Chris Hedges: Ordained to Write

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Ordained to Write

Posted on Oct 13, 2014
By Chris Hedges


Thirty years ago I stood in a church in Albany, N.Y., with my father, a Presbyterian minister. I had graduated from Harvard Divinity School and had purchased a one-way ticket to El Salvador, where the military government, backed by the United States, was slaughtering between 700 and 1,000 people a month.

I had decided, as George Orwell and James Baldwin did earlier, to use my writing as a weapon. I would stand with the oppressed. I would give them a voice. I would describe their suffering and their hopes. And I would name the injustices being done to them. It was a decision that would send me to war for two decades, to experience the worst of human evil, to taste too much of my own fear and to confront the reality of violence and random death.

.....(snip).....

James Baldwin, the son of a preacher and for a time a preacher himself, said he left the pulpit to preach the Gospel. Baldwin saw how the institutional church was often the enemy of mercy and justice. He saw how it too easily devolved into a sanctimonious club whose members glorified themselves at the expense of others. Baldwin, who was gay and black, was not interested in subjugating justice and love to the restrictions imposed by any institution, least of all the church. And that is why there is more Gospel, true Gospel, in Baldwin than in the writings of nearly all the theologians and preachers who were his contemporaries. His essays are sermons—among them “Princes and Powers,” “Down at the Cross,” “The Devil Finds Work,” “Sermons and Blues” and “History as Nightmare.”

.....(snip).....

The love that informs the long struggle for justice, that directs us to stand with the crucified, the love that defines the lives and words of a Baldwin or an Orwell, that defines the lives and words of James Cone and Cornel West, is the most powerful force on earth. It does not mean we will be spared pain or suffering. It does not mean we will escape death. But it gives us the strength to confront evil, even when it seems certain that evil will triumph. That love is not a means to an end. It is the end itself. That is the secret of its omnipotence. That is why it will never be conquered. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ordained_to_write_20141013

[KG]

1. Hedges K&R

[marmar]

2. a kick of your k/r