For They Shall Inherit the Earth
Beauty, Gentleness, and Renouncing Power
My birthday, September 28, fell this year on a Saturday, a fairly dreary and inauspicious Saturday at that. Here at the western edges of the Southern Appalachians the last ragged bands of Hurricane Helene were still moving overhead, spitting rain and wind throughout the day. Further north and east, in a huge swathe through the heart of the Southern highlands, the scale of destruction was becoming clear as the day progressed, highways torn from the map in a matter of minutes, workers and elderly people swept away by surging rivers, towns devastated, people cut off and isolated. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the war that started almost exactly a year prior in Gaza was escalating in Lebanon, the death of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah being made public on the same day. While minor in such a litany of ill happenings, I felt pretty awful myself, having been nursing a head cold most of the week. Despite that, and the lingering traces of the hurricane overhead, I made my way down to the little community library where we have been cultivating one of our inaugural community food forests, and where we were putting on a fall garden fiesta, as part of a push to expand our community agriculture offerings in the neighborhood.
Only a few days prior to the event—I am not exactly experienced in putting on things like this, and it showed!—I had managed to find us a musician, and wrangled up some free plants to give away for planting to anyone who came by. We had some food and drink on hand, and the kids began filing in, our event moved indoors thanks to the periodic bands of rain. I was not sure how the music part would go, as the musician who had agreed to perform for us played old time string music on a repertoire of tunes well known across the Appalachians and the wider South but hardly the kind of music that would be familiar to the Guatemalan kids and adults most likely to attend our event.
It didn’t seem to matter though. Instead, what resulted was something really beautiful, the audience of mostly Guatemalan kids and their parents listening and swaying to the sounds of the banjo, guitar, and fiddle (successively, it was just the one musician), clapping and dancing where appropriate. More families filtered in, the food and drink gradually diminished until they were gone, and the music went on, for a couple hours, some of the kids working at art or reading after a while, others just continuing to listen quietly and move to the music. Some folks got up and danced, a bit awkwardly but charmingly. Outside the disintegrating storm continued to spit rain, but inside was warm and bright and joyful. We had a big tray of kale and lettuce and cabbage seedlings, some I’d started at home, others donated by our local urban farm; they passed out into the neighborhood, hopefully for a few months of growing and eating (longer if we avoid a serious cold spell). Towards the end of our musical session one of my friends at the library brought out a cake with candles and the kids sang happy birthday, none of which I’d been expecting, and I cried.
Our Guatemalan neighbors are in many cases undocumented migrants, having made their way north along the same route that humans and non-humans alike have been threading for tens of thousands of years, long before any borders were drawn up or states gashed upon the landscape. They are in many cases reluctant migrants, descended from people who have clung to their highland fields and forests through a long cycle of states and conquests, one which began with the rise of classical Maya polities and entered a violent over-drive with the centuries long process of conquest and reduction carried out by Iberian invaders and the brutal state-building and economic transformations their descendants oversaw. The recent history of the region is too long and too fraught to detail here, but even a cursory look at it is enough to figure out why so many people have if reluctantly made their way to the prosperous north, either to settle or to work until they can build up the financial capital necessary to securely purchase their own land and live in peace. No one consulted the indigenous peoples of the Mesoamerican highlands, or the indigenous people of anywhere else for that matter, about where nation-state boundaries should lie, and I at least cannot grudge anyone for practicing judicious disregard of the bureaucratic impositions governing those borders and the flow of people up and down the continent.
Regardless, our Guatemalan neighbors, like many migrants across this country today, live in a state of constant caution, at once central to the life of this region, this country, and at once marginalized. Being able to share, if only for a couple of hours, a bit of the culture of these our Southern highlands, and to start to build some crossing points oriented around the cultivation and tending of this land and the care of our families, is a beautiful thing, and a quietly powerful one, or so I want to believe, to hope.
There is an election coming up here in America, as you might be aware by now. While I would prefer not to think about it or about the candidates from whom we effectively have to choose, the reality is that it will probably make some difference and that we are faced with some bitter trade-offs in choosing one over the other. Yesterday as we tended our handful of fall plantings and set in—a little late perhaps—onions at the library, I found myself distracted by the thought of what is liable to happen should the Republican candidate win and begin to fulfill his promises. It’s uncharted territory, and I cannot tell you what I will do should the worst come to pass, but it has started to keep me awake at night.
On Sunday of this week, Father Marcelo Perez, a Tzotzil Maya priest in Chiapas, Mexico, was gunned down by assailants of unknown affiliation. He had spent his life before his martyrdom working in one community after another serving at the Altar and working to build peace and sustainable justice in the violence-wracked borderlands, caught between the Mexican state and the para-state narco gangs that operate with increasing impunity, serving the vast markets of the north and battling amongst themselves and with the official state for a monopoly of violence. Fr. Marcelo knew the dangers—his bishop had transferred him at least once before out of fear for his life—but kept at his day-to-day ministry and his peacemaking work. Despite the fact that he carried no weapon and served no political faction, he was a threat—perhaps a greater threat for that very fact. He paid for his service in blood; he was not the first, and he will not be, sadly, the last.
On Monday in northern Gaza, where the Israeli state is steadily carrying out with no fear of rebuke or reprisal an increasingly effective campaign of ethnic cleansing, a young farmer named Yousef Abu Rabee was killed while delivering vegetables. Who knows whether he was deliberately targeted or not, perhaps ultimately it matters little one way or the other, the result is the same. I was not familiar with him before his death but have since browsed through his Instagram presence, where he and others shared the work that he and his colleagues were doing in the bombed out neighborhoods of northern Gaza. Watching the clips now knowing that the gentle young man in the frames is now lifeless in a grave, that his hands rest under the very soil he nurtured against all odds—it is heartbreaking. In one clip he helps children plant basil and mulukhiyya in whatever scraps of soil they can find, guiding their hands as they cradle the precious little plants and gently place them in the ground. Like children everywhere they respond joyfully, the same happy glow in their faces that I have seen in the children here in Chattanooga. But today he is dead and God knows best what will become of the plants and the children he tended and cared for.
At the start of every Divine Liturgy we sing the Beatitudes, and in so doing proclaim the shape and valence of the Kingdom of God, the true Kingdom, one that is a far cry from the satanic imitations so often falsely stamped with the sign of the Cross. Blessed are the meek, we sing, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. We sing these words, and I try very hard to believe them, to act upon them, but it is hard. What earth, I ask myself, do the meek inherit but the earth of an early grave, gunned down by men who pay no heed to the Beatitudes or anything else. How do we make peace in the face of violence that increases in its intensity when faced with small children, that lays them in the grave the same as everyone else? I know what I want to do: I want to take matters into my own hands, I want to make the evildoers pay, I want the bitter wretched men who threaten and deal out war and violence and hatred to shake in their boots, I want them to be paralyzed by fear of righteous retribution and to sink into the earth they pollute and stain. I want to see the smoke of Babylon rise up into the uncaring skies, and for hell to bear away the souls of the oppressors.
And yet. I know, intellectually and emotionally as it were, where such a path leads. I know, even if I cannot express in a coherent and intellectually satisfactory way, that the path of martyrdom, of meekness and gentleness and the peacemaker, is the only viable one, the only one that does not simply reproduce the power and the violence of Babylon. The only politics really worth pursuing in the end—both in terms of the outworking of political actions and in the final and dread sense of the eschatological End—are those that are carried out in the lives, and deaths, of people like Fr. Marcelo or Abu Rabee. By the standards of the world, against the measuring rod of state and capital, their lives were lives of weakness, of meekness in the pejorative sense; still they were strong in love, in the kind of self-giving that is a far greater task to take in hand than dealing out violence and vengance.
To say that this is a very hard position to take is an understatement; to reject power, to give up power as a way of life, is not intuitive, it does not come easily or naturally, and some days I want to ride out to battle and seize power, gentleness and holy weakness left in the dust. Ultimately only faith—in the truest and most fundamental sense of the term— can sustain such a path, and there is no promise that the specifics will be easy to discern, the right decisions, the right actions always being clear. The Beatitudes are not a political platform, though they are politically charged, revolutionary in fact, in a way that only becomes fully manifest in eschatological time, but breaks through—if we permit it—in our time in flashes and moments of beauty and grace, of weakness triumphing, even if the triumph does not look like what we might want, or expect.
Maranatha.