Prophets beat the algorithm
I had to get Biblical on myself
I went to seminary, did a parish and a clinical internship, and spent 10 years in pulpits.
But for all of that work and sincere investment, my study of and teaching about the Hebrew Bible and Christian testaments never had anything to do with salvation unless it is in the sense of the root word: a salve. It is a balm, for me at least, to read about other humans making a mad mess and the potential for holiness in the midst.
And we are in a mad mess. America’s tyrannical cult of personality has once again made legal and brazen the worst in us. Ours does not feel like a united state but one splintered, angry, afraid, paranoid, and bloodied. Nothing new under the sun, I know. And yet these particular detention camps are new. This wave of legislation against trans people is, too.
So what wisdom might we receive from this weird old collection of myth, poetry, and prose? What, for example, does the story of the prophet Elijah, as preserved for all these years, tell us about holiness in hard times?
A raven will feed us.
We don’t know anything about Elijah when he shows up in the book of 1 Kings. He has no reels, no grid, no followers. All we know is that Elijah travelled from the outskirts of a nation to announce to the ruler the coming of a punishing drought.
Then he leaves for the wilderness. In the wilderness Elijah has water from a creek, for a time. But he has to rely on a raven for food while waiting for creation’s next invitation. He is not girl-bossing or looksmaxxing or performing leadership. He is waiting, he has made himself wholly dependent on the more-than-human world.
Later in the story there’s a widow who uses the last of her flour and oil to prepare what she thinks will be the final meal for her and her son and Elijah. Instead, because of her generosity, neither run out. This has echoes of Sarah cooking for strangers who are actually angels and the divorced woman at the well who becomes Jesus’ disciple and the widow who gave her last pennies in offering.
We are accustomed to poor women showing us the way. It is common for holiness-hearers to point to how little we need in order to heal the world.
But a raven? Ravens are shiny, big carrion-eaters. During the Exodus the people had little quails with their goofy head feathers to eat plus and manna from on high. Elijah gets a big, noisy, maybe even creepy bird delivering roadkill.
So hope and survival in hard times is like waiting on vermin for dinner? No.
Elijah and Jesus and all of the prophets and all of the saints just wanted the kings and the priests and the people to remember the greatest commandment: love creation with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.
Care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Set the table for friends and enemies alike. Everything else is commentary, anything else is a distraction.
The divisions that are being so fully reinforced in this time are not the fault of our leaders. Unlike the people of Elijah’s time, we do not live in a monarchy or a fully-formed dictatorship. More than any group of people in human history, we have power. What we get is what we ask for–or what we allow. Whether Earth becomes as it is in heaven or as in a hell, is in all ways up to us.
Us with the raven.
(At last a raven? No, a turkey vulture circling over me as I stretch out on grass.)
The raven is the surviving, scavenging sacred to which we are blind most of the time. The paucity of our imaginations leaves us describing divinity in human terms, but, truly, the divine is to us as a raven: watching and weird.
If we so choose, what could distinguish us from other do-gooders is our willingness, like Elijah, to receive that mysterious metaphysics. What we might allow to sustain us in the counter-cultural work of love is not a good and rational argument about the social consequences of social neglect but the shimmering deep dark tehom of Genesis that agreed to partner with holy light, the divine well of life that we can never really see except as sunshine glints off black feathers.
So we need not go mad, no matter the circumstances. We can be ravenous.[i] We can become as hungry as that widow to live for the kin-dom of creation rather than merely existing in the kingdoms humanity.
We can daily choose for ourselves and our families how we will as a balm, how we will respond to this great wounding.
As we move together through this wilderness, for there is nowhere else to go, remember that our own strength and our own success depends on our willingness to see the eye of the raven and accept the strange nourishment that is reciprocal life.
[i] Thank you to The Rev. Debbie Blue and her book Consider the Birds for inspiration.