Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow

 Recent conversations in the newspapers, social media, and on cable news have had to do with our national story. Who are we? What is our country about? What is the truth about our heroes? Our history?

How are we to teach our origins? What is true patriotism? How do we explain what happened on January 6 at the nation’s capital?

When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620, were they escaping the tyrannical oppression of an English king? Or were they bent on impoverishing and disenfranchising a continent full of First Nations peoples?

Were our Founding Fathers visionaries giving birth to a society even more humane than they could imagine, or slave-holding egoists hell-bent on their own aggrandizement?

January 6, 2021 at the US Capital

What shall we make of Critical Race Theory? What was the role of racism in our history?

It is no accident that these questions are bubbling to the surface now. In our reading just now Arundhati Roy said, “pandemics force us to break with the past and imagine our world anew.” That is what is happening now.

In 1984 Tengiz Abuladze, a renowned Soviet director, created a film that altered the nature of political discourse in his country forever. It has an eerie relevance to what’s happening in our country today.

Called Repentance, the film languished, unseen, for years. Those who helped make it were punished for anti-Soviet activity. It took the intervention of Gorbachev himself to stop the censorious persecution and protect the director. Abuladze released the film about the time that the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. It was equally explosive and devastating. (Parenthetically, the film was shown again last month - as a Cannes classic - at the Cannes Film Festival.)

Repentance is the story of a corpse that won’t stay buried. 

Varlam Aravidze, a Stalinesque character, is the mayor of the city when he dies. He is buried with great ceremony. The next day the grieving city awakens to find his stiffened corpse leaning against a tree. He is reburied, but on the following morning, his corpse appears in a park.

“We have to arrest the corpse,” the officers say as they load it into a police wagon and drive off. He is reburied again. A protective metal cage is built over the grave; the door is padlocked. Police with guns and attack dogs take positions. That night a woman is captured as she begins digging at the grave.

“I confirm the facts, but I deny my guilt,” she says at her trial. “For as long as I am alive, he will not lie in a grave. This sentence has been passed and is not subject to appeal. I will exhume him 300 more times if necessary.”

 “It is not my wish to settle accounts with a dead man,” she proclaims, “but I have no choice in the matter.” She tells the story of his rise to prominence and his exercise of power. It is a tale of falsehood, intimidation, brutality, arbitrary arrests, exile, torture, executions, the separation of families, terror, and endless persecution.

The people don’t like her version of their history. Crowds tried to shout her down, but she remained determined. “On my own behalf, and on behalf of all innocent victims, I demand that Varlam Aravidze be exhumed by his kin.”

“Aren’t we to bury the dead?” they yelled.

“No,” she answered. “To bury him means to exonerate him. I say to you again: if you don’t exhume him, I will. I won’t leave him in the earth.

“How many times will you exhume him?” they ask. “Until you stop defending him. Aravidze is not dead. For as long as you continue to defend him, he lives, and he continues to corrupt society.”

Varlam’s corpse keeps showing up at inopportune times and places: when a couple is making love, when a man is doing calisthenics. The re-appearance of the corpse is inconvenient, to say the least, and distressing for the townspeople. But most of all it is embarrassing because it becomes the material manifestation of Varlam’s much more destructive presence in the minds and psyches of the people. Because the leaders refused to face the brutal facts of the past that he embodied, he continued to have all the more power over them.

They are simultaneously victims and collaborators, survivors and sycophants, hardened and vulnerable.

In today’s America, I suggest that these same people would embrace ceremony over accountability, reassurance over protest, 1776 over 1619, fake news, over critical theories of race or anything else.

This “corpse that won’t stay buried”, whether in the Soviet Union or in our contemporary reality, represents all the unresolved, unrepented, shadowy, repressed pain and evil that locks people into continuous bondage to their lesser angels. It prevents their growth and thwarts their true liberation.

The gravedigger in Repentance knew intuitively that, in order for the town to heal, the townspeople needed to face their past. They needed to own the harm that had been perpetrated in their name. They needed to acknowledge and repent of the evil that had transpired. “Hurt people hurt people.” People wound others when their own wounds go untended.

For the director, the people were “the dead trying to bury the dead”. They were the unfeeling trying to bury their conflicted feelings. They were the un-alive trying to bury the cause of their alienation. They were spiritually empty. They had lost faith in the future. They had lost confidence in the unknown. They had lost hope for a better world. They were choosing death over life, stagnation over novelty, and cloying respectability over spiritual rebirth.

The grave digger? They called her insane, but she was the community’s one voice of sanity and conscience. She was their witness. Her anguished appraisal promised new possibilities.

She was saying that the way to gain freedom from past harm is to face it with courage. The way to be rid of the burdens of our history is to acknowledge them, repent of them, and move on. Don’t glorify them. Don’t defend them. Don’t bury them. “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Abuladze’s film was powerfully specific to contemporary political realities in the U.S.S.R. Yet he exposed a theme more breathtaking and universal than even he dreamed of.

I once heard a radio announcer from the land of Garrison Keillor describe, in a Keilloresque sort of way, the formation of a fictitious group to be called Future Historians of America. Its motto was going to be, “Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow”. In an odd way, Abuladze was trying to teach the Soviet people how to prepare for the “yesterday of tomorrow,” for the day when the USSR would be no more.

We’re all deeply interested in tomorrow, and what the future holds.

What do you see? Are you Utopian? Dystopian or Apocalyptic? What must we face today to get to a better tomorrow? What must we do to go from the “no longer” to the “not yet”?

Unfortunately, there are many “Varlams” buried in our consciousness—sins unadmitted, pain unacknowledged, evils unexplored. Their unacknowledged existence will continue to divide and corrupt us until they are acknowledged and healed.

Arundhati Roy is not alone in observing that we stand now at a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can, she says,

“choose to walk through it, 
dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, 
our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas,
our dead rivers and smokey skies behind us.
Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, 

ready to imagine another world.” 

 

“Black Lives Matter” knows this. “Me too!” knows this. The Lincoln Project knows this. Conservatives and progressives among us are digging up Varlams from our collective past - not to punish but to heal us.

If we fail to acknowledge and deal with them courageously, they will continue to sap our energy and diminish our vision.

Repentance, metanoia, conversion, a paradigm shift, a changing of mind and heart, ‘making amends’, reparations, letting go—whatever we want to call it—this is the door through which we must pass. We need to learn new ways of listening to one another, respecting one another, learning from one another. This is the only way all that is dead within us can truly die. To repent of harm done and good left undone, to grieve what was and what will never be, to acknowledge our emptiness and the pain of our lot - this is the precondition for our healing.

Despair and cynicism are merely defenses. To experience our fear, feel our powerlessness, acknowledge our shame and take steps to rectify – this is how we begin again.

Let us trust in the goodness of Life to bring us to healing. Let us trust that, in our free-fall, Life will reach into the maelstrom of our own time, catch us in flight, hold us gently, and restore us to the fullness of a healthy social existence. Let us trust that together we can find a way out of no way, and discover real community.

If we find the will, the resources we need to make things right will become available. If we seek to develop a new ability to care for one another, then, and only then, shall we truly cherish the gift of our days upon the earth.

 

 © Budd Friend-Jones

Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, Florida

29 August, 2021