Hope is an Empty Chair

Three Watches, Part 9

Part of an ongoing series on Pistis, Elpis and Agape — faith, hope and love — as embodied political practices…

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To keep the watch of Elpis is to keep the formula: to live as not / to act as if. To act as if the Commons of the age to come were possible… and to live as not according to the present age of violence.

In the relational sphere, this formula is the first condition of Pistis. To act in good faith is to act in accord with a reality that cannot be guaranteed. Where we act in friendship we act as if living under the law of kynde, as the medievals called it, the paradise of the commons. When we live in friendship, we live as not under the rule of free competition and the war of all against all.

When we keep the hope of good faith, we perform with our bodies another political space. Our bodies perform a paradigm of friendship which may not even exist, but the conditions for its existence are created by the performance.

This is a risk and the degree of risk correlates to the strangeness of the other. The friend from way back constitutes a low risk and the stranger constitutes a high risk. But it is good faith between strangers that amounts to an event. These wilfully performed occurrences jar the world and change it. They re-draw the maps. They open new political possibilities. For this reason this kind of thing is concerning to business-as-usual, which relies on repeatable formulas, predictability and sameness. Do you love your friends? Even your enemies do that, says the Messiah figure. But if you love your enemies… well now you’ve broken the rules of the game; now the world is disrupted; now you are like the sun and the rain that ignore border, boundary, appearance and origin; now anything might happen.

Mark Granovetter’s study into social information flows speaks of two kinds of relational ties: strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties are those between people who belong to the same group. Weak ties are those tenuous, tender and uncertain connections between people who do not belong to the same group, but who somehow fall into relationship through chance, necessity or intention. It is observed that the weak ties are in many ways the politically potent events. It is the weak connectives that change the constitution of the world. Strong ties keep the world as it is. Weak ties open up another world. Weak ties exist as if, and as not.

This weak messianic power, available to all and yet so rarely availed, roots down deep in the messianic imagination. It calls the prayerful face each day to watch for the oncoming stranger, the redemptive arrivant; to remember them always and to leave a space for their chance visitation. And indeed, to wander toward their possibility, as a powerless guest. It was precisely this willingness to fraternise with otherness that made the first Century messianics dangerous to the order of things: “Away with such a fellow from the earth!” they said of Paul, supposedly seen with some Greeks in the temple. The algorithm and the accusative glare of social discipline enforce the same anxious purity culture today. The feverish social violence against otherness pervades.

The empty chair at the table, left so for the messianic visitor, has long been a religious practice that suggests something about the shape of hope. It’s a sort of mundane domestic religious shrine at one end, and functional political infrastructure at the other… of a home which chooses the discipline of hospitality, interruptability and possibility. It’s an empty gesture, of course, if not available for actual use when the door knocks. But the hours and days in which the chair waits empty are times of watchful attention. In the same way that people point to an urn of ashes on the mantle-piece when someone carelessly speaks in disregard of the dead, the empty chair informs the watch of hope as I keep it in my own body, over my own words and deeds. Who is the stranger who will sit there? I don’t know, because they aren’t here yet. And yet, the chair somehow represents that other, whoever they may be. If I allow myself to think this way, then I will keep watch over my words. It will not seem so easy to amuse myself at the expense of distant parties, outsider groups, nor those beyond my pale. I’ll think before I cut down my opponents in their absence, or speak with ill-measured force about matters pertaining to other peoples’ experience. I will slowly learn to communicate my dissonances as though directly to those whom they concern. Does it sound restrictive or diminishing? On the contrary, it lifts my way from a small path of narrow concerns, outward into a panoramic sphere of all relations. At first, living in the hearing of the empty chair will be a harsh exercise in strenuous self-awareness. After a while it will become a well practiced thing. Perhaps, in the age to come, my words and deeds will have no fearful reason for hiddenness at all, and my body will become a space of unmitigated good faith. By practicing a hopeful openness to unknown friends I will be the safe space of the age to come, and a terrorising danger to the present one.

Ivan Illich kept the watch of Elpis by lighting a candle whenever he sat in conversation with anyone. The candle was to keep the place of some un-designated third party, whoever they may be; to remember the one who was not present to say whatever they might say. It was not merely a matter of remembrance, but of care, attention and regard.