Peace, all. A quick reflection for y’all this AM. Incomplete. And hopefully worth a read and some musing :) Peace. ~Tom
“What’s insane is not [the bird’s] painful, clumsy, efforts to fly, but rather the hand that broke its wings.” - Rubem Alves, Tomorrow’s Child (1972)
Advent (Hope Against Hope)
For liturgical Christians, the season of Advent is around the corner–a season in which we sing and speak of and (at our best) summon something of hope. Hunger pangs of the heart. These we illustrate. With the colors of the night sky. Wreaths of green. Little candles pink and purple and blue. Sparks before the warmth. Of a sunrise that, fingers crossed, might be about to come. A rebellion against the cold. As best we can. From where we are.
Hope has been an obsession of mine for decades. Especially, I’ve been drawn to agnostic hoping. That is: hope that is not so sure and not so certain at all. “A pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will,” as Gramsci was known to say. No promises here, but to heck with so much of what is. And: here’s to the Not Yet (as Ernst Bloch would call it).
Faith, for me, in this frame, has been something like: the discipline of stoking a desire for the Not Yet. For not settling. For not letting an abusive world domesticate or slap us into submission.
Such faith can be nurtured in what Rubem Alves has called “aperitif communities.” Not appetizer communities. We don’t want to be full on those bread sticks when the spaghetti arrives. Rather aperitif. A forestaste before a meal. A “sup” that makes us not full but hungrier.
Sassy Faith
I was recently in a meeting in which the group was asked about “paths of faith that have inspired us.” I did not offer an answer at the moment. But my mind went immediately to an essay by Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. One that has influenced my sense of hope and faith since it was assigned to us as reading my Dr. Linda Thomas at LSTC so many years ago.
Dr. Copeland talks about this:
Known commonly as the sassy tree, it is said that tea made from the bark of the West African ordeal tree was once used when putting people on trial.
Specifically, the tea from the tree was used by people in power to “determine” whether or not a person was a witch. Meaning: whether or not someone practiced magic that was un-sanctioned by those “in charge.”
In front of an angry and accusing mob, an accused person would be forced to drink the tea from the sassywood. If she died as a result, well then clearly (!) she must have been a witch! If not (if somehow the poison did not kill here) allegedly she was then free to go.
The word sass arrived in the Americas and in the Caribbean, it is believed, in the 1600s. It was carried in the language and the hearts of people who were kidnapped and enslaved by the “company” and colonial powers. Here, the word took on a slightly different meaning. Folks also started using it as an adverb.
That is: to act sassy, to be sassy, or to “sass back,” but also to “have sass” or “demonstrate sass,” on a new continent and in a new context of oppression, came also to mean “giving the master a taste of his own medicine,” or:
“Giving the oppressor a taste of his own poison.”
According to Copeland, sassiness included acts suchs as: not taking abuse as it was offered by one’s “master;” talking back when it was not one’s right or privilege even to speak (but you did it anyhow); standing up against advances (including sexual advanaces) that, though they were ‘legal,’ were certainly not acceptable; and so on. Sassing back. Amen?
In so doing, Copeland observes, folks like Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Old Elizabeth, Sojourner Truth, and so many others were able to do something incredibly important.
In the real chains and bonds of a dehumanizing system in a dehumanizing society, one that would prefer to see them only as property, through sass, these women were (nonetheless) able to assert their humanity. Said again: to sass-back (to resist–even if only for a moment) was humanizing.
Whatever aggression or manipulations were being perpetrated, sass offered an interjection. A holy “No!” when a slaveholder was used only to YES. As it did (again even if only for a moment) it disrupted the power dynamic that allowed for and facilitated abuse. Sass did not change the whole system. Dammit. But it did offer a pause, an interruption, and an interjection that disrupted the imbalance.
For the moment, the scales tipped. The valleys were lifted. The proud brought down from their thrones.
Incomplete. Fleeting. But a foretaste. An outburst of desire for the Not Yet that is, in itself, a renunciation of bondage and a testimony of the last-becoming-first and much-prayed-for Reign of Love.
Fleeting. But still metabolized. An aperitif. God. Does it make you hungry?
Hope in Hopeless Times
In the worlds I tend to inhabit these days, we talk about being strategic. How will we instigate real change? What tension will lead to actual turning? These are important questions, and keep us from running in circles and running out of energy right before we might need it the most.
And Yet, in the quote from Alves above (about the bird not being insane for trying to fly–but only the hand that broke its wing being insane), there is a reminder for us that faith is not only nurtured by the pragmatic. The pragmatic does not always stoke in us that hunger of the heart, the longing, the optimism if the will, the discipline of faith that stokes forward-facing desire and longing.
Beyond pragmatics, there exists in acts that might be described as “sassy”–acts that provide an interruption and a re-framing, a renunciation of what is and glimpse of the lowly exalted…
Beyond pragmatic acts, there is something of desire shot-through, of hope, of hunger, of what we have sometimes called the “prophetic,” of the Spirt and of fire for the Not Yet, in the confrontation of abusive power (whatever the outcome).
For in that confrontation, we receive something of a delicious, hunger-inducing drink.
Chicago
So, to return to that question from that meeting: what paths of faith have inspired/stoked/influenced [us] lately?
My answer is this:
I think, at least for those of us who long in similar directions for Love to Reign and the lowly to rise up, little (nearby) has been as inspiring and hunger-for-justice-inducing as witnessing our beloveds in Chicago returning day after day in defiance to the crucifying powers who govern, fund, and empower ICE.
My friends, my siblings, I love you, we love you. This fascism rising around us can seem to be a hopeless situation. Demonstrations may seem futile, the pain not worth it. And Yet, each act of resistance we see from afar is a testimony for us: insane is the hand who inflicts abduction, imprisonment, and abuse. And delicious is the world where the powers who inflict these things are resisted, disrupted, and ultimately overcome.
Friends, siblings in Struggle, thank you for lighting the way for the Sun. Thank you for harkening the Dawn. Your work is beautiful. It moves us. It is the path, the Way, for the arrival of justice and peace and love.
May we all walk in hope in such ways where we are, when we are, and with whatever it is that we’ve got.
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