Blight is an ugly word. It conjures up ideas of broken down houses, broken down dreams, broken down communities. Blight is a word synonymous with death, with the complete absence of life. Blight is the absence of possibility, of positive change. It’s word that lays like a weight on the shoulders, pressing a person deeper and deeper toward the ground. It’s a yoke that is heavy to bear. Like a cross in Calvary, it’s a word that some people carry on their backs day after day after day.
Death is often understood as the antithesis of life. Blight is often understood as the antithesis of beloved community. We may have a definition of beloved community in our minds that we carry around, or perhaps it’s not something we think much about. But the practical matters do concern most of us. It is reasonable to want a good education for our children. It’s reasonable to want a place that is safe and that has access to fresh food. It’s reasonable to have have a place with the possibility of gainful employment. It’s reasonable to have a place that offers us vistas of possibility. All these things are part of a beloved community, but they are not the same thing as beloved community.
There is a key ingredient missing. Beloved community, a term made popular by Martin Luther King Jr., and now used widely within both religious and social justice circles, is the idea of a community where justice and love are possible. It’s a community where each person recognizes they are beloved, that who they are at present is worth loving. It’s a community where each person discovers for themselves that they are loved, and never truly alone. It helps for people to realize this if there is access to good education. It helps for people to realize this is there is access to fresh food. It helps people to realize this if there are opportunities for gainful employment. It helps for people to realize this if there are vistas of possibility. But all these characteristics do not equal beloved community. This isn’t a math equation, where we can add all the right elements, and come up with the this sense of beloved. These conditions create an atmosphere that is conducive to this reality but in no way guarantees it.
Many of us know through firsthand experience or through people we know that a good education, fresh food, gainful employment, and a sense of possibility do not guarantee that one feels beloved and worthwhile.
It’s a sickness of Western culture that we think we can satisfy spiritual problems by solely material means. We may think if we can gather all the right elements, we will satisfy our deepest yearnings, and our deepest pains.
Youngstown is at an interesting juncture at this moment in American history. In a country where in every major city, gentrification is the norm, and the economic possibilities for those even with advanced degrees seems to be narrower than past generations, there is a new vista approaching. When the impact of environmental neglect has taken such a toll that there is a movement across many nations, many more progressive than our own, that are realizing that our way of living will need to drastically shift to ensure any kind of future. In a city where major industry has been gone now for nearly 40 years, and a whole generation has been born and are now in young adulthood without any firsthand knowledge of this industry, there is a new dawn approaching.
Youngstown has had more than its fair share of politicians and religious leaders who routinely offer false hope.
There have been far too many people who have made promises they’ve been unable to deliver. There is a healthy skepticism and wariness among Youngstown citizens of such empty promises.
There is a need for hope. There is a need to believe in some form of resurrection, even a modest resurrection. There is a need to believe that blight is not the last word. There is a need to believe that death can be overcome.
For many Christians the coming of the Messiah is this resurrection. This coming is unknown and in the end has little to with our effort. There is a belief this day will happen, and once it happens, it will finally put an end to our present nightmares. Death will finally be overcome. There will be a new heaven and a new earth, and the former things will pass away.
There are pragmatists who offer the opposite response. They say, religious or not, that any resurrection, any positive change will happen through our own effort. No one can do it for us.
No one is coming to save us, and there is no hope outside of our own will, determination and vision. I have been in many Unitarian churches where I have heard this gospel preached.
I don’t believe in either of these extremes. I find it disempowering to wait idly for a Messiah who will arrive at some mysterious date who will make our current problems go away. This Messiah may be a religious person or a politician or an economic developer. Either way, I don’t believe a single person, a single industry, or a single religious perspective will save us all from the death we wish to overcome. I find this kind of faith disempowering, and it absolves us of a level of ownership that I think is our human birth right.
I also don’t think it is solely up to us, at least not the way we typically imagine. I see the limitation in any human striving. I see the limitation in myself as an individual. I see the limitation that seems to grow in proportion to the number of people who get involved in any project.
It is much harder to move a community, a country, a world, than it is to move an individual. But I see the value of turning the reflection of our world back on ourselves, and seeing what we can do, to see what we can offer.
Boris Pasternak wrote Dr. Zhivago at great personal cost. As a poet and philosopher who sought to write plainy and deeply about what it meant to be Russian after the revolution, he was caught between forces bigger than himself. Many remember the film, but it is the story of the novel that moves me most. Pasternak published the book in the West outside of Russian control, and risked what he thought would be not only his own personal safety but the life of his family. The West saw a political opportunity in this act, and was hopeful that this book which criticized Russia after the revolution would win the Nobel Prize for literature. It did win, and the Russian government threatened Pasternak with permanent expulsion from his home country if he went to Sweden to accept the prize. He wrote to decline accepting the reward so he could stay in his home country. There were immediate protests in Russia demanding his deportation.
He died two years later. As he lay dying he was given last rites by a priest in the Russian orthodox church, a tradition and and place that he had spent his whole life engaging and seeking to understand. At his funeral procession, one brave soul read one of his poems which was banned called “Hamlet”: The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
It is not a cheery poem, but a beautiful one. Pasternak was a poet who wrestled with tradition and place and reconciliation with something known and unknown, something bigger than himself. He respected Orthodox Easter, and he truly wondered if death had been overcome in an act that happened year after year after year. He wondered if perhaps there was something at work in his people that was both painful and an inextricable part of who he was.
The Western mind is different. We have a different kind of death to contend with, and our resurrection will be unique, if we can learn what our part in it is. We are not plagued with a loyalty to tradition, whether it be religious or familial tradition. Our sense of peoplehood is not found in the power of ritual.
Our life and death is bound up in an altogether different story. Our story in the West is a story of individual ambition. Our life and death is bound up in the perceived story of individual freedom and individual choice. It is less concerned about what our country wants or what our world needs, and more about personal needs, personal desires, personal dreams. It’s a belief that our life and death is personal and individual, and the quality of our life and death is ours to choose. There is a tremendous freedom and sense of autonomy in this story. There is also a great sense of responsibility and loneliness. There is a cost and opportunity to not being bound to anything but ourselves.
Thirty years after Boris Pasternak’s death, his children went to accept the Nobel Prize on his behalf. His son spoke on his father’s behalf upon accepting the prize in 1988. He said “This is a worthy ending of a tragedy.”
In our American narrative we are granted the vision of great vistas. We are granted the top of many mountains. We are taught that all we need is enough ambition to climb. The greatest effort is not the climb itself.
The greatest effort is not the toll of putting one step in front of the other. The greatest effort is not in trying to get to the top. The greatest effort is literally more down to earth than that.
The greatest effort is finding a mountain worthy of our life, and yes, our death. The greatest effort of resurrection is not to be found in the act of resurrection itself, but in discerning on which ground and in which circumstance our life will be spent. The resurrection of each of our lives may be unknown to us. It will be a mystery. But the effort of resurrection is not a mystery. The effort we make to see the climb we are on as something beautiful and worthwhile, makes our life something beautiful and worthwhile. In the effort we make to transform our community, to make it a place worthy of our living and our dying, this is the effort we make toward resurrection. To see the place we call home with its drawbacks, disappointments and distant vistas as the place where we come to know we are beloved.
