In recent months several friends have been afflicted in body and spirit. There have been hopes and fears, disappointments and breakthroughs—threats of death and true life.
I learned a new word, ersatz, while reading my daughter’s college syllabus on Ethics, and then re-reading one of my favorite books by William Stringfellow, The Politics of Spirituality.
Ersatz has to do with what is not genuine; used as a substitute instead of the real thing. This has to do with faith and ethics.
Catch the Bird of Heaven, lock her in a cage of gold/Look again tomorrow, and she will be gone.
Ah the Bird of Heaven! Follow where the Bird had gone/If you want to find her, keep on traveling on.
Lock her in religion. Gold and frankincense and myrrh/Carry to her prison, but she will be gone.
Temple made of marble, beak, and feather made of gold,/Bell and book and candle, but she will be gone.
Bell and book and candle cannot hold her anymore./Still the bird is flying, as she did before.
Ah the Bird of Heaven! Follow where the Bird has gone/If you want to find her, keep on traveling on.” (Sydney Carter)
I confess with gratitude I’ve had excellent teachers on the subject of faith and ethics through these circling years: Coleman Brown and Steve Hartshorne at Colgate, Robert Franklin and Henri Nouwen at Harvard, Traci West and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz at Drew. They taught me real—not ersatz— ethics, as did the excellent students in my classes.
Yet, “Mama may have, and Papa may have, but God bless the child that has their own!” We all must learn to live the faith through adversity with integrity, to pray and press on—do the next right thing—amidst real disappointments and existential challenge. We cannot live or die for one another.
One decisive gift for traveling mercies, living with gratitude through affliction, is crying out from the depths, that is, true prayer— solidarity in the gospel.
As my God friend Lorna says, “We have to take this to knee city.”
Coleman Brown has a word on eschatology and ethics, wild grace under pressure:
“The Bible, remarkably, has rather little to say, directly, about disappointment. Oh, in the book of Job, God warns Job, at last, that a person whose hope rests in human ability to master nature will be disappointed. And Job recognizes, earlier, that no disappointment is probably more intense than the disappointment which comes when, in great need for them, our friends fail us.
When the Bible speaks of disappointment its dominant word is about that which does not disappoint us. “To you, O my God,” declares the psalmist, men and women have cried out in their disappointment. In You they trusted and were not disappointed. In the midst of their disappointments they trusted in You—they hoped in You—and in You they were not disappointed.
The gospel does not give a direct answer to our disappointments—to yours, or mine—much as we want it to: we want either to have things our way, or not to feel disappointed.
But the gospel neither promises that things will go our way, nor gives us a technique for not feeling our disappointments. Rather, we are told to cry out—to cry out!—to let your disappointments be known: to yourself and to God.
It is not a matter of being free from doubt.
It is not a matter of not being, really, disappointed. We really are disappointed—with all kinds of things, with others, with ourselves, yes, often with our lives as we have known them. We really are disappointed.
But hope is not destroyed when we doubt or are disappointed. There hope begins. Cry out your doubt and disappointment. Cry out, “O God.” Then listen: this will not disappoint you . . . even in the midst of your disappointments.
There is hope that will not disappoint us.
It is that hope which is produced by character that has endured suffering, and into which—amidst that very suffering—the love of God is poured.
The peace of God, for which we hope—and in which God would have us live—is not contradicted by tribulation or even calamity. It is not removed from us even when we disintegrate. Our struggles without and our fears within do not quench it. When we cry out, “O God!” the cry is heard, and then and there we are the children of God. We are always restless in our tribulations; we can never accept them. People of faith are full of longing. And they cry out if there is misery . . . like Jesus their Lord. But our hope does not have its nerve center in ourselves. Our hope is in the One—unto whom we cry out our disappointment, our grief, our loss, our heart; and that hope will not disappoint us.
The hope that will not disappoint us? It is the hope that God means what, through Christ, God says—The broken-hearted are blessed; they have the special eye and compassion of God. Can you hope for that?
Those who are outcast and feel that they are worthless are to be brought forward. There is a place for them—now and forever—in the very presence of God. Can you hope for that?
There is a place for you—a place for you with all kinds of companions. Can you hope for that?
And for love for those companions? And for peace with God? And for the simple ecstasy of worship? When God will be everything to everyone— and real life will begin.
Can you hope for that?
You can. You do. Even against hope you hope for that. As do I.
The glory of God is the glory of being able to love—no matter what.
Our hope is that we shall share the glory of God. Our hope is that we, too, shall be able to love—no matter what. Have you not heard that “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things”?
Even when we come to our last hour, when we feel life no longer, when our dreams dissolve and we are parted from those we love, when the songs are silenced and the sun on the dazzling snow is gone, then, even then, this hope—this love does not desert us. Then it gives reality to an old prayer: “When I depart, depart Thou not from me.”
The Good News is that Hope, even the Spirit of God is given to us. It is not our poor spirits of which I speak: we don’t have to prove ourselves anymore. It is not like feeling good about something good we have done. It is not a reward for being religious, God knows.
The person who lives in this hope no longer lives in despair over what time brings—whatever it brings, whatever our disappointments—but in the hope of God which does not disappoint us.
Christ has died: Christ has been raised. And by the cross and resurrection comes the Spirit, the Spirit of hope that does not disappoint us—hope for ourselves, hope for our world, hope for our real life together as children of God.
The way has been cleared. We have a place to stand in hope…
For us the broken body, and Christ’s blood poured out.”
(My good friends, Wayne and Gabrielle, at Fourth Presbyterian Church in South Boston)
Part II: On Resistance and Gratitude
On the subject of the ersatz and ethics here is a timely excerpt from Stringfellow’s book, The Politics of Spirituality. It is remarkably prophetic for this historical moment.
“The extraordinary changes being wrought in American society by the politicalization of technology are not only literally counterrevolutionary of scope in their impact upon the inherited constitutional [and human rights] traditions but, further, represent a massive and sustained aggression against human beings and the faculties most definitive of human life. What is going on is a brutal assault upon sanity and conscience.
The reality is that technology and its political formulation as technocracy cannot prevail, and, most especially, cannot secure its totalitarian captivation of the nation, unless—somehow—human beings are dissuaded from functioning humanly. Technocracy requires the displacement of human creativity and the neutralization of human reason by intimidation, inducement of ignorance, passivity, indifference, indolence, diversion, coercion, or some other form of dysfunction. The process is, as often as not, abetted simply by neglect, or default or acquiescence on the part of persons.
Technocracy requires this abdication or equivalent loss of human originality and reflection in order to achieve a maximum efficiency as gauged by its own terms. The human involvement must therefore, so far as possible, be reduced to that which is quantifiable, predictable, reliable, uniform, and, in a word, conform to the survival interests of the technocracy rather than concerned with human rights, human potential, or human needs.
The requirement which technocracy has to neutralize human discretion particularly where that openly identifies moral problems, explains for the most part why the last decades have been marked with such emphatic, at times virtually pathological, anxiety about so-called security, surveillance, tracking of credit [now online] histories and political involvements, and the great inflation of the police presence in society while at the same time civilian control of the police has been practically set aside.
Meanwhile, the capability of technology to displace human activities, by substituting ersatz technical procedures steadily increases and encroaches upon human responsibility. “Knowledge engineering,” whereby a computer classifies and applies pre-fabricated “solutions” to societal problems, is ominous in its potential for eliminating human reason and conscience from social crisis. Similar schemas are already in wide use in medicine and increasingly in law as well as in the media, with so far as I can discern appalling consequences for human life in society.
One of the perils in this kind of substitution and displacement, as is happening so rapidly with respect to language, for an example, is that the substitute is readily confused with the authentic, and after a while, the genuine disappears, because of neglect or use, and all that is left is the ersatz, and further diminished human beings.
For instance in my household, the custom is to use oranges when they are available in order to squeeze juice from them. However, a recent guest in the household complained when served genuine orange juice. The guest declared that Tang—a wholly synthetic product composed chiefly of chemicals— would have been preferred. For this guest, I believe, the ersatz had replaced the authentic and the fake product was regarded as if it were the real thing.
The incident is seemingly minor but the same kind of changes are happening everywhere in America and have transmitted the quality of life for human beings to a radical degree while also occasioning the preemption of human capabilities of thought and response. This process of substitution of displacement is a principal manner in which political and cultural conformity is reached. It’s no less insidious because it is invisible or because it does not resort to overt coercion.
One very important accompaniment of the displacement process and the human dysfunction that it prompts, in one way or another, is the manifold increase in the [ceremonial] aspects of the government institutions, both nominal and actual. The most poignant instance of this affects the Presidency. In the urgency of the Second World War the presidency lost much of its effectiveness as a ruling authority to other extra-Constitutional agencies and institutions, notably the Pentagon. Instead of the control and direction of the Pentagon lodging in the Presidency the president became subject to the initiative, indoctrination and dominance of the Pentagon…
If the assessment of the ruling powers in the American technocratic state expressed here is accurate to any substantial degree, then resistance is warranted: a patient, resilient, versatile, tough minded resistance to the powers that be, urgently needed among all persons who still remember the Constitutional inheritance, and especially, the Bill of Rights, and all those who would prefer representative government over an… unaccountable, self perpetuating, technocratic totalitarianism. Or, on a broader basis, such resistance is called for as both an exemplification and a defense of human life and society as such.
For Christians, of course, participation in such resistance to the ruling authorities—because the purported ruling authorities operate on an arbitrary basis without means of accountability to human beings and to human life—is, theologically, speaking, normative. It has been since the days of the apostles an articulation of the characteristic and indispensable confession of the political efficacy of the resurrection from death…
Whatever other forms that witness of resistance may take, I believe it must incorporate two aspects of venerable monastic tactics, which also have origins in biblical spirituality.
The first of these is intercession, the work of intercession, and, if you will, the politics of intercession—the solemn offering to Almighty God of all the cares and needs of this world whatsoever, represented in the offertory of certain particular necessities and issues, implicating persons and communities known to those who are interested. In the tradition of intercession, as I understand it, the one who intercedes for another is confessing that his or her trust in the vitality of the Word of God is so serious, that he, or she volunteers risks sharing the burden of the one for whom intercession is offered even to the extremity of taking the place of the other person who is the subject of the prayer. Intercession takes its meaning from the politics of redemption. Intercession is a most audacious witness to the world.
Another aspect of the monastic style I consider especially suited to political resistance is the sustained eucharistic praise of the Word of God.
In the Bible, in such images or stories as we have received concerning the Kingdom of God, the only activity which seems pertinent in the Kingdom (including those scenes of the last Judgement) is praise of the Word of God. It is as if the locations of the whole assembly of created life, the angelic powers as well as human beings and the entire remainder and range of creation, are being fulfilled, and perfected in celebration of the Word of God… and thanksgiving for the Word of God.
For human beings, in these scenes, it is not God who is fulfilled, or made whole by the praise but we ourselves.”