I quit my job (not technically, but basically). I’m not really sure what to do, so until I
figure something out, I’m going to spend an hour writing every morning.
Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany. I think it’s the day that Catholics remember
that the wise men, guided by the stars, visited the holy family upon the birth
of Jesus.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the part of that story that comes next. I read it with some
folks at a Bible study at Glide a few weeks ago: King Herod tries to get the wise men to tell
them where Jesus is, but since they know he wants to kill the baby rumored to
be the new “king,” they deceive him.
Pissed, Herod orders the murder of every male Hebrew child under the age
of two. So as this massive military
mobilization gets underway, and as mothers all across the land are wailing for
their baby boys, Jesus’ father has a dream in which an angel tells him that the
family should move to Egypt. So they
do. And that’s how God fights back
against the mass-scale slaughter of infants – with a damn dream. I mean, Jesus gets brought to safety, and the
story can continue, but… hell.
The people I read the story with drew connections between
the targeting of Hebrew boys then and targeting of Black and Brown boys and men
by today’s state. They told stories of
funerals they had been to for victims of homicides.
The day that the non-indictment decision in the Eric Garner
case came down, I walked down Mission on my way to a therapy appointment, and I
wondered why the fuck everyone was acting so normal. Mothers all over this country are coping with
a terror parallel to that felt by the Hebrew mothers who were Mary's contemporaries;
Black people are twenty-one times as likely to be killed by the police as White people are. I searched my mind for
something to do that made more sense that throwing bricks through windows, but
I couldn’t think of anything. Certainly,
the way I was expending all of my own energy -- testing kids’ A-Z reading levels and
getting them to walk quietly in straight lines and administering district
assessments -- made no sense at all. Doing
that work is what I normally do, but I can’t act normally.
An epiphany is when you finally get some insight. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany. The world, represented by the wise men, encounters hope incarnated, "and the soul felt it's worth," as the song goes.
They encountered hope, and in so doing, triggered the genocidal rage of the oppressor, and hope's answer to that rage is as ephemeral as a dream. If I was Mary, and I'd just given birth (with no epidural, and in a dirty cave, and in the cold), and my husband (who maybe kinda still thinks that the baby is someone else's) suggested that instead of going home to our families who could help us take care of the baby we move to a new country because he had a dream, I would not have been feeling the divine love. But they did heed the dream. They took radical action and saved the child whose life became that which billions of people across two thousand years have organized their lives around.
So what does it mean to encounter hope now, in this brutal context? And beyond that encounter, what does it mean for us to practice the radical trust that the holy family practiced, taking not-small measures to move in directions we have never considered and that seem to potentially kinda suck?
And when I say "we" and "us," I clearly mean me. Because I have no job now. And I've got rent to pay in twenty-five days.
No comments:
Post a Comment