As a Christian, I will never buy the idea of Trump as God’s appointed man to right the American ship. (Most people I know don’t buy this either, or have thus far resisted it, publicly anyway.) Nor will I buy into the need to make less obtuse but no less dishonest excuses in that direction. (Most people I know do this a lot.) But for all I know, God could be using Trump to show us all just how fuckin’ stupid we are.

You guys thought you were rational, civilized, above the fray? Tee hee. Hold mine beer.

We’ll know have a better idea soon enough, I suppose.

Nick Catoggio:

The Times is biased. But there’s a difference between bias and propaganda.

Bias is having a rooting interest in a dispute. Propaganda is allowing your rooting interest to define your understanding of reality.

If Trump wins, the Times will overflow with thoughtful analysis about how he did it—turning out low-propensity voters, winning over union members, mobilizing young men, making inroads with working-class blacks and Latinos. There’ll be endless doomsaying about the outcome in the paper’s opinion section and many ominous (and justified) “news” pieces wondering how dark the next four years might get, but the reality of what happened won’t be challenged.

If Harris wins, right-wing media will overflow with conspiracy theories about how she did it—ballot stuffing, vote-machine tinkering, turning out illegal immigrants by the millions to vote fraudulently and, somehow, undetectably. The daytime hosts at Fox will engage seriously with the exit polls, as will legacy conservative publications like National Review. But across the broader industry, denying the reality of what happened will be treated as a supreme litmus test of tribal loyalty.

Most mainstream media is biased; most right-wing media is propaganda.

The Hinternet Editorial Board v. Justin Smith-Ruiu thing is quite interesting; it gets to the heart of what, in Normal Times, would be an important internal disagreement among conservatives. Now it feels more like a disagreement with nothing to be internal to except the remnant kerfuffle that makes up whatever conservatism still is. I mentioned to the person who shared it that my dad and I hashed out a more-or-less identical conversation while we were stacking firewood last night. I also mentioned that “In this tragicomedy, I play the part of the editorial board and my dad plays the part of JSR.” That is, I (the self-described 95% pacifist) am the one defending “American hegemony” and my dad, along with every other conservative Christian I know, is sounding more and more isolationist with each passing YouTube feed day.

For what it’s worth — and I really don’t know what it’s worth — the argument I find myself at least tacitly on the side of is not new, but it has changed hands. So part of what makes this all so tricky to navigate is not necessarily the argument itself but who I’m having it with and why.

In my experience, I have these political conversations almost entirely with Christians who have been longtime “conservative” Republicans, most of whom I have known for almost 40 years. They know perfectly well (as we all do) to say that their Christianity comes first. And, in their defense, I think that that fundamentally holds in their day-to-day interactions, and that it would continue to hold on pain of death. But for some reason when they are talking politics or walking into the voting booth, no line from Jesus is particularly effective. Whether on the Democrats, the border, or foreign policy, the political habitat to which they belong clearly has the first word. But I’m not writing this at the moment to talk about Jesus and politics per se but more generally about the truth. What makes conversion in recent years so exasperating is the lack of memory that everyone seems to be suffering from. Memory, that is, of their own not-so-distantly past selves. 

To wit, there is one person whom I can invoke to some sobering effect from time to time. (Again, I’m sorry, but it’s not Jesus.) The argument made by the editorial board above was given, less apologetically for American hubris but almost verbatim, by Charles Krauthammer in his 2009 “Decline Is a Choice” speech. (Right on down to the “you buy the health care, we’ll buy the bullets” bit.) And in the kind of average-Joe conversation I’m talking about, that speech will get you somewhere.

Mention Jesus’ name and we’ll dance all night with “yeah buts” and drag ourselves down endless rabbit holes explaining “the biblical context that contextualizes the difference from our context and what he really meant and what was I saying?”

Mention Krauthammer, however, and we’ll reminisce.

(I’m not simply criticizing here. Krauthammer is second only to Christopher Hitchens in recently deceased journalists I very selfishly wish we could still hear from.)

I suspect one of the reasons that Krauthammer seems, at least momentarily, to break through in these conversations is that he reminds “conservatives” of the (political) selves they seem to have very quickly forgotten: the tear-down-this-wall Reaganites who were proud of their country and its presence in the world. I’m sure that it is also something of an irksome wake-up to be shown that their present (i.e. latest) policy/American-historical positions align not with Krauthammer but with then-president Obama, a man they despised, and continue to despise, to no end. (Trump may have lit the fuse, but it was the absurdly irrational hatred of Obama that prepared me for my rocket launch out of the Republican Party.)

It’s worth noting here that I have no problem with criticisms of America or criticisms of its military actions in the world. (Au contraire!) What I am frustrated by is a group of people claiming to have the capital-T Truth of the world guiding their hearts and minds but who have recently rediscovered Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” speech not through Stanley Hauerwas or George Hunsinger but through RFK Jr. and Tim Pool. Call me crazy — and I do feel crazy — but the truth, if it can even be present here at all, feels a little less than safe in a group of people whose politics is by all appearances more enlightened by Jordan Peterson and Russel Brand than by Jesus and St. Paul.

And all this is to say nothing about the immigrant-slandering hatred that seems to be such ready, low-hanging fruit for the New Isolationists and self-appointed (oh yes, the ironic shoe fits) Border Czars.

In any case, while I am aware that my vote for Harris could be framed as a “Flight 93,” do-or-die approach to the upcoming election, I am disinclined to appeal to too much doom-predicting, simply because I have no secret knowledge about what will happen if either candidate is elected. (The utter doom of Republican integrity, though… that’s straight-up prophecy, continuously fulfilled.)

I phrase my choice more like this: I would rather have my political (i.e. policy) opponents in charge than have my own group maintain political power by dishonest and harsh means. In a way, it’s simply a political party version of what Simone Weil said about her country: I suffer more from the humiliations and lies inflicted by those on my own side — be they Christians or conservatives — than from those inflicted by anyone else. I prefer giving power to someone who I believe loves her country and, however imperfectly and misguidedly (or sometimes stupidly), wants the best for it and for the world over embarrassingly clinging to it ourselves through a lifelong con artist who suddenly “shares our values and concerns” and whose presence requires the maintenance of, and acquiescence to, historic levels of propaganda and bullshit. 

And, in this case at least, I would rather state it in these terms than to take the heavenly high road of a protest vote.

(For the record, I do not believe in a “wasted vote” and absolutely support the very legitimate third party or protest vote. I am, however, skeptical of the idea that George Will & Co. can wash their moral hands of the binary choice as easily as a lone farmer or logger in Maine might. But that’s an incomplete thought and another subject.)

As for the argument itself, I belive that national borders, while not unimportant, are ultimately artificial, temporary, blurry lines in a world shared by all. Far from being an excuse for bullshit revanchism or irredentism, this means that, just as no man is an island, no nation lives in isolation. And as such, I believe that America’s presence on the world stage, while horrifyingly imperfect, is still ultimately that of, to use Krauthammer’s phrase, the most benign hegemon the world has ever known. (If you follow the previous link, I hope you’ll see that I am extremely sensitive to the fact that “benign” by itself is hardly a good word here. That qualifying “most” is doing a lot of work.)

That said, I deeply admire Stanley Hauerwas and George Hunsinger, both of whose work has affected me greatly. (Hauerwas is a remarkably consistent Christian pacifist. I don’t recall if Hunsinger describes himself as a pacifist, but his criticizing of American foreign policy is also consistent and very much predates the current trendiness to do so. And it predates it because it is a Christian criticism, not an antagonistic fad.) I have no desire to make excuses for the American nation. I hate guns, I hate bombs, and I hate violence of any kind — especially our own violence. Something you’ll find if you follow that Simone Weil link above is a quote from Vaclav Havel alongside it, which offers what I think is an indispensable ingredient to national self-confidence and which I find not only missing but disturbingly criticized in Krauthammer’s speech. Namely, the public shame and sorrow for the suffering we have caused, the regular admittance of which is not antithetical to self-confidence but is in fact its characteristic sine qua non.

Another word for it is honesty. If people want to embrace an isolationist policy, that’s fine. As Krauthammer points out, there is plenty of it in U.S. history to fall back to. But I’m not convinced that that’s actually what’s happening. As Jonah Goldberg recently pointed out, “At a certain level of abstraction, there’s a lot to defend in the [non-interventionist position]. The problem … is that the facts supplied by the most passionate and ardent proponents of that position are lies, and falsehoods, and distortions, or just based on ignorance. And if you had a really good case to make along those lines, you would’t need to make stuff up. And yet, when you look at the things that people say about Ukraine, when you look at the things they say about NATO, before you get into the whether or not they come from a legitimate position, you have to start [by] asking the question ‘Are they true?’”

I have lost all confidence in most conservatives’ ability to ask let alone answer that question.

One of the simplest ways to describe the conservative mentality is (as I think David Brooks put it) that it believes in “making our mistakes slowly.” It believes that bad memory and big moves can cause a lot of damage, especially when combined. And I have sensed deep and terrifying levels of this combination in The Group Formerly Known as Reaganite Conservatives for some time. Any group this belligerently incapable of recognizing the truth needs as little power as possible in this relatively benign hegemon of a country.

While we attempt to stiff-arm the bullshitters and the propagandists — and the millions who freely buy and sell from them — maybe we can find a way to less violently and unapologetically … to more graciously and sorrowfully preside over our messed up beautiful world.

Or, to extend another Krauthammer phrase, one which has also been quite effective in the last 8 years of conversation: It’s a tough choice, and of course I could be wrong, but I am trying not to make others — other people and other countries — pay a potentially heavy price just so an increasingly nefarious looking bunch of propagandists, supported by an army of amnesiacs, can enjoy the catharsis of kicking over a table.

Josef Pieper:

The figure of youth is the eternal symbol of hope, just as it is the symbol of magnanimity.

Natural hope blossoms with the strength of youth and withers when youth withers. “Youth is a cause of hope. For youth, the future is long and the past is short.” On the other hand, it is above all when life grows short that hope grows weary; the “not yet” is turned into the has-been, and old age turns, not to the “not yet”, but to memories of what is “no more”.

For supernatural hope, the opposite is true: not only is it not bound to natural youth; it is actually rooted in a much more substantial youthfulness. It bestows on mankind a “not yet” that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man’s natural hope. Hence it gives man such a “long” future that the past seems “short” however long and rich his life. The theological virtue of hope is the power to wait patiently for a “not yet” that is the more immeasurably distant from us the more closely we approach it.

The supernatural vitality of hope overflows, moreover, and sheds its light also upon the rejuvenated powers of natural hope. The lives of countless saints attest to this truly astonishing fact. It seems surprising, however, how seldom the enchanting youthfulness of our great saints is noticed; especially of those saints who were active in the world as builders and founders. There is hardly anything comparable to just this youthfulness of the saint that testifies so challengingly to the fact that is surely most relevant for contemporary man: that, in the most literal sense of these words, nothing more eminently preserves and founds “eternal youth” than the theological virtue of hope. It alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady preseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them lovable.

We must not regard this as a fatal concession to the Zeitgeist. As Saint Augustine so aptly says: “God is younger than all else.”

William T. Cavanaugh, on the “freedom” of the free market:

The point is this: the absence of external force is not sufficient to determine the freedom of any particular exchange. In order to judge whether or not an exchange is free, one must know whether or not the will is moved toward a good end. This requires some kind of substantive – not merely formal — account of the true end, or telos, of the human person. Where there are no objectively desirable ends, and the individual is told to choose his or her own ends, then choice itself becomes the only thing that is inherently good. When there is a recession, we are told to buy things to get the economy moving; what we buy makes no difference. All desires, good and bad, melt into the one overriding imperative to consume, and we all stand under the one sacred canopy of consumption for its own sake.

Nice timing from Alan Jacobs on “the specificity of your enchantment” for a couple reasons:

1. I just got Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels in the mail not three weeks ago.
2. I read a fitting line in William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed just tonight: “Postmodernism also trumpets the vacuity of signs, such that the signifier refers only to other signifiers, not to the signified.”

I have to admit, though, that I have mixed feelings here. I don’t want a vague enchantment; I want to get to the signified and not be stuck only with signifiers. And I want this authentic taste of reality for others as well. But Jacobs’ post felt a bit like Brad East’s recent post on finding the real, “valid” Eucharist. (I did not like it.) Maybe it’s just that the older I get the more sensitive I am to the sound of things, but I can’t help hearing some explicitly Christian — but no less “American” — version of “give me liberty or give me death.” There is something preemptive and haughty about these calls for the real deal and nothing but the real deal.

I love what Christian Wiman says about Jesus: He’s not just mystical and meaningful, he’s “a shard of glass in your gut.” But Wiman does not use this to say “give me the real thing” but to say that “Christ is God crying I am here… here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God.”

There are a few things from Price’s introduction that are worth pointing out. While I have not yet read Price’s book through, I’m not convinced that he would share Jacobs’ sentiment.

Price has just said, in the opening paragraph before the one quoted by Jacobs, that the stories of the Bible held an intense magnetism for him since before he could even read. When Price says, in Jacobs’ quote, “By then,” he means “by the age of eight.” For anyone who knows anything about the gospel of small origins and worldwide implications (of whom — do not misunderstand me — Jacobs is a preeminent example), this kind of early specificity, a deep childhood absorption of the singular claim of Jesus at the burning heart of the Bible and of all life — it’s absolutely wonderful, but it is not a norm that can be taken for granted.

Nor can we overlook the fact that this is the beginning of Price’s faith. Naturally Price has had to take those early apprehensions into the rest of his (enchanted) life. So what does he say about where it has “led him”? To the (tellingly phrased) question “Do I participate in that state of mind which John’s Jesus calls ‘trusting’ in him?” Price answers: “complicated forms of Yes.”

“I have come to that trust through years of reading and watching the probing efforts of other times and people at the comprehension of mystery in their own cultures, through the unimplored early arrival of an uncanny sense of the rightness of one man’s claim, but above all from the overwhelming impression of both an emblematic truth and an honest effort at accuracy conveyed to me in the hit-or-miss words and domestic wonders explicit in both Mark’s and John’s stories.”

Price says of Jesus that he was “a man who knew himself to be, by birth and choice, one of the central aspects of pure reality (whatever that reality is, wherever it resides, whatever hopes it holds for my fellow creatures and for me, who am after all a creature as much like Jesus and his pupils as are the great balance of humankind).” He also says that his writing demands not only intelligence but above all “a reader with an acknowledged personal share of humankind’s old fears and hungers.”

None of this is wishy-washy, nor does it contradict the desire and the need “to get to the signified.” Price says, “I clearly believe that the gospels deliver what they claim to contain.” And he clearly extols the “uncanny sense of the rightness of one man’s claim.” But has this sounded like an author with even an ounce of impatience toward those who are learning, or relearning, or encouraging others to experience the world as “enchanted”?

I hardly think so.

I know that the obligatory disclaimer was made by Jacobs — “you may be aided enormously by such reflections [on enchantment]” — but he is obviously, in this post at least, not granting much genuineness to that possibility. “Every knee will bow to Jesus don’t you know? So your experience of an enchanted world has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging this.” I simply want to say: It might. And we have good reason to believe and to hope that it will lead to that very culminating moment “at the end of history” to which Jacobs points.

In his wonderful little book on the Beatitudes, George Hunsinger expounds on exactly the passage in Philippians 2 that Jacobs references. Yes, one day, the veil will be lifted, and every knee will bow and every tongue confess, with specificity, that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The knees of all—especially the knees of those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, of those who strove for peace, and of those who were persecuted for righteousness’ sake—will bow. It will be revealed to them at last that in the midst of their earthly aspirations, struggles, and persecutions, they were not alone. They will see and acknowledge the Crucified Lord who was with them all along. They will know that by his resurrection he has prevailed. And he will give them what he has always given. He will give them simply himself, and with himself the kingdom of heaven.

Julian Barnes:

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop. The current pressures on both are enormous. My last novel would have cost you £12.99 in a bookshop, about half that (plus postage) online, and a mere £4.79 as a Kindle download. The economics seem unanswerable. Yet, fortunately, economics have never entirely controlled either reading or book-buying. John Updike, towards the end of his life, became pessimistic about the future of the printed book:

For who, in that unthinkable future When I am dead, will read? The printed page Was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder …

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers—there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book—even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a ‘smell’ function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox-marks and nicotine). Books will have to earn their keep—and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside. I have no Luddite prejudice against new technology; it’s just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father’s school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, ninety years after he first won them. I’d rather read Goldsmith’s poems in this form than online.

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it—as I do many aphorisms—a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines the writer’s choice between ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’). When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual.

– Walter Brueggemann –

---

Recently finished reading The Prophetic Imagination. 

My first foray into Brueggemann’s work. He was not an author who was “on the table” growing up, and my early adult vision was plenty narrow enough to have excluded him. I’ve mentioned somewhere before a telling anecdotal story about a boy in the early 90s (me) who proudly bought a Jimmy Carter book as a Christmas gift only to discover, after some adult-splaining, that Carter was (not harshly, but essentially) persona non grata and that his Christian faith, it seemed, warranted little more than an eye roll from our Christian faith — and from our politics. Considering that Brueggemann gives Jimmy Carter a shout-out for his own “prophetic imagination” at the end of the book, it’s easy to see why…or how… or at least that Brueggeman was not lying around on the family bookshelves next to R.C. Sproul or Chuck Colson or even J. Vernon McGee.

But life is funny and we’ve all changed, and keep changing. Though, of course, genuine change is not guaranteed, as Brueggemann is zealous to remind us.

Egypt, like every imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, and possessed. If there is any point at which most of us are manifestly co-opted, it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns.

“We are all children of the royal consciousnesses,” Brueggemann says. “Royal consciousness,” like some of the language he uses throughout the book, is not a helpful phrase to me. By it he means the established, stubborn, “socio-ideological” mindset of ancient Israel in and to which the prophets spoke. Brueggemann himself 40 years later admits that he would change the phrase, reckoning that “totalism” would be a more widely applicable word. However, I don’t find that word much more helpful — maybe even less so. But what we certainly are prone towards, regardless of the phrasing, is being blind and numb to the world around us.

All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is: How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation?… We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.

It’s not the sort of thing we ever admit about ourselves, that we have been robbed, or have robbed ourselves, of the courage or power to think an alternative thought. Though most of the time we are not even conscious of it, at best we might sometimes catch ourselves in this “co-opted” state.

I can’t help thinking of the spoof on those stickers they give you after you leave the voting booth, the one that, instead of saying “I voted today,” says “I rearranged piles of shit today.” This cynical attitude may not be fooling itself about the “regime” or the “regime change,” but what it lacks is vision and purpose, imagination and motivation.

Even if we do at times manage to catch a glimpse of our co-opted or fatalistic selves, we know and must regularly admit that it is unlikely to change us. We need a sterner judgement and a livelier, more surprising hope.

In both judgement and hope, prophetic articulation—in elusive poetic form—voices the interruption of the known controlled world of the totalism and the emergence of an alternative world that is dramatically other than the world managed by the totalism. The prophets voice a world other than the visible, palpable world that is in front of their hearers. For that reason, prophetic utterance must perforce be “imaginative,” an act of imagination by world and image that evokes and hosts a world other than the one readily available. Thus the prophets, with their passionate rootage in tradition, their passionate grasp of social reality, and their passionate force of language, imagine the present world under threat and judgement, even while the regime continues to imagine itself as absolute and abiding.… The totalism imagines itself absolute to perpetuity, while the prophetic imagination—in contradiction—imagines an old world ending and a new world emerging. It is a contest of imaginations that admits no easy resolution but that puts the hearer in crisis between a failed imagination and a new imagination.

And the newness of that imagination is rooted in one thing and one thing alone: the absolute freedom of God. Prophetic imagination, says Brueggeman, “depends on the reality and confession of God’s radical freedom.”

That freedom, Brueggeman constantly emphasizes, is a freedom to make changes. As such, when it confronts our stubborn and numb world, it is a freedom that manifests itself in “passion and pathos” before it turns to blessing and peace. God’s freedom presents as “the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice.”

“…and then to rejoice.” Perhaps too often we assume that we are already prepared to rejoice.

It’s worth pointing out that, as far as Brueggemann is concerned, “regime” could easily be replaced with “church.” It’s not difficult to imagine that many Christians might be walking around believing that, because something called “the church” will always endure, the thing which they (or we) know and experience as the church is that very same thing which cannot fail or die. Certainly many Christians throughout history have thought, by simply saying “church,” that the thing which they experience as the church cannot be the thing which needs to end or be interrupted. Though it might be.

That’s a sobering thought. And not one that is easy to remain open to. But we must. And not in hypothetical ways but in real, concrete ones.

In the end, of course, “prophetic imagination” is not simply “a good idea.” It is a concrete practice that is undertaken by real believers who share the conviction of grief and hope that escapes the restraints of dominant culture.

Defining that concrete practice “will become more crucial and more difficult, and perhaps more joyous, in time to come.”

I hope that’s true. It’s been at least mildly true in my own experience. (Not because I have it, but because I get to read people who do 🙂 )

The specifically “prophetic” imagination aside — and in simpler, personal terms, rather than the megaphonic voice that seems largely to characterize it — my own Christian faith, which has certainly become more crucial and difficult, remains in part because it has also become, I think, more heartbroken and more joyous. Not bouncy castle joyous, but (to borrow a line) “that seed of being that can bud even in our circumstance of ice” joyous.

Yes, the older I get, the less I like people — but the more I feel I actually love them. For all of the negative, rambling and inconcise logorrhea that I put down, I love all of it.

The notion of a “prophetic imagination,” or “prophetic alternative,” is inspiring. I can see why so many have taken to Brueggeman’s work and why half a decade later people like me are still happily stumbling across it. There’s something remarkably true and needed in it. Though I wonder — lightly and carefully — if the capacity for newness, grounded in the total freedom of God, is overdone. After all, you can only say “alternative reality” so many times — and can only drive the freedom of God toward those endless alternatives for so long — before nothing, not even God himself, feels real or trustworthy.

In a way, I think there’s a smallness and a bigness that aren’t quite hit on in my reading of Brueggemann.

The smallness is perfectly put in a poem by Kay Ryan. (My assumption is that the “branch of rabbinical thought” she refers to is the concept of tikkun olam.)

Least Action

Is it vision
or the lack
that brings me
back to the principle
of least action,
by which in one
branch of rabbinical
thought the world
might become the
Kingdom of Peace not
though the tumult
and destruction necessary
for a New Start but
by adjusting little parts
a little bit—turning
a cup a quarter inch
or scooting up a bench.
It imagines an
incremental resurrection,
a radiant body
puzzled out through
tinkering with the fit
of what’s available.
As though what is is
right already but
askew. It is tempting
for any person who would
like to love what she
can do.

Needless to say, this is not the sentiment I took away from Brueggemann. The poem doesn’t use the language of an absolute newness opposed to a present totality. But the act and trust of “adjusting little parts a little bit” is one I greatly admire when I see it.

But it’s the act and trust in the act. The trust is the bigness, which is a kind of bigness (sovereignty?) that is missing, or perhaps just evasive within the book. What I have in mind is explained wonderfully by William T. Cavanaugh in six simple words: “stop trying to change the world.”

A changed world is one in which self-assertion has given way to an openness to the gifts of others. A changed world is one in which we abandon the assumptions that we know what is best for others, that we are good enough to impose our solutions on the world, and that are powerful enough to make our good intentions reality.

It means trusting the small things because God has and will take care of the big things. It means, as Cavanaugh puts it, “living as if God has already changed the world.”

There was one place in the book where I found something like this from Brueggemann (and in a fashion echoing Lao Tzu), where he expounds on Isaiah 40:30-31. (Cavanaugh himself receives a shout-out by Brueggemann, in an updated postscript, for his book Torture and Eucharist.)

The poet contrasts us in our waiting and in our going ahead. For those who take initiative into their own hands, either in the atheism of pride or in the atheism of despair, the words are weary, faint, and exhausted. The inverse comes with waiting: renewed strength, mounting up, running, and walking. But that is in waiting. It is in receiving and not grasping, in inheriting and not possessing, in praising and not seizing. It is in knowing that initiative has passed from our hands and we are safer for it.

The initiative has passed from our hands and we are infinitely safer for it. Because it has passed from our hands, we do not necessarily have to wait for a grand alternative to the royal consciousness or the totality in which we live. We can trust that when any divine imagination is granted us, we can work for an alternative reality even by adjusting little parts a little bit.

No matter which way the change occurs — en masse or incrementally, in determination or in patience, by the prophetic or the commonplace — one thing is certain: it starts with grief. As Brueggeman puts it, “real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.”

And then comes hope, then comes life. “It is a move,” says Brueggeman, “from scarcity to abundance that is likely routed through lament to doxology.”

Gilbert Meilaender:

“That in these gray and latter days/There may be men whose life is praise,” Martin Franzmann’s great hymn says. But how easily we forget it. Forget that the gospel means freedom from the tyranny of good works — so that we may serve God in the whole of our life with good work. Work which in its quality and character would be an offering of praise and thanksgiving to God and would, therefore, serve our neigh-bors.

In its simplest and least complicated sense the word of the gospel announces that God is pleased with us, that God is on our side. Hence, anxiety about our fate, anxiety that might cripple our spirit and distort our work is dispelled. The energy that might have gone into trying to be sure that God is pleased with us is released for service to others. Freed from incessant introspection about our own fate, we may for the first time see rightly, see the tasks that God sets before us. Now we can do more than talk about freedom from sin and guilt; we can live as people who are really free. […]

Faith brings God’s acceptance and our security, not that we may simply bask in it but that we may live.

Not that we me complicate it, not that we may simply bask in it, but that we may simply live.