As my first blow against it, I would not stay.
As my second, I learned to live without it.
As my third, I went back one day and saw
that my departure had left a little hole
where some of its strength was flowing out,
and I heard the earth singing beneath the street.
– Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer and the City
*****
Do not be afraid, little flock, for God has been pleased to give you the kingdom.
Sell your possessions and give to the poor.
— The Gospel of Luke*
*A Note from the Author: Sacred texts have been and continue to be an important resource for most cultures in the world, with narratives and teachings that help us deepen our understanding of who we are in the world. As a Christian, I find the Bible, particularly the teachings of Jesus, to be this kind of resource, providing a larger Story in which to place my story. Despite the ever-present temptation of dominant cultures to freeze these texts and use/abuse them as justifications of social control, I find it well worth the trouble and hard work to thaw the texts out and allow them to live freely and do their challenging and liberating work.
Arroz con mango is a great Cuban expression used to describe any two things that don't belong together, like rice with mango. My three year old neighbor Lucas loves a particular cartoon where the characters think up such things, and there's a great word to react whenever you hear an example of rice and mango—¡guácala! For example, the host might ask Do you like ice cream? and the kids yell back, ¡Sí! Then he asks Do you like pepperoni pizza? ¡Sí!
Do you like pepperoni ice cream?
¡Guácala!
We see an example of arroz con mango, a ¡guácala! combo, in the words of Jesus ; it's the juxtaposition of two of Jesus' favorite images: sheep and kingdom. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for God has been pleased to give you the kingdom." Do you like sheep? ¡Sí! Do you like the kingdom of God? ¡Sí! Do you like sheep running around the throne in the king's palace? ¡Guácala!
This particular rice and mango combination represents what is perhaps the longest-running conflict in human history: two dreams, two ideals, two visions of what it means to be human. According to anthropologists like Jared Diamond, this conflict is ten thousand years old and running, starting with the emergence of settled agriculture and the ensuing project of civilization that began around 8,000 BCE in the fertile crescent. Biblical scholars see the conflict illustrated in the Genesis account of Cain and Abel, with their divergent offerings of produce and lamb. Cain's offering represented the settled community; the Bible says he was the father of cities, with its attendant civilizing tendencies, while Abel's offering represented the much older nomadic shepherding and hunting/gathering way of life (or as Jonathon is learning to call it in pre-school, the "foraging and tracking" way of life). The Genesis fratricide story hints at what was happening ten thousand years ago: as the settled communities developed and expanded they found coexistence with the nomads to be problematic, and started killing them off, or pushing them to the margins.
It's interesting to me to note that this conflict was not just occurring over there in the holy land; for some strange reason the urge to abandon the flock and construct kingdoms was happening all over the world, including here in the "new world" long before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Thousands of years before Colombus, Cuba was first inhabited by the foraging and tracking and fishing people known as the Guanahatabey, and long about the same time Cain was slaughtering Abel in the fertile crescent, along came the Ciboney, Cuba's first agricultural and settlement-oriented group of people. The Ciboney started killing the Guanahatabeys and driving them further and further west, until Columbus and his explorers found the surviving remnant living in caves around Matanzas.
Cain and Abel's conflict doesn't stop with the Genesis murder account; it continues throughout the Hebrew Bible with competing understandings for the kind of life one can offer to God in order to be blessed. Cain and the civilizers won this culture war, as the story of kingdoms and empires has been the dominant, defining, and determinative voice not only for the semitic middle eastern people but for virtually the entire world over the past ten millennia. But the beauty of the Bible is that Abel's voice, the voice heard outside the realm of the kingdom, still echoes throughout. Listen to some examples of the biblical argument between the constructor of civilization and the nomadic shepherd:
Example One: The descendants of Cain celebrate surplus production; you see this in the story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh's dream, while the descendants of Abel strongly critique the idea of surplus; you see this in the story of manna in the wilderness.
Example Two: Cain's folk worship the god of conquest who shuns strangers, seen in the Joshua story, while Abel's heirs worship the god of convivience who welcomes strangers, seen in the Ruth story.
Example Three: The civilizers glorify the city in Isaiah 52 (Awake, Zion, clothe yourself with strength! Put on your garments of splendor, Jerusalem, the holy city. ...Rise up, sit enthroned). The same prophet, a few chapter earlier, channeled the voice of the shepherds who celebrate the destruction of the city (The noisy city will be deserted and will become a wasteland forever, the delight of donkeys, a pasture for flocks, till the Spirit is poured on us from on high, and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest. ...How blessed you will be when the city is leveled completely, letting your cattle and donkeys range free.)
Example 4: The kingdom folks turn in their hymnbook to sing Psalm 99 and imagine God as a King to be feared, (The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned, let the earth shake). The nomads, on the other hand, prefer the music of the beloved 23rd Psalm (The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want).
Final example: As the city-oriented communities became ever more stratified and complex, the civilizers needed an ethic focused on social control, and they came up with 613 laws governing and regulating every aspect of daily life, while nomadic communities throughout time and across cultures have all shared a simple three-fold ethic of care, hospitality, and courage.
For hundreds of thousands of years prior to the first settled community, Abel's way of life was the only story, but it didn't take long for the kingdom story to push it to the margins of history. So if we spit into the test tube and send it off to Ancestry.com they are likely to reveal that we are all grandchildren of Cain (like it or not). The attraction of the city, the felt need for increased production and surplus, the influence of the latest technology, the nostalgia around homeland and the necessity of drawing borders, plus all of civilization's attendant assumptions of conquest and privilege and supremacy, this is the dominant story in which we all live. It is our project—and we spend a lot time trying to restore it or reform it, to realize its ideal.
Without even being conscious of it, our cultural prejudice against those who live outside the project is woven throughout our vocabulary: words like villain, vulgar, vagabond, vagrant, barbarian, delinquent, heathen,—they all have etymologies denoting someone living outside the boundaries of civilized city life. Even the progressive reformer Bartolome de Las Casas, the heroic advocate for indigenous rights in sixteenth century Cuba, said of the foraging and tracking Guanahatabeys that they were "living like savages" (that's another word with roots meaning "living in the woods").
Cain's vision of city and kingdom and empire was no doubt the dominant story in Jesus' day, and everybody had a place and a role in the story. The carpenters of Nazareth were aiding and abetting in the construction of new Roman cities, Galilee's fishermen were the heart and soul of the empire's export industry, the tax collectors were complicit in administration of Caesar's economy. Even dissenting groups like the revolutionary zealots were living out Cain's story: their aspirations were simply to replace one system of civilization with another. They thought their king could do it better. So it was a family argument between cousins, between the grandchildren of Cain.
And yet the people of faith still had to deal with this ancient alternative voice that just wouldn't go away; their scriptures told them that the very earth, drenched in the blood of Abel, was reverberating and singing beneath the streets. So throughout the Hebrew Bible we see evidence of arroz con mango, these two stories colliding, and throughout those sacred texts we see some of the ancients trying to develop a third way, a way to reconcile the conflict. Their resolution was to bring the margins to the center, to bring the values of the shepherds into the city and incorporate them into the imperial project. This third way is seen most fully in the crowning of shepherd boy David as Israel's most iconic king. He was a musical shepherd-king who could sing "we are God's people, the sheep of God's pasture" in one verse and then in the very next verse invite the sheep to come into the palace courts where he ruled. This was an interesting way to try and heal the cultural divide between flock and kingdom.
When we think about and bemoan the ideological and cultural divide we have in our own country, it would do us good to remember that at its core this, too, is a family squabble between cousins, the grandkids of Cain. Most all of us cousins share a basic conceptual framework of something we call "America," with liberty and justice for all, where liberty is mostly measured by purchasing power and justice is mostly defined as everybody having access to that power. We just argue about the best way to administer life within this framework. Then, when we think about an even greater historical divide, the deeper global divide between capitalism and socialism, now represented between the US and Cuba, it would do us well to remember that this, too, is just another family squabble, because both sides are also arguing over the same story and who can get it right. Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump, they are all cousins in Cain's lineage with opposing ideas on how to administer the means of production and its distribution within the kingdom.
All the branches of Cain's family tree have at least one thing in common: in order to participate in the project it is essential to be identified with the patria, with the home team's version of the story. This is as true in the context of Cuba as it is in the superpower US. Paco Rodés remembers how it was imperative for him and his progressive baptist compatriots in post-1959 Cuba to prove to the new government leaders that they were loyal to the project; they were just as revolutionary as anybody. Paco and other people of faith spent decades trying to prove their pedigree as bona fide Cubans. One of the worst things that can happen in Cuba is to be labeled counter-revolutionary. You lose all credibility, all respect, all sense of belonging. It's like being labeled un-American here in the US; no one wants to lose credibility and membership in the tribe and the access it affords. Think about what response is engendered by the phrase "America: love it or leave it"— don't we generally go to on the defensive? Hey, that's not fair, they're as American as you are! It's the same way the Squad of four congresswomen and their allies reacted to the president's racist remarks; a strong assertion of their pedigree as real Americans. No doubt they are; no matter where their ancestors immigrated from, they are bound to share the basic conceptual framework of liberty and justice for all; they want everyone to have access and purchasing power. What's missing in these reactions is any consideration of actually leaving America; the pull of the membership narrative is way too strong.
We share these core values because we live and move and have our being in the cultural assumptions of Cain. The 23andMe tests are not likely to reveal much Guanahatabey in our blood; we are in the line of Ciboney and Columbus and Las Casas. It's our dominant, defining, determinative story. And while we can celebrate that the foraging and tracking values of hospitality and compassion care have not been extinguished, our basic infrastructure remains that of a civilized kingdom, complete with all the complex web of laws and hierarchies and methods of social control and violence.
This is part of what makes Jesus so unique: he presented a completely different and unimagined third way to reconcile these two incongruent images of flock and kingdom, a way totally opposite to what the ancients had tried. Jesus was not bent on assimilating the marginalized into the dominant center of his society; instead he was constantly calling people to leave the center and hightail it to the margins, making the Abel story dominant, inviting Cain to leave the civilization he founded and join a movement outside the city walls, creating an entirely new paradigm: a kingdom without a king, a commonwealth without borders, a reign based on the relationship of sheep and shepherd, grounded in the ancient nomadic values of compassion care and hospitality and courage.
Maybe Jesus intuited that the civilizing project will always come at great cost. For all its benefits—orchestras and architecture and cars and computers and competitive sports— the world's kingdoms always demand a steep price: violence and social control and corruption and assumptions of privilege and supremacy, be it Roman supremacy or white supremacy or US supremacy or Communist Party supremacy. Maybe young Jesus woke up one morning and on his way to work heard some faint music, Abel singing beneath the streets of Nazareth, telling him to leave the carpenter shop, leave his family, leave the comforts of home. He tuned in and turned on to a new vocation as he dropped out of the old one. Jesus left hammer and saw at the construction site and started walking, inviting others to listen for the earth song, calling them to leave whatever was holding them captive in the kingdom—jobs or responsibilities or possessions or family—and join him on the journey.
When I think about the history of those who have claimed Jesus as Lord over the millennia, I wonder, could it be that churches by and large have been so screwed up because they have the story backwards? Since the time of Constantine, hasn't the church's mission been to weave the Jesus story into the tapestry of the Cain story, to assimilate the good shepherd and sheep and incorporate them into the courts of the palace?
What would it feel like to unravel the story here and now, to reverse the story that defines our dream as an American one? What would it feel like to change the story that keeps us captive to a complicity of oppression and exploitation that produces suffering all over the world, not the least of which in Cuba? Jesus' calling was not to continue taking advantage of these systems, no matter the comforts they offer, but to leave them. Jesus consistently called people to divest themselves of the common dream, to withdraw complicity in Cain's project, to quit their jobs as he had done, to leave fishing nets and tax collecting tables and swords behind, to leave the possessions they so carefully guarded. What if Jesus' mandate to "Sell all you have and give it away" was not so much a do-good ethic of charity within the civilized world as it was a radical sign of leaving that world behind? What would it feel like to leave?
What would it feel like for any of us cousins to leave Cain's dream, whether it be hasta la victoria siempre or one nation under God with liberty and justice for all? I'm spending a lot of time these days trying to discern what such leaving would mean for me. Who knows what it would look like for you? Maybe it would involve pulling up roots to start living a pilgrim life, or moving to another country to start from scratch with a new language where you have to be dependent on the kindness of strangers. Maybe it's figuring out how to keep Jonathon and his outdoor companions in the woods past pre-school— imagine him foraging and tracking all through elementary school, and then deepening his learning through high school and university, with all of his education based on the curriculum of the forest's wisdom. Whatever it might look like for you, and wherever you find yourself captive to the craziness of this civilized world, take a moment to consider brother Wendell's invitation :
As your first blow against it, don't stay.
As your second, learn to live without it.
As your third, go back one day and see
that your departure has left a little hole
where some of its strength is flowing out,
and listen to Abel singing beneath the street.
And maybe you'll hear the voice of Jesus in the mix:
Do not be afraid, little flock,
for God has been pleased
to give you the kingdom, another kind of kingdom,
a kingdom of care, a kingdom of welcoming hospitality,
a kingdom of courage. Amen.
Stan Dotson is a native of Asheville, NC, and now lives in Matanzas, Cuba. He is co-pastor of the First Baptist Church of Matanzas, and is guitarist for the fusion group Con Fe Mezcla'o.
