kyrie for a hazy, day in winter...

Somewhere (I can't recall the place) - long ago (neither can I remember when) - I heard (or read or maybe just dreamt it!) something like this from Walter Brueggemann: "To understand what God is saying to your culture look to the Biblical texts that have been pushed to the periphery by the king. Like other rebels living on the porous border between wilderness and domestication - think monastics, prophets and artists - these discarded texts hold words of healing and hope for your moment in history." I did hear the poet, Robert Bly, begin a story-telling gathering saying, "Part of what I am going to tell you is true, and, part is bullshit. The problem is: I don't now which is which - so you're going to have to do some work..." Interpretation, it would seem, is always complicated. So let me add a quote I know I read from Brother Brueggemann's work in The Prophetic Imagination:

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

It is those who live on the edge of society yet still engage the center with a critical consciousness that get this creative challenge. They care for the well-being of all the people. They haven't checked-out through privilege or cynicism. Their hearts can still be broken. Brueggemann put it like this: “The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.” The opening paragraph in a recent Salon.com article, "Resist False Hope: American Under Trump is in Big Trouble - and there's No Going Back," offers some context for those of us living on the periphery of mainstream culture in the USA at this moment in history:

The United States is a sick society. It is a failing democracy. By that measure, America is no longer truly "exceptional" among nations. Income inequality and other forms of social inequality are limiting the life opportunities of many Americans. Mass shootings and other forms of gun violence are a public health crisis. Our nation leads the world in mass murder by guns, an ignoble distinction For much of the American population, lifespans are getting shorter. The Republican Party's policies are actually killing and hurting those Americans who are not rich. Loneliness and social atomization are increasing. Politically, the U.S. is paralyzed by extreme polarization and "negative partisanship," especially among Republicans and conservatives. Donald Trump's white rage politics are normalizing white supremacy and overt racism. The American right hates the very idea of government (especially in the form multiracial democracy) except as a means of protecting its political power. The basic idea of government as a means of solving common problems through collective action is anathema to today's conservatives. The public commons is being gutted. An entire culture appears to have amused itself to death, drunk on spectacle and self-medicating with dopamine hits to their brains from social media and smart phones, opioids and other drugs.

(go to: https://www.salon.com/2020/01/31/resist-false-hope-america-under-trump-is-in-big-trouble-and-theres-no-going-back/?fbclid=IwAR35ZXx7c8t-HuL_Sx8FGjso3pZVfchx3weZtXz7jogiGjcrHMzLLmOKNh4)

Ours is a bleak time - even people who know that the current regime's hype is bullshit still try to spin it for their own short term advantage - while so many others give-in to quiet despair. Our coarse behavior on the highways, our crude language in public, our hair trigger tempers at home, our abandonment of all forms of traditional religion, and our thorough disgust with all things political are clues about the state of our union. We are hurt and bewildered. We are bored and afraid. We are starving for meaning and exhausted from work that leaves us empty and alone.

The good people at Culture Crush and Creative Visions just put out a brilliant photographic essay to deepen our understanding of this moment in time. The opening text asks: So when did the unraveling begin? With the 2016 election? Or was that just a warning sign of how low we had already descended? (Check it out here: https://mailchi.mp/theculturecrush.com/the-state-of-the-union?e=e3754cc52f) My take is that this longing and aching is not a new phenomenon for those of us in the West. In 1930, T.S. Eliot wrote:

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Allen Ginsberg was certain back in 1956 that he had seen: "The best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night." (Howl) Paul Goodman added his insights in 1960 with Growing Up Absurd. Five years later, Bob Dylan spat it out for us in "Ballad of a Thin Man." And Neil Postman updated the analysis with his Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1984. 

To this mix we could add Orwell, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Greer, Friedan, Steinhem, Malcolm X, MLK, Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye, Annie Di Franco, Nina Simone, Lenny Bruce, Frank Zappa, Sarah Silverman, Tupac, Tig Nataro, Samantha Bee, Whoopee Goldberg, Margaret Cho, John Stewart, and Stephen Colbert - and this would just be part of the choir of critique. Like R.D. Laing said so long ago paraphrasing the prophet Amos in ancient Israel: "There will come a time when there will be a famine in the land, not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord. That time has now come to pass. It is the present age."

Please understand that I am not being literal here. Nor am I thinking about the staggering departure of young people and their families from the practices of so-called organized religion in any of its varieties. Rather my concern has to do with our collective loss of connection to human and sacred wisdom. Not only have we failed to grieve our rejection of childhood certainties, but we also have chosen to fill our days so full to overflowing with distractions that our grief only surfaces subconsciously. In our dreams. Our nightmares. Or our darkest films, poems, and video games. We can't even remember where those ancient and overlooked texts are any more. You know, the ones that might hold a clue to our healing?

So into the cynicism and busyness comes Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. And Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer sharing music, poetry and conversation all over this weary land in pursuit of hope and integrity. And William Barber reviving MLK's poor people's campaign in small towns in every state of the union. There is Bernie and Elizabeth and Pete and Amy. There is Adam Schiff. They have not forgotten. They know that there is a ton of grieving to be done these days. And they are just some of the comrades all around us ready to help us when we are finally ready to wail like there is tomorrow. And with the risk of stating the obvious, there is also ... tomorrow. In my yard the sun is brighter than it was last month. And most of the snow is gone, too. It won't last but it was true today.

Earlier this afternoon I was in the post office to buy some stamps. There was a young woman there also who was staring at the stamp dispenser befuddled. She was poking one button and then another wondering if she had unlocked the secret mystery of this beast. After a few minutes of watching, I asked, "Do you need any help?" (Brilliant, right?) As it turned out she was from Iran or Iraq and didn't really read English all that well. She spoke English clearly, but could not figure out how to get stamps out of this damn machine. I was glad there wasn't a line. "How many stamps do you need?" I queried. "About 20" she replied. So we figured out which buttons to push together. Then she shoved her credit card into the slot and pulled it out in a flash. "Ah, Miss," I said softly, "The post office does nothing quickly. Not like a gas station, right? You have to wait until the machine tells you to take out your card." So, we did it again. And when she finally got her stamps, we had another little adventure for she wasn't sure where exactly to put the stamps on each letter. We worked that out, too. Then, before she deposited her letters in the package barrel, I showed her where the letters would go and when they would be post marked. As she left she thanked me vigorously saying, "Thank you, sir, That really helped." I felt like Mr. Rogers and thanked God that my new life is slow enough to be present for times like these.

Later, sitting in the foyer of the Physical Therapy department of the Berkshire Medical Center where I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting while Di finally got some treatment for the vertigo that has plagued her since the middle of December, I came across this poem/prayer, "Kyrie" that brought it all together for me. The grief and the joy, the humor and the humiliation. As the day came to a close and I roasted some chicken, I thought: This is enough, Lord. 

Because we cannot be clever and honest
and are inventors of things more intricate
than the snowflake - Lord, have mercy.

Because we are full of pride
in our humility, and because we believe
in our disbelief - Lord, have mercy.

Because we will protect ourselves
from ourselves to the point
of destroying ourselves - Lord, have mercy.

And because on the slope to perfection
when we should be half-way up
we are half-way down - Lord, have mercy.