Whether you voted red or blue this past election, there is no argument that this inauguration is one of poignant historic proportions. I was watching the Today show this morning and the soon to be official White House photographer was sharing some recent photos of the Obamas. I was struck with the image of the president elect with his two daughters in the Jefferson memorial; the three of them standing in front of this likeness of the American patriarch, founding father…white marble juxtaposed with brown skin. I realized that if the Obamas lived just two hundred and fifty years ago they quite likely would have been slaves….wives separated, sold at auction away from their husbands; parents separated from children; losing touch forever with family….a stony road indeed. I can’t imagine what African Americans must be feeling now….joy, hope….liberation.
The entire sweep of Biblical narrative history, both Hebrew scripture and New Testament literature, is one long epic tale of God’s vocation of liberation: the liberation of the people Israel from slavery in Egypt; the liberation from the Sinai desert sojourn; from the Philistine overlords; the liberation from the captivity in Babylon; from the oppressive Seleucids; liberation from Roman imperial indignity…..and liberation always begins on the margins, where it is most urgent; wherein it begins as renewal of community, the renewal of genuine human commerce. The way we have been forever meant to live. Community means that we forbear our differences in gracious hospitality; that we take care of our neighbor first; we feed and heal and clothe; the greater good being that which we serve; that violence will always be a lose/lose proposition….in short liberation always is engendered through sacrifice for the other.
All of us: the rich and the poor are in need of liberation; from that which binds our true creative predisposition, our true nature…self reliance is an illusion…our salvation is in community…the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is the Gospel formula, as it were, that we live first for our neighbor, and the mystery is: That is where we find life abundant…and the abundant life is for all, not just a few.
It seems to me that both political parties find themselves in renewal…a reality that has settled upon us; I have such high hopes…I hope not naive, not just because of another step towards liberation for our African American brothers and sisters; but for the liberation of all of us; we are all contingent to each other…a greater mysterious human organism, a powerful collective which in truth is the very body of Christ; and living within which we know intuitively that until all are liberated, no one is free….but perhaps soon enough.
Jim,
I share your hope, but I wish I could fully share your optimism. I see this election, this amazing and historical inauguration as a fundamental first step in a
journey that I truly believe will reach the promised land, but I fear it will be a long and troublesome journey, challenged both by backlash in the beginning and disappointment from unrequited overinflated expectations down the road.
But as you point out, this struggle has been going on a long time. It is no accident that the Romantics (esp. Blake, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman) took it as their task to rewrite the “supernatural” Biblical narrative in “natural” terms in order that their poetry might, as P. B. Shelley said, “quicken a new birth” of the world, of humanity.
Who knows, perhaps the time has come that we are finally in reach of Blake’s vision of building “Jerusalem in [this] green and pleasant land.”