Consecrate for Change

“In a word, if “Mormonism” is not my life, I do not know that I have any. I do not understand anything else, for it embraces everything that comes within the range of understanding of man. If it does not circumscribe every thing that is in heaven and on earth, it is not what it purports to be.” —Brigham Young

Hi all! This is the first post for my blog www.consecrateforchange.com! As you may have guessed from the epigraph, this blog will have a lot to do with Mormonism, but it won’t be a single issue blog. It will be my personal blog, and so I plan on writing about what I love: art, literature, politics, philosophy, religion, nature, love, and a whole slew of other abstract nouns. I’ll also use it as an tool for a political/artistic/religious organizing tool. Most of all, I hope to use this blog as an essayistic exercise in chasing truth wherever and however I can (whether I catch up to it or not). In this sense, only and especially in this sense, will this be a Mormon blog.

In my first two posts I will take on the task of explaining the title of this endeavor, “consecrateforchange.com.” I want to describe the verb and the noun that will hopefully inform everything that I write, so forgive me if these first posts tend toward abstraction. In Part I I’ll describe what I mean by consecration, and in Part II what I think this principle has to do with a word all the pundits and presidential candidates have been fondling as of late: change.

But first, a couple of general caveats:
1) I am going to use this blog to think through ideas, not necessarily to issue proclamations. Therefore, I’m not aiming for precision or complete consistency, though I will try to offer you something worth reading.
2) Given the heuristic nature of this blog, I look forward to reading, responding to, and learning from your comments.
3) Given 1 & 2, I reserve the right to change my mind!

Now, on to definitions: I was originally going to start this blog last year, thinking I would use it as an online journal to record my experiences protesting the Iraq war. The idea was to ‘consecrate’ part of each day—thirty minutes, an hour—to sit out on a corner here in Provo, Utah with a sign that read “No More War—Out of Iraq.” Instead of holing myself up in the depths of the library (which is something I quite enjoy), I could read on the street, consecrating my study time to what I saw as a righteous purpose. Of course, I was under no illusion that my efforts would have anything even resembling a direct effect on US foreign policy. Rather, it was to be an experiment in which I would test reactions in others and transformation in myself.

The first few days were inspiring as well as worrisome. On the one hand, I was able to have several wonderful conversations with passersby, respectfully sharing opinions and information. I even got quite a few thumbs-up from honking cars. On the other hand, I was surprised to see so many Happy-Valley-ites waving middle fingers at me and lobbing such admirably frank verbal mortars as, “Idiot!,” or, “War is worth it!” On another occasion, while protesting with my friend Adam, an SUV plastered with yellow ribbon decals screeched to a halt in front of us. A stout young guy stomped toward us asking us what the hell we were doing there, didn’t we know the soldiers were fighting for our freedoms, etc. A slightly tense conversation ensued, and continued until a police officer pulled over next to our friend’s vehicle. Sensing trouble our interlocutor pointed a pretty scary finger at us with the not too pleasant promise, “If I see you out here again I’m going to beat the f*** out of you!” Luckily, he calmed down a bit after the officer reminded him of our right to freely speak.

All of this in the first three days of my experiment . . . which turned out to be the only three days. What happened? Couldn’t I handle it? Well, I guess not. I just got too busy. I had books to read, assignments to finish, people to be with, and after only three days I began to feel like I couldn’t even spare an hour for public dissent. (What about studying on the street? I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t much of a multi-tasker.) And so, I burned out as fast as I had flared up.

At first I felt like a failure, like I hadn’t had the fortitude to consecrate my time in the forthright ways I had foreseen for myself. This may have been the case, but I soon began to suspect that maybe I needed to rethink my notion of consecration. Perhaps my approach was actually too straightforward, in that I still saw consecration in a compartmentalized way. Maybe instead of setting aside a part of my day to a good cause I had to be “anxiously engaged in a good cause” all day long. Or rather, I had to quit making a distinction between consecrated time and ordinary time, between the spiritual and the secular. Also, my approach had probably been overly individualistic. I had had the mistaken notion that in order to consecrate myself I had to cut myself off from others.

However, I now think that consecration means seeing every thought, word, situation, action, and relationship as heavy with truth and, therefore, spiritual. To consecrate is less to make sacred than to see all things as sacred on the basis of their being interconnected (or interconnectable) and infused with purpose and potential. To me, a consecrator is not so much the person that sets himself apart (the monk, the lone protester on the street-corner) as the agonist that, tarrying with other beings, inherits truth from the world as he seeks to interact with and interpret it.

And so, the way I now understand consecration is similar to the way Adrienne Rich understands “commitment” in poetry, to wit: a conflation of the public and the private, an understanding, like Israeli poet David Zonsheine’s, that “everything is political” and “everything is completely personal.” A committed poet doesn’t differentiate between poetry and struggle, or even between “protest poetry” and pure poetry. She can’t be content to sing the rose from 9 to 5 and rally the resistance on the weekend; song and struggle must coincide. Such poetry pulls at the rigid repetitions of politics, forces them to relent for a moment so that creative minds—which all human minds are—can perceive what is prior to power and what still lives and flows in the interstices of the deflating and demystifying discourses of politicians: truth.

There are at least two reasons why truth is not to be found within ideologies, be they political, economic, religious, etc.: First, it is a basic premise of any ideology that truth is transparent, clearly definable, and apprehensible; something that can be handled, examined, turned about in one’s hand like a coin. Second, every ideology must claim to possess this kernel of truth in order to assert its own validity and justify its self-perpetuation. So, since there is no such thing as true communication between ideologies and no way to evaluate one ideology on the terms of another, one is forced to pick a paradigm and its axioms on the basis of personal preference alone. And this is what is at the heart of today’s ideological deadlocks: Republicans and Democrats refuse to understand each other (and neither will understand a non-Republicrat), secularists and believers choose not to comprehend one another, and so on, because each has already made the choice to calcify in their respective ideologies; each simply likes what they have more than what they think the others have; each prefers its own found-object version of truth.

To be sure, every ideologically based group is willing to compromise to a certain degree. However, this is not because they are seeking grains of truth from other ideologies to add to their own storehouses, but instead are just trying to survive amidst a hostile clash of ideologies, trying to guard as many of their own axioms as possible by exchanging or relinquishing a few of them. And so, if, as I believe, truth is not palpable like grains or coinage, then (I’m following Alain Badiou here) the calculations of political or economic pragmatism have nothing to do with the search for truth. Truth can only get in the way of special interests, and so it must be blotted out, ignored, talked out of sight in order to make space for the averages and compromises of interested parties.

Truth, in other words, is an interruption. And so, we should be looking to the disruptions in discourses, the schisms in systems, and, instead of trying to choose one side of the split or the other, we ought to try to understand the gap that makes them irreconcilable. This means that we will never be able to rest within the comfort of a sealed ideology, that, by owning up to inconsistencies, we will have to struggle in the spaces in between. I don’t mean to say that we should be content to wallow in the stagnant waters of cynicism or noncommittal “tolerance.” Instead of resting snuggly inside a particular in-between—between Right and Left, doubt and belief, ethics and nihilism, conscience and capitulation—we should take measure of whatever impasse we may find ourselves in and make a firm decision to act, not on the terms of either side but on what we have learned from the impasse itself. Of course, this means that choice and action will always be based upon an infinitely regressing web of previous impasses and will always lead us to yet another point of irreconcilability. But that is the point! Truth is about movement not rest, progression not paralysis.

I believe this is why in The Gospel of Thomas the Lord says, “Be wanderers” (log. 42). A wanderer is less a skeptic than a pilgrim that realizes she will never arrive at the final shrine. A wanderer is never content with the truths she has already glimpsed, for she knows that “from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have” (2 Nephi 28:30).

A wanderer is driven on by wonder: wonder at the inability of any given philosophy to fully portray the truth of being, the poverty of political policies when it comes to articulating and ensuring justice, the inadequacy of art to wholly represent the beauty and significance of the world and our place in it, the deficiency of dogma in matters of spirit. The very fact that no paradigm is impervious to interruption fills the wanderer with awe. The danger of ideologies lies in their assertion of completeness, which, along with the pragmatic brokering of ideological particulars that characterizes our society, stifles wonder and, therefore, precludes the always immanent revelation of truth. A wanderer, then, should be ever wary of matter-of-factness and should instead stick to the pursuits in which, on account of their openness, wonder may persist: poetry, music, art, real religion, true politics (what my friend Ash Sanders calls “politics as unusual”), etc.

Modern-day prophets have taught that all truth can be circumscribed into one great whole, but this does not mean that it is univocal. Truth does not exist monolithically, always already circumscribed. Rather, the world is circumscribable, and we must draw the circle of truth ourselves, impelled and inspired by a sense of wonder. But, as wanderers, we must remember that the circle will never be closed. And so, to return to the definition at hand, to me consecration means committing ourselves completely to this eternal task of wandering from one struggle to another as we trace, erase, and retrace endless circles on this wonder-full world.

In Part II, I will try to explain what I mean by “change.”