( image courtesy of Chris Briley )
Wendell Berry’s critique of western progress is always staggering. As always, he
procures incredible insight with a sort of blunt wisdom that reaches
beyond rhetoric and our flimsy presuppositions. We , all creation, find ourselves in a profound space of uncertainty. We've climbed as high as we can climb on the myth of certainty. We teeter back and forth in the space frozen in fear, grasping to the breaking pieces of certainty. We watch the hope that we might save ourselves break away in our hands. These words, from poet and prophet Wendell Berry...
The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this “progress.”
So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”
Written decades ago, the poem is incredibly poignant, mystical, and even prophetic:
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, “Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!” I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
Though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
Jesus asked questions, good questions, unnerving questions,
re-aligning questions, transforming questions. He leads us into
liminal, and therefore transformative space, much more than taking us to a mountain, the myth of certainty. He subverts up front the cultural or religious assumptions that we
are eventually going to have to face anyway. He leaves us betwixt and
between, where God and Spirit can get at us, where we are not at all
in control, where divine imagination gives rise to something beyond. Hope. Maybe
this is why we have paid so little attention to Jesus questions and
emphasized instead his seeming answers. They give us more a feeling of
success and closure. We made of Jesus a systematic theologian, who
walked around teaching dogmas, instead of a pilgrim, engaging
transformer of the humanity, the redemptive imagination of God...the reality of new creation.
Jesus always reminds
us that God is all wisdom, we had best not try to
concoct our own hope by providing ourselves with pat or immediate
answers about great and intentionally unanswerable questions.
I'm reminded of the story of the " rich young man." The young man asking Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. We too, may think we have given everything away, that we too are good. But we still, cling to one thing...our " wealth " of human knowledge. Here comes that challenge. We have a history in which we've climbed a mountain to the myth of certainty. We have amassed great knowledge, and yet, we've come to the tip of it, and teeter dangerously...ready to fall. And, Jesus asks us to sell all we possess...and follow him into the reality of life.
Sadly, we want Jesus to answer, to reassure us of our certainty, of the hope in our knowledge. Jesus is so much mystery, and so many questions. I used to have lots of answers, lots of knowledge, but I've had to give it all away. Jesus is the biggest mystery in my life, and in it, I have found the radical scandalous redemptive imagination of God. And in the mystery, the questions and the unknown...is the Hope of all creation.
The church needs to re-kindle the mind of Christ...the language of divine redemptive imagination, to a new creation, the Kingdom. This is our only hope.
