When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. I suspect that our own self-concept is as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim.
Breaking in here I'll say that most of what I was led to believe about "the prophets" in the Bible is in line with this joyless and dour and arrogantly self-righteous concept of what is not at all realistic when you consider what is actually said. Yes, the prophets deal with the terrible reality that we create when we go along with the "royal consciousness" that is permitted, and in the United States, in Britain, in many places under the secular, even the republican form of that (gangster consciousness, really), without an officially admitted monarch, that is the product of everything from academic respectability to commercial pop culture to the officially respectable "art" even poetry that remains in the prescribed limits of that consciousness.
I'll throw in that when I re-read that just now, the first thing I thought of was John Singer Sargent's famous and admittedly beautiful frieze of The Prophets at the Boston Public Library.
But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric. The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for the 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 makes it possible to implement anything and everything is 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 alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
I don't think that we can be certain that even the officially deemed "poets" of opposition will speak a real, alternative that breaks out of the allowed limits and not become a troubador or some brand of gangster consciousness or other. Recently I remembered getting into a couple of brawls over one of the official "prophets" who for a time fell into the comfortable realm that allows for even the odd top-40s sales, the late Phil Ochs over him being very comfortable with the "rights" or pornographers - one of the most putrid of expressions of this "royal consciousness" as translated into American secular "liberalism." A "liberalism" in which the actual lives and bodies of the prostitutes who work, occasionally, within that prostitution for viewing, the enablement, protection of which and normalization of which has been one of the greatest achievements of that secular "liberalism" as is allowed by the corporate state. He also notably was a huge fan of Soviet Communism even as he admitted that if he lived there he would certainly have been imprisoned or killed, which he seemed to think was a joke. He was hardly alone among the "poets" and "prophets" of the American secular left in finding that either not serious or important. Which I think is a dead giveaway as to what is genuine in prophetic consciousness and what is merely a cheap knockoff made for easy sales and profit. So much of what was officially, or, really the same thing, commercially was deemed prophetic in my youth was that. The real thing was seldom mistaken for fasionable or sold on top 40 radio that might play, "Small Circle of Friends" - where I heard it.
The prophets of Israel were not categorizable in the way that LPs used to be in record stores. They defy that kind of categorization. Categorization is something that should signal to us that either what is being labeled is being done so for a selling con job or for some other fraudulent purpose. I think it was always necessary for that to be done with this body of prophetic poetry, poetic literature because when taken the way Brueggemann and others take it, it is dangerous in ways that the corporate establishment and our own weakness can't tolerate.
Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. The dominant reality is necessarily in prose, but to create such poetry and lyrical thought requires more than skill in making rhymes. I am concerned not with the formal aspects of poetry but with the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises.
I am not talking about local pastors spouting poetry that is an assault on the corporate state. What I mean is that the same realities are at work in every family and every marriage and every community. In our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," do we begin? What I propose is this:
The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of the prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death.
Remember that the next time you hear someone making breezy comments about "herd immunity" about people dying of "preexisting conditions" as being expendable and not worth taking into consideration, about the other people whose lives are breezily wiped out of consideration in the media or in public discourse, in the kind of talk that issues so easily out of Dr. Senator Rand Paul and so many of the MD Republicans. But it comes out of those who out of secular "liberalism" are quite willing to casually disregard the lives of the "actors" and "models" the prostitutes who are used and spit out by the porn industry or, in fact, the movie and TV industries and the commercial prostitution which good "liberals" are supposed to want to protect as some kind of freedom of expression or association or commerce.
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