“Their world was a big, fantastic, crawling, exploding junk pile of despair. I will write her name with honor for seeing it so clearly and looking straight at it without remorse. Perhaps her way or irony was the only possible catharsis for a madness so cruel and so endemic.” – Thomas Merton
The world is on fire. Some would say the world has always been on fire, that civilization itself is a slow smoldering, until we are amid the ashes and ask ourselves how we got to that point. Others may think of the fire as something akin to the fire of ancient Rome, with a modern-day Nero looking down upon the flames plucking away either at his fiddle or his harp (technically, it would have been a cithara, which is a heavy wooden instrument of four to seven strings….you know what, I may be getting off topic). Either way, many seem convinced the flames may soon consume us, both literally and figuratively. With the polar ice caps melting at quickened rates, a rise of strong-arm nationalism across the globe, and a widening gap between the rich and poor, we seem in more dire straits than at any point in history.
The United States of America has voted in a leader who has displayed abject apathy regarding the principles the nation was founded on almost three hundred years ago. Syria has crumbled under the fist of its own leader, who would sooner destroy all under his rule than give up all he ever ruled. This has created an unprecedented refugee crisis and has let loose a clash of civilizations, of identities, and of ideologies. Christian and Muslim, white and black, democracy and demagoguery – conflicts of tribe and thought that have existed throughout history, but never on such a global scale. We face the challenge of a fundamental question that has been posed time and time again to various species – change or die?
“The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because it is full, but because it is void. Yet if he knew that the void itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of creativity… he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.” – Thomas Merton
Would you believe we have been here before, in histories real and imagined? Men waging war, beating their chests, cities burning and crumbling under the weight of our ego, the world on the brink because of our unwillingness to stare into the void and truly see what we are afraid to see. These are not new developments within our story, yet the story never repeats, it only rhymes. There are character traits that carry from one person to another, but the way the story plays out always comes with a new twist. And for every zig that comes, we can zag.
For every fire, there is a stream. For every dictator and government, there is a quiet place and a quiet peoples. For every moment in time where hope seems lost, there is the intervention of the sacred, whether we know it or not. While the history of great men, the history of the West, is a history of imperialist tendencies and abject racism that manifests within demagogues such as Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, the history we have of hope speaks of a different outcome.
“And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” – Micah 4:3
There are moments in time that seem dark and dour, moments when we come to a crossroads where the world seems ready to burst at the seams and fall apart. The antithesis of those moments have manifested themselves in hope and radical amazement. Walter Brueggemann, a leading scholar in Old Testament Studies, writes and speaks of the notion of “prophetic imagination.” That, in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, we have an example of men (and women) who go beyond the realm of philosophical inquiry in an attempt to understand the world and try to hit at the heart of things. A tradition that is in communion with a higher message than that of intellectuals, politicians, or the ego.
No matter what we are told by the men among us and the men who think they rule us body and soul, we have a feeling, a spark within us, that can never be extinguished and works against all we have been told to accept as part of our society. The message of prophetic imagination is not one of men predicting the future, which is what we usually associate the nature of prophecy with in terms of mode and intention. The message of the prophets is one of radical truth, of facing the reality of our situation and accept it so as to understand the true nature of our immediate reality as we have currently shaped it in our image. Then, when we have registered the reality, we hope. We choose hope.
“Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.” – Walter Brueggemann
Hope is one way to embody a philosophy and perspective the great rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel coined as “radical amazement.” Radical amazement is the principal attitude toward life that Heschel says should be taken by men of spirit and religion, that we must have a wonder and appreciation for life. We lose that appreciation when we desire for ourselves, become bogged down in our differences and our conflicts instead of focusing on what brings us together and makes each of us unique and important to the whole of the world experience. A lack of wonder welcomes darkness and dourness, times when hope and wonder are needed most. Hope is what gives us the strength to see the world differently, radical amazement and wonder is what occurs when a better vision of the world is realized and lived through the power of hope.
The world is a mess, but keep in mind, being human is utterly messy. Being human is also utterly beautiful. The wicked and the wise live side by side at all times in history; kings and commoners, truth and falsities. Humanity embodies multitudes, contradictions, both dark and the light (Okay there Matt, getting a little too cliched there for me…). Being better, being our best selves, requires an intense amount of work. The perfection of the art of living means to constantly self-examine, to put our own interests aside and sacrifice what is best for the self and do what is best for the world.
Men of power and men of influence have not remembered that lately – but this should not come to us as a surprise. Even so, always try to be surprised, to be grateful. Surprised by our ability to gather and fight for a better world, to feed each other when we are hungry, to help each other when we are down. Embodying hope is exhausting, but necessary in the face of an abyss we may not come back from. We will make mistakes, we will falter, but as long as we have a drive for the good, we can embody the truth of our very essence.
There will always be men who crave power and destruction for the sake of their own ends. However, as long we embody hope that can lead us to awe of the world and the radical amazement needed to appreciate life, as long as we commit ourselves to deeds that make the world a little brighter in the midst of despair, we will ensure love prevails.
“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies.” – Abraham Joshua Heschel
Zen Millennial 