The Prophetic Office I: Withdrawal
Much ink is spilt over Priests and Kings. But I say to you: what of the Prophet?
Many years ago, I got a phone call at work. I picked myself up, trotted over to sales, and entered the office of my interlocutor. Let us call her Mary. She needed help with misbehaving software. A few minutes later, the problem was solved; she, sitting, I, standing up from kneeling by her desk, my hands still typing a last few commands. My knees weren’t wreathed in inflammation back then: I stood up facilely, a quickness radiating as I hit [Enter] one last time.
“Wait, Paul. But. Before you leave. You’ve been like a ghost lately. Where have all the jokes gone? Why have you gone quiet? You’re so—withdrawn.”
Eying her office door hanging open, but noting the busy din of business around us [n.b. only one vowel separates “busyness” from “business”], my voice mildly dips in volume, and I told her a parable of sorts.
Consider a person whom others entrust with fears, terrors, with violences they’ve suffered; with fruitless hopes, with grasping wishes. For that is what I am, Mary: I am a black hole. People deposit things into me, and those things simply disappear. I never tell a soul. I hear all, bear all, I render counsel, or even, I simply, quietly, listen. When the eyes glisten with tears, I do not look away, I do not equivocate: I look in the eyes, at the soul therein, and I stay steady. I do not waver. Consider if there are people who render unto such a black hole, say, 15% of the darkness in their lives. After six people, cumulatively, I’ve 90%—90% of an abstraction, sure, but 90% of something. Of what? Perhaps the grief of a suffering human soul? But it’s all by proxy, you see. And what if it is more than six people? Well, we’re over 100% now. And there are more than six people. And of course, I’ve all my own griefs and troubles, few of which are known by, well, anyone.
The numbers begin to get unpleasant. We are at well over 200% of something, whatever the abstraction means. Say that people give me some of their worst: that which they cannot share with “others” without losing face. They need a black hole. Not just a sounding board: oblivion. They need the absorption of their woes with zero leakage. People need spices, right? A little spice goes a long way? So I like to say that I receive the salt and pepper of people’s lives. The special stuff, where a little goes a long way. I want to get a divorce. I wish I were dead. My employer is committing fraud, but I’ll lose my job if I do anything about it and I need the healthcare plan. I think my sister has apostatized. I don’t love my spouse anymore, and I don’t think I ever did. My mother is dying and we are estranged and I don’t know what to do. My best friend falsely accused me of adultery. My brother has abandoned his wife and children for transsexuality. I don’t even remember what hope feels like.
So I like to say that that percentage, whatever it is, is a form of salt. Salt is what makes us human: it is what gives our tears taste. And we, Mary, we Christians, we are called to be the salt of the Earth. And so I bear it. I lap it up: into the black hole it goes. But, Mary, have you ever taken a tablespoon of salt and tossed it into your mouth?
Sometimes, I find my mouth, my soul, dry—with all the water—all the life—adsorbed to the salt. Sometimes, I’ve nothing left. And so I withdraw.
And she stood up, eyes bright with glimmering keenness, and she hugged me, not in that white-collar-super-disincarnation-mediated side hug so common then [much less now], but a real hug, laying her tear-sprinkled face against my shoulder. And a week or so later, the ghost withdrew, the jokes and the words, returned.
Withdrawal is a funny word in contemporary parlance. The doctors talk about withdrawal: it is a psychosomatic condition of elevated physiological stress, a chronic biological insult, resultant from the removal of a substance or substances to which a person’s body has become, in some fashion, biochemically reliant. Withdrawal is something to be avoided if possible, and there are usually step-down protocols for tapering off exposure to a given addictive (“habit-forming,” as they now say) substance. Because withdrawal is not the ideal.
What do the military brass say? Well, withdrawal is akin to a four-letter word. It is failure, it is humiliation, it is retreat. It is the loss of a strategic position which was only taken in the first place by some expenditure of material, men, or both. Rare are the withdrawals which were undone by a later redoubled assault. (The Inchon landing is one such rarity of a redeemed withdrawal.) Withdrawal is just about the opposite of any military ideal.
But withdrawal has a grammatical specificity to it to which few pay any mind. Withdrawal describes a motion, and motion refers to two discrete loci: an origin, and an endpoint. Everyone is quick to consider withdrawal with regard to its origin: a state of addiction, or an indefensible strategic position.
In short, people’s concern lies in the question: withdrawal whence? My concern is rather the opposite: withdrawal hither?
The doctors and the generals see withdrawal as unideal. Very well. That is materialism’s judgment. My judgment is rendered from a very different heuristic. My care lies not with the material, but the liminal.
And my withdrawal is not particularly a withdrawal from anything; it is a withdrawal unto: unto something in particular. Well, three things. If materialism claims withdrawal is not the ideal, I claim: withdrawal may be unto the ideals. There are three, in my mind. They go by different names. You know them, of course. They are Christ: Prophet, Priest, King. As a secular author (Mark Edmundson: Self and Soul, AD 2018) put it, they are: Hero [Warrior], Saint, Thinker. The Trinity obscures it slightly, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; but consider, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
Hero -> Redeemer
Saint -> Sustainer
Thinker -> Creator
For are we not the very images of God? Is not Christ clothed in our flesh, coming down from Heaven that we might, with and by and in Him, be drawn up unto Heaven?
We’ve little difficulty in prattling on about a need for Heroes and Thinkers. It is by Creation and Taking Dominion that we emulate God the Father, the Thinker; it is by Courage and Fortitude that we emulate God the Son, the Hero. But what of the Sustainers? What of, in Edmundson’s language, the Saints? What of the Holy Ghost?
The vast majority of Western Christians outside of the Roman tradition have entirely rejected the idea of Sainthood. I’ve little interest in addressing that rejection here, save mentioning two facts: (1) Western Christianity is now largely predicated by egalitarianism, necessitating that all Christians are equal in office and stature; (2) Sainthood as an idea is predicated by the two words Hierarchy and Distinction (cf. Richard Weaver), necessitating that there is a graduated quality to Saintliness, and that there are distinctions of degree inherent between different people. Sainthood, in whatever form you use the word, implies necessarily that not all Christians manifest equal qualities of faith and works. The two dogmas animating the above two facts, accordingly, are ontologically antithetical.
What has resulted has been a slough of cognitive dissonance. Because, of course, people are still in need of sustaining. They still need Sustainers (Saints). And they still seek them out when things become difficult enough. If pressed, people cannot verbalize how it is they pick out the Sustainers from the madding crowds, for the language therefor has been liquidated into, and by, the aforementioned slough; but their actions speak with the clarity of crystal.
Consider the opening verses of II Kings 4. Elisha, a Prophet of God, walking along, minding his own business—which is to say, God’s business—and a woman calls out to him. She lays a terrorizing crisis before him, and—nothing else. She does not even ask for help: it is an unalloyed cry of despair. Note Elisha’s response, What shall I do for thee? Now remember the words of Christ in John 2, upon his mother saying unto him, “They have no wine”: Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.
In both, the plea for aid is tacit. It is by implication. And in both, the Prophetic office shines out, radiant and clear, as both Prophets bring to bear the abundant riches of Faith into according abundance of material goods. We are quick to brush by the miracles—ah yes, the oil is magically multiplied, ah yes, the water is turned to wine—but this is folly. What is the central act of the Sustainers? They do not work within the bounds of the given crisis; they do not reorganize and reallocate preexisting resources to greater efficiency; they do not reframe the disaster into a more palatable, less terrifying image—no. The act of Sustainment is the manifestation of Greater Power. The Strength which is displayed is possible to glimpse only in the context of desiccating weakness (remember that water—Life—adsorbs to salt). Elisha does not impart his own material wealth of oil to solve the widow’s heartbreak: he pours out that which was, is, and will, never be his own to claim ownership of—the infinity of Heaven. Christ, going much further, too does not impart His own wealth of wine, materially solving the social faux pas, nor does He multiply much wine from little, as did Elisha with oil. No, Christ, seizing the water on hand for ritual cleansing, weaves the water of purity laws into the aqua in excelsis of Heaven’s wine. Elisha, the Prophet, can only Sustain; Christ, the God-man, Sustains the feast by Redeeming the purity laws into the Creation of Paradise’s foretaste. Shall not Paradise be a wedding feast?
Prophets, Saints, Sustainers—they do not solve problems in conventional ways. The problems they face are not mere conventional “problems,” either; they are disasters, horrors, death—they are those terrors which defy all convention. The Prophet is looked to when men are at their weakest: when all the artifice, sophistication, and technique have failed, and nothing remains but quivering mortal weakness. Hear the words of St. Paul in his second epistle to the Corinthians:
And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
For when I am weak, then am I strong. The Prophet, by the alchemical workings of the Holy Ghost, transforms quivering mortal weakness into the strength, into the power, of Christ. For, our God, to our dim eyes of spent light, is a God of paradox: and thus it must be that His Greater Power, His Strength, is made perfect—is manifested perfectly—in weakness. This gift, like so many, is given by means of the Holy Ghost: that Person of the Trinity titled, Sustainer. And so it is fitting that the Prophet, the Sustainer, is in fact but an instrument of The Sustainer, the Holy Ghost.
A constant in every story of the Prophetic office throughout Scripture is withdrawal. The Prophets don’t tend to be very popular, do they? How often do Christ and His disciples withdraw, much less how often does Christ Himself! I pondered for years why this was, and over the years, I cultivated a ramshackle theory. Its radix is, after a fashion, found in Luke 15. Christ tells the parable of a shepherd leaving ninety-nine sheep in the pasture to find the one sheep that has been lost. To make a further abstraction out of the already parabolic language: consider that in the framework Christ lays out, the one sheep has been considered, even if only temporarily, of greater value or import than the ninety-nine. (What might this suggest about the aforementioned dogma of Christian egalitarianism?)
I realized long ago that my place is usually with the weary and tired, the lonesome or the overexerted, of the world. My place is as a healer for the body or spirit, a judge or counselor for the lost and aimless, a displaced force of love and fiery Glory of Life for those in the darkened valleys of this world. Tending to those lost amidst depression, poisons of mind or body; to those who stand above the cliffs and bathe in dizziness; to those whose affairs are grave and shadowed. Then, when the green place is reached, I am ordinarily forgotten and passed from. C’est la vie. There are always more saints laboring in the Church Militant; always more to pray for, always more burdens to bear. The harvest is great but the gatherers are few.
What flickers in the negative space, though? The reality that I go looking for the one sheep versus remaining with the ninety-nine sheep. How could we be so foolish as to presume that the ninety-nine sheep don’t notice when the one is sought after, with them being left in the pasture? It is fertile ground for resentment.
What’s more: why am I ordinarily forgotten and passed from? Well, again, my suspicion is that resentment is in play. I am well acquainted with being discarded at the gates to the green place. So many wounded souls have found themselves in the howling abyss, the sucking void, of the valley of death’s shadow, and then they find me there. None appear to have ever once considered that I appear to have been there before they arrived. And they, with my aid, straggle towards the green place, and they reach the verdant gates to rolling, pastoral hills, and then it happens: I am become a totem of death unto them. They wish to forget the trials, the fire and water, the agony and fear: and I, by some peculiar alchemy, become a totem for all which they wish to forget. And so there is severance. I am cut away.
It has happened many times. The best metaphor for it is in fact itself even true: the romances which I have labored to help and heal and repair, but to whose weddings I ne’er have received invitation.
The ramshackle theory, thus, is that the Prophet—he to whom others flee for aid—becomes an incarnated, walking and talking mausoleum of those memories which both the one and the ninety-nine are desperate to forget. The ninety-nine resent having received less attention than the one, and the one(s) resents being faced with the person whom they stumbled upon in the valley of the shadow of death. I remarked that none appear to have ever considered that I was there [the valley of the shadow of death] before them, but I choose my words carefully: appear to have considered does not mean have considered. It gnaws at the soul, I imagine. For the Prophet to be a channel of God’s Greater Power, he must too then be weak. And what the one sheep knows, if only subconsciously, is that the Prophet was weak, remains weak, and is at peace therewith. But simultaneously, that his dwelling, seemingly, is that selfsame valley of death’s shadow: and that such living quarters must surely necessitate some great degree of strength. And what purer resentment is there than that of another’s perceived greater strength? Perhaps resentment at being faced with an inscrutable paradox?—especially a paradoxical person, one who simultaneously evinces parched weakness and a gushing font of strength? (Perhaps this is why the glaring soprani were silent.) Remember that paradoxes often make us feel foolish, and few enjoy the sensation of folly.
And so, the Prophet sometimes withdraws. Remember that the Prophet, the Sustainer—he is but one glowing fraction of Christ. He may be kingly, but a King he is not; he may be priestly, but a Priest he is not. Christ in His fullness is all three and is at still greater unity with the Trinity Who is all Three. Remember Christ’s words in the Gospel of St. Matthew: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. Why oughtn’t the same estate befall the Prophet? And in our contemporary age, in which exiles and anathemas are rarely effected in a tangible sense, they are nonetheless still effected; and so perhaps a clever prophet might willfully come and go, ebbing and flowing like the tides, having the well-tuned sense of when both the one and the ninety-nine are in concord with their distaste for him. The military brass aren’t wrong, after all: withdrawal is not the ideal—but withdrawal is usually of much greater strategic value than defeat.
Thus, the Prophet withdraws. In Scripture, it’s usually to the wilderness. What is out there in the wilderness? What lurks behind the scrim of withdrawal? A preliminary answer might be, “Whom did Christ meet in the desert after forty days?”
Here endeth the first part. I end as I began, with a story, whose meaning shall be plumbed later. I was fleeing life’s grinding labors for a weekend, visiting faraway friends for respite. I was withdrawing. Hurtling northward on an interstate, a heavy rain getting worse and worse the more northerly I drove. But I knew the road well. When lightning punctuated the nighttime landscape with exclamation points of daytime, everything was as I knew it ought be. All was in its proper place. The road began to drift from due north; I was coming up on the tunnel, and in a moment, I entered its maw. With the suddenness of a storm melting away over open water, all of the sound and fury evaporated. The glow of the tunnel’s aged halogen lamps was gentle and mellow. The black aperture at the opposite end of the tunnel was gradually enlarging, both in diameter and darkness. It was just a few seconds, now, till I was through.
Three seconds. The aperture is very, very dark—it, it is almost black? Where are the lights at the tunnel’s exit?
Two seconds. The air out there seems alive with slight motions, like an old cathode-ray tube television that’s tiring out. Wait—oh, no, no—what if the storm were moving south and got stuck against the mountain’s north side—
One second. The lights are there after all; but they’ve been blotted out by rain. That thunderous sound is not thunder: it is a flood. A rearward glance confirms there is no one behind me: I need room in case I—
Mark. The windshield is instantaneously blotted out by a wall of water, thicker even than that of a Cat. 3 hurricane I once drove amidst. The tachometer skips up and down by the thousands as the wheels lose traction.
Plus one. I feather the gas and clutch, angling westwards, knowing that that is where the pavement bends. There is a steep chasm hugging the east side of the road, and all that stands between me and it—a thin rail—is occluded by the deluge.
Plus two. Twice-downshifted, the car has bled off some speed, despite heading downwards along the sloping plateau onto which the tunnel was built. I know the road, though I see it not. After another thirty yards, just curve back northwards from westwards…
Plus three. I hear myself say aloud, …Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven…; and I realize that I have been speaking aloud for the past four seconds.
Parts II and III shall be linked below upon being published. Part II shall address the wilderness of the Prophetic office. Part III shall return to where Part I began and recast it, or baptize it: which is to say that Part III shall render a theology of black holes.
A beautiful writing, Paul. I look forward to your next piece