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.

+++++