More on Prophets

I am enjoying reading the Brueggemann book, but it has had an unexpected effect on me. It has led me completely away from, and then right back in to, my original feeling about the Hebrew Prophets.

I don't like them.

Now, I like studying them very much. I think they are astonishing case studies in history and psychology, and also to some degree in theology, but something always bothered me about them as religious role models.

Studying the Brueggemann book has shown me much of what was good about them. I appreciate that they were trying to transform the societies in which they lived, and Brueggemann makes a compelling case that we ourselves are living in royal times. Royal for Brueggemann is not a good word. It implies both complacency and despair, as well as numbness, and all of these, in his view, are deliberate on the part of the royal establishment. Hope for anything implies a need to change, and the royal establishment wants things to stay they way they are forever.

Brueggemann sees the primary mechanism of complacency to be consumerism. I have felt for many years that the modern day slave owner is the credit card. If you give people what they want temporarily, they really will sell their souls for it, and then spend the rest of their lives digging themselves out of the hole they themselves created. Credit card companies are insidious, especially in how easy they make it for college students to get credit cards, knowing they won't care about interest rates or finance charges, and are only looking for a way to live beyond the means their parents are able to give them.

So the prophet speaks against this consciousness. And the primary means available to the prophet are criticism of the establishment, and energizing people toward an alternative that they don't realize exists. However, the energizing is not based on something unheard of, but on something very traditional and grounded deeply both in the past and in the collective psyche, which is what makes it resonant. And the energizing comes from hope. Brueggemann is wonderful on this:

...we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. ... Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.

I love this, because I have often felt that facts are overrated. I believe what we call facts are really just the limits of our blinders, and we use these to confine ourselves to "possibilities." So-called "realists" urge us to live within these limitations, mocking any who would stretch outside of them. But the greatest and most essential ideas have always arisen from those who refuse to accept current limitations. Relativity and quantum physics came from a daydream about what it would be like to ride on a light beam, and this after the president of Harvard had announced that there was nothing fundamental in physics left to be discovered.

So I share the suspicion about facts. But where the prophets and I start to part company is that they seem merely to be replacing one royal mentality with another. This is something that always bothered me about the Exodus. The escape from slavery was an escape directly into a forced servitude to a new master.

Now, I understand the story psychologically, and I understand (and believe fervently) that true freedom only arises from submitting ourselves to something greater. The only way to transcend the ego is to admit our frailty. It is only through humility that we can recognize our place in creation. So understood metaphorically, I believe the Exodus is pointing us toward the universal truth that only in submission to God can we really find freedom.

But the story itself, when examined rigorously, doesn't really support this. The Israelites have not chosen this God; he has chosen them. And he is so volatile and jealous that they really are given no freedom of choice whatsoever. The list of prohibitions may indeed be a covenant, but they enter the covenant from fear rather than willingly. And they transgress these prohibitions so often that the book of Judges seems like one redundant disobedience after another.

Of course, if we go back to the metaphorical and psychological interpretation, we can see this as a simple description of the truth of how the individual ego chafes at the effort for submission. If every Israelite is seen as a cell of my body, then once my mind decides to transform, many of the cells will rebel out of habit until new habits are established. And if we saw a society in time-lapse, we could see this in the macrocosm too of how a society progresses through the civil rights era, for example, or in the current debate about gay marriage. Seen this way, the entire Bible is a guidebook for spiritual and psychological transformation - all the ups and downs and traumas and victories and defeats that can be expected on the spiritual path. And that is how the Bible has always made sense to me - as an guidebook for understanding God and our neighbors by first understanding ourselves, in all the messy complexity this necessarily implies.

But Brueggemann denies this:

The prophet employs no psychological gimmicks and no easy meditative steps because the issues are not private, personal, spiritual, or internal.

I am still working through this, but what that statement implies to me is that what the prophet is working toward is societal transformation, and specifically the dismantling of the royal consciousness which Brueggemann (and I) find so debilitating and dangerous. And again, we are still on common ground here.

But where we really diverge is on the issue of hope. Brueggemann says that the royal consciousness wants time to stop - for the emphasis to be entirely on the present so that we aren't thinking about alternative futures. The prophet, he says, is the one who "knows what time it is." And he reinvigorates hope, which is how change happens. He does this through criticism and public grieving:

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.

Maybe I've spent too much time with Buddhism and Taoism, but I am more inclined to agree with Lao-Tzu when he says that hope is as hollow as fear (13). I am also inclined to agree with T.S. Eliot, when he says, "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" (East Coker). Hope keeps the mind focused on the future, which can help us escape some of our present circumstances, but will never help us escape the present.

From one angle, it could be argued that what Brueggemann calls the royal consciousness shares a lot with Buddhism - particularly in its focus on the now. But keeping the mind trained on the present is not necessarily a form of oppression. Buddhism does not merely replace one monarch for another one. It abolishes monarchy altogether. It abolishes oppression as well, for as Thich Nhat Hanh shows in his talk to prisoners, titled "Be Free Where You Are," we are only chained to our circumstances if we give those chains our consent. This is an oversimplification, but you might say that the prophets look for ways to break the chains, while the Buddhists seek to realize that the chains do not exist. Both lead to freedom, but the freedom of the prophets is temporary, while the freedom of the Buddhists is permanent.

We can certainly see this in the way that the prohibition of false idols seems so impossible for the Israelites to obey. Asherah and Baal seem unable to be suppressed, and Jung connected this to the cult of the Virgin Mary in Hispanic countries. No matter how many times it is torn down, the mother goddess crops back up, and if it can't be an Asherah on the hill, it will sneak in as the mother of God crying tears of blood or popping up in a toaster. Even Moses created a false idol in the bronze serpent, and perhaps even in the ark of the covenant itself. The entire Hebrew Bible is an attempted genocide on all of the false gods which, like the hydra, refuse to die.

The Israelites left the chains of Egypt for the freedom of the desert, and immediately felt chained there. They transgress their covenant so many times and so quickly that it becomes difficult to believe it was entered into willingly. And then once they get into Jerusalem, they continue to worship false idols - even David and Solomon. The prophets and the rabbis see this as weakness on the part of the Israelites, who apparently lack any modicum of faith. But when it is such an epidemic, we have to start to wonder if there isn't something wrong in what is being asked.

The Israelites are going from one set of chains to another. Some break free with each prophet, but then they are enchained again. Hope is followed by despair and numbness, and then another prophet arises to offer the necessary grief, criticism and hope to break the chains again. This, surely, is what the Buddhists mean by samsara.

So the royal consciousness is indeed the poison of complacency and consumerism that leads to despair or numbness or apathy, and is the wasteland from which a hero must arise. But the hero who merely lifts the veil for a moment, only to have it descend again, is not the hero we need. What the Buddhists offer, and why I still find them more compelling, is a shift in perspective. Certainly, living in the royal consciousness does not work. And a change is vital. But when we shift our attitude toward it and realize that the "facts" of the situation are simply illusions we ourselves have created, we can escape the chains once and for all, and it won't matter what king tries to rule over us. We will have taken responsibility for ourselves rather than needing a savior.

This is all still very new, and I am grateful to Brueggemann for stirring all this up in my brain. And I still believe firmly that the Bible is one of the best spiritual guidebooks around. I just have never placed a lot of faith in its historical or sociological powers. To me, it reigns supreme in illuminating the messy chaos of personal and collective transformation. Jeremiah represents the voice of my conscience, as does Elijah. Ezekiel is a peek into my most fevered nightmares, where my subconscious is speaking to me in broken images that my conscious mind fights to understand. And of course, once the spiritual transformation has taken place, I need to take that understanding with me into my interactions with those around me, so the ethics are of supreme importance, and society can indeed be transformed at the base.

But I'll do all that without hope.

More on Prophets

I am enjoying reading the Brueggemann book, but it has had an unexpected effect on me. It has led me completely away from, and then right back in to, my original feeling about the Hebrew Prophets.

I don't like them.

Now, I like studying them very much. I think they are astonishing case studies in history and psychology, and also to some degree in theology, but something always bothered me about them as religious role models.

Studying the Brueggemann book has shown me much of what was good about them. I appreciate that they were trying to transform the societies in which they lived, and Brueggemann makes a compelling case that we ourselves are living in royal times. Royal for Brueggemann is not a good word. It implies both complacency and despair, as well as numbness, and all of these, in his view, are deliberate on the part of the royal establishment. Hope for anything implies a need to change, and the royal establishment wants things to stay they way they are forever.

Brueggemann sees the primary mechanism of complacency to be consumerism. I have felt for many years that the modern day slave owner is the credit card. If you give people what they want temporarily, they really will sell their souls for it, and then spend the rest of their lives digging themselves out of the hole they themselves created. Credit card companies are insidious, especially in how easy they make it for college students to get credit cards, knowing they won't care about interest rates or finance charges, and are only looking for a way to live beyond the means their parents are able to give them.

So the prophet speaks against this consciousness. And the primary means available to the prophet are criticism of the establishment, and energizing people toward an alternative that they don't realize exists. However, the energizing is not based on something unheard of, but on something very traditional and grounded deeply both in the past and in the collective psyche, which is what makes it resonant. And the energizing comes from hope. Brueggemann is wonderful on this:

...we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. ... Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.

I love this, because I have often felt that facts are overrated. I believe what we call facts are really just the limits of our blinders, and we use these to confine ourselves to "possibilities." So-called "realists" urge us to live within these limitations, mocking any who would stretch outside of them. But the greatest and most essential ideas have always arisen from those who refuse to accept current limitations. Relativity and quantum physics came from a daydream about what it would be like to ride on a light beam, and this after the president of Harvard had announced that there was nothing fundamental in physics left to be discovered.

So I share the suspicion about facts. But where the prophets and I start to part company is that they seem merely to be replacing one royal mentality with another. This is something that always bothered me about the Exodus. The escape from slavery was an escape directly into a forced servitude to a new master.

Now, I understand the story psychologically, and I understand (and believe fervently) that true freedom only arises from submitting ourselves to something greater. The only way to transcend the ego is to admit our frailty. It is only through humility that we can recognize our place in creation. So understood metaphorically, I believe the Exodus is pointing us toward the universal truth that only in submission to God can we really find freedom.

But the story itself, when examined rigorously, doesn't really support this. The Israelites have not chosen this God; he has chosen them. And he is so volatile and jealous that they really are given no freedom of choice whatsoever. The list of prohibitions may indeed be a covenant, but they enter the covenant from fear rather than willingly. And they transgress these prohibitions so often that the book of Judges seems like one redundant disobedience after another.

Of course, if we go back to the metaphorical and psychological interpretation, we can see this as a simple description of the truth of how the individual ego chafes at the effort for submission. If every Israelite is seen as a cell of my body, then once my mind decides to transform, many of the cells will rebel out of habit until new habits are established. And if we saw a society in time-lapse, we could see this in the macrocosm too of how a society progresses through the civil rights era, for example, or in the current debate about gay marriage. Seen this way, the entire Bible is a guidebook for spiritual and psychological transformation - all the ups and downs and traumas and victories and defeats that can be expected on the spiritual path. And that is how the Bible has always made sense to me - as an guidebook for understanding God and our neighbors by first understanding ourselves, in all the messy complexity this necessarily implies.

But Brueggemann denies this:

The prophet employs no psychological gimmicks and no easy meditative steps because the issues are not private, personal, spiritual, or internal.

I am still working through this, but what that statement implies to me is that what the prophet is working toward is societal transformation, and specifically the dismantling of the royal consciousness which Brueggemann (and I) find so debilitating and dangerous. And again, we are still on common ground here.

But where we really diverge is on the issue of hope. Brueggemann says that the royal consciousness wants time to stop - for the emphasis to be entirely on the present so that we aren't thinking about alternative futures. The prophet, he says, is the one who "knows what time it is." And he reinvigorates hope, which is how change happens. He does this through criticism and public grieving:

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.

Maybe I've spent too much time with Buddhism and Taoism, but I am more inclined to agree with Lao-Tzu when he says that hope is as hollow as fear (13). I am also inclined to agree with T.S. Eliot, when he says, "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" (East Coker). Hope keeps the mind focused on the future, which can help us escape some of our present circumstances, but will never help us escape the present.

From one angle, it could be argued that what Brueggemann calls the royal consciousness shares a lot with Buddhism - particularly in its focus on the now. But keeping the mind trained on the present is not necessarily a form of oppression. Buddhism does not merely replace one monarch for another one. It abolishes monarchy altogether. It abolishes oppression as well, for as Thich Nhat Hanh shows in his talk to prisoners, titled "Be Free Where You Are," we are only chained to our circumstances if we give those chains our consent. This is an oversimplification, but you might say that the prophets look for ways to break the chains, while the Buddhists seek to realize that the chains do not exist. Both lead to freedom, but the freedom of the prophets is temporary, while the freedom of the Buddhists is permanent.

We can certainly see this in the way that the prohibition of false idols seems so impossible for the Israelites to obey. Asherah and Baal seem unable to be suppressed, and Jung connected this to the cult of the Virgin Mary in Hispanic countries. No matter how many times it is torn down, the mother goddess crops back up, and if it can't be an Asherah on the hill, it will sneak in as the mother of God crying tears of blood or popping up in a toaster. Even Moses created a false idol in the bronze serpent, and perhaps even in the ark of the covenant itself. And the entire Hebrew Bible is an attempted genocide on all of the false gods which, like the hydra, refuse to die.

The Israelites left the chains of Egypt for the freedom of the desert, and immediately felt chained there. They transgress their covenant so many times and so quickly that it becomes difficult to believe it was entered into willingly. And then once they get into Jerusalem, they continue to worship false idols - even David and Solomon. The prophets and the rabbis see this as weakness on the part of the Israelites, who simply lack any modicum of faith. But when it is such an epidemic, we have to start to wonder if what is being asked is not really what is needed.

The Israelites are going from one set of chains to another. Some break free with each prophet, but then they are enchained again. Hope is followed by despair and numbness, and then another prophet arises to offer the necessary grief, criticism and hope to break the chains again. This, surely, is what the Buddhists mean by samsara.

So the royal consciousness is indeed the poison of complacency and consumerism that leads to despair or numbness or apathy, and is the wasteland from which a hero must arise. But the hero who merely lifts the veil for a moment, only to have it descend again, is not the hero we need. What the Buddhists offer, and why I still find them more compelling, is a shift in perspective. Certainly, living in the royal consciousness does not work. And a change is vital. But when we shift our attitude toward it and realize that the "facts" of the situation are simply illusions we ourselves have created, we can escape the chains once and for all, and it won't matter what king tries to rule over us. We will have taken responsibility for ourselves rather than needing a savior.

This is all still very new, and I am grateful to Brueggemann for stirring all this up in my brain. And I still believe firmly that the Bible is one of the best spiritual guidebooks around. I just have never placed a lot of faith in its historical or sociological powers. To me, Jeremiah represents the voice of my conscience, as does Elijah. Ezekiel is a peak into my most fevered nightmares, where my subconscious is speaking to me in broken images that my conscious mind fights to understand. And of course, once the spiritual transformation has taken place, I need to take that understanding with me into my interactions with those around me, so the ethics are of supreme importance, and society can indeed be transformed at the base.

But I'll do all that without hope.

The Prophetic Imagination

I am currently reading Walter Bruegemann's The Prophetic Imagination at the recommendation of two priests (or one priest and one soon-to-be priest). I spoke with them about the Bible class I teach and they said he was the pre-eminent mind at work today concerning issues of the Hebrew Bible. Certainly this may be true if you look at it from a Christian priest standpoint, which both of them are, and the book is really geared toward the current church community rather than toward the secular world, as much of the work I have already done is (Karen Armstrong, Jonathan Kirsch, Elaine Pagels, Stephen Mitchell, etc.).

Bruegemann states his hypothesis in the preface:

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

And he also acknowledges his general paradigm when he says "I have brought to the text my own hermeneutic of suspicion." This is valuable to me, as is his emphasis on criticism, because it prevents the argument from becoming too dogmatic. In fact, I might argue even at this early stage that his work is the opposite of dogmatic, though, since it is concerned with modern prophecy (not equated with fortune-telling for him, though distantly related), it opposes any oppression by the status-quo.

Here are some passages I found intriguing:

...texts--in particular biblical texts--are acts of imagination that offer and purpose "alternative worlds" that exist because of and in the act of utterance. ... Imagination is indeed a legitimate way of knowing. ... biblical texts, in particular prophetic texts, could be seen as poetic scenarios of alternative reality that might lead to direct confrontation with "presumed, taken-for-granted worlds."

Since it is a book for the ministry, he brings home the current need for prophecy in America:

...consumerism is ... likely the foremost circumstance of prophetic faith in the United States.

Contrasting our situation in America to the much worse situations of torture, war, and famine in other parts of the globe:

Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity. ... Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric. ... Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope.

I find this personally compelling, and have often felt that the demons of our day are far more subtle than the ones of biblical times, or the ones going on in other parts of the world. The credit card is really the oppressor in America today, and politicians typically do everything they can to continue the status quo rather than effect any radical change. Bruegemann looks both forward and back here:

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the prophet is called to be the child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.

The other great oppressor today (and I say this as an English teacher) is language. But my job as an English teacher is to help students examine the underpinnings of their language and recognize words for the false idols they are. Only then can language become a catapult into a deeper reality, rather than a hollow container for an even hollower fiction.

Bruegemann sees that the task of dismantling the current system of oppression will be difficult, as it always has been:

...the dominant culture, now and in every time, is grossly uncritical, cannot tolerate serious and fundamental criticism, and will go to great lengths to stop it.

He then heads into his examination of Moses. In the past, I have felt highly conflicted about Moses, since on the one hand, he liberated the Israelite slaves, but on the other hand, his compassion and sense of justice extended only to his own tribe, and even then only to the faithful. I have seen the Hebrew Bible as three main narratives that serve as a progression. Genesis charts the journey to spiritual maturity of an individual (culminating, after many mis-steps in Joseph or Judah, depending on your viewpoint), Exodus shows the spiritual journey of a tribe, and the story of David is about creating a nation. One could go one step further and see Jesus as transcending national boundaries and making spirituality something intensely personal again (as in Genesis), but extending the compassion universally. The journey for him is both inward and outward - but that's a subject for another time.

Moses - in my view a stepping stone in this process - has always been problematic since his compassion extends only to his tribe. Even in his punishment of his tribe for its manifold transgressions, he is acting from compassion since he wants to bring them closer to God.

But Bruegemann takes a different view, looking at the Exodus entirely from the point of view of the dismantling of Empire. For him, the Egyptians are equated with Pharaoh, and I suppose as long as we view the Bible as literature rather than history (which I do), then this is a useful viewpoint. In my mythology class, we study the Mahabharata, and since the work is so fantastical, it is not even tempting to discover the historical impulses behind it, so the Pandavas and Kauravas become alternative metaphors rather than individuals. The Bhagavad Gita was Gandhi's favorite book, which is mind-boggling until you realize that for him the characters are not human beings, but rather qualities within ourselves. As a spiritual seeker, nonviolence is paramount in dealings with others, but we need to attack our own inner demons with all the vehemence we can muster. As one of my favorite modern gurus - Lama Marut, who lives in Las Vegas and posts daily on twitter - once said, "We should not be playing footsie with samsara under the table. We should be kicking samsara in the groin."

So Bruegemann seems to have no problem with the destruction of the Egyptians, even the ones who weren't in the government. In addition, he sees the royal reign (Solomon in particular) as a return to the ways of the Egyptians, proving the impossibility of institutionalizing what is essentially a nomadic God. He says,

Moses dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing the gods and showing that in fact they had no power and were not gods. ... Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion [though again this is only for his tribe]

He makes clear why theology is important in a concise sentence that I find profoundly important:

Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology.

I can't say how often I have felt that to be true, but since we leave our theology unexamined and unquestioned, we end up being slaves to it, even though we don't really pay any attention to it. It is those who accept religion uncritically and pay lip service to it in church on Sundays who are in the most precarious position in terms of their faith and in terms of their relationship with those around them. One tragedy can destroy such an unexamined faith, but at the same time, it influences our tiniest actions, which are entirely unconscious.

Bruegemann is truly compelling in his examination of how the need for a prophet comes about.

...the real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right--either in the dean's office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.

He brings this home to the Israelites, and makes a point that counters my traditional view of them. I had always viewed them as unbearably prone to complaining. I think perhaps the biblical authors intended it this way, but Bruegemann sees a virtue in complaining:

...it is characteristic of Israel to complain rather than lament; that is, Israel does not voice resignation but instead expresses a militant sense of being wronged with the powerful expectation that it will be heard and answered. Thus the history of Israel begins on the day when its people no longer address the Egyptian gods who will not listen and cannot answer. ,,, The grieving of Israel--perhaps self-pity and surely complaint but never resignation--is the beginning of criticism.

I wonder how the complaints of Israel against Moses and Yahweh figure in to this vision...