Dying Words

“The New Testament writings all presuppose that the fallen human race and the equally fallen created order are sick unto death beyond human resourcefulness.”

― Fleming Rutledge, "The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ"

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Dear Kate,

How you live today is already determined the night before.

How so, you ask?  A big metaphor is coming your way, you think.  What could be so fateful to speak so definitively about your destiny?

No, no poetry for you today.  No figuratively speaking.  That, too, was already determined on my part, the night before.

Words.

What was spoken to you the night before sealed today's fate, and you are now waking up just to put some finishing touches to it.

Imagine Meghan and Harry, waking up this last Monday morning, after that bombshell of an interview (which really wasn't, because the entire cosmos was holding her breath, craving for no less than a Big Bang): what would you expect your Monday morning to be, if you were them?  They were asking the world to see them in a certain way and judge their victimizers as they should be judged.  The trial (that wasn't) was perfectly engineered.  Now what?

Words.

Imagine too, you're being told, ever since you were born, that you are a victim of your circumstances, something, someone, is out to get you.  What you were told could be true.  The point is you were being told, shaped by the words, the same narrative, day after day, as if that is the only way you can see yourself waking up to a brand new day.  Of course, you were also encouraged to go against the negative and assert the positive aspects of your existence; but the bedrock of your self-identity has to be your victimhood, and don't you forget that.  Someone owes you something, and you better rise and shine and go claim it.

Expectation enunciated in words is a self-fulfilling prophecy, perpetually and perpetuatedly true.  You might think, Well, words are words, what could they possibly do to me, if I don't let them?  Well, we do, and we always do, let them, let others, let ourselves, speaking words, cementing our own fate.

Have you ever met a man who's been given everything conducive to his life's flourishing, but woke up one new spring morning troubled by the one block of road he hasn't gone down the night before and for that paid 2 cents more for every liter of gasoline the block before?  You are talking to that man now.  Do you also know a woman with ten properties under her name but often wakes up in the morning wanting to end it all?  What has gotten into her head?

Words.

The Jewish people know this well, holding onto the words of God, survived the unthinkable--not figuratively like the words were chicken soup for their soul, flowers on the roadside to make life more bearable, but utterances that literally sustained them, continually generative, endlessly abiding.  The same words that set the world in motion before the beginning of time as we know it.

Last Friday there was an article posted on a local news site I frequent, titled: "BLM resorts to 'emotional blackmail,' argues Black SFU academic."  I cut and pasted the link and hoped to read it more thoroughly later in the day, but the article was quickly removed and an empty link now remains.  I wonder, why am I not allowed to read something that I might completely disagree with?  Why can't I make up my own mind?  What if the article was indeed not "fair and balanced"; shouldn't I still be trusted to discern its unfairness and imbalance?  If everything is "fair and balanced," that perfect morality can be preached into me, why do I even need to grow as a human being and take responsibility for a new morning I am about to live out?  Should we come up with the technology to inject perfect morality into each newborn and solve all our human problems?  And, really, what is ever perfectly "fair and balanced" that cometh from the mouth of Man?

I've found a cached copy of the article on the internet.  Ask me if you want to read the entire piece for yourself.  This is how it begins: "Claiming that Black Lives Matter is founded on a faulty and racially divisive premise, a local Black academic is sharing why she no longer identifies with the movement."  The "local Black academic" goes on to say: "There are people who have committed violence against Black people. People of other races who have done for their cause, who have killed Black people — whether intentionally or non-intentionally. But to state that that is a systemic issue, I think that that’s a dangerous claim...This has done more harm than good to the psyche of a lot of Black people who believe that, for some reason, the police is ‘out to get them’ or that white people are ‘out to get them,’ when that’s really not the case."  We don't need to agree with what she said, but we do need to hear her voice, read her full academic report as part of an ongoing conversation.

Words.  Words spoken.  Words left unsaid.  Words deleted.  Faces defaced.

We are sick, unto death.  Sometimes we would tell ourselves we are not.  Mostly we'd say we've found the cure and it's just a matter of the right policies, a strong enough human will, people coming together to do what we should know by now to be the Truth.  These claims, too, are just words, tested and found wanting by each one of us every new morning, less-than-half truths that are more dangerous than outright lies. 

Yours, Alex