Prophets, Illusion, and Manifest Destiny

 In 1977 everything seemed adrift. The definition of Christianity itself seemed up for grabs. It seemed God was out of the old box we had kept him in for so many centuries. He was now on the streets.

 I am sure that this was a trying time for those clergymen trying to hold together their congregations. Like the river managers, they too were wondering how to infuse life into their denominations. The people were clamoring that there was something missing. Their doctrines were full of stories that were mythic in proportion to what they dealt out Sunday to Sunday. They faced what the river managers faced, trying to shoehorn the concept of wholeness and its grand virtue into a divided river. They were probably wondering what had been lost and how to put life back into a "river of faith" that was by all standards as wealthy and as powerful as the nation that gave it a home. Many denominations instituted contemporary spins to their rituals and music. Many decided to start something new and experiment outside the stiffer groups. The "river of life" needed reform and the best way was to start over. But as many would find out the only structure they knew how to build were dams. No one knew how to build a river.

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 I first saw the Columbia River through the window of a Greyhound bus. Moving along Interstate 84, I could see the river through the Douglas firs; it was wide, blue and muscular. It moved calmly and majestically through the landscape. This was my first notion of the west, that great rivers give the geography significance. They make the land whole and vital.

 It was January, yet everything was green, hemmed and graced by the Douglas firs and rhododendrons. My glimpse of the Columbia River was when it was at its most robust. The waters had traveled more than 1200 miles through Canada and Washington, collecting the tribute of a thousand streams. It was still a hundred miles from the sea, moving like a river, yet looking like a lake. It had the stately gait of plow horses, well harnessed. It was this river Woodie Guthrie, the depression era troubadour, had sung about and "Roll on Columbia" became a national hit in the 1940s.

 Now I can't say that I was searching hard for the big answers in life but I had an open eye for it. When I arrived in Oregon at the beginning of 1978, two of my brothers were living in a Christian commune. They seemed to have an abundance of answers for everything. The who, what and why of life came easy to them. They talked of restoring and reforming the faith, all of Christianity, a tall order I admit, but you don't question what you are hearing if there is a free meal at the end of it. I was broke, stuck on the west coast without a car, so I didn't have much choice but to accept their offer of hospitality. I was given a bunk with the single men, a group of souls who were socially marginalized for a host of reasons, in a cramped little apartment on their postage-stamp-size religious collective.

There was much that was familiar to me watching these people who had separated themselves from secular society. I grew up with monastic stories of the life of monks and nuns. The rigid daily devotions, hard work and obedience were their pillars of everyday life. In Ireland I watched my relations work together in their little community making life easier, stretching their resources and sharing all around. So what was going on in front of me had a foundation in my mind, flashes of legitimacy.

 The folks in the commune told me they had an edge on seeing into spiritual matters, that their collective future could be known. It was their trump card. They had people who could peek around the corner of the present while we were still in it; people who could make the invisible plain. They had prophets. They promised I would see one in action the next Sunday.

 That following Sunday, in a ragged, come-to-Jesus meeting, I found myself in one of those 19th century wood-paneled anterooms that groups like the Oddfellows rent to fringe groups trying to find their wings. About 70 of us sat in crooked rows on flimsy metal chairs. A man paced in the back of the room. He was distracting, vaguely reminiscent of a Hasidic at the Wailing Wall, mumbling and bowing continually at the waist. His pacing and mumbling seemed to be on a spiritual crosscurrent against the routine of the sermon and worship songs.

 Suddenly, he turned toward the podium and pointed skyward with his head bowed, and started yelling from the back row. In the Queen's English, with curious Brooklyn inflections, he dropped the cosmic plumb line, "Thus saith the Lawd." I spun around to see what God looked like. The pacer had his eyes closed, like he was reading the script from behind his eyelids. And then his finger shot straight out and he pointed at us. "You are called." It was like he had a current running through him. Then he went on charging the air with more jagged, mystic prose.

 They told me it was prophesy--the Holy hose with no kinks. I was hooked, and I hardly understood a word he said. It was my welcome to the holy fringe, kookdom with a purpose, Christianity of the 70s. I felt I had been initiated into an ancient mystic order. Here was holy tension, a spontaneous intimacy, where we were stretched between our incredibly failed miserable existences and something high and holy. A door had been opened up into another dimension. We were all tingling, excited, and full of wonder because here was some Old Testament biblical wildness being demonstrated before us. It was prophetic theater; loose, fast and cosmic.

 After the service I learned that this was a regular occurrence. The organization had made a special place for this otherworldly agency, the prophetic. The way it was explained to me, the apostles were in charge and the prophets were divinely connected number twos, VPs in a manner of speaking. They were men or women who validated the activities of the apostle and ultimately, the organization. They were expositors of the mysterious and the explainers of vision. They were people who could see the future.

 On another level they were the organizational poets able to elevate the everyday experience into something grand and purposeful. They could infuse the immediacy of God into almost any situation; which they did. In the early days, when respectability wasn't an issue, the prophetic folks operated right up against the edges of true craziness, without even the slightest patina of legitimacy. They functioned in a world of surprise. They would scream and hurl down judgments on the unsuspecting and the innocent. They had the distracted look of edgy artists.

 All in all, though, they added an element of spiritual legitimacy to what was going on around us. Because we were so socially removed, living in a commune and working at daily grinding tasks, the prophets gave us a spiritual positioning, a rightness to our cause that we couldn't get reading the Bible or listening to a sermon. It was like talking to God.

 As a whole the prophetic was organizationally insecure. The organizational chart for our outfit had an Apostle who set the ideological course; below him were other apostles who reported to him, then prophets, evangelists and pastors and elders and deacons. The whole panoply of New Testament titles was squeezed into a very small movement. The apostolic leaders were the ones who gave the prophets space to spin their extravagant insights and warnings. And, for the most part, they were keenly aware of that. As time went on and the organization grew, they usually linked themselves to some apostolic man for their own legitimacy and survival. So it wasn't out of the ordinary to see in the entourage of an apostle, a group of men with what appeared to be nervous tics. They seemed purposely distracted from the moment. Then they would leap back into reality, declaring all sorts of things, holy hunches, fuzzy strategy and wild predictions. It was as far out on the Protestant edge as you could get. I signed on with these folks as soon as possible.

 We stretched our imaginations, intellects, spirits, and psychic connections to really try to see beyond what was physical. Real results in these cosmic endeavors were usually more by accident than on purpose. And what we did see, seemed utterly disconnected from our organizational efforts. The cinematic future dramas, on the political and religious fronts, escaped us with great regularity although it didn't stop us from making all sorts of ludicrous predictions on these matters.

 But on a personal level there was a surprising degree of accuracy in seeing into the lives of people without any foreknowledge of their situations or circumstances. There was something to it. It scared the hell out of people. To those of us who could see, we were as giddy as ten year olds with shotguns. It was a gift that eclipsed qualification. If you could see, you could see. As the gift became more proficient there came a concerted effort on the part of the leadership to contain and establish protocols for the operation of the prophetic. Now this was a good thing, as a lot of spiritual firepower was resting on some rather flimsy frames. And being mere mortals we were subject to all the normal elements of arrogance and silliness that go along with ventures like these.

 This ministry created a new element in our Sunday services--the "Word from the Lord." Or as it went each Sunday, a question was asked from the pulpit; “Is there a word from the Lord?" It opened up a whole new element of mystery in what would otherwise be two hours of singing and one man talking. A venue was created for what would have been considered lunacy in a church service ten years before. We had "words from God" that existed outside the scripture, outside the normative ritual, and way outside of the normal social existence.

 As the organization became more systematic and organized and moved away from the tribal atmosphere that pervaded the commune, the prophets were squeezed into a more regimented format for their celestial activities. We were required to be more about the activities of the organization than spiritual woolgathering. We became experts in enforcing the finer points of doctrine, discipline, and validating authority, than the things of life. All this organizational business put an edge on predictions and appointments. We became point men for the cause. In many ways we were the scriptural spin doctors. We spun the company line, using a hodgepodge of biblical sayings from the Old and New Testaments as validation. We echoed what we heard coming from the apostles and elders, as echo would get us a venue. Discordant words would get you shut out.

 We were exercising our own version of spiritual manifest destiny. Our outfit was in the business of sending out evangelistic teams to other places around the country and across the sea. We spun grand illusions for the teams about the unknown world they were to go forth in. We wrapped everything up in great moments of prophecy, rich in biblical imagery, tapping into the primacy of our cause, our spiritual manifest destiny; with references to team leaders being like famous Bible heroes and their followers like the Army of God. We fit them into their future precisely and safely. They would successfully expand the ideals, scope, and rule of the organization. Those that opposed them would melt.

 So like emigrants, these young, naive folks moved out into a gritty reality that was far from the prophetic illusions we spun. For the most part they tried very hard, wondering why the life they were living out on the spiritual frontier was not in line with the prophetic fantasy they went out with. Now there were attempts to frame reality with prophetic send-off, but they were artfully reconfigured to comfort the adventurers.

 In time, we had to put on a more public face. The system was becoming much more polished and streamlined. We were becoming successful. We had a legitimate entree into the larger forum of Christianity. Prophetic fast and loose was no longer acceptable. And many of us couldn't make the shift. We were sidelined. Now the words greased the flow of management. It wasn't relational anymore. It was a membership with an established management, comprised of young men who were naturally ambitious and competitive. The prophetic lads (and a few lasses) were learning how to shoehorn prophecy into the ever narrower perspective of the organizational regime with passion and flourish.

 Now you have to understand that we thought that the church we were with was a legitimate religious power. And that those in authority were appointed by God Himself. We had all the trappings of a mainline Protestant denomination with a few organizational embellishments such as apostles and prophets. As our structure changed into a more power-centered conventional organization, so did the functions. Our prophets began to spin very focused highly managed words from God that began to mirror the contemporary Christian world we were trying to escape from a few years earlier. Our attempt at reform and restoration of Christianity ended up being an endorsement of the status quo. In the beginning of the effort, we brushed up against truth occasionally. In the end we were far from it.

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 In 1928, four of the sons of the pioneers, those whose fathers and grandfathers had come west were having coffee at a cafe in Ephrata, a small desert town in eastern Washington. They were visionaries sitting on the eastern edge of a million-acre desert. The land was settled, the Indian tribes no longer a threat, but the ideas of manifest destiny and taming the wild elements of the west were still strong in them. Down the road from the cafe was one of the wildest rivers in North America, the Columbia. With the help from an editor of a newspaper in Wenatchee, they put together a request to build a dam on a spot up the river, a place called Grand Coulee. It would have to be the biggest dam in the world to stop the incredible flow that coursed through. It was also the prime fishing spot of the Colville Indians. They dreamed of turning their desert into a garden. To achieve that dream they had to exert dominion over the river. Dreaming big and taking risks were part of the pioneer mystique.

 A hundred years before, dreams and vision took a new turn in fueling the expansion of the west. Vision wasn't enough; you had to draw people into your vision. A grand picture had to be created where folks could see opportunity, a vacuum of possibility that would draw them in.

 In the mid 1830s America was dependent on expansion as the heart of its economic progress. Although the trans-Mississippi west was slowly being settled, wealthy economic visionaries and politicians were looking for new ways to inspire the emigrant to move west across the Mississippi. This would mean leaving the safety, comfort, and convenience of the East, and going into a vast wilderness and proceeding with the hard work of settling the frontier.

 The promise of free land was a significant lure but the apostles of progress knew that if they could create a vision of what was out there, they could accomplish the goal quicker. So to remove the logical hindrances of settlement, to make it sound easy and emotionally glorious, they set out to wrap the westward movement in a noble cause. In doing so the emigrant wouldn't be going just for the land--he would be fulfilling a holy and patriotic destiny--a manifest destiny.

 Since the visionaries were dealing with an abstract, the future, they needed prophetic voices to describe this place out west for the emigrants that incorporated the esoteric elements of their vision. Although the idea grew in stages, the result was the establishment of a foundation called the American Art Union. Funded and organized by a clique of railroad magnates, merchants, bankers, lawyers and politicians, by the 1840s it was the largest patron of the arts in America. The commissioned artists painted America, American scenery, and the American character in vast panoramas that portrayed quaint and intimate settings, muscular adventure, and holy cause. Art had long been a message medium. Artists were a major influence in bringing the world out of the dark ages into the Renaissance period. Artists were commissioned to paint vast mosaics of God, the world, sin, purity, good, evil, and all the various messages the commissioners wanted portrayed. It was cinema with oils and canvas.

 During the thirteen year existence of the American Art Union, three million people viewed the paintings that were exhibited primarily in New York. For the artists it was a boon. They were to paint and legitimize the ideology of expansion into the West. People were moving away from the known into an unknown land. So the artists were challenged to take the unknown and show it being tamed. The grand future across the Mississippi would be subtly familiar.

 The audience for their work was largely poor, European, white, and mostly Christian. The grander panoramic paintings were a prophetic stew of religious icons and images, national symbols and grand, open, bucolic scenery. Probably the greatest work of this sort was painted by Emmanuel Leutze, who painted for the American Art Union and later after it folded, secured a commission in 1860 to paint a very large mural in the Capitol building in Washington DC. It is truly a larger-than-life painting, 20 by 30 feet. The title is "Westward Course of Empire Takes Its Way". It is Moses in buckskins on a horse. He is pointing the way to the children of Israel who is in covered wagons. They are going into the Promised Land and are bringing along what looks like the Madonna and Child. The national symbol, the eagle with wings spread, hovers overhead, blessing the event taking place below. The Native Americans flee in front of this great tumbling movement of high purpose and holy calling. The bottom frame is a sunny ocean vista of San Francisco Bay with no settlement visible--the end of the trail and of course their destination--Utopia.

Other paintings showed the scouts, vaguely reminiscent of the Old Testament spies, sent out to evaluate the promise land. Then there are typical western scenes that look like vast Italian vineyards without the grapevines or the villas. George Caleb Bingham painted a hero, Daniel Boone, moving in celestial light, through the Cumberland Gap into the Promised Land. A painting by William Ranney depicting a wagon train camp transporting the Madonna and Child shows angelic horses hovering near, symbolizing celestial guardians. In the background of many of these paintings, the folks have a lifted look of promise and determination on their faces.

 When the American Art Union itself folded, the government and the railroads took over commissioning the artists to continue to create these sweeping illusions of the West. They wanted the message of manifest destiny to continue to be propagated.

 The West in the early part of the 1800s was a vast and in most ways a forbidding place. It was difficult to get a comprehensive perspective of what it was like. There were many singular explorers but the information trickled out of the West and by the time it got to the listeners and the readers, it was largely inaccurate. These paintings filled in the informational voids with hope and destiny. In their time they were powerful communicators of an ideal that was a blend of western fantasy, religious motif, and patriotic symbolism. The artist, as a palace prophet, created illusions for the vested economic and political interests, in return for venue. They innocently created an ideal West that was implied to be a safe place, where the current occupiers, like the Hittites and Amorites of the old promise land, were not the people of promise and had to go. The land was rich for farming and the mountains easily passable. It was beautiful propaganda and it worked. These paintings, along with the legends that spun out from them, form the cornerstone of our romantic history of the West.

 The lessons of expansion were not lost on those building the dam. Eastern Washington was one of the most desolate parts of America. Political infighting was fierce but FDR prevailed. However, the romantic and patriotic elements of the dam and its construction were still missing. The Bonneville Power Administration was trying to find ways to pitch the political objectives of the water project on the Columbia River to the people. At the height of construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, the BPA hired Woody Guthrie, America's preeminent depression troubadour to write some songs about the efforts of dam building that were in full swing at that time.

 At the time, because there was so much power at stake, there were many private utilities trying to derail the government's objective to keep control of the project and the electric rates low. They needed someone to sell their idea to the public. In the end they got Woody Guthrie. In 30 days he wrote 26 songs about the great construction effort on the river. His songs put a common touch on a huge project. It glorified the men who built it, the powder monkeys and the jackhammer men. He sang about aluminum and manganese and the bombers that were made from them. He sang about the jobs created from the river. And when he sang about the river itself, he sang about power. Because of the hard economic times the country was in, the river project brought some comfort to men out of work. He sang the praises of those men, a river, and the colossal power that was created from their efforts. He brought nobility to the cause of electric power. He created a high moment and national pride for ordinary work. He wrote songs about a land of real promise with great forests and new open farmland created by the availability of water these great dams provided. On a darker side though, he was singing a dirge, a requiem. It was the beginning of the end of life in the river, and the end of the way of life for the people who had lived on it for centuries. He sang about a river of the future, for the river of the past had begun to die.

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 When a dam is built it recreates the structure and function of the river. It goes from an open natural system to a closed thermodynamic system--a mechanical system. Flow, the most vital component of the river, is now regulated and released, based on contrived efficiencies. The demand that was created by the creation of power now has to adjust itself to expectations of power from the consumers. The men that run the dams are in control. Establishing control over so much energy is something akin to being a god. It mimics the creative force in a brute sort of fashion. It is the creation of monoliths and machines that control and regulate vast energies.

 The river now runs on man's time. It is no longer a river of seasons and cycles that initiate great explosions of life on every level. The regulated flow is timed and calibrated to the demands of the new constituencies the power has created. The river has become predictable and efficient.

 The machines that the water flows through transform the loose energy of volume and velocity into measured power. The volume of the river has been measured in quarts, gallons, and acre feet, and the velocity can be measured in megawatts of electrical power. It is the world of accountancy. Accountancy is the fulcrum of control. Those who build the dams must make an accounting of the components created. Accordingly, the debit side of this equation, those vast intimate elements of the river lost forever, are aggregated and seen as the cost of doing business. Because it was impossible to measure the life in the river, it was seen as a waste of energy, not a legitimate quotient to be figured into the new river equation. Sixty years later, however, there is a call for a revival of the river and the salmon, which has been gaining in volume. The river management and vested interests have had an incredibly difficult time dealing with the natural intimacy required and the expense to the system to foster life again.

 The relational intimacy that has been lost in the river system is almost impossible to replace. The enormous effort and expense required, as evidenced by the trucking of smolt salmon down the river in trucks, the hatchery system, fish ladders, protective passageways at the dams and the new flow requirements, add burdens to the river system that begin to take large bites out of its economic efficiencies. In the end though, it puts more responsibility, control and money at the feet of the river management. The more we ask the management to accomplish, the more power we vest in their abilities. And consequently, the greater the management challenge, the more appealing it is to want to take a position that is situated at the junction of so much power, life, and responsibility. It creates momentum in the career cycle. The illusion is fostered that management can do anything. With that sort of power available, who could resist wanting to get behind the controls? As the dams and mechanicals within the river create tension, it is the job of the river management to manage the tensions created. The river wants to flow, the salmon require passage, and the vested interests demand their entitlements. As the structure and the function of the river struggle against the alterations, it is the management's responsibility to maintain the contrived equity in the river. As the river is no longer reproductive, hatcheries must be built and maintained. Passage is blocked for the fish so fish ladders must be built and maintained. Because hatcheries and fish ladders are built, there must be accountancy of the numbers of fish raised and the numbers of fish using the ladders. These equivalents are new benchmarks of success. Fish raised and fish moving in the river, keep the political tensions of those trying to elevate the wild salmon issue in the river, at manageable levels. The constant production of power and the flow of subsidies keep the vested interests at bay. The system thrives on the management of created tension.

 Woody's songs now are catchy tunes that remind us of more innocent times. The illusions of the river and its promised land are fading fast. Prophets, as scientists, environmentalists, fishermen, native stakeholders, and civil servants are coming forward with hard facts about an immediate future. The visions of the West and the river were bent to narrow interests. The paintings, the songs, movies and the political prophecies that came out of this time are being benchmarked against what has been lost. It is not the kind of stuff you can put to music or want to.

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 Every Sunday in Christian churches throughout the country, songs are sung. Like Woody's tunes, they bring us back in time to places that we think were more innocent, a time of greater honesty and fiercer determination, a time of more unified national destiny, a time when the values that we live by were more prevalent. We think them to be songs that praise life, but could they be songs that praise the power of our efforts, songs that praise the kingdom we have built, and the destiny we have created? And when we close our eyes and sing with all our strength, is there hope that the present will adjust itself to our visions of the past?

 Our music and our prophets keep us centered in a reality that is of our own construction in many ways. We focus on keeping a religious status quo of consensus from the aggregate congregation. It is the work of the constant familiar dressed up as thinly veiled eternity. The relentless illusion of the past keeps us emotionally in check and resistant to real change.

 On the larger religious scene, the "river of life," organized Christianity, seems to be managed with the same scrutiny and finesse as the BPA manages the Columbia River System. It is the management of tensions that are processed through our doctrinal dams. The intimacies of normal life are collected and homogenized in grand themes that try to affect the flow of political and economic power. In the right/wrong game, there is nothing wrong with these attempts to influence society for the greater utilitarian good. But in my estimation it does not constitute true spirituality, life. It strays far from enhancing relational intimacy and sacrifices pretty much everything that is abstract and cannot be counted, controlled, or managed. It is not the stuff of real day-to-day individual living and life. It is not spiritual leadership--it is the time-honored way of connecting to God by managing our collective moment. Religious management fosters the ideal that contemporary power can be married to spiritual life efficiently and effectively, or as some might put it, we can have the Kingdom of God on earth.

 Like the river managers, the dedicated clergy in organizations accept responsibility for accounting for their activities. They are in the primary business of membership numbers, counting both people and money, the maintenance of structures, and the regulated delivery of information seems to cloud genuine spiritual activity. They efficiently regulate the order of rituals, maintaining standards of modified behavior cued to the rituals. They bestow functionary titles and honorariums on the membership. And finally they manage the tension created by trying to extract power from the relational river, while attempting to put the life back in that has been taken out. In this attempt to manage tension, what they see is the relentless decline of the life in the river. For all the cries of restoration and revival, they are loathing to take down the divisions and change the status quo. It is the weight of jobs, money, real estate, programs, and many years of being "right." We are trapped in our conventional, cultural illusions that have been handed down to us.

 The government of God, as a force in the earth, is like the natural river. Its power is in the flow. Like the river, only God can contain the vastness of the relational variables that exist in life. He is the seasons and the cycles that allow our passage to true maturity and spiritual responsibility. He is in the turbulence of passage and the quiet interstitial waters of regeneration. God is in what He created. He created us and so He is in us in truth and relationship, both with Him and with each other. Real leadership likewise is also fluid. It finds itself moment to moment in the turbulence of everyday life. It is not a static title that one wears for pay. For men and women, real leadership is the accumulation of experience and knowledge gained in spiritual passage in relationships. These insights gained are used to enhance the relational moment for people in real life.

 In the end, honest spirituality is a work of reflection on the many illusions that have been spun in our lives by palace prophets and poets, more than it is about restoration. It is the examination of our intimate and larger worlds and our activities in them. It is the difficult work of seeing the river of power separated from the river of life. It is a discerning work of being able to tell the imitation from the real thing. In most cases it has nothing to do with rationalized doctrine, but rather the life of the person in front of us. It is knowing that the future is a very personal, eminently unpredictable adventure.

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