Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

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Blessings, my friends.

David Dark: Karl Barth once said that if you don't have any solid difference with the person with whom you exchange the peace of Christ, the peace of Christ isn't there because the peace has to overcome some kind of difference. So I would say that a small exorcism occurs whenever we repent, whenever we apologize, whenever we back down.

I have my opinion, and then I have my posture, and then I have my position. I don't have to confuse my opinion, or my posture, or my position for my identity. So you think that I'm wrong in my position, okay? You want to talk about your position? So people can do that, they, not only do they do it all the time, people manage to not confuse their positions with their identity, more often than not.

All around us, people are choosing nonviolence in their differences. And then every so often, something gets hold of people. They confuse their position for their core self, and violence ensues. So, exorcism is an exotic word. That part of my robot soft exorcism idea is that we manage to not lose it with each other all the time.

We overcome our own road rage.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Welcome to For the Life of the World. I'm Evan, and I'm here with Macie Bridge again.

Macie Bridge: Hello, happy to be here again. This year for Advent, we are doing a series. Each week of Advent is themed, if you didn't know that. The weeks are hope, peace, joy, and love.

Last week was hope, so this week we're going to be chatting about peace.

Evan Rosa: And we're trying to take a slightly different look at each of these themes, not just the normal ones you might find in a hymn book or a prayer book, but we're looking through some past episodes of For the Life of the World. And today we're going to share one called "Robot Soft Exorcism."

Macie Bridge: Which may not make you think about peace.

Evan Rosa: No, it may not, but it is in fact about peace. And it comes from a guy named David Dark. He's a professor of religion and arts at Belmont University in Tennessee. He also is a teacher at Tennessee Prison for Women. He's the author of a bunch of books with great titles, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, We Become What We Normalize, Everyday Apocalypse, The Gospel According to America. His ideas are fun and provocative, and I find them wonderful to interact with. But a few years ago, he took to Twitter with this idea, and he posted a series of tweets about something he was calling "robot soft exorcism."

And the first time I heard that, I just thought it was like a deep cut Radiohead song or something like a science fiction novel. But what it is, is really just nonviolent resistance.  

Macie Bridge: Yes, which has everything to do with peace.

Evan Rosa: It absolutely does. Rather than the use of violence to secure peace, the technique of nonviolent resistance is this magnificent human experiment, I think, that exists throughout history, but I think for Christians is really deeply exemplified in Advent, and this is kind of the surprising twist.

Macie Bridge: One of the things that I really love that David Dark touches on that we'll, um, cut to in a bit is, um, that example of passing the peace in church with each other, um, which so many of us do every Sunday, um, as kind of a routine part of our liturgy. And he shares how if we don't have, I think he says any solid difference with the person with whom we're passing the peace, the peace of Christ isn't there because there's nothing to overcome, like that the nature of peace is somehow overcoming this difference.

That reminded me of an Advent reflection that I actually heard this weekend that I'd never heard before of how Advent and Christ coming into the world was an act of trust between God and humanity to have Jesus come in this little vulnerable baby, and how that, that act of vulnerability, that act of trust is really an overcoming of the difference between us and God, and how beautiful that, I mean, we call Jesus the Prince of Peace, and that's the mode with which he came into the world.

And I like David's example of how we can think about that everySunday.

Evan Rosa: Yeah, an act of trust. That's interesting because Christ's own received him not. An interesting connection here that I wanted to make before we jump into the episode is this, this bit from Thomas Merton on Christmas that I read several years ago that I continue to love.

And it comes from his book Raids on the Unspeakable, another great title, and the essay is called "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room." And I was going to just read this briefly:

"Into this world, this demented inn. In which there is absolutely no room for him at all. Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present. And those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst."

That presence of a vulnerable child who comes to nonviolently resist the powerful and usurp and subvert what we normally think of powerful in this world is really the war that Christmas is. And it's this subversive war. It's this, it's a war of peace in so many ways. And well, I hope you all enjoy this little bit from David Dark and hope that your Advent is going well.

Macie Bridge: Peace to your Advent.

Evan Rosa: Indeed, peace to your Advent.

David Dark: I was trying to find a way of describing those boundaries. And a way of describing that interaction that honored everyone. Power differential is a thing that we're naming here. So out of that gave me a way of naming nonviolentresistance.

Evan Rosa: That's, that's this important instance, but the reason you're retelling of that narrative through the metaphor is so gripping is because of the way that it picks up and helps explain so much of the history of human justice and injustice make it present.

David Dark: Yeah, so I would say that Jesus is teaching, and I learned this from Walter Wink actually, turn the other cheek is not, um, asked to be hit again. Turn the other cheek is in ancient, in Roman society, in the ancient world of first century Palestine, a Roman soldier might regularly backhand someone like Jesus.

And when you are backhanded, you are struck as an underling. Um, to be struck by an underling, I guess we could say struck by a cop or by law enforcement. Jesus counseled his audience in the Sermon on the Mount that when you are backhanded, you don't hit back. You also don't run away. You offer your other cheek.

And when you offer the other cheek, you are standing before your oppressor or your bully as an equal. And, um, this time, if they're going to strike you again, they aren't going to backhand you. They are going to punch you as an equal.

Evan Rosa: Wow. Visualizing what it means to turn the other cheek, having been struck that way, right? Having to turn away, then to come back up and then offer the other. I mean, there is a form of taking power back.

David Dark: That's right. In a peaceful way. You are dramatizing the conflict. And I think that is the task of prophetic action. You take the contradiction, the unequal relationship, and you dramatize it. It doesn't mean you don't get hit again, but for anybody nearby, you're making it clear what's going on.

Similarly, Walter Wink tells us that a Roman soldier could compel a Jewish person to carry their bags for one mile. That was the limit of the law. Jesus instructs Jewish people to offer to carry the luggage a second mile, thereby asserting your own personhood in an arrangement that legally is an arrangement between non equals.

So robot soft exorcism is inviting someone to be a human being rather than just being their position.

Evan Rosa: I want to really pull this out to see ourselves as human and not just our position.

David Dark: That's right.

Evan Rosa: And so I want to talk, I want to now break it down, like you've explained robot soft exorcism, its context in nonviolent resistance and communication, but I want to break it down a little bit.

Robot, soft, and exorcism.

David Dark: Yes.

Evan Rosa: So let's start with robot. Where I want to begin is, well, one, I wanna read the beginning of your Twitter thread.

David Dark: Okay: "If my desire to maintain a certain overhead over the years left me at the control panel of a giant robot, which I discovered was working with other robots to deport people, traumatize children, crush descent, and destroy the possibility of human thriving for most people, I'd welcome someone, anyone, who spied a living person staring down from the window that is the robot's eyeball socket, and tried to reach me and offer a strategy for exiting the robot beforeI died inside it or offered instructions for stopping the robots without hurting the people inside them.

The robots are what the Apostle Paul referred to as principalities and powers. We call them brands, platforms, parties, offices, and follower sets. We're right to wrestle against them, the robots, while remembering that we're to avoid wrestling against flesh and blood, the human beings looking down at us through the window/eye sockets of the robots."

Evan Rosa: Yeah, so I, I just, I see myself, and I kind of see myself in the cockpit or in the head of this giant mech suit.

David Dark: You are, and you're in more than one, that's where it gets really complicated.

Evan Rosa: It is a complicated thing that you're talking about. So what is the robot specifically in your metaphor or what can it be?

David Dark: Absolutely, I will begin to unpack it by naming some of my robots. One of my robots is the United States government because I, we, are the United States government. Another robot of mine is the state of Tennessee. Another robot of mine is Belmont University, where I am employed.

And that's kind of a big one in my life, because it's how I have healthcare coverage, and it is my primary source of cash flow. Another robot of mine, I suppose, would be my publishers because they're my books thatI sell and that are mostly in print. Another robot would be my Twitter, my social media account.

I have power within my Twitter account. I guess my family, my personality, my brand. But we have a lot, we move in and out of a bunch of robots. And we are all, well Martin Luther King Jr. said that we're all in an inescapable network of mutuality. So let me say two robots are institutions.

Apple is a robot. Google is a robot. Tesla is a robot, and this might be helpful. This is borrowing from William Stringfellow who said something similar about Marilyn Monroe, but instead of saying Marilyn Monroe, I'm gonna say Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is a human being with a heartbeat. Taylor Swift is flesh and blood, but then there's also perhaps we could call it the small nation or corporation that is Taylor Swift that employs, I'm guessing maybe 200 people, who run the brand that is Taylor Swift.

Marilyn Monroe is dead, but Marilyn Monroe Robot lives on. So robots name the constellation of power that both depends upon human beings but is something other than human. There are so many ways to challenge people and their problematic relationships with their robots which have no life or power apart from the people inside them.

There's calling your, our, representatives and specifying what you expect of their activity within their robots. There's also accepting responsibility for what we allow people to say aloud in our presence, unchallenged. It doesn't have to be a blow up.

We can take it slow. It can be a soft exorcism. Talking people out of their robots takes time. People need the assurance that we're interested in them, apart from the power they think they have or wield in their robots. One can't have a realization and feel shut down simultaneously. Soft exorcism looks like Ella Baker and Fred Rogers and every good teacher we've ever had.

It's everywhere. Be the beloved community, the politics, the media, the broadcast, the witness you want to see in the world. One specifically non-robot mediated human interaction at a time. Stand where you must stand. Be human there, Daniel Berrigan tells us. This message was brought to you from within the robot that is my Twitter account, and among other things, a bulletin board, a cry for love, a promotional tool, and an influence campaign.

Thoreau says that we all crave reality, and I think that's true. So when I'm in the classroom and somebody's upset with me, I believe they crave reality, and I think I honor the Buddha within them. So if Buddha just means the enlightened one, when we do this, we've disagreed with each other.

But we're honoring the enlightened nature of the person we just had a difference with. I would say there's almost an exorcism going on. When two Buddhists have disagreed with each other, and they do one of these before they part, they are kind of, it seems to me, I've seen it happen. They are noting that there was difference, but they are surrendering whatever spirit of conflict existed between the two of them.

In the same way that we do when we pass the peace, "peace of Christ be with you," Karl Barth once said that if you don't have any solid difference with the person with whom you exchange the peace of Christ, the peace of Christ isn't there because the peace has to overcome some kind of difference. So I would say that a small exorcism occurs whenever we repent, whenever we apologize, whenever we back down.

I have my opinion, and then I have my posture. And then I have my position. I don't have to confuse my opinion or my posture or my position for my identity. So you think that I'm wrong in my position, okay? You want to talk about your position? So people can do that. They, not only do they do it all the time, people manage to not confuse their positions with their identity more often than not.

All around us, people are choosing nonviolence in their differences. And then every so often, something gets hold of people. They confuse their position for their core self, and violence ensues. So exorcism is an exotic word, but part of my robot soft exorcism idea is that we manage to not lose it with each other all the time.

We overcome our own road rage all the time.

Evan Rosa: The softness of the exorcism, but let's think specifically about through the lens of resistance. And I have to say that when I read your thread and when I've thought about robot soft exorcism, I think of like Tank Man or Tiananmen Square. I think of the Freedom Riders that are, you know, standing in front of hoses and, and at countertops, and so many other instances of nonviolent resistance. Talk about why softness of the exorcism.

David Dark: Well, I think we've become what we converse with. I think we can only heal what we know ourselves to be a part of. So beloved community, I will say the words beloved community, which are often shared among veterans of I want to say the Civil Rights Movement, but I also want to say, instead of Civil Rights Movement, I want to say the Nonviolent Movement of America.

When John Lewis died, the Reverend James Lawson made, specifically said, they call it the Civil Rights Movement, but Congressman Lewis and myself have always called it the Nonviolent Movement of America. And Lawson also says that with the Black Lives Matter Movement, that the Black Lives Matter movement is accomplishing something that the Civil Rights Movement did not.

So the Nonviolent Movement of America continues. And with these words, beloved community, we're describing both an idea, a moral vision, and a kind of biological fact. If we believe that we are all kin, that all human beings are sisters and brothers. And one of my mantras that I'm telling myself is, "I wrestle not against flesh and blood."

So I might get pushed, I might get yelled at, but "I wrestle not against flesh and blood," is a kind of mantra or lyric that I have to tell myself in order to keep my best self alive when someone is trying to provoke me. And I think that is the softness, if I ever think that if I could just kill someone, or if I ever think that if fill in the blank died, we would have peace, that's where I surrender to the demonic.

That's where I have lost my way because I have persuaded myself that the face of evil is one other particular human being, and I don't believe there is a face of evil. I, if I have a person that I have enmity toward, part of my exercise is to imagine them eating Doritos by themselves or looking in the mirror and being disappointed in what they see because we are all ungrown children.

And the softness is making sure, even if I get maligned one human exchange at a time, I was as human as I could have been. And then we see what happens. And I do think this can, if this doesn't center myself in an unhelpful way, but I do think "take up your cross and follow me" refers to the burden that is placed on you for trying to follow Jesus into every interaction.

Or follow the holy, or follow Buddha, or follow whoever you're, you're trying to follow in your attempt to be a morally serious person. So my cross is not the fact that I need a cup of coffee every morning or that I have a weakness for sweets. Those are not my crosses to bear. My cross to bear is what gets put on me as I seek righteousness.

And there's something to that, as you say, is a style, is a softness, is a non-defensiveness. And I think that's how the work gets done.

Evan Rosa: You know, we're in Advent season awaiting and expecting what might be something like a prototypical robot soft exorcism in the birth of Christ, that, that, that a vulnerable infant in the backwaters of, of the Roman empire and a refugee family, brown skin.

And yet there is this kind of message, there's a, there's, it's a message to humanity to come out of the robot and be fully human.

David Dark: Yes, the undocumented Christ child, we might say, becoming, you have the stones the builder rejects, the builders reject become the chief cornerstone. I think of the Bruce Cockburn line, "Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe."

We get to bring that kind of expectancy to the way we read the news, the way we categorize people, the way we feel threatened. Well, I'll say for me in the traveling that I've done, I've felt I have a passport, which makes me the robot, you know, gives me a kind of power over those who don't have an American passport.

And we're really going against the news cycle. If we insist on the meaning of human history being in this manger scene, to be alive to it, to be citizens of a better future than what is being settled for by our robot overlords.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured David Dark, production assistance by Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.

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