And then today - more about remembering - again, Walter Brueggemann.
The matter is recognized in Isaiah to be dialectical. On the one hand, there is an urgency to remembering, to cherish the rootage that is deepest:
Look to the rock from which you were hewn,
and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;
for he was but one when I called him,
but I blessed him and made him many. (Isaiah 51:1-2)
On the other hand, there is an urgency to forgetting in order to notice the newness:
Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:18-19)
Empires specialize in one-dimensional scripts. But the dissenting tradition is more supple than that. Such suppleness makes doin' time doable; empire becomes a context for generativity.
We are not like the empire because we have a way of bending and bowing that does not destroy us. That is one of the fears of empire. If we bend and bow to others, they will destroy us. When we are in the role of empire, we must never bow or bend - we must be ready, at all times, to fight to keep what we have and who we think we are. And so, how do we maintain that suppleness - that ability to listen anew and see new ways of life and resist the temptation to fight and dishonor and secure ourselves at all costs? In some way we must keep inn mind these 'opposite' opinions that we hear in the above passages from Isaiah. We need to remember that there are always different ways to see what is at hand. From there, we have a way to move out from the control of empire.
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