Revolution.

"You say you want a revolution?"

(John Lennon and Paul McCartney)

"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss."

(Pete Townsend)

Revolution is Empire's way of operating.  Revolutions offer the illusion of significant change; in reality they merely change the surface of society.  At best, they rearrange the furniture.  Revolutions do not change anything except the names of the small group of people getting rich off of the people's forced labor.  They do not budge the grip that Empire has on humanity and the planet.  Indeed, they tighten it.  They promise great progress and hope for human liberation.  But at best revolutions merely deliver Empire in a slightly different configuration.  

The manifestation of Empire we have been under for five-hundred years is Modernity.  Modernity thrives on periodic revolutions in technology, and also of course in politics.  We have, and more importantly, we celebrate, these revolutions all the time.  How many breathlessly optimistic predictions begin with "this is going to revolutionize..." whatever?  Political, economic, and social revolutions promise great improvements in people's lives.  They  are supposed to indicate on the one hand that life just keeps getting better.  And they often do deliver superficial and unequally distributed alterations in the way we live, and indeed, sometimes these are improvements for some of us. 

Revolutions have winners and losers; they claim to be about "regime change."  But the revolution itself always wins.  For even if the contras, the conservatives, the reactionaries, the restorationists, etc., "win" the revolution by putting down the rebels, change still happens.  Life after the revolution is always significantly different from life before, no matter who is victorious.  There is no going back.  There is no becoming "great again."  Revolutions always produce something superficially new.

On the other hand, let's not forget that the whole reason that people hope in revolutions is that at some level they are not content now.  Yet, no matter how many revolutions we go through, people still come out of them frustrated, exhausted, resentful, disappointed, angry, and depressed... with the exception perhaps of the lucky few who wind up on top.  For all the changes (paid for in their blood), people remain frustrated.  The lofty goals of leaders on both sides of the revolution are never met.  Therefore, the new bosses have to blame someone (other than themselves) for this.  So the central characteristic of Empire, in particular Modernity, continues to thrive by stoking discontent, dissatisfaction, and resentment, and generating enemies; promising all the while that things will be better after the next revolution, purge, pogrom, election, reform, innovation, policy, adaptive change....  The conflict -- the death, suffering, disruption, and destruction -- is not a means to some other end; it is the whole point.   

Revolutions do not, and indeed cannot, heal the core areas of dysfunction in human life.  Not only are they not designed for that, they depend on and intensify these pathologies.  This is why revolutions will always miss the mark and cannot deliver real transformation. 

The Christian gospel 

is far more radical 

than the mere going-in-circles 

which is the literal meaning 

of the word, "revolution."  

For Christianity (and other authentic traditional religions) has to do with real, fundamental, basic, and essential change, which happens in the human soul.  These traditions, practices, stories, and disciplines change the very orientation of human life itself.  It is analogous to reversing the direction of a river.

Christianity concerns metanoia, a different way of thinking by which we turn from an egocentricity in which we imagine ourselves as isolated, independent, alienated, and at-risk individuals, who approach the world by craving, acquiring, hoarding, fighting, and consuming, whose souls are discolored by fear, shame, and anger, generating the classical deadly sins -- greed, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth, and so forth -- which in turn get expressed in acts of violence.  Instead, in authentic spirituality we turn to see ourselves as participants in interconnected and interdependent networks of inter-nesting communities which are elements of a larger unity.  Such participation is expressed in an economics of giving what we have and receiving what we need.  The values here are compassion, generosity, empathy, humility, gratitude, equality, inclusion, forgiveness, sharing, communion, joy, and unity.  These values are antithetical to Empire.

Change in Christianity is therefore apocalyptic, and always has been.  For it has to do with coming to live together into the revelation of a human nature and a common life that is already here waiting for us in creation.  This is what Jesus means by "the Kingdom of God," which is already "near" and "among/within" us.  It is the main agenda of his whole ministry.  The Kingdom of God is the antidote to Empire.

The vocation of the Church as the gathering of disciples, the communion of believers, the witnesses to and participants in the good news, is to offer and embody this alternative community of wholeness and unity.  It is to live together according to these values expressed in Jesus' commandments, summed up in "love God; love one another."  

This is the only way to break the deadly revolutionary cycles endemic to Empire, which are spinning us to the oblivion of a wrecked planet and a lost civilization.

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The Bones.

When we ignore, discard, or otherwise mess 

with the bones of a tradition

we place our personal agenda ahead of 

spiritual continuity and integrity.

This is a kind of colonialism in which a dominant power

takes the liberty of separating a tradition from its ancestors,

ripping off its skin to be used for its own purposes.

Appropriation is the extractive skinning of a tradition.  

In her excellent book, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel talks about the roots of Zen Buddhism in ancient Shamanic practices.  As an African-American woman who is an ordained Zen priest, Manuel has a unique, remarkable, and refreshing perspective.  Her experience is considerably wider than Buddhism, and much of what she says resonates with well with Christianity.

Part of what she means by "the bones" is the importance of recognizing and respecting our ancestors in faith.  Just as the bones are the invisible framework of the body, attention to ancestors and tradition serves to ground, form, and empower a living tradition.  Our bones hold us together.  Manuel finds the bones of Buddhism in the rituals of offering commemorating the ancestors that are a part of Zen practice, ceremonies that go back to pre-Buddhist times. 

We Presbyterians, of course, do not explicitly venerate ancestors.  Neither do we have recognized historical "saints" like some branches of Christianity.  For Protestants, more than anything else, I suspect, this function is filled by the Bible and the Sacraments.  Our Christian ancestors also heard and cherished these stories and practices, and were guided by these insights.  When we pray the Psalms, we are praying not only with our Christian forbears, but with Jesus himself and the Jewish tradition.  The basic rituals of Christianity in which Presbyterians share also constitute the bones of our lived faith.  Mainly, of course, these are the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist, which are obviously rooted in Scripture and authorized by Jesus.

Our Book of Order recognizes this by allowing and encouraging innovation and adaptation in many areas.  But we recognize basic limits to this flexibility.  Presbyterian worship without the Bible is unthinkable.  And the Sacraments retain certain minimum required elements, including that they be authorized and authenticated by the recitation of specific Scriptural words.      

This is why I get deeply concerned about attempts to undermine, compromise, or unrecognizably alter Scripture or the Sacraments.  All kinds of things about our worship, theology, and mission may change, shift, and evolve.  But the deep, structural bones which make us who we are remain.  These at some level finally do not change.  They are what hold us together with each other, with our ancestors, and even with the Earth.

Speaking of her own Zen tradition, Manuel says, "When we ignore the bones, we appropriate.  With appropriation, we don't see the practice as one of enhancing interrelationship but one of personal improvement....  And we don't see that there is an opportunity in ritual and ceremony to activate justice through collective awakening with the help of ancestors...." (p. 54)

In other words, when we ignore, discard, or otherwise mess with the bones of a tradition we place our personal agenda ahead of spiritual continuity and integrity.  This is a kind of colonialism in which a dominant power takes the liberty of separating a tradition from its ancestors, ripping off its skin to be used for its own purposes.  Appropriation is the violent and extractive skinning of a tradition.  For us this is usually done for the sake of some form of commercial Capitalism.  We have seen this happen repeatedly with Native American and Asian traditions which are taken by white people and adapted to fit a self-help model and commodified for sale.  

And it even happens to Christianity when the faith is disconnected from its bones, roots, and history, and refitted for profit.  This whole idea that everything is on the table for me to appropriate and customize to my personal preferences is a Western, Imperialist, colonialist approach that violates the integrity of indigenous, ancestral, organic traditions.  This can be done for the sake of marketing; or it can be done for reasons of ideological purity and correctness, sometimes even labeled "inclusion" and "justice."     

Where the limits of this may be set is a matter of conversation within those traditions.  But Manuel points out that harmful appropriation begins when we stop honoring the bones of the ancestors, that is, the basic and fundamental framework of the tradition.  When we do this, no matter the rationale, whether it is from within the tradition itself or from outside, we break with the essence of that body and invent something new.  

I wonder if Manuel's observation, that we find the deepest roots of what became Zen in an ancient and nearly forgotten Shamanism, which nevertheless remains in its bones, applies to all religion.  For instance, Christianity emerges from an Israelite religion embedded with Shamanistic elements.  There is research that brings out the relationship of Jesus to Shamanism as well.  (See, for instance, The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective, by Pieter F. Craffert.)  And Shamanism is deeply grounded in the Earth, creation, and different forms of life.

If we dig deep enough into the bones of our lived faith, we will find ourselves digging in the dirt.  For all authentic religion is grounded in and emerges from the Earth of which humans are made.  The essence of the Earth, which resonates with the voiceprint of the One who spoke it all into being, is giving.  Authentic religion is therefore the sinews, tissues, and organs built on the bones constituted by the ultimate and original self-offering of the Creator in love.

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