The Migrant and the Song
[“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept . . . How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” (Ps 137:4)]
[“Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearance they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had not dreamed” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics).]
O Lover,
I remember traces of being a migrant, a wanderer among the nations. The first language of both of my parents was Plautdietsch (“low German”) even though our ancestors’ actual transit was two generations earlier. Before that my Mennonite people had wandered from Friesland in the Netherlands to Prussia to the Ukraine to the American Middle West. The lingering Teutonic scent, diminishing yet real ethnic cohesion, and the abiding issue of conscription helped to sharpen awareness that we had not always been where we were. Such a history of meandering qualifies as geographical migrancy.
But there is another kind of migrancy, one even more explicitly of values and spirit. While it can appear simultaneously with economic prosperity and nationalist assertion, these can and do mask disproportionality of wealth, institutional racism, structured injustice, and stunning moral compartmentalization. In such a setting persons and communities of faith can experience ourselves to be spiritual refugees, indeed, aliens profoundly conflicted as to the very meaning of “homeland.” Such is our present situation in these disunited states where many of various faith traditions, or none, agonize over the quandary of the ancient Hebrew exiles: how can we sing Your song in this alien land? How do we live here and now truthfully and with integrity when so much is being subverted or worse? More importantly, how do we allow our alienness to foster clarity, identity, and urgency rather than the mogrification of Your song?
The questions burdening our present discontent are legion: Are you Lord, but only when the sun is shining? Are You, O Lover, a local tribal deity—e.g., the patron of “America First”—whose jurisdiction can be exited via passport? What does a melding of unblinking realism and prophetic cry look like? Why am I so offended by the usurpation of cherry-picked Christian texts, images, institutions, and god-talk toward autocratic ends? Might my shock in the face of recent developments say more about my having segued into comfort zones than the severity of our present jeopardy?
May I add to the latter query more of the same? What are the possibilities, hitherto neglected, amid which our shared malcontent not only burdens but may also free us? For example, can we now see more clearly the monetizing of influence and the lure of consumption which our society has freely and democratically chosen? Relatedly, is there now not greater clarity regarding the inherent bent in our ecclesial institutions toward certitude, what the poet Geoffrey Hill calls the “religiously secure”? When, in the words of Bonhoeffer, “Shakespeare’s characters walk among us,” how can the counter-cultural character of Jesus and Your mission embodied in him any longer be ignored? Does not the conviction that only You The Center hold place me in Christianity’s historical minority report, the one “acknowledging that they were aliens and exiles on the earth” (Heb 11:13)?
Too old to emigrate (again), aware as never before of the flux of all things, yet convinced that Your Kin-dom holds sway in Babylon as surely as in Jerusalem, I acknowledge the dire situation giving rise to this post. However, this prayer is neither a surrender to the chaos nor an escape from the world into some ethereal “afterwards.” All that I have experienced of You, With-Us-One Self-materializing in the Christ, is in the here and now of this created life; all that is, is being drawn toward Your Télos of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Apoc 21:1). I remain persuaded that Your transformational disposition, concretized and ever-augmented in what we experience in the two great feasts of the liturgical year, is the core of our hope whether, to edit Lincoln, the “angels of our nature” be of the better sort or no.
So, O Lord of the Dance, in this our emerging Babylon we migrants will continue to sing Your cosmos-embedded song.
