Anpanman

As previously mentioned, my sister is a fanatical devotee of the K-pop group "BTS." (Apparently the rest of the world is too, unbeknownst to me, since I learned today that there is a store in the middle of Times Square -- the most coveted retail space on planet Earth -- that is devoted solely to selling -- wait for it -- not even BTS merchandise, but merchandise about a group of fictional stuffed critters who are indirectly associated with BTS.)

As a result, these seven Korean men have become a part of all of our lives, at least in my family. Not an album is "dropped" that I will not eventually become acquainted with its contents.

And so, on a family vacation this weekend, I learned that one song on their most recent album is called "Anpanman." My sister explained that this refers to a comic book character -- wildly beloved in Japan but extraterritorially unknown -- whose head is made of a jam-filled bread, similar to a jelly donut. (I picture something like this scene from the Simpsons.) Apparently he also fights crime and injustice.

The plus side of having a jelly donut for a head is that you can feed hungry strangers and creatures and anyone in need, which Anpanman proceeds to do. The problem with it is that he becomes weaker every time he has to part with some of his head in order to help others.

And as soon as I heard this, I thought: here is a metaphor for the Christian life if ever there was one. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness. Take this bread in remembrance of me. When Anpanman offers food, it is literally a part of his body. This bread is my flesh. 

Anpanman is also ridiculous. And his very superpower-- that of being made of jam -- is also the source of his weakness. His ability to help others is the very thing that deprives him of power. By the same token, his weakness is his strength. God chose the weak things of this world in order to shame the strong. Anpanman is the most Christ-like superhero I've ever heard of. The atrocious "Bible Man" is not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath.

This stray remark about Anpanman's powers struck a particular and unexpected chord in me -- this week especially. I am just coming home from Honduras, where I joined the SHARE Foundation as part of a solidarity delegation. We met there with human rights defenders who have been directly affected by the political crisis in that country and the violence committed by the police and military -- security forces that have been funded, equipped, and trained in many cases by the U.S. government. Our tax dollars at work.

I spend a lot of time in the United States with people who work for human rights, since it's what I do professionally. But it is not every day -- in fact, it has never once happened to me before -- that I am in the presence of people who literally stake their lives for this cause, on a regular basis.

Nearly everyone with whom we spoke on the delegation knew members of their organizations, circles of friends, communities who had been assassinated -- often by unknown actors using death squad tactics. (Nor did this happen thirty years ago, during the period of the civil wars. Margarita Murillo, campesino leader, was shot dead in 2014, after receiving threats. Indigenous and Afro-Honduran leaders and campesino activists are especially at risk.) We spoke with people who had been roused from their beds and taken from their families in the middle fo the night, tortured and made to sign false confessions. In some cases, U.S.-trained forces like the TIGRES were involved.

As always in the presence of people who have shown themselves willing to bear the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of others, one feels confronted by something transcendent. And I mean that term literally, in the sense of something that crosses the limits of the phenomenal world. Logic would tell us that we are by definition our own self, and nothing beyond that. We can no more accept the possibility of our annihilation than we can conceive any unthinkable thought. The not-particularly-literate British artist Damien Hirst nonetheless managed to choose a striking title along these lines, for one of his most famous works: "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living."

Yet death plainly exists in our world, even as it remains unthinkable. The sacrifice of the self exists in this world -- even as it should be inconceivable. Either we will some day die and cease to exist, which defies the limits of our conceptions (since any thought we have can only be formed within the context of an assumed existence), or we will exist forever, which is equally unthinkable (for no one can conceive of an existence that would be eternal; no one can think of a consciousness that would be unchanging -- generally understood to be a feature of the eternal -- and yet in some sense still exist). Yet we don't have any options other than those two unthinkable ones.

These facts force us to accept the unthinkable as a part of our reality. Going back to the very origins of philosophy, we realize that this is also what Zeno's paradoxes are designed to show us. Unthinkable things are built into the very fabric of our reality. The mathematical notion of the continuum and the infinitesimal are necessary to any experience of the world. Yet, by definition, we should not expect them to be available to us as ideas. We shouldn't be able to fit an idea of something infinite -- like, say, the limit concept in mathematical analysis -- into our finite minds.

We are left with a transcendent that is evident, but inexpressible. "There are indeed things," as Wittgenstein said, "that cannot be put into words."

I am led to this conclusion not by the usual religious doctrine of personal immortality -- which I think is a false one -- but by its opposite. It is mortality that leads me to recognize the reality of the unthinkable. It is the fact that people can give up their very existences for the sake of others, even though existence is the sum of all any of us has.

Many people believe it is not possible to make such sacrifices unless one believes in a personal immortality. They think that people need a heaven as a reward for such deaths. They would think that Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton was talking nonsense when he called for a religion that "risks itself in this world, rather than in the life hereafter."

I believe the opposite. I believe that it is the fact of our own mortality and finitude that ultimately allows us to conceive of sacrificing ourselves for others. Because as soon as we realize that one day, we ourselves will not exist, we realize that anything we do that benefits ourselves alone will ultimately be futile. It cannot last forever. It is only that which we do for others that counts. Because it is only others who will be here, after we are gone.

This -- not the hope for heaven -- is the essence of the Christian life. It is the life of Margarita Murillo. It is the life of all the atheists and Marxists and Catholics and Archbishops who were and are willing to die for human rights in Central America, or in any part of the world. It is people who care more about humanity, at last, than they do about the preservation of their own selves, even when that should be impossible. Even when that should be unthinkable.

They are Anpanman. The walking eucharist. The man who gives of his life so that others might live. They are what Thomas Hardy is writing about, when he writes in "The Blinded Bird":

Who hath charity? This bird.
Who suffereth long and is kind,
Is not provoked, though blind
And alive ensepulchred?
Who hopeth, endureth all things?
Who thinketh no evil, but sings?
Who is divine? This bird.