God is Broken

Naming Things

You chisel away the
superfluous letters
to reveal the name,
awaiting disclosure from
a block of babble.

You name the way
you have lived, via the
negative: not, my name is,
but, my name is not . . .

Our core is nameless,
being seeking itself;
anonymous shards
of  exiled  Shekinah,
wandering, turned always
empty away from
unfamiliar alphabets.
You somehow know this,
you find and arrange
Her scrabbled shards;
so you name things.

There is a story that
at the judgment
(when wandering ends)
each will be given a stone
whereupon her true name
is carved; a stone from which
the babel has been chiseled,
revealing only what is left,
what is precisely true.

And this is how
we shall finally be named;
and you will weep
when you see yours,
then smile,
then laugh,
when you hear it said.

             TT Patterson, San Francisco, 12/18/2002

I try to avoid any kind of monomania, falling into the cynicism that relegates all twisted human behavior to self-interest, economics, fatalism, unbridled free will, formal materialism, or even, especially, the influence of the Satan or demons. One can understand the reaction-formation that was Ayn Rand's Objectivism, her essentially Fascist response to the Soviet Union's totalitarian, oppressive collectivism, under which she was born. But what was twisted, what was "evil" for Rand? That which is against reason and contrary to that which is needful and appropriate for man to exist as a rational being. An interesting but small and inadequate definition. Personally, I don't care why or how the world broke--choose your myth--but you don't have to look beyond yourself to see that it is, more or less, broken.

We all participate in the divine (fill in here the imago dei, pantheism, the collective consciousness, the Oversoul--my personal favorite--or merely our highest aspirations, I don't care), even those of us who are not Rand's hero, John Galt. But there is also the shadow, the brokenness, or evil, in which we also participate. I have often thought that we, human beings, are the shadow, working itself out, reconciling itself to the light and thus, eventually, willingly, absorbed by it--the end of evil, evil that had to be played out, overcome, because the implication of it was there from the beginning by virtue of God's, or the good's, very existence, the shadow that light creates when material objects block it. Rock, paper, scissors. Unobstructed light overcomes darkness. But does it really? Light requires energy, darkness requires nothing (good people doing nothing?). But this is pushing the metaphor too far. Darkness, as a metaphor for evil, will be overcome forever by its fleshing out over human history and being, eventually, utterly abandoned as human beings learn to repair the world (tikkun olam), and to repair themselves. Perhaps the day will come when the only evils mankind will have to suffer will be "acts of God," and we'll even learn to mitigate those by better understanding weather patterns, plate tectonics, and disease: the messianic era.

Why must we repair the world? How was it "broken?" As to the latter question: what difference does it make? That's how we find it. As to the former question: we don't have any choice in the matter if we believe in survival, much less justice, compassion, fairness, mercy, and the value of every single unique human being. Ayn Rand didn't believe in the value of every human being, but to be fair, nor do any of us, not really, though most of us at least hold it up as an ideal. And this is essential. Repairing human affairs, repairing the world, requires that we, at least as an ideal, believe it as an axiom of existence, believe in the good, believe in the value of every human life; that each human life owns inalienable rights, whether they are American lives, Chinese lives, or Afghan lives; and that those who would alienate us from these rights are themselves alienated from reality, from the good. Why should we believe this?  Because it must be true for us to survive. Jefferson said it: these truths are self-evident. What is the consequence of not believing it? We have solid evidence of that: slavery, discrimination, the exploitation of workers, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot . . . add your favorite despot (I'm tempted to add American names here, but will refrain), wholesale abortion (this not to comment on its legality, but its practice), environmental degradation, and corporatism/capitalism at its terrifying worst.

I like the myth reflected in the poem I began with. The world is broken because God is broken. In the act of creation, the Shekinah, God's glory, the feminine aspect of God, was shattered, doled out, separated. Tikkun olam is the Shekinah seeking itself, through and in us, to reunite us to one another and hence God. Myths are true to the extent that they mirror a reality in our experience. To me, the Christian myth of the fall has never made sense or seemed adequate as any kind of explanation of the brokenness in the world. The idea of the shattered Shekinah, on the other hand, is a remarkably incarnational and healing idea (as Jesus should be), particularly of you prefer to think of God as participating in human suffering, even unable to relieve it without our efforts. As we participate in the process of tikkun olam, we will gradually connect with one another, with God, and this process will finally give us our true name, as a people, as individuals.