Today we will continue to look at components for the practice of hope. Walter Brueggeman shares his consideration about the particular shape of despair in dominant Western society. To this despair, we must respond in transformative ways.
The convergence of ideology and technology produces a shameless kind of certitude that closes off the future and shrivels the human spirit. It is clear, nonetheless, that such shameless certitude is only a veneer that conceals depths of anxiety that feed back into a quest for greater certitude... Thus, the system of security makes us even more insecure.
Shame-less, what a great way to speak of such an aura of certitude. Nothing can and will get in the way of this sense of certitude that attempts to make everyone agree or fall in line with the line of thinking and believing that comes when ideology and technology join forces to turn the world into their vision for life. Unfortunately, this shame-less endeavor is a sham. This sham piles up victims in its attempt to create its own world. The victims are judged to be a part of what it takes to make way for a self-proclaimed righteousness that fits a certain mold. When there is a push to stuff everyone into this path of self-proclaimed righteousness, there is no room to grow...there is no space for the Spirit to move us beyond ourselves...there is no word of life that can oppose the rigid word of certitude. Brueggemann says it well when he notes that it closes off the future. Fear and anxiety want nothing to do with an unfolding future that brings life beyond our expectations and continues to make things new. Instead such systems of security are systems that are so anxious about what could happen, they rope off possible roads to new life so that life-as-it-must-be can be forced upon everyone. What is most amazing about this kind of certitude is how fear-filled it is. Anything and everything outside this shameless kind of certitude is condemned or denounced or turned into a demon or scape goat. Insecurity does reign in such despairing times.
Connection: Some of the great movements of non-violent resistance have insisted on moving a people to a place in which they are shamed into action to change life as it is. In India under the guidance of Gandhi and in the U.S. under the guidance of King and others in the civil rights era, there was a way of holding up the truth so that those powers that were in control would eventually see how they had fallen away from their own roots and become something of a demon. Truth-telling is so important for all of us.
Lord God, we need to be encouraged to ask questions and seek the truth and resist the many ways that we are being driven to follow the crowd into a sense of certitude that is quite demonic and unable to witness to the truth. Be our courage and our truth. Amen.
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