Prophetic ministry seeks to penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught. Clearly, the numbness sometimes evokes from us rage and anger, but the numbness is more likely to be penetrated by grief and lament. Death, and that is our state, does not require indignation as much as it requires anguish and the sharing in the pain. The public sharing of pain is one way to let the reality sink in and let the death go.
… And we do know that the only act that energizes is a word, a gesture, an act that believes in our future…
In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost. Grief and praise are ways of prophetic criticism and energy, which can be more intentional even in our age.
Three or four related things and thoughts from this week.
First, Nick Catoggio, on the continued lack of anything even pretending to be respect or reverence from Trump — and the continued futility in pretending that it even matters:
Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so? […]
The same goes for Trump’s photo op. Who would have thought a regulation might need to be extra specific in order to stop politicians from campaigning in military graveyards? Shouldn’t shame suffice to deter them?
Trump has no shame, and Republicans have completely abdicated their civic responsibility to make him behave as if he did. In a thoroughly amoral, persuasion-proof political culture, the only solutions to moral problems are legal ones.
I think fairly often of a moment described in Frontline PBS’s 2021 interview with Frank Luntz. Seven minutes into the interview, Luntz describes a major political turning point. He refers to an interview he did with Trump in 2015, the not-as-infamous-as-it-should’ve-been one where Trump belittled John McCain’s status as a war hero. “I never liked him as much after he lost [the election] because I don’t like losers,” Trump said. “He’s not a war hero — he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
In the PBS interview, Luntz recalls observing the shocked look on the faces of journalists, but not on the faces of Republican voters. “Not only did those voters allow it [the belittling of McCain as a POW],” Luntz recalled, “they were nodding their heads in approval.” In the 2015 interview, you can hear Luntz asking the giggling audience, “You agree with that??” And it is this that Luntz believes to be “the single most significant moment of the [2015 presidential] campaign,” and of the shift in right-wing voting.
Something was deeply, deeply wrong.
This is the classic “Now, we’re f***ed” moment in the movie timeline. You can imagine Luntz — and, frankly, much of the yet-to-sell-their-souls Republican Party as of 2015 — saying along with Jason Statham (in British-accented unison), “All he’s gotta do is stay down”— this has to be the moment that we move past Trump. But it wasn’t. The man — and, more importantly, his voters; and, even more importantly, his just-asking-questions excusers and shruggers — didn’t stay down, won’t stay down. And we (the sane not entirely insane ones) are all left with a stupid look on our faces.
The “different kind of voter” that Luntz goes on to describe does not, I think, do justice to the actual changes — nor to the years of self-priming for those changes — that have taken place in the GOP/right wing. Nevertheless, while not everyone laughed right away, the shrugging did start and before long the momentum of bullshit excuses was well on its way.
And here we still are.
I was reading a sermon from Gilbert Meilaender the other day on the Jesus who said, ya know, love your enemies and turn the other cheek. Meilaender points out that one of the sad realities in this country is that you are not unlikely to meet an isolationist-type Christian who denounces military/government intervention in many if not all cases and who yet believes quite passionately in his right to defend himself in any and all circumstances. Yet this gets things precisely backwards, Meilaender says. We are called (commanded) to defend others and not ourselves.
Jesus does not here legislate for society. He speaks to his people, to us, and tells us not to defend ourselves, not to pour energy into making certain everyone respects our rights. Not to do this — so that the very same energy can be used to defend the rights of our neighbors.
Given Meilaender’s history, it’s fair to say that we are not talking here about the kind of consistent anti-militarism you’d find in conversation with someone like Stanley Hauerwas — a prophetic conversation which should never stop taking place.
What comes immediately to my mind is a growing group of people, one which seems not only filled with but championed by self-professed Christians (not the generic, fill-out-a-form kind that some claim are blurring the definitional lines of “evangelicals,” but the “I’m a Christ-follower” kind), who exactly five meaningful seconds ago — and of course, right on cue — started using the phrase “military industrial complex” to describe their ironically (shall I use this word for the first time ever?) “woke” new understanding of American power and exceptionalism, but whose very souls don’t seem to even blink at the anticipating and boastful thought of blowing an intruder’s head off in their living room — and likely with a gun sold to them by that very same industrial complex.
(Not all are this extreme, and most are full of shit, but this openly expressed sentiment is not, in my experience, even a little bit rare.)
I have in mind the kind of Christian who thinks the second amendment is as sacrosanct as the ten commandments and that it enshrines his right to defend himself anywhere, at any time, to any extent, and yet who also seems to think — again, suddenly — that a fraction of a percent of an exceedingly wealthy country’s GDP is too much to spare on behalf of a people who would like to defend their country, themselves and their neighbors, against a violent invasion.
It is painfully plain to say, and to feel the need to say, that none of this makes any sense. Of course, these are not new inconsistencies. Two of my longest-standing intra-faith debates are on the default, gun-loving belief in the self-evidence of violent self-defense, and, more broadly, the deeply hostile way that partisan reaction passes for, and under the guise of, principled stance. But these debates have long since stopped being cordial or meaningful, and certainly aren’t fun anymore. Most of the time, if I’m being honest, they don’t even feel intra-faith.
All of this chaos, as mentioned above, seems to take place in some persuasion-proof realm. But I can’t help wondering if — more accurately, and more tragically — it takes place in some repentance-proof realm.
It was in that same 2015 interview with Luntz that Trump first stumbled around an answer to the question, “Have you ever asked for forgiveness?” “Why do I have to repent or ask forgiveness if I don’t make mistakes?” Trump later clarified.
Jesus said that those who mourn will be comforted. “Implicit in his statement is that those who do not mourn will not be comforted,” wrote Walter Brueggemann. Numb people, he added, will never understand that “only grievers can experience their experiences and move on.” Is it any wonder that the Rupublican Party, and the church that supports it, seems stuck where it is?
Genuine prophetic criticism, Brueggemann also said, which Jesus understood and embodied, “knows that only those who mourn can be comforted, and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away.”
I think this is another good way of describing the heart of my troubles: the lack of serious and faithful mourning. Trump and the GOP and the church that excuses him — all numb peas in a persuasion- and repentance-proof pod that has no desire to turn, to move on.
(Too harsh? It feels too harsh, though no less accurate for it. Harsher words have been uttered against this demographic.)
I write stuff like this down from time to time simply because I spend a decent amount of that time thinking about it and an equal amount of time being exhausted by it. (It’s the water we swim in and I don’t seem able to close my eyes and wish it away with happier blogging.) Writing it down here is a fairly benign way of sharing it while also continuing to think about it.
Catoggio’s piece above, titled “Mourning in America,” is worth reading, but not in this case for the enjoyable and honest punditry he reliably offers. It’s worth reading because it really is about a certain mourning that… I want to say isn’t taking place, but it’s one that is taking place across the country only at nowhere near the level it ought to be taking place, and certainly not in the places that it ought to be.
It made me very, very sad.
Because if you can read that piece and be reminded afresh of just how poor the character is that we’re talking about, and if you can overlook the lightyears-beyond-hypocrisy pivoting that has taken place in so many politicians and voters and friends and family members, and if you can still cast a vote for that man, or if you are still so governed by your scripted hatred of Democrats that you stutter to offer a word of condemnation against him…
Well, I guess part of the dilemma in my own conscience over the last ten years is that I’ve never quite been sure how to finish that sentence.
If there’s been one dominant message in 21st-century American artistic culture, it’s that you have permission — permission to consume nothing but superhero movies, Barbie, pop music by a recent Disney Channel star; permission to never eat your cultural vegetables; permission to never expand your cultural palate or stretch your attention span.
I have to concede that I am a fundamentalist. No, not like what you’re thinking of when you hear that word: I’m not a literalist, not an extremist, not an ultranationalist, not one who shuns modernity. Rather, I am a fundamentalist in that I believe that what we need to focus on, in this world of infinite choice and limited time, are the fundamental aspects of Judaism: Shabbat (Sabbath), kashrut (holy eating), Talmud Torah (learning the words of our tradition and making them come alive today), ritual (connecting our actions and thoughts and feelings with our tradition), and community. […]
… the key is to lean into Heschel’s “realm of endless peace.” Shabbat is a taste of a world that could be, a 25-hour glimpse into a healthier, less stressful and more even-keeled existence.… It allows you to let go, to lose sight of the give-and-take of Sunday through Friday, and just breathe, and accept, and enjoy. By mandating a pause, Shabbat enables us to see once again the beauty of creation, to return to the simplicity which God gave us, stripped of human elaboration.
May be it’s just my mood given… well, many things, not least being that I’m currently reading Shūsaku Endō’s Silence. But something about Brad East’s over-zealous search for the Real Eucharist sounds more like voodoo than the Lord’s Supper.
I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate.… Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. That same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for— even Solomon in all his splendor. […]
In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon, the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon.… He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries to the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.
As a result of this hope in God’s future, this present world becomes free in believing eyes from all attempts at self-redemption or self-production through labor, and it becomes open for loving, ministering self-expenditure in the interests of a humanizing of conditions and in the interests of the realization of justice in the light of the coming justice of God. This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world. This world is not the heaven of self-realization, as it as said to be in Idealism. This world is not the hell of self-estrangement, as it is said to be in romanticist and existentialist writing. The world is not yet finished, but is understood as engaged in a history. It is therefore the world of possibilities, the world in which we can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and peace. This is an age of diaspora, of sowing in hope, of self-surrender and sacrifice, for it is an age which stands within the horizon of a new future. Thus self-expenditure in this world, day-to-day love in hope, becomes possible and becomes human within that horizon of expectation which transcends this world. The glory of self-realization and the misery of self-estrangement alike arise from hopelessness in a world of lost horizons. To disclose to it the horizon of the future of the crucified Christ is the task of the Christian church.
(c) The history which is initiated and determined by [God’s] promise does not consist in cyclic recurrence, but has a definite turn towards the promised and outstanding fulfillment. This irreversible direction is not determined by the urge of vague forces or by the emergence of laws of its own, but by the word of direction that points us to the free power and the faithfulness of God. It is not evolution, progress, and advance that separate time into yesterday and tomorrow, but the word of promise cuts into events and divides reality into one reality which is passing and can be left behind, and another which must be expected and sought. The meaning of past and the meaning of future comes to light in the word of promise.
(d) If the word is a word of promise, then that means that this word has not yet found a reality congruous with it, but that on the contrary it stands in contradiction to the reality open to experience now and heretofore. It is only for that reason that the word of promise can give rise to the doubt that measures the word by the standard of given reality. And it is only for that reason that this word can give rise to the faith that measures present reality by the standard of the word. “Future” is here a designation of that reality in which the word of promise finds its counterpart, its answer, and its fulfillment, in which it discovers or creates a reality which accords with it and in which it comes to rest.
(e) The word of promise therefore always creates an interval of tension between the uttering and the redeeming of the promise. In so doing it provides man with a peculiar area of freedom to obey or disobey, to be hopeful or resigned. The promise institutes this period and obviously stands in correspondence with what happens in it. This, as [Walther] Zimmerli has illuminatingly pointed out, distinguishes the promise from the prophecies of a Cassandra and differentiates the resulting expectation of history from belief in fate.
(f) If the promise is not regarded abstractly apart from the God who promises, but its fulfillment is entrusted directly to God in his freedom and faithfulness, then there can be no burning interest in constructing a hard and fast juridical system of historical necessities according to a scheme of promise and fulfillment—neither by demonstrating the functioning of such a schema in the past nor by making calculations for the future. Rather, the fulfillments can very well contain an element of newness and surprise over against the promise as it was received.
In Eddie Glaude’s great book on Baldwin, Begin Again, Glaude quotes Ralph Ellison: “The way home we seek, is man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy.” Ellison’s impressionistic sentence, delivered in a short speech upon receiving the National Book Award for Invisible Man in 1953, tells us a few things. Democracy is not, in the first place, a procedure. The procedures and structures of democracy—voting, say, or the separation of powers—depend on a democratic aspiration, a vision of the good. This moral vision underwrites the procedures and structures. It’s the blood to the bones. But the content of this moral vision, Ellison tells us, is a vision of love. And this love is itself a different way of seeing: You are not invisible. You are my brother. As brothers, we stand as equals in need of the grace of our Father. No one is innocent. We all come at a cost.
Ultimately it’s not the Trump enthusiasts of the Republican Party who supply most of the fuel that keeps the reactor running, it’s frauds like [Nikki Haley].
