The Pilgrim: Part II:

The Pilgrim: Part II

"There were many at first," he breathes and goes on,
"The Road was busy with those like me who wanted
To flee the flames of a city, a nation, tearing it
Self apart and casting the poor to the grinding stone
Like Babylon, Rome, great Persia before;
The Empire claiming Godhood for all to cling to, and kneel."

"We wasted no time with our things, we 
Have seen enough of material gain, spending long
Days and years working for scraps of paper now
Burning with all the banned books and seditious 
Speech read aloud as hate; all we did was claim that this
Road was more than a myth, more than the hope of a fool."

I dare interrupt with a smile, the first to my lips in long
Weeks as the autumn chill cuts into thin skin: "Hope? Is
Not hope the very thing that proves the fool as wisest of them
All? He has wasted his riches for nothing, and in Nothing he
Finds the very truth he sought all his long life..." and we
Stare into the fire that crackles as if it laughing at us.

Commentary: Stanzas 10-12

The Pilgrim divulges more of his story and gives the crucial context that underlies his own struggle. He is more of a refugee than a true pilgrim, fleeing the moral and political corruption of society at large in search for a deeper truth, some meaning to be sought amidst the destructive dehumanization that marked Empires earlier in time. Babylon, Rome, and Persia were large nation-states that rose from warlike, tribal beginnings to emerge as they carved out expanses of territory, each growing on the basis of its military prowess and the brutal subjugation of local peoples. Babylon is the great Enemy of the Hebrew scriptures, and most scholars understand that the majority of those biblical texts were composed in the late period of exile as well as its immediate aftermath. Only under the threat of ethnoreligious destruction were the people of Israel and Judea able to put their oral traditions and sacred narratives to pen, inscribing their history, their songs, their very worldview upon scrolls of parchment kept in the synagogues that lie now in ruins. In fact, the greatest treasure of 20th century biblical archeology was found in an isolated community of Essene caves near the Dead Sea, the legacy of a group of desert dwellers representing the spiritual ancestors of our Christian monastics, and thus our Hermit himself.

Implicit in the Pilgrim's description is the corruption of the current global regime. Whereas military and material domination were the primary goals of the previous empires, the contemporary situation is overwhelmingly economic. Because of globalized trade and natural resource exploitation, military and material decisions now overwhelmingly support this invisible superstructure, instead of the other way around. The Pilgrim thus flees this decay in response to the most blatant result of such an economic engine: the devastation and stratification of society for the sake of a very few. We cannot say yet if these flames are metaphorical, or represent a lived experience in this man's mind. The pain can be heard in his voice, even if we have no ornamentation in this verse from which to glean. For all the injustice by which the empire does harm to itself, the man cannot help but be haunted by an unspoken complicity in the crimes from which he escapes. Once he worked for wages, not he runs, and we must ask a lingering, unanswered question: is he being followed?

The Hermit listens to the point that the Pilgrim introduces the first of our theological concepts to consider, hope. In linking the virtue of hope, mentioned as a chief theological virtue by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, to the idea of "Nothing," we find a curious juxtaposition. This is a substantive "Nothing," one fuller than mere emptiness. Instead, we are open to the radical freedom of Nothing-that-is-Something. Rejection, not only of material wealth but of the risk-reward cycle that drives the economic engine of the empire. This is a freedom to embrace the formless substance of liberation...a journey that can be seen paralleled in the ancient narratives of Hebrew Scripture as Abraham is met by the traveling messengers and Moses meets with YHWH on the mountain in the wilderness. Both had to be taken outside of their country, culture, and home to embrace a life where their dwelling was not a house, but a tent. We shall engage this concept presently.

"Did not the Maker of all things choose to meet in a tent?"
The Temple, the gold, the smoke and fire...all idols and shame,
Thrown down as Empires trampled in their fury, erecting
Their images, Their likeness in place of the Holiest
Holies. What else could we do but flee as history
Fell back on itself over again? 

I lived long years chasing breath, wearing my wealth
On my arms and prosperity in my speech. I was 
Educated and groomed to live as the ones who crossed
The long waters, who met my great-great-grandparents
And traded smiles and laughter before they traded 
Knives and staffs of thunder. But they are all gone now,
And I pray to those ancestors in the fragments of a dead tongue.

"But you must still believe in the truth of the Way, teacher?"
He asks and a crack of desperation flashes along with the flames,
and I stare with him back into my past for as long as I can bear:
"Belief is a flimsy foundation to build a life upon...did not 
Belief cause our ancestors to stand over slain bodies and 
Justify their wars? No...I do not believe. But faith is another thing."

Commentary: Stanzas 13-15

The Hermit begins his teaching by referencing the aforementioned Meeting Place of the emergent Hebrew Nation as recorded in the Torah. God chose to dwell in a "tent," or Tabernacle, designed with specific and intricate detail to allow the Ark of the Covenant to abide, a sacred chest which held the Tablets of the Law given to Moses. In this Meeting Place we find aspects of the Creator's intentions: that the Law, setting them apart as a Chosen People and specific nation (ethnos), is at the center, but the Tabernacle as a tent is entirely mobile and meant to accompany their people on their journey of liberation. The Hermit's anger is described with images of the Temple's destruction, pointing at the chief contradiction in the emerging Judean state: their sacred Meeting Place was institutionalized, built by the arrogant King Solomon to display his own power and satisfy his greed instead of glorify the Creator. Whether this, or Herod's opulent Second Temple is the subject of this image is not immediately identified, because both were destroyed in violent siege warfare by the enemy Empire (Babylon and Rome). The Hermit's story is given as a historical nod to his own journey as a refugee from destroyed spaces of the sacred. His own disdain is evident when he mentions that the Jews were not worshipping the God-of-All-Things, but merely images they created for themselves. History is repeated with the destruction of both temples, and now again as a new generation of refugees attempts to create meaning in this aftermath. The implicit hope is that, like the Hebrew scholars before, new meaning can be recorded in their own interpretation of history against the violence of the Empire.

"Chasing Breath" is a reference to Ecclesiastes 1, where the narrator (or Qoheleth, per Ecc 1:1) describes all of existence as "vanity," which is literally "breath" in Hebrew. He speaks of his upbringing in vague but decipherable terms as a person of Indigenous heritage, whose ancestors greeted the Europeans as they "crossed the long waters" of the Atlantic generations ago. He was trained to forget his identity in the trappings of wealth and privilege, most likely a product of education, that obscured his own history and the truth that it speaks. The worst of previous generations saw Indian boarding schools set up on reservations, many run by Christian missionaries, who trained Native children to speak "proper" English while using corporal punishment to enforce against infractions like traditional forms of worship, dress, or even speaking in their native languages. The Hermit has retained traces of this heritage in the form of prayers to his ancestors, which takes the form of analogous Catholic teachings on the communion of the saints, whereby death marks not the end of Life but a waypoint into another "spirit world" intersecting the world of the living. Syncretism, the blending of different spiritual worldviews, is not something to detract from authentic faith, but something that arises out of the genuine journey for people to embrace, adapt, and work through questions of new relevance. Native scholars like Richard Twiss (Sicangou Lakota) and Vine Deloria, Jr. (Oglala Lakota) emphasize that the supposed contradictions or incompatibilities arise only when seen from a crystallized or rigid European rationalism, entirely alien to the Indigenous sensitivity.

The Pilgrim seems to be surprised by the Hermit's disillusionment. His pain is marked by the question of "belief" that the Hermit continues to treat, returning to the substantive No-thing that is the essence and energy of God. Belief, for the Hermit, is an assent to a set of ideological premises which inform the convictions and crystallize opinion and thought. It means that reasonable human beings can be trained to kill, maim, and otherwise do violence to each other when supported by a belief that such behavior is morally justified or even necessary for their survival. The rhetoric that shapes contemporary criminal justice is upheld by the belief that rehabilitation is a costly waste of resources and that the death penalty is a reasonable deterrent from crime, even though both premises are not substantiated by any evidence whatsoever. An even more potent example is given in the history of the United States when concerning immigration. Since the nation is built upon successive waves of immigrants, starting with religious refugees and now including political and economic refugees, each group of "native" citizens had to create an ideology to justify the persecution of incoming immigrants. At first the religious justification was enough to scapegoat Irish, Italian, Polish, and later Russian immigrants because they were not Protestants, but now prejudice is acceptable against Latin American and Middle Eastern immigrants because they do not speak English, have variable religious beliefs, and are tied to traditional media-driven imaginations of the "enemy." The Hermit does not "believe," but speaks of something entirely different: faith. What can this mean? We shall see.