Two notes—
This week and the following two weeks I’ll be writing about Christmas, after a fashion. I was raised in a Catholic parish renewed by radical nuns after Vatican II, and dedicated to liberation theology, the priesthood of the people, and the preferential option for the poor. I want to think and write through that lens about this time of year. So if that’s not your thing, or you’re simply saturated, this might be a good time to ignore the weekly essays. (Maybe I should note that I’m not interested in a theological debate. I have no stakes in anyone else’s belief or nonbelief in my [unsettled, sometimes contradictory, still-in-progress] theology, and no interest in converting anyone.) As always, I’m trying to write through, with, into, and toward bewilderment in Howe’s sense.
Tonight at 7 Irish time/this afternoon at 2 US Eastern time, I’ll give the second Annulet Linkages Lecture. It’s called “On the line” and you are very welcome if you’re interested. Sign up via this link.
Listen. There is a voice calling to us in the wilderness. There are gold stitches on blue cloth like the gold marks in the deep blue sky. The wind goes through the rushes where the tents have been pitched along the canal and the rushes hum with that wind, and the tiny fish swim oceanward in the dark water. In the tents the light from a cell phone is blue-white for a moment, then extinguished. A long time ago a census was undertaken and everyone was required to return to their homeplace. People move across the land and the water, using what conveyances they can find. The cost of living rises so quickly that it is impossible to find a place to stay. The landlord opens the door and the apartment stinks of mold. It has only one window, which will not open. The night sky above us spins with galaxies that distant telescopes record. Through the universe the thread of song comes: and is gone again. Overnight the pink roses outside the public library open their buds despite a hard frost. And the temperature rises, and the ones sleeping among the rushes are a little warmer in their sleeping bags. The man and his pregnant wife bend against the wind as they walk a road that seems never to end, toward a town where they don’t belong. When they arrive, who will open the door? Listen: there is a person calling to us from the street corner.
In the desert the billionaire stands on the cliff surrounded by data centers. The United States vetoes the ceasefire. Soldiers and police exchange expertise online. They may seem to constitute the world but they are not the world. Violence, resource hoarding, fear—these occlude, by their greedy gobbling of our attention and even our understanding of what is normal, the granular facts of the world of the miraculous real.
I think the word ‘miracle’ is not a description of something that once happened as if by magic, or by a power beyond comprehension; I think that word is a direction toward the world we know we need and have been infinitesimally schooled by capitalism (with its roots in racism and patriarchy) out of being able to name, out of longing for—sometimes even out of knowing what it is possible to long for. In that sense, to me ‘miracle’ is a word that points us toward a living and livable place where no one is outside the circle. It is a word that first and foremost means imagine and understands that imagination is world-making work, the founding gesture of the possibility of change and toward the kinds of work and kinds of company necessary for that change.
That something is unlikely does not mean it is impossible. That the word ‘miracle’ has come to imply extraordinariness does not mean that miracles are out of our hands. The people stand between the oil pipeline company and the river. The trade union closes the arms factory for a day, then for a second day. The tenants union finishes raising funds and buys their building. The city passes the basic income ordinance. The passersby make eye contact with the woman sitting on the pavement. The public library is open seven days a week and taxes on corporations pay for medical care for everyone. The light in the sky is a light in the sky. The people are grass, and the canal is a canal.
Listen, the prophet says, and directs my ears to grass, to water, to the ones all around me, near and far in endless concentric rings. Listen, the prophet says, and the scroll unfurls to words that proclaim release to the captives, that direct oppressors to let the oppressed go free. What is holy? Answering the poor and needy who seek water with water. Honestly? Abolishing the police. Banning fossil fuels. Living wages for liveable hours of dignified work. Sharing our food with one another.
Near the canal someone is cooking over a camp stove. The government announces that refugees will be housed in tents in the countryside. Swans dive into the clear water to eat the thin stems of lilies. The news report indicates a rising death toll in Gaza, and in cities and towns, in villages and in rural places all over the world people leave their intact and warm and sweet-smelling dwelling places to insist over and over that it is wrong to murder any people, it is wrong to bomb houses, wrong to destroy universities, wrong to target hospitals, wrong to poison the earth, wrong to inflict suffering at any scale.
Outside, it is unseasonably warm after a week of cold temperatures, and the fuchsias are still blooming. I peel and portion a tangerine and spit the pips and feel the drunkenness of things being various. In old books and on banners carried by families walking through Minnesota winters of the early 1980s, the words war is not healthy for children and other living things blur into the words they shall beat their swords into ploughshares. We have been doing this a long time, this work of imagination. We are not alone. We know what kind of world we want: grass, water, houses, warmth. Flowers. Safety. Clean clothes. Books.
Teach us what enough means. World of infinite beauty, right here around us. We make it together. Above us, way out in an atmosphere we can never reach but that touches us, the stars continue shining.
Colors for this time of year: almost-not-there blue, camellia pink, translucent orange, wet street gray, dark brown, red-brown, light purple, opal pink, dust-blue, persimmon, faded red, porcelain blue, condensation gray, gold, glaucous green, anther yellow. The meek, the poor, the vulnerable, the mourning, the hopeless, the abandoned, the neglected, the excluded, the overlooked, the weak—this is their season. These are their colors, how beautiful. The colors of justice, liberation, courage, solidarity.
Hermann Cohen: “the God who appears to me is the comforter of the poor and their avenger in world history. This avenger of the poor is the God I love.”
Thank you for reading. See you next week.