Consecrate for Change

You may have thought I had given up blogging the way I gave up the solo-protesting I described in my first, and till now only, post. But no, I haven’t written anything because after frantically finishing my finals, I took off on a BYU study abroad program called Integrated Natural History of Utah. A group of friends, professors, and I camped and backpacked around Utah for a month learning and writing about the land, life, and history of this spectacular place. I’ll be posting regularly every few days from now on, so keep checking back.

In my last post I promised to write a follow up piece explaining what I mean by the “change” in “Consecrate for Change,” but I’m going to put that off until next time. For now I’m going to put up the manifesto I had to write as part of my final exam for the study abroad. I’m writing my final essay for the class right now, where I’m trying to work think through the ideas in the manifesto in a more discursive way. I’ll post a link to it when I’m done.

God died in the city.

The streets of Paris, Berlin, Turin all curved like question marks, and the answer was “no.”

Why? Because the city is predicated upon death. Most forms of life (except for a few rats and pigeons) must be crowded out and paved over so that one, humans, can remain stationary. The city is a dead space, and our minds become its mirrors. And a living God cannot survive there.

“But the city is a vigorous, bustling place,” you might say. Indeed, but its clamor is mechanical and repetitive, its clanking and grinding serving primarily to isolate us from wildness. Such repetition cares nothing for living others, be they plant, animal or human. Repetition serves only production and rolls over anything that would infringe upon profit and prosperity (real or imagined). Creation, which is God’s work, is essentially care. Creation cares for the living others that are as well as the those that can be.

Repetition is the opposite of creation.

Repetition is most apparent through sound. It may escape our eyes and fingers, but it rings constantly in our ears: the growling pulse of traffic, the drone of air conditioners, the chatter of TV commercials at regular intervals, the indefinitely prolonged crash of assembly lines. The tinny meter of industry and ease muffles almost all variation and diversity.

The song of creation is very different. It is always elaborating itself, speeding up, slowing down, dividing and multiplying, returning and revising. Creation allows for an infinite number of counterpoints; if one note is missing its correspondent, another will burst into existence.

So: let us resurrect God in our minds by listening to creation. Let us begin by listening to the birds that land in our backyards and perch on our wires. They have not yet been mechanized; strands of creation stream and billow behind them as they fly toward the city. Let us then follow these songs up into the trees and out into the forests, marshes, and mountains outside of town.

What at first we hear—the interrelations of living things and the coarticulations of care—will soon become available to our other senses and will become beautiful and true to us. We will return to our streets and houses and the buzz of our former lives will then sound like unbearable noise. But, since we have heard creation, we will realize that the sounds of repetition are not inevitable, and we will dismantle its instruments. We will allow creation to reinhabit our space and its vibrations to restructure our minds.

The song of creation will answer yes in thousands of ways.