Messianism as Folk Culture

On the deep memory of land as a form of resistance and resilience

[This essay is adapted from the second episode of the Messianic Folklore Podcast. I've developed the threads here somewhat since I found myself more and more compelled to explore how a soil-and-stars, rooted kind of folk culture lives and moves as a path of messianic resilience, joy and home.]

We are learning to love the roots of the mountains

From which we were birthed and to which we return

We all slowly are making our peace

With deep time layers in the rocks resting

Pierced with drills for our transgressions  

by dull machinery of the Roman Peace

Late in the golden age of Caesars, 

Princes of privilege on inherited seats

     sons of the oil gods, listless

But we are learning to love the deep

The messianic idea is something that has developed over a long time. Before it was fixed upon the coming of some person who would put everything right, it existed in a less specific sense. It existed in the belief that the Creator arights things, and so everything gets balanced out in the end. That's just how it is. It's a law of nature, or of super-nature, perhaps. One day everything would be arighted, and so everything could be understood in the light of this imagined arighting. Whatever was going on, a person could look at it and ask, "well, is that how it'll be when everything is made right?" And the answer might be "I don't think so…" Or it might be, "yes and amen, let's have that all day long!" Of course not everyone agrees about what a world made right would look like. Probably, no two people have quite the same idea. But even so, it provides a kind of frame for thinking about things. It provides a way of seeing imbalances of power in the world. 

The anthropologist Vittorio Laternari wrote a book called messianism The Religion of the Oppressed. It explores messianic cults as they emerged among indigenous cultures as they resisted the onset of European colonisation over the course of modernity. Why was messianism the religion of the oppressed? Because it was nearly always the oppressed, the enthralled and the colonised who longed for a shifted future. The colonising rulers of the world didn't want change. They wanted everything just as it was. They didn't want to see the valleys lifted up, or their mountains of power brought low.

Every valley shall be lifted up,
    and every mountain and hill be made low;
and all people will see it.

All people are grass,
    their constancy is like the flower of the field.
Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
   
    Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
    and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
    and spreads them like a tent to live in;

who brings princes to naught,
    and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.

He gives power to the faint,
    and strengthens the powerless.

Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,

These lines are taken from Isaiah 40. This is just the beginning of a long poem. It rolls on for sixteen chapters. It was written to lift the spirits of a migrant community, displaced by war and looking for a way home. It's full of radical messianic energies. There are two things about it that strike me in the light of our present strange moment.

Messianism, Land and Folk Culture

This poem is full of language that powerfully diminishes the human story. "People are like grass… like flowers… they wither… they fade…" This is all quite at odds with the anthropocentric worldview of modernity, which sees the world as a human story. Under modernity, nature is the word we use for everything besides ourselves; all the things that retreat into the thin margins. In this poem, however, the humans are like grasshoppers. God is associated with deep time and the vast material universe. The human story is small. 

It would perhaps seem a little strange that this poem begins as a song of comfort. Is our smallness here comforting? These days I sense that more and more people really are taking comfort in the reality that the more-than-human world is vast and alive and resilient, and much bigger than we are. There is a surprising hope in the slow realisation that this human-centric world produced by the machinery of modernity, is a passing thing. When the machinery becomes monstrous, it becomes easier to understand why the messianic imagination would fix its gaze on a time when the humans don't rule creation, but have learned to live as part of it. It's not so terrible to be small.

Our smallness asks questions of the power relations we live amidst. From deep time, our power structures and hierarchies look foolish. "The nations are a drop in the bucket… are less than nothing." The One who sits over the circle of the earth, "brings princes to nought, and the rulers of the earth to nothing." 

Here is a way of thinking about power. Here is a deep knowing: that deep time overthrows every regime. And so, deep time becomes the friend of the oppressed. The long memory of the land is home to the powerless. By re-membering with nature, and becoming embedded in the whole and becoming kin with the land, the oppressed root themselves in that which outlasts the belligerent powers. This is messianism as a kind of deep time land based folk culture. Deep time is the past. Deep time is the future.

Of course, there are other things. There is grief and loss. There is the arresting violence of now. There is anger and immediacy and urgency. This poem wasn't telling a story to help a migrant community numb out from their losses, but to survive them and outlast them. This is one way of being, held in a web of threads. But it's something, and it feels poignant these days.

Revolutionary Patience

And then there is that word that almost never sounds appealing: the word "wait." It is so common in the Hebrew Bible.

Waiting is not always the thing. Sometimes everything is now, and rattling at fever pitch. The messiah is about to appear. The walls are about to fall. The world is about to come apart. I suppose these are the times to be brave. Time to sell all you have and give to the poor. Time to sit in the street and get arrested. Time to tell the undiluted truth without blinking. Time to pack up the wagon and make a journey.

At other times–most times perhaps–the world is long and slow, and often hard and unjust. These are the times to hold your nerve. Time to take care of each other. Time to survive. Time to gather your embers, keep your integrity and not be corrupted by the slow wearing and twisting of the world. These are times to wait, and play the long game. Ched Myers called it "revolutionary patience." When we lean into the deep time of God, we make our home in a time that outlasts the powers, the princes and the belligerent systems of the age which gradually undo themselves. Folk culture dwells in deeper memory. It is formed to outlast.

Sometimes, I suspect, we are obliged to live in both kinds of time at once. We navigate the state of emergency with one hand, and the long game with the other. There's something crucial about discerning which is which. Wisdom knows not to mix them up.

When I think of deep time, honestly, I think about death. It's not an easy thing for my heart to rest into. There's a lot of death down there. And there's plenty of deep time without us in it. The gift is, partly, in allowing ourselves to be relativised. But this poem sees deep time also as drenched in God, in miracle, in blessedness. Ancient heavenly bodies are named by God and primordial oceans held in God's cupped hands. This is about feeling empathy and belonging and welcome in this more-than-ancient, more-than-human creation. Perhaps in this folkish rootedness we might feel a little less anxious attachment to this violent age of the humans, which is defeating itself a little further every day. Perhaps we can exercise the kind of messianic imagination that views this great creature as home, as the place of our belonging, even after all that occurs.