The Universal Spirituality of Exile and the Apocalypse of John
"I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and
kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the
island of Patmos because of the Word of God and the testimony of
Jesus."
Revelation 1: 9
I was walking my Long-Haired Dachshund tonight in the cool fall
breeze of an isolated, wooded enclave located in the confines of
suburban Philadelphia. If your mind operates like mine, this type of
late-night trek in complete seclusion clears the mind. As the mind
clears, it begins to take mental snapshots of different episodes
spread over many years. As the snapshots isolate a moment in time,
there are occasional moments where an insight occurs that
supernaturally connects the dots and provides a deeper, more
mysterious meaning to both the past and present. Without claiming
clairvoyance, the deeper ponderance of past and present can supply a
premonition about the future as well.
The first snapshot tonight repristinated the scene of a quiet
dinner at the secluded outdoor table of a suburban Los Angeles
restaurant. A night in June of 2005 was temporarily frozen in time
warp. I saw myself seated again at the dinner table, with a scenic
noctural view of the Van Nuys airport and the routine takeoffs and
landings that punctuated the pleasant desert air without intruding
into the thoughts and conversation of the table's occupants. My
dining companions on that memorable night included the Persian human
rights activist Shirin Neshat of
Sarbazan. The other participants were a carefully
chosen cadre of other Persian human rights activists and exiles from
the tumultuous events which accompanied the demise of the Pahlavi
Dynasty and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran (IRI)
regime over a quarter of a century ago.
I received a brief, poignant glimpse of the tortured psychic
synthesis of love, pain, fear, estrangement, bitterness, and
constant remembrance which characterizes the Persian expatriate in
America. The anecdotes that night ranged from gripping personal
accounts of bare escape from the nightmare that became Khomeini's
Iran, to the terrifying conveyance of ongoing episodes of shadowing
by IRI agents in a variety of locations in both the United States
and Europe. The fear of the sudden gunshot or knock-on-the-door in
the dead of night that permeated Tehran in 1978 and 1979 has
recurred with relentless reality in the allegedly safe haven of
Southern California. This fear combines with an understandable
Persian alienation from the increasingly decadent character of 21st
century American culture, to produce a most noxious cocktail of
incessant fear of the Future Unknown, where the apocalyptically
turbulent and bizarre becomes a regular staple of life.
Worst of all, the denizens of the 94th Aero Squadron
Restaurant that night wondered aloud if repatriation to the Land
of Persia could be realized in their steadily evaporating lifetimes.
The Youth of Revolution had been ruthlessly replaced by the Middle
Age of Exile.
The next snapshot produced by the night air of early-fall
Philadelphia took me farther back in time to August 12th,1996 and a
nondescript Motel 6 room outside of San Diego. The exiles
that night were not Persians but Middle Americans.
The occasion was the aftermath of the collapse of the Pat
Buchanan Presidential campaign, and the latter's 11th hour
endorsement of Bob Dole at the Republican National Convention. The
handful of largely working class, culturally conservative Americans
who had staked their lives on Buchanan, gathered over pizza and Diet
Coke in Room 123 of the Escondido, California Motel 6, far
removed from their candidate's posh suite at the Horton Hotel in
downtown San Diego.
They had not shared in Buchanan's televised Faustian
rapproachement earlier that afternoon with Corporate America and the
Republican Establishment at the San Diego Convention Center. They
dined together in a spirit of quiet despondency and fatalistic
resignation over the state of their individual lives and the dark
landscape of the discernable future in a post-Christian America
moving full speed ahead into the New World Order.
Andy Griffith's Mayberry had suddenly vanished in the
darkness without a trace. The denizens of Room 123 at Motel 6
compared notes that fateful night on their various experiences and
mutually desperate situations in the different regions of America
from whence they hailed, concluding that the America they resided in
bore no resemblance to the land of their youth--or the
choreographed, skillfully packaged, flag-draped pack of lies
emanating from Bob Dole's coronation that week as the Republican
Party's anemic answer to an America limping into the 21st century as
a mere shadow of its storied past.
The nine years since Pat Buchanan's Salamis in San Diego have
only confirmed the decision of the Exiles of Room 123 to follow
their noctural departure from Motel 6 and California with the
abandonment of a political party, process, and culture totally
coopted by the stacked deck of cards dealt to the losers by the
predatory power elite of relentless globalism.
King George W. Bush is now the latest front-man for the supposed
winners in this cruel and rapacious charade. He has brought the
United States into an unwinnable $300 billon dollar war of
counter-insurgency in Iraq, a move tagged by ex-National Security
Agency chief Lt. General William Odom as the "greatest strategic
blunder in the history of the United States." The burgeoning budget
and trade deficits of $500 and $700 billion respectively, signal an
eventual jettisoning of dollar-based debt instruments by Asian banks
holding a dagger at the throat of what remains of the Government of
the United States. The fatal culmination of this turn of historical
event will collapse the American dollar, even as Middle Eastern oil
bourses contemplate the exchange of the dollar for the Euro as the
currency of the day in petroleum sales to the world.
And the tragi-comedy of the non-performance of FEMA in the
catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is suggestive of the
larger slippage of the grip of the American political establishment
on the management of events and contingencies in every single aspect
of economic and political life on the planet. On the cultural front,
the exponential increase in decadence and lawlessness is matched by
the continued invasion of the American homeland by an estimated 3
million illegal aliens a year. Corporate America has apparently
decided that cheap labor is worth the price of the Balkanization of
the homeland.
And speaking of the homeland, the Department of Homeland Security
and its beloved USA Patriot Act, continue to reduce the Bill
of Rights to a paper fiction in the wake of the advent of the
emergence of the Beast derived by the marriage of the Central State
to the Economic Consortium/Conglomerate. Those left out cannot "buy,
or sell, or trade" (Revelation 13: 17).
Who will be the final instrument in the impending Babylonian
Exile of Old Glory? Communist China? An emerging pan-Islamic
alliance fed up with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and British-American
support of Zionism? The clock is ticking to cataclysm.
Two thoughts hit me in the fall night air of a contemplative
forested wandering in Philadelphia. The Persian expatriates of Los
Angeles in the summer of 2005 are as organic one with the Middle
American wandering in the wilderness embodied in the horrid events
of San Diego almost a decade ago. For the former, spiritual exile
has been accompanied by physical loss of home and geographic
banishment at the hands of theocratic fanaticism. For the latter,
spiritual exile may yet be accompanied by a tragedy matching that
which occurred over a quarter of a century ago in Iran. The two
constituents, in a mystical union enacted by psychic and physical
suffering,have become one in spirit and in testimony.
John speaks in his Apocalypse to all such exiles as their
companion in suffering and patient endurance, awaiting the
intervention of God and the dawning of His Kingdom (Revelation 1:
9). Having been banished to the island of Patmos, a Roman penal
colony, for staunch resistance to the idolatrous Emperor-worship
cult of Domitian (81-96), the Apostle offers his Spirit-induced
wisdom to exiles of all nationalities and epochs in history.
The people of God in Smyrna are warned of the rise of persecution
and opposition in the world (2: 10), even as they are reminded that
spiritual, not monetary currency, will determine the ability to
persevere in an evil age. The martyrdom of Antipas (2: 13)
underscores the potential cost of individual faithfulness to God and
His people.
John then contrasts this faithfulness unto death with the
perpetual temptation to enact bargains and accommodations with
predatory evil, as he sternly chastises the spirit of cancerous
compromise among some in Pergamum and Sardis (2: 14, 15, 20f); the
Church in Philadelphia is subsequently assured that patient
endurance will mysteriously keep those who are of God from the hour
of trial coming upon the entire world (3: 10); and finally, the
Apostle reiterates the warning that the personage of the Beast is
empowered by the Dragon who utilizes both signs of deception, and
overt force, to coerce obeisance to a world system not under the
authority of God, but of Satan.
Shirin Neshat's Sarbazan
.
