This essay is about bending history. It is not about controlling history, for humans do not have the power to control the course of time. We can make a difference in some of the directions that social history moves and in some of the directions that planetary development takes. Our choices do matter. We are response-able. We make choices. We select options. The entire course of time is affected by those acts of our freedom.
One human being’s efforts may matter very little in the broad sweep of historical consequences. But large groups of humans, activated by significant inspiration, can matter very much. This is true both when our human “mattering” means great benefit to key human values and when our “mattering” means huge and tragic consequences. We are now experiencing an era of human history in which we experience many matters of “big time’ mattering. We see a climate crisis so immense that we can barely stand to face it. We see a drift toward authoritarian government that threatens to undo all that as been done toward a viable and vital democracy. We see much to be done in solidarity with women’s efforts to deliver themselves from second-class oppression and and to deliver all of us from patriarchy. We also see racial and cultural minorities treated with practices of suppression, contempt, and cruelty that shock our sensitivities to the very quick.
Indeed, the consequences rendered by deeds of the human species have become enormous. We live in an era of human life that some now call the “Anthropocene.” This name takes note of the fact that the once tiny human species has become a key planetary force—melting arctic ice, raising sea levels, reshaping the climate, multiplying extinctions, polluting air-water&soils, as well as uprooting the distribution fabrics of our societies. Our everyday historical experience is challenging us to do a better job with our now vast history-bending capacities.
Lessons from Biblical History
The prophet Ezekiel was called upon to do history-bending within a seemingly hopeless situation. He was a religious leader of the Mosaic-heritage people exiled in the land of Babylon—a strongly influential culture in contrast with the tiny and compromised kingdom of Judea in which Ezekiel and others lived before their exile. Many exiled groups simply melted into this creative Babylonian culture. Speaking in the voice of Yahweh (understood as the power of history itself), here are some of the “power words” of this wildly imaginative poet:
I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will watch over; I will feed them on justice. (11:16)
These words went into the bending of history. These words not only participated in preserving the Yahwist faith during forty-seven years of Babylonian exile, they prepared the way for the rise of another prominent prophet. We now refer to this figure as Second Isaiah—a prophet whose gripping poetry spoke of leaving exile and returning home to rebuild an independent national expression of the Yahwist heritage. The Persian empire was then conquering the Babylon empire and was instituting new polices for exiled people. This unnamed prophet, whose writings appear in the last part of the scroll of Isaiah, saw the Persian emperor as a servant of Yahweh come to deliver Israel. Second Isaiah also saw these historical developments as Yahweh’s call to leave exile, return to the wreckage of the old Palestinian geography, and build a new society rooted in the long memories of this people. Here is “the voice of Yahweh” according to the poetry of Second Isaiah.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her this:
that she has fulfilled her term of bondage,
that her penalty is paid. . . .
Prepare a road for Yahweh through the wilderness,
clear a highway across the desert for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up;
every mountain and hill brought down;
rough places shall be made smooth;
and mountain ranges become a plane.
Thus shall the glory of Yahweh be revealed,
and all humankind together shall see it,
for Yahweh has spoken. (40:2-5)
Bending history takes place when we use our essential freedom to do for others a Second-Isaiah-type of inspiration—to do such powerful visioning through our words, our deeds, and our presence. Let us also remain aware that historical results can be achieved by ourselves and by other humans who willfully crowd out essential freedom and act from a place of inner bondage. Adolf Hitler and company bent history, even though their dreadful acts derived from a terrible bondage of soul. Hitler’s living is judged” evil” from the perspective of the realism revealed in the Jesus, the Christ revelation, the Moses of the Exodus revelation, the Buddha of awakenment revelation, the Mohammedan Qur’an revelation, and so on. These “revelations” of Profound Reality quality realism provide us with depictions of a faithfulness that allow us to see values that are given to us by realism rather than values that are simply made up to advance our egoism or preferences.
The Pit of Evil
Adolf Hitler was an intelligent and capable man who went over to the “dark side,” as we Star Was fans might call it. His extermination spasm toward the Jewish people of Europe and his invention of a mode of “total war” that he thought could not be defeated dug a horrific ditch of evil. He showed us our human capacity for evil with a vividness toward which we still close our eyes.
Nevertheless, we remain vulnerable to enchantment by leaders who are skilled in calling forth our own rebellion against living in the real world. How has it happened in Russia that a leader can get away with poisoning his political opponents? How has it happened in the United States that a president and his cronies can get away with undermining elections, selling out to foreign interests, tearing up democratic institutions, misusing the military against peaceful protesters, and sowing confusion by lying daily as if that were an acceptable way of life. And this list of “bad doings” does not include a long list of omissions and failures to face and handle a significant list of emergencies.
Perhaps the sheer foolishness of neglecting a clear scientific way of minimizing the impact of Covid-19 pandemic will discredit this administration for all time. We have experienced a US president too inept to be compared with Hitler. We might better compare him with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who has been portrayed as the most evil U.S politician until now. We can be thankful that McCarthy was never allowed to be president. And perhaps we can also be thankful for President Trump’s gross ineptitude—even as we stand in horror of how far toward fascism someone as sociologically ignorant as Trump can take our government and a significant portion of our population.
In 1851, a century before Hitler, Herman Melville wrote a novel, Moby-Dick, that gave us a classic picture of the strange charisma of a defiantly evil human being. In this novel, the evil and “charismatic” person is Captain Ahab, a ship captain who has captivated the crewmen of a whaling vessel. “Evil” in this story is symbolized by the passion of this ship captain’s murderous hatred toward a huge white whale who had taken one of his legs in a previous encounter, making him, as he called it, “half a man.” The strength of this intentional fight with the white whale fascinates the other shipmates, who are, perhaps, open to follow him based on their own fights with whatever they aren’t able to control.
The huge white whale turns out to be a symbol for that Profound Reality that never loses. In this mythic story all but one crew member follows Ahab into his fight with an unbeatable power of nature—symbolically with our own fight with the Profound Reality we may also call “God.”
Symbolized in this story is something more inclusive even than the extreme aberration of a Hitler. In this story we see the whole of industrial society in a winless fight against the vast ocean of nature. Such an enchantment with human arrogance toward the natural planet precedes the futility of Hitler’s “total war” against all human societies. We can view the Jewish people playing the role of that white whale of personal humiliation in Hitler’s imagination. A similar role is being played today in the imagination our US white nationalist authoritarians by people of color and immigrants who might vote for democracy against the white nationalism that we see tending toward its fascist fulfillment.
This essay is about being delivered from these gloomy dead ends of human living. This delivery will require a vast bending of history in some different directions through the agency of our own essential freedom.
In addition to lawless authoritarianism, we also face a new kind of total war from our current fossil-fuel companies who are waging their un-winnable fight with the atmosphere of the planet. History is always presenting us with fresh challenges, some extremely large, some quite small.
Perhaps the reality of our true nature supports the quest for justice, but justice is a gift that must be asked for with our lives. Getting justice and keeping it requires foot movements, finger movements, telephoning, organizing, e-mails, speeches, money, voting, teaching, running for office, and this list is much longer. Social justice is a contact sport, so put on your shoulder pads, your shin guards, and come to the meetings, events, or protests with your wits about you.
True justice must be defined and brought into being by those who are accessing their profound consciousness and thereby becoming the early few who use their essential freedom to bring thought and action for justice to this time, this place, and this course of events. Each doable step can bring into play the action of an ever-larger force for some massive bending of time.
Obedient Freedom Changing History
Many Christian theologians have spoken of the origin of the cosmos as a “creation out of nothing” by that totally-free, all-powerful mysteriousness, that was anciently personalized with the name “Yahweh.” The word “God” in the phrase “Yahweh is my God” means our devotion to this all-powerfulness—that is, our loyalty, commitment, dedication, and obedience. This obedience is the obedience of freedom—the obedience of being our essential freedom and the freedom to be obedient in facing the actual response-able options available to us in our time and place.
The actions done by our essential freedom in response to Yahweh our God are also “creations out of nothing” in that these choices are not being caused by any force other than our essential freedom itself. Other forces are always playing a role in our behavior, but essential freedom is one of those forces. And this essential freedom is free indeed—no moralism or dogmatic rigidity can stand in the way of the essential creativity of this freedom.
The essential freedom of the human being differs from Yahweh’s freedom in its capacity for historical results. Yahweh’s freedom is boundless, but the essential freedom of humans is limited to initiating temporal results in accordance with the temporal powers possessed by human individuals and groups. Humans bend history, but they do not control history. We find ourselves continually surprised by the results of our own actions. Yahweh, our God is the determiner of the results of our free choices. Our free choices are like petitions pushed into the face of mystery. Final results are out of our hands.
Our essential freedom draws a great deal of its boldness from our trust in the total forgiveness of all our deeds—before, during, and after those deeds are performed. After our deeds are performed, we must release them into the imagined “hands” of Profound Reality who now clearly owns our done deeds and their consequences. We cannot take back our deeds.
In the context of this forgiveness, we can take into ourselves the guilt of all the malfunctioning of our species that has led up to our current options. The boldness to take on the guilt of the entire species is made possible by the faith that all is forgiven nd that a fresh start in realistic freedom is before us. However horrific that may sound on the surface of it, being our freedom is found to be restful, even though it is certainly not “rest” in the sense of a withdrawal from the battle of living. We rest in our activism. We do not burn out. We find that our freedom is a gift that keeps on giving energy to us from that Profound Reality that we are trusting as our forgiving God.
Alongside our amazing freedom, we notice that there are other powers already in motion—material and social forces that are producing historical results along with whatever historical power we bring into play. In most cases our own human freedom can bring to the fray only a small vector of force within that vast sea of force vectors that combine to spell out the actual results. Nevertheless, historical outcomes can be bent through the agency of our human choices—real choices that are made by our own freedom. And the choices of multitudes of individual vectors of force strategically applied to real historical situations can create a true revolution in social structures.
While a million human beings acting in some sort of coordinated response have many times more temporal power than a single person, even the power of billions of humans is severely limited in relation to the vast forces of the natural cosmos. Just as the Earth swings around the sun with massive force, so also are there forces in human historical movement that simply have to be respected and worked with rather than against.
Profound Reality is manifest towards us as an unconditional Power we cannot resist, yet part of that boundless Power has been delegated to us humans. If we include the plain fact of this delegating of power to humans and to other living beings, the power of Profound Reality can be said to remains unlimited. Both the life and the freedom of all living beings remains in the overall control of this One all-powerful Power. There is no contradiction between real human power and the All-powerful Power of that Profound Reality that can be the God we obey, honor, and serve.
These awarenesses enable us to picture a human life in dialogue with Profound Reality. If we are dedicated to consciously living within the stern yet merciful realism of a dialogue with Profound Reality, then we can say that Profound Reality has become our “God”—the “focus” of our devotion. This personal devotion allows us to symbolize Profound Reality as an Infinite “Thou.” In the light of this devotion, human history becomes the story of Thou—we—Thou—we—Thou—we— . . . Thou. “Thou” has both the initial word and the final word in each human story. Yet we humans do have a role in the choreography of this historical dance, the making of this music, the authorship of this drama.
Conclusion
The prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus, and the authors of the New Testament dared to to speak for Reality to humanity and to speak back to Reality on behalf of humanity. They wrote their poetry about living within the overview of this relentlessly all-powerful Reality. Such a God-devotion to Profound Reality includes at least these three broad themes: (1) the judgments of Reality upon our inadequate customary living—calling us to a relinquishment of our clinging to obsolete and illusory ways of living, (2) Reality showing us the openings toward whole new futures for human living, and (3) Reality’s callings to us for courageous ventures into these new possibilities well ahead of the crowds. This means that however meager be our talents or skills, we may become luminaries and exemplars who are showing forth our own unique adventure into an unknown future that many may fear, hate, and oppose, and many others may honor and join. Onward ye history benders!