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 though lament to doxology.”