For those on the outside, a year ago, permanent busyness and speed were the norm. Everyone was so frantic and rushing in the madding crowd of a consumer and cell phone frenzy, driven by an unseen nanosecond digital dictator. Now the lockdown has brought a taste of boredom, slow time, and anxious waiting for the day the authoritarians will give the word that the new normal has arrived and the children can fling the doors open and run out to play. But they will have to learn the new rules of the game. Same game, but Built Back Better. Better for the bosses.
Forget that criminal born in a manger. Getting there is a long and hard journey. We are in lockdown. Just do as you are told.
Or imagine that child as a grown man in a prison cell in Seville 15 centuries later.
Or in Bethlehem today, in the West Bank as Palestinian territory is inexorably disappeared by the Israeli government and Palestinians' places to dwell on this earth grow smaller and smaller as their houses are bulldozed and land stolen.
Imagine the fates of all those locked down shut-in abandoned ones, those who are doing time to the slow ticking of the clocks. Or those who have no time to escape the supersonic hum of drone-launched missiles. Those whose time is up because the authorities deem it so. Those who just won't do what they are told.
In lockdown, there is plenty of time to imagine.
Thomas Merton, the inspirational anti-war Trappist monk, in "The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room" in Raids on the Unspeakable, said this about that child in a manger, soon to be radical anti-war criminal executed by the state:
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
Their numbers are growing by the day.
Pundits are fond of saying that time is all we have. This is untrue. We don't have time; time has us. We are born into it and in a techno-clock world those clocks start ticking and we turn with the seasons until our turning stops and our time is up. It comes with being born, being mortal. Human. We don't need astrology to tell us this. We don't want authoritarians controlling our experience of this greatest of mysteries.
If you listen closely, you can hear waves of empty words tumbling through the world, whistling windy words saying nothing. Whining words, nodding heads, vacuous sayings. Media saturated fatuous words. About "time" more cliche's have been coined and more quotable quotes recorded than nearly any other word. Quotes about what no one knows.
Time stands still, time flies, time is up, time is on your side, time is short, time is long, who knows where the time goes, time out, time starts, stop the clocks, start the clocks, we're running out of time, clock in, clock out, time served, serving time, lacking time, losing time, having time, gaining time, the end of time.
Yet everyone knows what time is even though they can't tell you. It comes with the territory of existing. Like silence, like love, like peace, like truth - simple gifts that authoritarians invert to suit their evil designs. Twisted people twisting words.
And yet:
It is no different now.
The yearning still gnaws.
The night dark, utterly silent,
Sky stretched endlessly back
Into an infinity beyond reach.
And the fears, the tears
Are they any different?
It is no different now.
Joy sometimes, hope too, divisions
Seemingly unbridgeable, vast chasms
Opening between those closest.
Little changes, though two thousand years
Dissolve into oblivion behind us.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
