hope : mackenzian

April 16, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Called to life

“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” —1 Corinthians 15:22

This verse, part of an extended argument from the writings of Paul, became a triumphant chorus in the hands of Baroque composer George Frideric Handel. In my favorite version of his Messiah, which I mentioned two weeks ago, it swells from genteel to full-throttle and back again thanks to a four-part choir.

It’s really quite epic, it’s only two minutes long, and London’s Royal Choral Society approximates it every Good Friday.

This verse and the theme of Resurrection have been in my head all day, and I spent much of the morning reflecting on what it means to be made alive. I’m not talking about theological explanations, which are many and can be great.

I’m more interested in the practical implications of “being made alive.” If it’s not just a concept and means actual change, then it must mean something for daily living and relationships, and it must change the lenses ordinary people can use to perceive our experiences and choices.

As Walter Brueggemann explained in the 2000 edition of The Prophetic Imagination, “texts—in particular biblical texts—are acts of imagination that offer and purpose ‘alternative worlds’ that exist because of and in the act of utterance.” Stories like the Christian Passion narrative and texts like the canon that refined and passed it down over the millennia are all tools that can help me and my communities to to provoke and evoke new visions of what’s possible for us.

“Imagination,” Brueggemann writes, “is indeed a legitimate way of knowing.” And it can inspire us to build with our texts, not just deconstruct the worlds we’ve premised on them; it can inspire us to put flesh around “a differently perceived, differently received, differently practiced world” than the conventional one we grow up learning to operate in.

About sixteen years ago, I stood at the threshold between death and life. Through my experience and recovery, I learned that passing from death to life involves letting go. Being part of the flow of life means releasing the temptation to keep a tight grip, to try to tame and control.

As easygoing as I was, I still had to let go of my immediate plans and expectations. It took me a little longer to practice letting go of familiar forms of pain and restriction as well (I’m still in process on that).

But losing the ability to forecast exactly what came next was a major part of what the freedom of living meant for me at that time. Being made alive wasn’t only about me regaining physical capacity or spiritual hope. It also meant me gaining the courage to step toward the unknown and to risk growth and challenge at the edges of the life I’d lived before.

I put aside some work, and I’ve still not returned to some writing from Before even though it’s all some people remember of me. Some relationships from Before faded to black too.

But also my attention drew me in new directions and new companions have joined me, including many of you.

I can’t help but think that whatever’s “wild and true” should fill the lives of those who’ve been made alive. I’m not sure that the wild-and-true can be blueprinted or plotted out of context. I’m sure imagination must be required and there are more surprises than we can count.

Because the already is is a kind of tomb. And it would be a shame to come alive in a tomb yet perceive its walls as the outer boundary of the outer world and try to build a life in there.

More is possible. Not only do we get to be made alive, but we also get to leave our tombs behind. That’s good news right there… even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

December 24, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Advent: The other walking dead

An individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I am not accommodated to it. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.” —R. Abraham Heschel

I first heard the concept of creative maladjustment from Heschel’s contemporary Martin Luther King and his speeches between 1963 and 1967. The two men literally walked together during the 20th Century civil rights movement, but I’m not clear on which was first to use the language of maladjustment to describe the dissonance between a justice worker’s faith-full perception of alternative ways to order life and the contemporary and historical systems they name disordered and seek to change.

When Heschel ties the capacity to be surprised with awakening to life every day, that strikes me as a very different approach to violence and oppression than the cynicism and pessimism that comprise much political and social commentary. In difficult and distressing times, it’s not comforting to assume that evil is normal and power will protect itself, but it seems somehow more reasonable. Yet expecting it, and declining shock or grief about it, is a kind of accommodation.

People can disagree about whether that’s true. It might be that we need some sort of acceptance to be able to either change the current order or change how we operate in and around it. Framing the system as static seems to encourage us to recognize our agency despite it.

But tonight, on the cusp of Christmas Eve, I’m thinking about the distressing times that the gospel writers set the Jesus story in, the plagues of imperial violence and suffering, capricious rulers and repression they lived with not just for a short four or eight years but for generations.

And in that context, these writers offer readers so many surprises. Starting their story with an unremarkable immediate family, poor shepherds, rich foreigners, and democide on every side, these writers craft a claim that there are reasons to hope anyway, reasons to envision life beyond exploitation, reasons to live as though life, real life, is available even for those on the edges of the social circle.

Heschel argues that it’s our ability to persist in imagination and the curiosity that permits surprise that distinguishes us from the walking dead.

While we’re waiting actively and securing ourselves wisely, we also have the choice of cultivating an openness to possibility and hope despite those Powers that could afford to worry about us less if we took everything about what is for granted as fixed and bound our expectations to its limits.

But there are stars in the sky suggesting there’s more beyond those borders, and there may always be just enough of us who are maladjusted enough to follow them.

October 26, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Writing hope through fantasy

Andrew Slack, whose work on myths I’ve shared before, once spoke on a TEDx conference stage about the archetypes of the underdog orphan and their nemesis, the evil empire. As Slack traced instances of this archetype, he also explained the story it tells about human society, human storytellers, and our capacity, despite all appearances, to overcome structural oppression and the oppressors who keep it running. “Fantasy is not an escape from our world,” he said, “but an invitation to go deeper in it.”

There’s power in the stories we tell: they inspire us. Given enough time, they also shape what we can imagine, and that drives up the responsibilities authors have to offer us more than practical visions of our lives and our world. We need hope, Le Guin argues.

In an interview with The Nation, Le Guin explains that the traditional dystopian premise—”the world’s coming to a nasty, ugly end, and only a very few people will survive, by luck and violence”—is a dangerous cliché.

Hard times are coming… when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom.” —Ursula Le Guin

We need those alternatives and writers who will write hope into our collective imagination much more than we need more stories about an inevitable undoing of the world.

When I was in high school and newly baptized into the Adventist community, I read the writings of our church co-founder Ellen White and fretted about the fiction I was finding at my local library. I was drawn not to detective stories or romances but to historical, science fiction, and also fantasy, and early Adventists like White were deeply suspicious of “the novel.”

I eventually realized that the most dystopian of the stories and books in these genres shared Adventist fatalism about our world. As Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart explain in Seeking a Sanctuary, early Seventh-day Adventism adopted a contrarian view of 19th and 20th Century modernism.

When the mainstream was bullish about its trust in human nature and the human capacity to innovate, Adventism declared that society would turn against its minoritized populations and violently persecute them. Adventist writers said that, rather than using technology to end suffering and resolve war or global hunger, we would instead use technology to underscore mass surveillance and centralized social control.

My fantasy books and my Adventist books shared these assumptions about human nature and human destiny, but I didn’t quite grasp that at the time. Not for a few more decades did I realize that an expectation of global disaster wasn’t at the core of my own faith even if it was part of my subculture. I didn’t need that expectation for my mythological story to fit together, and it wasn’t a vision I could comfortably coexist with.

What was and is at the core of my faith is a fundamental hope that not all that has been needs to persist: the oppression that has been need not be. I have too much faith to put my trust in the belief that mass suffering and desolation are inevitable; too much faith to believe that only my kind of human will survive, or that only we should.

And I think this is part of the value of the humanities. The arts and humanities sow the faith that alternatives are possible, and viable, and good enough to build lives on, and we need those alternatives more than ever.

“When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism—exactly the same grounds, in fact—that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt our gravest error.” —Marilynne Robinson

July 30, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Planting Paradise

Every time I see a box of Bible story felts, I remember the garden. I hear those stories, stories I learned and repeated. I remember childhood safe places and I remember “In the beginning.”

With time I’ve learned to hear those stories in new ways. I can note the silences in each history now: the missing characters in each tableau, the counterpoints and undercurrents, the untold, the angst.

Take the first human parents at the garden’s edge. Stand safely distant, peering toward them from the crest of the hill nearby.

Zoom in. See the fruit forbidden as if cookies before dinner, blame and bifurcation like crumbs around the mouth.

There are voices.

Where are you? I missed you.
“It wasn’t me.”
Then who?
“She. The one you gave me.”

My parents are no longer whole, and they stand at the gate of the garden uncertain, small. I am with them. I am them.

I stand at the gate of the garden, not ready to leave, not able to stay. My skin shimmers, reflecting the crossed flames blocking the retreat we don’t launch. There are messengers overshadowing me, sentries between me and the grass that used to spring to meet my feet.

I look up at these messengers and study their faces. As I stare, their faces morph, and each of them speaks a message to me.

Marcus Garvey fills his lungs with power: “Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.” He morphs into a pillar of a woman with three-inch Afro coils cresting her head.

Octavia Butler weaves parables with each blink. She proclaims the Earthseed verse, each phrase like lightning: “Every child / Is cast from paradise / Into growth and new community / Into vast and ongoing / Change.”

“Every child?” I ask.

“Every child.”

Other messengers manifest in her place and also speak.

Iranaeus: “Gloria Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei. God’s glory is the living human; the human life is the vision and manifestation of God.”

John J. McNeill: “Bad psychology is bad theology and vice versa. Good psychology is good theology and vice versa. Good morality and good psychology cannot be in conflict.”

Toni Morrison: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of your language mean the limits of your world.”

While they speak, I’m silent. I don’t seek to tune them out; I couldn’t. They speak over me yet not against me, and the more they speak, the less vital the old world seems. The trees of the garden sway and the air around us is still.

Jeremiah: “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

Eleanor Roosevelt: “We need imagination and integrity, courage and a high heart. We need to fan the spark of conviction, which may again inspire the world as we did with our new idea of the dignity and worth of free men.”

Desmond Tutu: “We are different so that we can know our need of one another.”

Paul: “He who plants and he who waters are one—we are God’s colleagues.”

Sue Monk Kidd: “Embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment.”

Do not seek communion. Remember it.

My head tingles and I feel the heft of a garden tool in my fist. I look down at my hand and then back up at the messengers. The garden tool is a pen. I roll it across my fingers.

“Work with us,” Jeremiah says to me. “Your dreams are not enough.”

And so we turn away from the garden of simplicity, heels imprinting rough ground as we head toward the hills. The prophet speaks to me of knowing beyond instruction, wholeness beyond analysis, restoration beyond justice, peace beyond protection—more safety, more trust, more progress for us all.

I blink in the sunlight and wipe grit out of my eyes. The wilderness claims me.

I know I can’t return to the garden. I know we can’t. But with time, post-grief, I do not wish to.

My body teaches me how to work the land, as if it has always known, and it draws dirt grooves for new seeds wherever we walk. We plant and water this wild world, buds of possibility breaching the soil. I don’t know whether these buds will all survive rains, droughts, or frosts. But spring does come, and fruit will bear, and we’ll eat the harvest as family.

January 19, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Event Update: The Future of Adventism

Adventist Today has posted an updated announcement for the panel discussion on the Millennial Generation and Adventist Faith next month at Loma Linda University:

I’m looking forward to talking with Edgar Momplaisir, Alfredo Lee, Pr. Courtney Ray, Syd Shook, Monte Sahlin, and Ryan Bell about our denomination’s future (if not its “arc”!).

When I have my presentation ready, I’ll share it with you. You can make sure you’ll see it by becoming a mackenzian.com site subscriber. Add your email to the Get New Posts By Email box to the right of this post.

Thanks for reading!