“The prophet does not scold or reprimand … the proper idiom for the prophet in cutting through the royal numbness and denial is the language of grief, the rhetoric that engages the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. It is indeed their own funeral” (Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 46, emphasis in the original).
I have to admit, the Occupy movements have me torn. I’ve never protested anything or marched anywhere. I’m not opposed to either forms of expression, but have not felt moved to join in any. Rarely do they result in the kind of systematic changes they call for. Often, they fade into distant memory. But there’s something I just can’t shake about Occupy.
Our country claims to be the land of opportunity, a place where anyone with enough determination and gumption can take hold of the American dream. Yet few of us are fooled into thinking that is actually true. It helps if you have a college degree. And a master’s degree. And to be white. And male. If you had some combination of those attributes, then your chances of laying grasp on that American dream were pretty good. Until recently.
Now, saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, college grads are clutching their diplomas and looking around for jobs that will help them make enough money to make payments on their student loans (and credit cards, and car, and mortgage). And the jobs aren’t there. The corporations they thought would hire them, won’t. The banks they want capital from aren’t lending. The government they borrowed the money for school from wants it back. And those three institutions seem to be doing fine. Their leaders are that 1% that control a majority of the world’s wealth. And that just doesn’t seem right.
So people start venting about it to one another. And somewhere along the way, they take those private conversations into the public. The feeling that things aren’t as they ought to be begins to resonate and reverberate. More and more people gather in public squares and parks to vocalize the frustration they’re feeling and demand that things change. Their targets are the very institutions in which they’d placed their hope of attaining their piece of the pie–corporations for jobs, banks for capital, the government to make sure the other two played fair.
And that’s the root of the problem: mislaid hope. This is where it gets messy. I agree that things aren’t as they ought to be. Haven’t been for a long time. There is an unsettled longing deep in our souls that we’ve been trying to placate with our consumerism. But now that we can’t consume like we used to, now that we don’t have the ability to earn and spend like we used to, that unsettled feeling is welling up into a great roar.
I think that Walter Brueggemann is helpful here. In The Prophetic Imagination he writes about the sharp contrasts between the Israelite community that Moses established by leading them out from under oppression and the Israelite community under Solomon, which was marked by affluence and satiation. This leads to what he calls a “royal numbness.” In times where affluence and satiation fail to work any longer, times like we are experiencing right now, followers of Christ are called to have “prophetic imagination,” which Brueggemann says has three parts (p. 45):
- To offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and denial.
- To bring to public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know what they are.
- To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anger and passion.
Are we willing to take on the uncomfortable role of prophet? What is needed within the Occupy protests are voices that will bring new metaphors that speak to both “deathliness” as well as to a future hope. And that is a tricky, delicate task:
Prophetic ministry seeks to penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught. Clearly, the numbness sometimes evokes from us rage and anger, but the numbness is more likely to be penetrated by grief and lament. Death, and that is our state, does not require indignation as much as it requires anguish and sharing in the pain. The public sharing of pain is one way to let the reality sink in and let the death go. … Prophetic ministry seeks to penetrate despair so that new futures can be embraced by us. There is a yearning for energy in a world grown weary: ‘The world has lost its youth, and the times begin to grow old’ (2 Esd 14:10). And we do know that the only act that energizes is a word, a gesture, an act that believes in our future and affirms it to us disinterestedly. In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost. Grief and praise are new ways of prophetic criticism and energy, which can be more intentional even in our age. (117)
The numbness is fading, friends. People are desperately seeking a vocabulary with which to describe their discontent, their longing. We need to be the ones to give that to them. But we can’t do that from the sidelines. Today people will gather in over 950 cities around the world to wrestle with their growing conviction that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. People who are hurting and searching for a sense of justice and fairness. Where will the prophets be? Where will YOU be?
Note: After I this post went live, I went down to OccupyPDX with my daughter. That follow up post can be found here: http://www.thecrookedmouth.com/reflections-from-occupypdx
