In what for me feels like truly transformational times, I keep being thrown back to Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination as questions like these begin to arise:
- How do we support one another through huge personal and societal transformational shifts?
- How can I/we use our privilege to support the Earth and her inhabitants?
- How do I/we listen to the wisdom of the marginalized as well as listening to the voices of those with whom I/we disagree?
- How do we create alternative community…and what does alternative community look like?
“We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation,” writes Brueggemann. “Israel can only be understood in terms of the new call of God and [God’s] assertion of an alternative social reality. . . . The participants in the Exodus found themselves, undoubtedly surprisingly to them, involved in the intentional formation of a new social community to match the vision of God’s freedom.” (Italics in the original.)
“We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation,”
– Walter Brueggemann
Having been moved and inspired by this prophetic book when I read it while attending seminary (in 1978, the year The Prophetic Imagination was published), in re-reading even that first chapter, “The Alternative Community of Moses,” I feel as though I’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert of imagining what this new social reality might be. Although I’ve focused deeply on exploring alternative consciousness, the creation of shared community around a new consciousness remains for me both fleeting and experimental.
I’m wondering in these days when it seems, as it did for Yeats, that “the centre cannot hold,” when “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” am I brave enough to really live into the alternative social reality of God. The pull of normalcy—“the normalcy of civilization,” as Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan repeatedly called it—is so strong in my life. The need to fit in, to go along with the system—with things as they are—to be loved and accepted. Even my personality type leans in the direction of accommodation and avoiding conflict. I am so easily co-opted. And that’s without considering the formidable pull of our primal survival instinct.
Brueggemann’s book warns of the “domestication” of the Divine vision, and this is where I also see the church so often going as well—when St. Paul speaks of “the powers and the principalities,” this is what he is describing—not supernatural forms of evil; rather “natural” systemic and usually unconscious egoic forces pulling us back into the ways of empire and enslavement.
Prophetic criticism, says Brueggemann, “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.”(Italics mine.)
The “empire” includes our own propensity toward believing that “things are all right” when they are all right for me, and losing sight of the oneness of humanity and interbeingness (that all is interconnected—Martin Luther King: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”). But I think many of us realize that things are not all right—neither in the empire, nor throughout the planet.
I could go on. The task of prophetic ministry, Brueggemann emphasizes in italics, is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
To this challenging call, he adds yet another dimension: “[P]rophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.”
The question he asks of persons in faith communities, speaking particularly to the church, is, “How does one present and act out alternatives in a community of faith, which, on the whole does not understand there are any alternatives, or is not prepared to embrace such if they come along?”
The question he asks of persons in faith communities, speaking particularly to the church, is, “How does one present and act out alternatives in a community of faith, which, on the whole does not understand there are any alternatives, or is not prepared to embrace such if they come along?” Then he presents this challenge to clergy—to ministry leaders—to me:
My programmatic urging is that every act of a minister who would be prophetic is part of a way of evoking, forming, and reforming an alternative community. And this applies to every facet and every practice of ministry. It is a measure of our enculturation that the various acts of ministry (for example, counseling, administration, even liturgy) have taken on lives and functions of their own rather than being seen as elements of the one prophetic ministry of formation and reformation of alternative community.
This essay is long, and filled with questions to ponder, so I’ll close with one vision of alternative community coming out of a more recent prophetic work by two feminine theologians, Saving Paradise. Rita Nakashima Brock and Kathleen Ann Parker present thorough evidence that the early Jesus-movement saw “paradise” as being here-and-now not something to be awaited until after death, and here is a bit about what such a “paradise now” looks like:
To know paradise in this life is to enter a multidimensional spiritual-material reality….Paradise is simultaneously this earth, a beautiful, luminous creation, and the realm of the dead, which is connected to the living but is separated by a thin veil through which the dead can pass to accompany, bless, or guide the living. Paradise is human life restored to its divinely infused dignity and capacity, and it is a place of struggle with evil and injustice, requiring the development of wisdom, love, nonviolence, and responsible uses of power. Paradise can be experienced as spiritual illumination of the heart, mind and senses felt in moments of religious ecstasy, and it can be known in ordinary life lived with reverence and responsibility. Paradise is not a place free from suffering or conflict, but it is a place in which Spirit is present and love is possible. Entering paradise in this life is not an individual achievement but is the gift of communities that train perception and teach ethical grace. Paradise provides deep reservoirs for resistance and joy. It calls us to embrace life’s aching tragedies and persistent beauties, to labor for justice and peace, to honor one another’s dignity, and to root our lives in the soil of this good and difficult earth.
Rev. David Hett is the minister of Religious Life and Learning at First Community Church and the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center
