(Ir)religiosity

I wrote this for one of my classes.  It is (very) loosely inspired by the last several verses of Genesis 32.   I felt that my relationship to hope right now was such that I couldn’t write it an any other way.  I haven’t written something like this in a long, long time.  It was cathartic.  Maybe I should do it more often.

Like Jacob and his nameless adversary,
in the veiled shadows at the edge of chaos;
Together we wrestle with the world, with ourselves,
with an abyss so enveloping it must be divine.

As the darkness grows darker still,
The specters of the nameless forgotten surround us,
Bodies:
Crushed.
Broken.
Burned.
Lacerated.
From everywhere and nowhere I hear their cry of dereliction,
Of resistance against our omnipotent projections.
It penetrates my very marrow:
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
It echoes into eternity and beyond.

As the disquieting night wears on
The tears come; tears and tears.
Tears on our anguished faces,
Tears within the fabric of this world we claim as home.

Yet, in an instant, in an evanescent moment of maddening surprise,
I feel it begin to rise up inside me;
It comes from I know not where,
Calling me outside myself,
And like an ellipsis,
That mark of (un)punctuation,
Meaning and the answers I crave like a palliative narcotic are suspended.
Belief is eclipsed.

I feel myself begin to whisper,
“I don’t believe in hope.”
Yet, somehow, hope happens anyway.

I lift my tired eyes toward the abyss,
To see that hope, if there is such a thing,
Is located here:
In the darkness, in our wrestling;
In the tension and the antagonism;
In the ellipsis,
Suspending expectation,
Forfeiting certainty and confidence.

As the darkness breaks into dawn,
We limp forward together, scarred by the past be/com/ing future.
The nameless, elliptical angel remains, awaiting our return.
I know of no other name to call her than that of hope.
That wounding, agonizing, haunting “thing.”
I do not know that it exists,
Only that it sometimes occurs,
Mostly in the infinitesimally mundane:
The face of a friend,
The eyes of a perfect stranger.
I know not why, nor how, nor when;
Only that despite my despair,
Despite abjection and lamentation,
Despite the weight of the world;
Something (sometimes) happens;
Something I unceasingly pray will irrupt in every instant.

Outside there is a sidewalk.
One day even the permanence of its concrete sedimentation,
Will be displaced by the enduring soil underneath.

An instance of ellipsis?
Of interruption?
Of hope?
Perhaps. . .

I’m really looking forward to this movie.

[Ht]

1968-2008

Forty years ago this evening, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee. Dr. King has no doubt been unofficially canonized as the patron saint of the civil rights movement, and rightly so. As I’m writing this post it is barely 8:30 in the morning and I’ve already heard sound bytes of Dr. King’s “I have a Dream” speech on at least 3 newscasts. Indeed, most persons will predictably label him as a civil rights leader and again, he surely was. But that is not all he was.

I think it is interesting, and quite unfortunate that we tend to romanticize folk like Dr. King for certain pet issues, usually issues we’d like to think we’ve resolved. So, Dr. King is reduced to only a civil rights activist. I never hear anyone mention his opposition to the Vietnam war or his advocacy for economic justice both of which were quite unpopular stances for him to take at the time. We worship him now for his nonviolent protests against segregation, but we forget that he was considered a threat while he was alive, not just for a pet issue, but unapologetically speaking prophetic truth in the face of injustice.

So today I’m not going to post a video of the sentimental U2 song (though it is a great song) laden with “I have a Dream” clips.  I’m not going relate Dr. King to the current presidential race or the ongoing saga of Jeremiah Wright (though King was blackballed in a similar manner for not limiting himself to civil rights).  No, instead I’m simply going to ask that we remember the whole King today, not just the civil rights King, but the King who spoke out against the rush to war; the King who criticized the misuse and abuse of political power; the King who rejected the ever-growing disparity between the rich and the poor; that King who refused to let economic injustice remain the status quo; and the King who selflessly gave himself for others, not just black others, but poor others, Vietnamese others, and oppressed others regardless of whether it was popular to do so.  

May we all remember the whole King.