Recently my wife Cathy and I went for a hand-in-hand stroll around Green Lake. I love public spaces where people gather, whether it be the Lake or the Market, or the great festivals that bring this city alive throughout the summer. I delight in watching us, in chatting with us, in feasting and playing and creating together. I'm basically a happy person that finds great renewal in simply being with people. I love this city. I even like the weather. An overcast day is always good to dive into a book.
But as Cathy and I talked my end of the conversation was full of worry and despair, full of troubles and gloom about the political and cultural environment. I truly think our nation is in the beginning of an emerging catastrophe. I'm having an almost impossible time trying to imagine real political hope, or hope in a spiritual and cultural renewal. It's like we are the embodiment of a house of cards whose inevitable collapse is one small touch away.
The problem is that we've become absorbed into empire. We've lost our national and cultural sovereignty to a global empire ruled by a wee tiny elite of financial overlords who care not at all about real human beings. Empires are destructive, demonic manifestations that despise the simple ways of people feasting and playing and creating together. Empires live for only one purpose: absolute dominating control of others. Otherwise known as the death of freedom.
Biblically speaking, we live in the time of the hard-hearted Pharaoh, and increasingly we are being asked to make bricks without straw. But our Moses is nowhere to be found. It is a time before the movement of freedom. It is the time of groaning, of weeping and gnashing of teeth, the time before God hears the cry of the crushed and moves into history to change it. It is the time when everyone does what is right in their own eyes because community coherence, community conversation, community connection has fallen apart.
We are each now on our own, alone. We have become weakened caribou for the ravenous wolves of global military capitalism. And there is no political party to save us. There are no spiritual movements with the imaginative capacity to transform our consciousness. There is no artist or poet who inspires our courage with a vision of new creation. Even the earth is dying of open wounds that fade in and out of the news cycle.
We have become slaves to those who would build a Tower of Babel with which to storm Heaven and become gods. How do we defeat such gods? How do we escape from empire?
How do we change the world when we don't have the capacity to embody the change we seek? I keep holding Cathy's hand but I know our love is not enough.