I think I've described my idea of "The disassembly of God" - how it was spurred on by a sermon where a preacher used a scripture for completion of the temple to describe raising money for a gym. It was a very conservative church - the kind of place that has successfully engineered an iron-tight assurance that they've acquired the best rooms in heaven [more godly than God]. I should say, that this assertion is simply the outgrowth of being certain about oneself but not about others [because they meet in different buildings and have different kinds of worship]. What is striking is how heretical - or I should say sub-heretical [because Marcion Valentinus Servetus - all those guys could care less about building a gym and would never mistake a gym for the Solomonic temple]- a church like this is. Or I should say out of touch with Church history and the narrative force of the gospels.
My idea for the disassembly of God - besides the delight in the catchy title - was for an experimental space and experimental worship. Somehow the business of knowing God and hence loving God - that is finding God Love - would be a matter of removing accretions. The problem as it seems to me now is the persistence of the signifier. The subject (that's you and me) are constantly being wound up and played. We do not know it, seldom recognize it. Think of it as the light motif of the human condition. Just notice that changing labels doesn't change emotional reactions: buttons are still being pushed.
It's inescapable that people have an ultimate ground of being - believer and unbeliever both. No one gets out of the cage, as it were. This holds me in place. I know more about what I want than what I desire. The way I see of constructing God is much like a painting. It is the paint and surface that tell me more what will happen and how it will come out. The painting is not the result of what I want. The painting happens. I trust that God happens as well. It is a matter of seeing through the dust thrown up by others.
When I was small and learning to paint, I had a teacher who insisted on taking the brush from me and finishing my painting. She'd just do it. I bloomed when the lessons stopped. I began painting my own paintings - not smooth concoctions are very artful, as it were, but filled with life, filled with the love of paint and color and line. And so it seems theologically, my experience has been with people who want to think and believe for me. These are not my strokes, not my words. This is the frustration I feel. I especially recognize it in some of the smaller, more insular congregations. That sense of insularity seems to be a clue. The non-connectivity Deleuze identifies with the fascist line of flight or the black holes of subjectivity. I've been there: very loving and interesting people desperately want to tell you what your experience with God should be like.
Isn't it strange we arrive in this world, for a brief time, and answers to the great questions are already laid out for us. We are given commitments of country, family, belief, and sometimes career - as well as expectations of class, gender, and politics. We don't even think about them. We never say, why right handed and not left? Or do we, and the impulse is snuffed out, either by adults or peers.
Our egos are constructed from the larger pool of material in the self - a pool that , unused, sinks back into the unconscious where it seems to live a life of its own, sometimes erupting into our lives (and we blame it one other people). At once, with our ego, we engage with others as well as defend ourselves. Defenses for problems at 5, 10, 15 remain long after the need for them has ceased. The effect is like having men with muskets and attendant fife and drum corp march into modern combat.
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