcome. Thus, rather than speak of knowing black bodies as embodying a lack or conditioned to exist only in the peripheral world as defined by racial biases, knowledge of black bodies resides in the domain of the continuum. Black bodies exist as epiphanies of meaning that must constantly be encountered in order to appreciate their relevance in our social world. Also, they help to foster a richer understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism. In Baptism, one becomes a Christian, a child of God, and a member of the church. However, none of these is to be understood as realized in a moment with a particular meaning that can be known exhaustively. The opposite is the case. Becoming a Christian is not a badge to be worn. Rather, it is a summon to live in a manner that one becomes an icon of the God–human in the world by being a bridge for encounters and for mediating abundant life for all. By being a child of God, one is invited to be a symbol of theosis for a world that is in need of saturated encounters with God who divinizes all that is in proximity to it. Through a Christian’s relationship, all that is encountered ought to be transformed to embody in themselves the divine-creation qualities. By being a member of the Church, the baptized is rescued from an existence of insularity to allow for being a people. To be a people is never realized in isolation from otherness. Rather, it is through a deliberate turn to sociality that allows for existential proximity to otherness and embodying an ethical consciousness of being a “we” person, rather than only an “I” person, that one can thus symbolize the markers of being a member of the people of God that the Church serves as the locus for its realization.

Similarly, black bodies reflect what the Sacrament of Baptism does in its symbolic agency as a sacramental ritual for the Church. The sacramental symbol for baptism is itself common and easily accessible because of its ordinariness. Water can be found anywhere. It does not discriminate as to who it nourishes. It participates in the life of the ones it nourishes just as symbols participate in the meaning they mediate. Black bodies have been reduced to the peripheral world. They are ordinary bodies. They are not protected by the laws of racial hierarchies in a racialized world. Christ sacramentalizes water as a symbol for mediating the grace inherent in Baptism. The Christ of Nazareth, who was born in a place that is ordinary and is also not protected by state power, associates Itself with black bodies because of their social ordinariness to allow for accessibility and proximity for others who seek transformative encounters. This solidarity with black bodies is intended to frustrate black bodies from embracing salvific elitism. To be black is not to be privileged. Rather, it is to be ordinary in the full sense of the word. It is to embody a kenotic way of being that allows for the replenishment from the kenotic Christ who has also emptied himself to allow for solidarity with all of humanity. Thus, to be black is to be open to otherness and to be invitational in a manner that all who encounter one can experience abundant life as well as be transformed to also be kenotic beings themselves.

This turn to kenosis that the ordinariness of black bodies exude is itself a prophetic response to anyone who appropriates insularity as a mode of being in the world or those who uphold ideologies that fragment other persons, be they sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, tribalism, unhealthy nationalism, or even religious exclusivism. Baptism creates a human being according to the humanity of Christ, which is a humanity that is open to otherness and saturated with hospitality for all to experience. It is not to embody any form of supremacy. This new humanity in Christ is achieved or best realized only as a continuum that is grounded in the concrete day-to-day existence and encounters of the baptized in the world. It is not abstract. Similarly, one can argue that black bodies are bodies-in-becoming. This means that to be black in Christ is to take seriously discipleship in Christ that calls for full surrender to Christ and openness to surprise and the unfamiliar that play out when otherness is encountered.

This leads to another reality defining symbols. Symbols, though mediate opaque meanings, they allow for holding in place the paradoxical. Because symbols mediate the disruptive in the world of the familiar, its ability to hold captive the imagination of the one who encounters them is enacted based on the fact that it embodies the familiar as well as the unfamiliar. In other words, symbols are ordinary in their proximity to our senses. We encounter them on a daily basis. We get used to them. They are not alien to our world. However, their symbolic power resides in their ability to be transcendent. In their constitution lies an openness to the transcendent and to mediate that transcendent in an immanent manner. This was what Nathaniel was alluding to when he spoke of Jesus as coming from an ordinary place and thus being an ordinary person. Jesus was ordinary. He was familiar. After all, everyone knows where his parents are from. He is the son of a carpenter. Yet, within all that lies a turn to the transcendent, the apophatic dimension of Jesus. In his familiarity lies the hidden and the unfamiliar—the divine. While the familiar is common to the senses, the unfamiliar, the apophatic, functions as a summon to encounter in a deeper manner. It is a higher level of encounter that evokes in the one who gazes at the symbol a form of epistemic and existential surrender that allows for the hidden to become revealed. The apophatic becomes a revealing immanent reality. When Jesus tells Nathaniel to come and see, he is inviting him to move from the level of the familiar into the deeper level of encounter where the divine side of Jesus is fully ritualized. But this depth where encounter goes beyond the domain of judgement (sense making) embodies a prophetic turn that allows for the shattering of unhealthy biases (meaning making). This shattering of previously held biases gives way for a deeper level of intimacy that continues to draw closer and closer to the referential reality that the symbol is serving as a participatory bridge. This process is a continuum. The epiphanic revelation of the hidden into the domain of the cataphatic gives way to another shattering of biases to allow for more surrender of the self to the experience to allow for the apophatic to draw closer the subject more into the relationship (Heidegger 1962, p. 320), thus leading to authenticity and the retrieval of the sense of self as a subjective being for the other (Cortez 2016, p. 169; Zizioulas 2006, p. 9). The prophetic dimension allows for the subject to let go of the old ways of being to allow for new ways and to begin to participate in the life of God that is a life meant to be shared with others without exception—becoming a eucharistic person (Zizioulas 2001; Papanikolaou 2003, pp. 357–85; Cortez 2016, pp. 166–67). Negative biases give way to positive affirmation that serve as the voice of radical inclusivity for all. Lawler states this well when he writes: “A symbol is charged with many meanings, and once it has caused an interpreter to take account of its many meanings, its work still continues. For there is always more depth of meaning to be uncovered in it, more questions to be asked of it, because the abundance and richness of its meanings are inexhaustible. The human mind can never get to the bottom of a symbol and be done with it. … A symbol, any symbol, is mysterious” (Lawler 1987, pp. 21–22).

Since black bodies are symbols of encounter with the divine, they are themselves saturated with meanings. Their ability to mediate saturated meanings resides in their embrace of being ordinary. Symbols are ordinary. They are common. There are not extraordinary. It is their ordinariness that allows them to embody the disruptive effect and power over those who encounter them. They become most effective in this disruptive ability when those encountering them reduce their ordinariness to being meaningless. They have the power and efficacy of surprise because they mediate that which is beyond them. They ritualize the process of temporality that allows for the attainment of authenticity because of their power to be disruptive of the status quo (Heidegger 1962, p. 377). Nathaniel was shocked to find out that the so-called ordinary Jesus that he has reduced to being incapable of any meaningful power to transform becomes the one who conquers death by his resurrection; who raises the dead back to life; who heals the sick; who feeds the hungry; and who casts out demons. Similarly, the power of black bodies as symbolic media of divine grace in the world resides in their ordinariness. They are not just bodies. They are black bodies. It is their blackness in a world that is racialized that serves as the condition for the prophetic power of transformation when they are encountered by those who uphold racial biases. Thinking with Cone, “we believe, then that we can learn more about God, and therefore about human nature, by studying blacks as they get ready to ‘do their thing’ than by reading some erudite discourse on human nature … God in Jesus meets us in the situation of our oppressed condition and tells us not only who God is and God is doing about our liberation, but also who we are and what we must do about white racism. If blacks can take Christology seriously, then it follows that the meaning of our anthropology is also found in and through our oppressed condition, …” (Cone 2010, p. 90). Embracing their blackness and living fully as bodies saturated with relationality can allow black bodies to be authentic. Only in this authenticity does the sacramental mediation of the grace of conversion occur for those held captive by racial biases. As Andrew Prevot notes, “for black people, as for everyone, ‘authenticity’ does not mean performing certain dubious roles assigned to their race; it means living freely in their bodies” (Prevot 2017, p. 81). This turn to authenticity is not driven by a preference for insularity. In fact, racism affirms insularity. It reduces humans to categories that are never intended to form a pluriform social world. Rather, it insists on the unbridgeable uniqueness of persons categorized by racial preferences and markers. But a turn to authenticity is defined by a defiance of the status quo and an insistence on going beyond the boundaries while insisting on encounters and connections. Through the reimagining of blackness as a color that is not formed to be uniquely different; rather, it is a color that validates the right to exist by other colors, as well as its link to other colors. Authenticity is thus able to transcend the world of insularity. Consequently, black in black bodies is intended to be a symbolic marker for relationship building and exclusionary existence.

The insistence on black bodies to embody authenticity by redefining blackness calls for a new theological language that speaks of the sacraments, the Church, God, and the human person. Such a language must necessarily imbibe the disruptive in such a manner that a shift occurs from a monologue to a multiplicity of discourses that point to a polyglottic preference. In this way, the process of imagining grace and the theological attempt to explain it clearly, and to show how and when the divine mediation occurs as though it had to do with turning on and off a switch is abandoned. Just as symbols dazzle our imagination and force us to be comfortable with vagueness, our theological imaginations ought to be comfortable with the mysterious and the disruptive. The paradoxical is embraced as a way of encountering a transcendent God who is also immanent—a God that is as hidden as It is revealed. The same is the case with our imagination of the human person. Black bodies help to shatter the anemic narrative coded in the color black. Their insistence on living and claiming their ordinariness as the locus of the saturated grace of encounter serves as the disruptive effect on the psyches of all, especially on those who uphold racial biases. This turn to being ordinary that their blackness instantiates is the very link black bodies have to Christ who is also ordinary by being from Nazareth. However, I repeat, it is not meant to be insular. Jesus transgressed the worlds of the so-called important people by embodying the markers of Nazareth. I want to imagine Jesus as speaking Aramaic with the accent from Nazareth. I want to imagine him dressing like someone from such an insignificant place. Yet, he brought all these to his encounters with those with social and political power. He encountered the Roman centurion who embodies imperial power and transforms him by healing his servant while always maintaining his ordinariness as a person from Nazareth (The New American Bible 1998, Lk. 7:1–10). He dines with Zacchaeus the Tax Collector who has economic power and has social status in Judaea while embodying the markers of Nazareth from where ordinary people come from (The New American Bible 1998, Lk 19:1–10). What these tell us is that the power to transform others lies in one being ordinary. In a racialized world, being black is to be ordinary. In a sexist world, being a woman is to be ordinary. In a xenophobic world, being a migrant is to be ordinary. It is also to be connected with Jesus who is the source of our salvation. This proximity to Jesus, while being comfortable with being ordinary, is the media for the sacramental mediation of the grace of transformation, which is itself disruptive in all its effects on the psyche of those who encounter the symbolic, that is, those who are at the margins. In a racialized world, it is persons who are defined to be outside of the claim to flourishing. Hence, the full humanity of Christ is a prophetic stance of option for the poor. In the words of Cone: “Jesus is not a human being for all persons; he is a human being for oppressed persons, whose identity is made known in and through their liberation. Therefore our definition of the human being must be limited to what it means to be liberated from human oppression. Any other approach fails to recognize the reality of suffering in an inhuman society” (Cone 2010, p. 91).

6. Conclusions

Black bodies, as sacramental symbols of the disruptive grace that leads to transformation, must necessarily lead to a healthier way of speaking of the human person as a subject. Individualism is itself the condition of the anemia of a sign or an idol that can only transmit one meaning. It sees the world as essentially lacking and limited. Consequently, it attempts to be self-centered and to seek its own interest at the expense of the common good. On the other hand, the subjective is itself crafted in the world of relationality. It instantiates sociality and an invitation to engage. In fact, the subjective is derived from the world of connections and solidarity. This solidarity is not initiated in the world of the abstract; rather, it is crafted in the world of the senses or the messiness of human existence. As stated earlier in this work, even though the human being, at its core, is a being oriented towards encounter, the fullness of their humanity as persons who embody “authenticity” (Heidegger 1962, pp. 130, 160), “proximity as care for the other” (Levinas 1993, p. 94), and “subjectivity that is eucharistic” (Zizioulas 2006, p. 9) is realized through their actualization of hospitality, care, and living for the wellbeing of others. In a racialized world, where racism favors white bodies and white interests at the expense of that which is not white, black bodies, in their concreteness as bodies living in the here and now, evoke solidarity in the ones who encounter them through their senses. To see the plight of a hungry, homeless, poor black child is to be met with a disruptive vision that shatters the mausoleum beauty of a social world of wealth and privilege where the benefactors of racism reside. It is for the residents of Beverly Hills to encounter the residents of Skid Row who are houseless and battling with different types of addiction. The power of such an image resides in its ability to draw one to a domain where new questions arise: questions like what type of society have we created that allows for a few to enjoy our collective wealth at the expense of the flourishing of others?

Again, authenticity in the subject evokes authenticity in the other. By living truly in their freedom as black bodies, the white body is transformed and summoned to embody authenticity as well. To respond differently is to reject authenticity and to embrace idolatrous ways of living that continue to instantiate racism and economic injustice. This is the case with the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Lucan account (The New American Bible, Luke 10: 25–37), as stated earlier in this work. The victim laying on the side of the road was able to draw the Samaritan into an encounter that led to his embrace of the grace to care for another as their neighbor not by the logic of his argument, but rather through their embodied vulnerability, which instantiated the symbolic invitation and the mediation of the sacramental summon to the Samaritan to be their neighbor. To be a neighbor is to be an icon that exudes invitation to encounter the other in whom God is fully present, waiting to be experienced as a God of fellowship. Black bodies are bodies that invite us to encounter each other in the messiness of our lives. This is because black bodies are bodies that exude neighborliness through which God is encountered and also through which one derives their subjectivity as an invitation to be ethically conscious. This form of encounter is not cerebral. It is embodied. It is messy. It is disruptive. It also leads to new ways of thinking of our world and acting differently to bring about a new social order where justice reigns supreme. In this manner, to speak of the self as a subject is to always instantiate the claim to one’s time, one’s resources, and one’s intellect by the other whose embodiment is a statement and also an invitation to embrace disruption as a source of solidarity that leads to self-transformation as well.

Again, black bodies are not just pointers to a better world. They participate in what they mediate. If they lead us to God, it is because they are already participating in the life of God. Their neighborly quality is itself an instantiation of divine invitation to those whose subjectivity is grounded in an ethical consciousness of care for the other. As argued earlier in this work, the Good Samaritan derives his ethical identity as a Good Samaritan not in insularity, but only through the gift of invitation to embrace the victim on the road whose reality is itself a neighborly invitation to embrace fellowship (koinonia) with God in and through them.

Black bodies as being ordinary, just as Jesus of Nazareth was ordinary, is how their participation as media of the grace of fellowship for those who derive their subjectivity as an ethical connection with others is realized. Consequently, if black bodies bring about the transformation of others, it is because they are themselves being transformed. To be a sacramental symbol is to experience the effect of the grace that one, as a symbol, mediates for others. This ability to participate links the symbolic agent to the community or persons it mediates meaning for. Black bodies, as sacramental symbols for and in the Church, serve as agents intended to expand the vision of church for all. They expand the borders of the Church to include the peripheral world as well. Again, their participation serves as a prophetic reminder for the Church to never forget how it is constituted. It is meant to be a messy church with many perspectives, different experiences, and, most especially, many vocations. Black bodies can help the Church to reject an elitist way of being in the world. They are to help the Church to be a church of the poor until that time when poverty is completely eradicated in our world. They are also meant to help the Church to reject all forms of discrimination, whether of race, or economic status, because to be church is to be pluralistic and to speak in a polyphonic manner.

The power of grace is that it brings about a transformation that is not intended to retain the old ways of being. This means that both that which serves as the sacramental symbol and those who encounter it are all transformed in order for them to embody a new way of being in the world. Similarly, black bodies, if they serve as sacramental symbols for transformation by mediating a disruptive awakening for others, must necessarily be transformed themselves. This means that they must be open to new identities and meanings that transcend the inherent pathologies that blackness evokes. They must also reject any temptation to see white bodies as loci of hate. The transformation ought to lead to a consciousness of solidarity that affirms the dignities of all persons. By doing this, a deliberate shift is made from the injurious biases coded in our collective sense making world that has weaponized racial identities to allow for a turn to meaning making that allows for a new way of seeing each person as an embodiment of saturated meaning and goodness. As bodies with saturated meaning and goodness, the sight of each other is an invitation encounter and to be in fellowship. Simply stated, to see each other is to receive the gift of knowledge of the self and of the other, but such knowledge is limited because there is still more to know of the self and of the other.

Finally, in this work, I have achieved the following. I offered a critical response to the question “how can one conceive of black bodies in a world defined by systems of erasure that directly affect black persons and their embodied agencies?”. In doing this, I have appropriated a constructive theological approach that is intentionally interdisciplinary. I have probed deeper into ways that subjectivity arises through encounters with the other, who mediates not just the subjective identity for the one encountering it, but the grounding of that subjectivity within the domain of ethics. In doing this, I have argued that the ethical turn is the pathway for realizing one’s full humanity. Rather than speak in abstraction, I have grounded the work in the existential realities of black bodies in the world and how such bodies serve as icons of encounters that mediate holistic humanity for themselves and for those who encounter them. I have shown how black bodies can do this for the Church, since the Church is itself a sacramental gift of fellowship that arises through the invitation of Christ to all who follow him. Rather than follow an abstract Christ, black bodies serve as an epiphany of Christ both in the Church and in the world where the Church manifests its mission and derives its identity through a fellowship of love and care for all.