The Promised Community

Oblivion

TO BE SWALLOWED UP into nothingness, to sink into oblivion and pass out of notice; this is the threat and the work of death, a truth which the poetry of Psalm 69 sends home through images of the terrible, elemental power of water in which oblivion becomes the metaphor of death. The threat of oblivion is fearsome, and it triggers an instinctual panic and rage in the human psyche to resist and to escape being thus overwhelmed. No one wants to be forgotten, of no account; no one wants to be so earthbound by the gravity of insignificance that neither escape nor flight is possible, only a sentence of despair.

On the other hand, that is exactly what most of the human race, whom we speak of abstractly as the masses, experience as daily reality. To exist as one of the masses is to live under a sentence of oblivion: the oblivion of being forgotten by justice or compassion; the oblivion of not being known in the integrity of one's personhood; the oblivion of being irrelevant to any enterprise that allows one to see the fruit of his or her own capacities received and celebrated. The masses are invisible, and their cry is unheard.

They are denied because it is a simple human necessity to deny the inevitable oblivion of death, of which they are the discomfiting reminder. Of course, the fact that oblivion threatens the entire race puts everyone in the same boat. Injustice describes the arrangement in which the desperate few appropriate the upper decks and consign the deprived majority to the lower ones, as if those higher up will escape drowning when it is time for the vessel to sink. Injustice is the few hiding themselves from the needs of the many; it is the rich and powerful refusing to accept the truth of their solidarity with all humankind. When the elite few dance on the upper decks, they dance over their own watery grave, trying to stall the ever-present threat of oblivion. "Let not the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up...."

The Ghetto

THIS IS THE SENTENCE that hangs over the black ghetto--consignment to oblivion, with nowhere to go, and even if there were, with no way to get there. How useful is it to know as a member of the black masses that the doors to American institutions are now legally open to me, if I do not have the means to get there? No, there is no way out for the majority of us who live there. Nobody knows our name. From our viewpoint the ghetto is a vessel to bear the projected, unwanted burdens of those who contrive it.

I was reminded vividly of this consignment to oblivion during a recent experience of crabbing in a South Carolina tidal marsh. A big part of crabbing is standing in bogs along channels where the crabs follow the tidal currents to the nearby immensity of the ocean. An ankle-deep position may lie just an unwitting sidestep from a mud-hole, in whose stench half your body, and most of your balance and dignity, can get mired.

City dude that I was, I waded in barefoot; and it was only a matter of time before a side step plunged me into deep mud, at the bottom of which a jagged oyster shell pierced my foot. While struggling out of the mud to firm ground, I had to stem a rush of anxious thoughts about septic toxins getting into my wound and guess whether my next step would be false or would lead out of the morass.

Ghettos are a machinery of oblivion that serves to trap masses of humanity in the mired backwashes of history. We are left there to forage for an existence in the enervating currents of boredom and monotony. Oblivion is the ocean whose brackish waters ebb and flow through the inland where we live, able without warning to unleash floods of devastation. To dull its assaults on our sensibilities, we counter-flood them with rhythm, blues, gospel, or anything else that registers louder than the menace of oblivion. If we don't, the pent-up waves of rage and panic that swell in our subconscious, a sea with its own tidal forces, threaten at any moment to burst through the dikes of repression or to run out through the floodgates of dissipation.

So we waver between effective and ineffective ways out of oblivion. That is how so many ghetto young end up grasping at the allure of a fast way out. Too often the only other choice is surrender to the allure of despair and to the forces of death for a grim trip on tickets to nowhere: the crime ticket, the drug ticket, the violence ticket. Too many folk we know end up slipping from ankle-deep involvements to depths which bristle with embedded dangers that daily drive fatal wounds through stray feet. "I sink in deep mire where there is no foothold...."

THE TIME-HONORED CHANCES for a fast way out of oblivion are the tickets pushed by Mammon. Its spirit hustles the masses every bit as much as it does the elite of this world. How many of us bank all our hopes on hitting the right number, the right lottery, the right jackpot, the right job, the right insurance settlement, the right lawsuit? On a visit to a neighborhood soup kitchen, I once saw someone fall into a broken section of sidewalk where the repair grid had been left askew. Unharmed, he regained his balance. The mishap was not two seconds old, however, when another bystander called out some envious advice, "Hey, bro', you got a lawsuit!"

The same hustler pushes another ticket-chance for a fast ride out of oblivion--the celebrity ticket: entertainment celebrity, athletic celebrity, religious celebrity, and in some cases, political celebrity. We endure these because, even though as misplaced celebrations they glorify the wrong vision of life, at least their instinct is for life. Nevertheless, celebrity passes most of us by but transports just enough of us out to keep its empty rumors circulating among the credulous. In every neighborhood of the ghetto, someone seems to know someone else who took a celebrity trip to become anything they wished to be, but who returned empty-handed to oblivion.

There is a more sinister celebrity, however, which is the prodigy of the same powers that craft and control the ghetto machinery--military celebrity. Militarism is a power of darkness clothed as an angel of light. It boasts the power to bestow glory and personal transformation. Again, just enough of us return transformed to keep the lie afloat among the ghetto and other poor, but at the cost of a judgment on this society of indescribable wrath. Even now it implodes in the lives of many who are disillusioned. They have been discharged back into oblivion without having become all that they can be in the Army. They've only become more lethal, and only death has been glorified.

Most of the time, however, the military simply represents a plodding necessity which is crassly promoted not for patriotism but for lucrative advantages in ads that are the economic lifeline of many black publications. Most of us will find a place in the blue- and white-collar labor force as part of a stressed but vital majority. We live life on dearly gained higher ground and strive for equilibrium, not having much hope of escape--we all know the way is heavily guarded from without--but struggling not to succumb to the behaviors of despair.

Others of us have fulfilled the dreams of forebears through education for professional careers, only to face' the question of where to practice our skills. In the past most of us would do so in the ghetto, with an exceptional few moving into the capitalist marketplace to fill the rare openings it has been willing to cede. That is, our professionals once gained a livelihood chiefly within the structures of the common lot imposed on the masses. We knew, even if reluctantly, that we were in the same boat, and we shared in the building of other structures that were uniquely ours.

Now, history has shifted. The path from mass oblivion is less guarded, and for many of us it has become a way of escape into obliviousness. In our haste to trade historical places, we risk abandoning our shared historical projects, like so many high-class hustlers working the lucrative corporate gig, unheeding of our own.

Psalm 69 pricks our dull consciousness when it asks, "What I did not steal must I now restore? 0 God, you know my folly; the wrongs I have done are not hid from you" (Psalm 69:5). Why would victims, who are themselves the descendants of a stolen people, so uncritically restore to the thief what has been stolen from themselves, as many black professionals now appear to be doing? Is this the purpose of education? If we black folk barter our souls in exchange for escape from social and economic oblivion, what do we gain? Sometimes we run amok in the mire of our own folly. Mammon, like wisdom, is justified by its deeds.

The Promised Community

IS IT NOT THE PROMISE of the kingdom of God to be the one space where there is no oblivion? Regardless of the extent of the kingdom population, no one is unknown or consigned to non-productivity. Indeed, the very dynamic of the kingdom is that of light making all things, all souls, visible. The kingdom is the sole hope of the masses--indeed, of the whole race--because only its structures establish the kind of interrelatedness that redeems individual personhood without requiring the misery of the many to secure the privilege of the few. It is being called and known by name, before being known by number, class, race, gender, or any other partial aspect of one's whole being. Your name is the symbol of your wholeness and holds clues to the rest of your history.

The gospels record an important preview of this promise in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. When Jesus faced the harassed multitudes in the wilderness, he succeeded in touching them at a level of felt need that no one else had ever reached--the need to be known in a community of spiritual, material, social, and emotional goods. For a fleeting moment, the masses tasted the possibilities of peoplehood as Jesus knew that God willed to realize it among them. Thousands of men, women, and children ceased to be uneasy strangers and became a people of cooperative good will. Shrouded minds were enlightened, the suffering were healed, the hungry were fed economically and equitably.

The shepherdless experienced a compelling but sensitive leadership, which in John's gospel fetched an explicitly politicized response on the part of those who wanted to turn this king-for-a-day into a permanent ruler. Had he not redeemed them from estranging anonymity by grouping them in close-knit, manageable clusters of fifty and a hundred, where none would be overlooked and where order went hand in hand with peace and grace? Had they not found in him a potent solidarity with each other? In that theater of shalom, the power of oblivion had been routed by a demonstration of the promise of God's new order.

Is it not the function of our faith communities to make space for the dynamic of that new order to operate right here in our age? Is not community of the Holy Spirit the one way out of the ghetto, the one way to be engaged in the struggle that quickens human dignity and rescues it from oblivion? Is it not God's promise that the powers of the age to come are made available to operate decisively in this world as our life together becomes available to the Divine? This has been the legacy of the black church at its best, whether in the plantation or the urban ghetto, although that legacy now begs for renewal. For the black church will have the lead role to play in the mediation of the promised community in the ghetto.

The function of the promised community is to make the invisible visible. It should never be possible to come into the community's midst just to slip into the background, because the effect of community should be to make you all too visible, to require your gift, to single you out; it is a stepping into the light. Entry into the community of Jesus is to receive the gift of sight and of hearing; nothing will ever look or sound the same. We gain sensibilities for things that never before lay in our awareness. In consequence of all this, a community risks judgment and danger to obscure the light or to ignore what it reveals of a sister's or brother's need.

This dynamic somehow has to become the focus of other tasks, such as our evangelizing. Faith speaks to faith. The presence of a people being faithful to what God is doing in their own history has the peculiar virtue of stirring other women and men to wake up to their unconscious dread of oblivion, to the contradictions of the non-effective behaviors by which they seek to escape oblivion, and to see the limitedness of the world's understanding of reality.

Such a focus on the part of any faith community within the ghetto is the only way to redeem the rest of our witness from deteriorating into a sick symbiosis of charity. To recall Irenaeus, a people fully alive is the glory of God. God's redeeming promise to us in the ghetto is to be just that, to see the promised community realized in our midst.

Let the oppressed see...and be glad; you who seek God, let your hearts revive.
For the Lord hears the needy, and does not despise [those] that are in bonds....
For God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah; and God's servants shall dwell there and possess it;
the children of God's servants shall inherit it, and those who love God's name shall dwell in it.
(Psalm 69:32-36).

Ron Spann was the pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Detroit, Michigan when this article appeared.