After the Flood

As with the Jewish practice of “sitting shiva,” I have been staying still as I absorb the return to our national presidency of the tyrant our founders feared and tried to prevent. Schooled in the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, they knew that republican forms of government usually succumb to the lies and empty promises of demagogues who turn the corrupted leaders of the republic’s senate to their own ends. And so we have it. The only president in our history to foment a riot to overturn an election has been returned to power by the very electorate he sought to defraud. Whether we can, because of peculiar features of our own culture and time, reverse this classic decline, is the challenge of this day.

We all await the more nuanced and rigorous investigations of political scientists and sociologists to understand more fully the sources of our own chaotic circumstance. Trump’s very narrow victory in the popular vote absolved the misconceived electoral college, for the moment, of the blame. Was it the vanity of an aged Democratic president that forced a valiant but untested candidate upon us? Was it really the price of eggs and an illegal influx of immigrants (on whom our farms and infrastructure depend) that overwhelmed the people’s fear of tyranny? Was it the digital flood of lies and fakery that hypnotized a mass of ignorant voters? Was it the anti-democratic crusade of a revived Christian nationalism? Was this the result of an entire culture soaked in cinematic violence, consumer fantasies, and greedy individualism? Is our political train wreck the result of gerrymandered state and national legislatures? Of immense rivers of dark money? Of winner-take-all election systems? All of these contribute to a possible explanation.

In our search for explanations we seek some guidance for how we should lead our lives as responsible citizens. We cannot do everything. As individuals, our task is to discern our own path, our own specifics that can anchor us in this time, this circumstance. Among those tasks is participating in and supporting groups that are advancing the repair of Constitutional norms in the wider culture and society.

For over forty years I have been wrestling with the task of bringing the symbolism of Christian worship into a positive but critical engagement with our federal, republican, and democratic heritage. But today the headlights of patriarchal monarchy that I once saw in my rear-view mirror are now glaring from a wreckage immediately before me. The classical cycle of political rise and fall seems to have overtaken the linear hope for a “new heaven and a new earth.” The fabled arc of history begins to look like a slight curve on the wheel of eternal decay.

Yet the image of a just republic in a land of mutual care of people and the earth endures. As I begin to rise from my sitting I resume my journey with this initial observation. I think we have experienced a hard-to-comprehend collapse of the public arena that has been  fundamental to republican visions of governance. The federation of face-to-face publics assumed by our Constitution has been overwhelmed by global bombardments of images that overrun our capacity for ordinary language, argument, and persuasion. The propaganda blitz of “mass society” illuminated by thinkers like Hannah Arendt after World War II has metastasized in the social media and closed environment of cable news. The very language for a public conversation has been polluted by outrageous lies and subversion of the common meaning of our words. The “publics” sustaining all viable re-publics are smothered from without by a media avalanche and from within by our urge for fame, comfort, and self-approval. Narcissistic celebrities have shouted down the conversation of the common good. If there is any hope for us it is in reclaiming these living publics from the make-believe world of speakers and screens. 

For me and my neighbors, the trauma of the election floated in the hurricane that washed away homes, towns, forested slopes, bridges, roads, and businesses only a month before. But in that wreckage, as I reported earlier, emerged people helping each other, speaking to each other to solve problems, reconstructing networks of trust and communication. At one point, our only means of information was by radio! But even in that communication void the flash fires of lies that surfaced to interrupt our work were soon suppressed by facts that all could share. The floods and winds stripped away the apparatus of commercial distraction and left us face to face across the tables of our common good.

As we talk with our neighbors in the community, we find ourselves saying “before the flood” and “after the flood,” as if we were denizens of Bible-land. But this is the image that is carrying me these days. Ecologically, we have to get all the creatures into an ark to survive the blind attacks by fossil fools on our efforts to sustain a planet on which we can live. We have to find ways to live together on this speck of rock, air, and water. We need that rainbow covenant and we will not let it disappear from our vision. We need that covenant of mercy that extends to friend and adversary. And we need to find our way back to a public life that seeks a common good through persuasion, agreement, and trust. We don’t have that in our national government right now, but there are a million shoots of new life emerging “after the flood.” We have to nurture them. The ark has landed but we have to trust that we can live upon the land.

I close with a reading from the late Barbara Holmes, a member of the Center for Action and Contemplation, founded by Richard Rohr.

At the center of every crisis 
is an inner space 
so deep, so beckoning, 
so suddenly and daringly vast, 
that it feels like a universe, 
feels like God. 

When the unthinkable happens, 
and does not relent, 
we fall through our hubris 
toward an inner flow, 
an abiding and rebirthing darkness 
that feels like home. 
   —Barbara Holmes, “What Is Crisis Contemplation?”