. . . nor maudlin assurances but an honest articulation of how it is perceived when seen from the perspective of the passion of God

 Politics and private matters led me off the rails after my last post from the Prophetic Imagination way back last Tuesday, Remember last Tuesday? I barely can. I had just started on one of Walter Brueggemann's lists of related issues, I discussed my take on the first one, which you can review here. Before I continue with (b) and (c) I'll give you the opening paragraph, again:

The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord. Notice that I suggest for the prophet in a really numbed situation a quite elemental and modest task. That task has three parts: . . .

(b) To  bring to public expression those fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there. The public expression of fear and terror, of course, requires not analytic speech and not the language of coercion but the language of metaphor, so that the expression can be touched at many points by different people. Thus the prophet must speak evocatively to bring to the community the fear and the pain that individual persons want so desperately to share, and to own but are not permitted to do so. It is obvious that much caricatured prophetic speech serves only to encourage the suppression rather than to end it. This speech requires neither abrasive rejection nor maudlin assurances but an honest articulation of how it is perceived when seen from the perspective of the passion of God.

I will focus here only one one thing listed as a category of the "much caricatured prophetic speech" we will almost assuredly be witness to this week "maudlin assurances." We will certainly hear those in regard to the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the "rule of law" the rules, the traditions of the Senate and the pious declaration of Amy Coney Barrett as she dutifully professes her adherence to the normal range of acceptable Supreme Court "justice" and she will be lying through her teeth as will the commentators on the cabloids and many of the Senators, needless to say the Republicans more than any. The aroma of sanctity surrounding the Supreme Court and the Constitution is matched only by that of Hollywood historical dramas and the media operation of American football, and it is a strong, industrial strength odor to mask the decay it all is.

It is one of the conclusions from my addressing this great work that I am too abrasive to be an effective prophetic voice, though I can conjure an image of what's wrong and some of what will have to be done to avoid the worst of it. I can see that there is an enormous amount of work to be done and little time to do it.

(c) To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor in cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion. The deathliness among us is not the death of a long life well lived but the death introduced in that royal garden of Genesis 2--3, which is surely a Solomonic story about wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management. That death is manifested in alienation, loss of patrimony, and questing for new satiation that can never satisfy, and we are driven to the ultimate consumerism of consuming each other.

I did say that every time I went into this book evert passage struck me how it was entirely apt to our present situation. If that is not a list of items relevant to understanding America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, . . . well, there's nothing to consider, it's an exact listing of items from our daily experience and our own mental habits.

The attribution of the story of the Garden of Eden to the Solomonic period, or, at least noting that those are attributes of the Solmonic mindset is interesting. I don't know of a literature that is better for maintaining a diversity of materials than the Old Testament, which contains both that royal point of view as well as the harsh, exacting and blasting condemnation of it - it contains both the radical stuff-less-ness of the Exodus experience and the nauseating list of decorations and decore and costume for the Temple stage set. The day I looked at Isaiah and saw the condemnation of the Temple rites was the day my eyes were really opened to the substance of the thought of the Israeli prophets which was my opening into it. It is necessary to note that the text of these books which come down to us are certainly nothing like an urtext from authors but are what we have as has been filtered and altered by centuries of unknown scribes, copiers, editors, amending, imagining, creating and nudging of meanings, though it is remarkable how coherent thoughts and meanings come through.  The original visions must have been extraordinarily powerful to have survived that kind of a history - which these texts share with every single other ancient text and many more modern ones than we're supposed to admit or even notice.  Including those of the "founders" especially as "originalistically" asserted by ideological hacks, academic thugs and gangsters in black robes and sitting on Ivy League and Ivy equivalent law faculties. 

Note: I am hoping to go through this book by the end of November, I'm almost half-way through it. I hope that anyone who does not have a copy of it will find one to read for themselves, I hope that you are moved to express your thoughts on it. I'm only giving you a little of what I'm getting out of it. I got side-tracked by a contemplation of late 19th century Christian Socialism in the United States and how that got side-tracked by Marxism and scientism and the piously asserted and observed, though, I suspect, counterproductive secularism which should never have been mistaken as anything but a clerical necessity in the American government or, in fact, any democracy that aspires to become egalitarian instead of gangsterism but which, in The People is a sure guarantee of amoral depravity in which egalitarian democracy is doomed. I'll certainly be writing about that a lot in the future as my reading of old magazines and books proceeds. 

 

Note also, I have no idea why Blogger keeps copying and pasting random excerpts in places they weren't before.  Either that or I'm losing my marbles along with much else.