the divine schema
It felt almost cruel.
I attended a lecture at an Anglican church in downtown Chattanooga yesterday evening. The lecture was titled “The Subversive Prophetic Imagination: How the Arts (and Brueggemann) Can Help Us Navigate the Rise of Christian Nationalism,” and the speaker, one Mary McCampbell, wove together various threads of cultural history, from ancient to modern, to construct the thesis that true creative enterprise is inherently anti-“empire,” her term for a perverse fusion of the religious and political—a phenomenon she took pains to elucidate goes back pretty much to the dawn of history; it’s nothing new. She used Walter Brueggemann’s book Prophetic Imagination to scaffold the lecture, but referenced a whole bunch of works by luminaries I need to read, from Flannery O’Connor to Frederick Douglass to Michel Foucault to Charlotte Brontë (the Goodreads list is about to get much longer).
The lecture was hosted by a local group called Theology on Tap, whose name hearkens back to the one I used to attend 20-odd years ago at a pub in downtown Raleigh. I felt refreshingly at home with the attendees, echoes of my last, best real friend group prior to marriage occurring and overwriting that whole side of my life. I definitely plan to continue attending, and not just because of the free beer, although the tasty Oktoberfest I sipped while listening to the lecture certainly enhanced the experience.
So what felt cruel? During the lecture, as mentioned, the speaker name-dropped Flannery O’Connor, an act which drew an enthusiastic burst of mini-clapping from the pretty woman sitting by herself, offset a bit to the right in the row ahead of mine. During the break between the lecture and the Q&A session, I leaned forward and mentioned offhand that I still needed to finish Mystery & Manners, a compilation of O’Connor’s essays and short stories I’ve had sitting on my shelf for ages. We struck up a conversation, and I learned she’s an English professor at Bryan College up in Dayton, married to a videographer and filmmaker, and that they collaborate on films; she writes the screenplays that he directs. She joked that she felt a little like an army wife because of how much he’s away on shoots. She inquired about what I did for a living, and we discussed a few other things before the Q&A session started, and during one of the speaker’s answers about whether or not art is always subversive, or can be used in service of “empire,” I muttered “Birth of a Nation” and the woman immediately countered with “Triumph of the Will,” and we both chuckled.
That’s all I want. All. I. Want. A pretty college professor (any subject; it doesn’t even have to be English) to whom I can just sit and listen for hours as she rattles off the highlights (or lowlights) of her day in front of her students, or navigating the vagaries of academic administration. I don’t think that’s asking for much. Maybe it is. And it keeps getting dangled in front of me, tauntingly close—or within my hands!—before being cruelly jerked away (not that I would have ever in a million years done anything with the woman at the lecture; but she embodied the concept). The fact that it happened within the context of the lecture, an experience I thoroughly enjoyed, makes it seem even more wanton. I know it’s all in my own head, and I shouldn’t let it color my overwhelmingly positive impression of the evening, but just the same, it’s hard to shake a feeling of divine capriciousness. It’s still difficult to imagine how it could possibly get any better than it was earlier in the year, but in order to have patience, if I put any stock at all in his promises, I have to remind myself that the Lord does have something better for me, whether in this life or the next. Or maybe he doesn’t; maybe that was the romantic high water mark of my life. Either way—I’ve got nothing left but that blind hope. There’s no solace there except some vague notion of singular, in-and-of-myself integrity and consistency, which is fine as far as that goes, but it certainly doesn’t do my emotional state any favors. I’d sure like some good news one of these days, Lord. It’s hard to be patient, but I have no alternative.