Coach — Agape: Love That Needs No Victim

The other riders are not obstacles to your wave. They are other views of the same ocean.

Paddle out on a crowded morning and you learn something about human beings within a few sets. Nobody in the lineup wants the wave only for its own sake. We want it because someone else wants it, and because someone else might get it first. Positioning starts. A drop-in is answered with a drop-in. Within an hour the whole lineup can be wound tight around a few people jostling for the same peak, and often enough the tension finds a target: one rider everybody agrees is the problem.

The other people in the water are not obstacles to your wave. They are other views of the same ocean. Relationship is how the ride is shared: you give way, you call a set, you do not treat a neighbor as a tool for your score. Love is association across the line that still distinguishes you from them. A great ride is not a private trophy. It is a line other people can still feel after you kick out.

The highest commandment is to love God with all the heart and soul and mind, and the neighbor as oneself. The neighbor is a child of God: a participant in the field, a soul, not a map of one. Love does not erase the difference between you and that neighbor. It joins across it.

The hunger to no longer be separate

In the philosophy EnSurf applies to the living body, reality is one field of experience whose movements are association and dissociation. Love belongs to that picture from the start. Agape is association recognized as the hunger to no longer be separate. It is not a moral extra glued onto thermodynamics. God's agape is pure association: the non-rivalrous, non-sacrificial joining of the field that does not consume the other in order to remain itself.

Sin, in the same terms, is believing or acting as if we are not associated with God. That is separation, dissociation, from God. Coherence with God is association.

Here "dissociation" means coming apart from God and from one another; it is not a psychiatric diagnosis. It is not a name for any illness, for an addiction, for an eating disorder, or for any condition of the mind. Nothing in this essay treats a sick person as a sinner, and the story at its center says the opposite.

This keeps the picture whole. There is no rival kingdom of evil with its own substrate. There is one field. Sin is not a second power. It is living as if we were outside the love we are in.

How rivalry comes to need a victim

Girard gave a clear account of the lineup. Human desire, on his account, is mimetic. We do not spontaneously generate our wants. We borrow them from models. Desire is triangular: a subject, a model, and an object. When the model is close enough that the subject can compete for the same object, rivalry follows. The closer the model, a peer or a neighbor rather than a distant hero, the more the rivalry intensifies, and it can become violent.

Escalating rivalry produces a crisis in which differences dissolve into a war of all against all. Communities resolve that crisis through the scapegoat mechanism: spontaneous, unanimous violence directed against an arbitrary or marked victim. The victim's expulsion restores a temporary peace. Then the community tells the story in a way that hides the victim's innocence and the crowd's guilt.

The prisoners in the old image of the cave are bound less by chains of ignorance than by this reciprocal imitation of one another's desires, and by the competition for prestige, objects, and recognition that follows from it. We are not mainly confused. We are caught in one another.

Sin, on this account, is exactly this mimetic dissociation: the turning from the infinite field of association into rivalrous patterns that require victims. God's agape is the opposite movement. It is pure association that does not need a scapegoat to remain coherent. It is the non-rivalrous imitation of the Father that Jesus both teaches and enacts.

The one the community pushed out

The Bible gives this mechanism a face. Biblical tzara'ath, the condition translated "leprosy," is never merely a skin condition. It is the visible, progressive sign of dissociation that isolates a person from the community and from covenant life with God. The community makes the person the living sign of what it fears: a surface rupture that spreads, threatens the communal body, and must be isolated. The required separation shows how easily any community gives the scapegoat logic the form of a ritual.

Notice who carries the weight in that picture. It is not the guilty. It is the one who was made the sign. Jesus treats leprosy as the public metaphor of this spiritual reality, not as a verdict on the person who is sick. The person he touches is the one the community excluded, not the sinner.

When Jesus touches the leper (Mark 1:40–45 and parallels), he does far more than heal a disease of the skin. He enters the place of maximal exclusion without himself becoming dissociated. He refuses the sacrificial logic that says "touching the unclean makes one unclean." He does not answer exclusion with rivalry, and he does not need anyone else to be pushed out in the leper's place. He associates with the one who was put outside, and by that association coherence returns at every scale. The body's coherence returns. Social coherence returns, as the person is sent back to the priests and to the community. And coherence with God returns.

I read this as the heart of the Gospel story. The miracle is spiritual; the healing is how it appears in form. The man is no longer the necessary victim whose exclusion keeps everyone else together. He becomes the living proof that a community can stay together by inclusion into the field of agape.

Agape is the counter-movement. It is the association that does not require the expulsion of the other in order to remain itself. Jesus' repeated association with lepers is the model of how human beings are to associate with God: by entering the places of exclusion without becoming rivalrous or sacrificial, and by allowing the Word to restore coherence from within.

The same pattern, and its limits

EnSurf reads leprosy as biology too, and the two readings are not parallel tracks. They are the same pattern appearing at different scales of one field of experience. The bacterium shows us, at the scale of the cell, the pattern of dissociation that sin is at the scale of the person and the community, without implying that the sick person has sinned.

That sentence has a hard edge, and it should be kept sharp. The pattern runs through every scale, but it does not give anyone a lever to pull. Love does not repair mitochondria, and prayer is not a treatment plan. Purpose does not cure a cell. The point is the reverse: whatever is happening in a body, the person is not to be pushed out because of it. Any question about diagnosis or treatment belongs with your own physician.

The victim declared righteous

Girard located the decisive unmasking of the scapegoat in the Bible itself, culminating in the Gospels. The biblical texts progressively side with the victim. The Joseph story, the Book of Job, the prophetic denunciations of sacrifice, and above all the Passion narratives reveal the innocence of the scapegoat and the guilt of the persecutors.

The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate exposure of the mechanism. An innocent victim is killed by a mimetic mob under the cover of religious and political legitimacy. Yet the resurrection and the proclamation that followed declare the victim righteous and the violence unjust. The crowd's version of the story does not get the last word.

I find this most coherent in Christ, and I will say it plainly. Christ's revelation is the field revealing itself from within, outside of time. It came to Abraham and to others, most deeply in the Passion, and it continues through the Holy Spirit as intuitive knowledge of God. This fits Girard's early non-sacrificial reading, and Girard helps me see what the Gospel already shows; he does not stand in for it. The Passion is more than payment for sin. It reveals the pathway to relationship, to coherence, with God. That is why the resurrection was needed.

What changes in us is not a climb to a higher realm. It is a conversion of perspective: seeing the same events from the side of the victim rather than the side of the crowd. Once you have seen the leper from the inside of Jesus' touch, it is hard to go back to watching from the edge of the crowd.

Back in the lineup

So paddle out again on that crowded morning. The same pull will be there: the borrowed wanting, the jostling for the peak, the quiet agreement about who the problem is. Agape does not pretend the other riders are not there, and it does not dissolve the line between you and them. It asks for association across that line. Give way. Call a set. Refuse to need a victim for the lineup to feel settled. Go toward the person everyone else has decided to keep outside.

That is not a technique for a better session. It is the shape of love in a world that is one field, and it is the ride the board was always meant to serve.

The fuller readings are on the Sage pages: Agape and Jesus and the leper. The Shore itself starts here.