When I was finding my way back to some kind of Christian faith, I stumbled on a zine from the 80s called “A Pinch of Salt,” initially founded by a group rather cheekily calling itself C.I.A., or “Christians Interested in Anarchism.” I was a would-be radical fumbling around for some sort of faith, and they were a group whose tagline in the early days was “some sort of an attempt at revolutionary Christianity,” and it completely turned what I thought I’d known about the religion of my birth upside-down.
Indeed, one of the pages of first issue boldly declared in xeroxed marker:
“THESE THAT HAVE TURNED THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN ARE COME HITHER ALSO.”
That’s a line from the Book of Acts. It’s what defenders of the status-quo in Thessalonica were saying about the followers of Christ, accusing them of “defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.”
These were troublemakers. Later in the same book, Paul defies the people gathered at the Areopagus, declaring: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So, you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”
These were not diplomats. These were rabblerousers, and I liked their style.
WHEN ARE WE GOING TO WAKE UP? asked another page from issue one.
WHEN ARE GOING TO WAKE UP AND SHOW THEM THE STRENGTH OF LOVE?
Underneath that line was an excerpt from a piece titled ON ANGER by Barbara Deming. It typified the demands that such a peculiar intersection of interests will put on a person; this is not mere eclecticism, but true synthesis:
“Many radicals feel that we are not quite healthy. They feel that there is health in anger. … They see anger as a necessary emotion if there is to be any change. I think there is some truth in this. I think that there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination; this must change.
This kind of anger is not in itself violent- even when it raises its voice (which it sometimes does); and brings about agitation, confrontation (which it always does). It contains both respect for oneself and respect for the other. To oneself, it says: ‘I must change – for I have been playing the part of the slave.’ To the other, it says: ‘You must change – for you have been playing the part of the tyrant.’ It contains the conviction that change is possible – for both sides; and it is capable of transmitting this conviction to others, touching them with the energy of it – even one’s antagonist… it communicates.
…there is another kind of anger, very familiar to us, that is not healthy, that is an affliction…This anger asserts to another not: ‘you must change and you can change’ but ’your very existence is a threat to my very existence.’ It spea.ks not hope but fear. The fear is: you can’t change – and I can’t change if you are still there.
It asserts not: change! but: drop dead!
The one anger is healthy, concentrates all one’s energies; the other leaves one trembling, because it is murderous… Because we dream of a new society in which murder has no place; and it disturbs that dream.
Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could, give this as a definition of revolution…”
I’ve been unconsciously drawn to the those who synthesize, transmute, and alchemize at the borderlands of difference for a long time.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about Christians who had been interested in Communism over the past century or so; one such group in Italy even founded a whole party with that name before eventually melting into the official bolshevized organ. This was “cattocomunismo” (a portmanteau of “cattolico” and “comunismo”), which was literally an insult hurled at them and not a term of endearment. They were disliked on both sides. The left-wing of Catholic labor unions were even seen as a bigger threat to the socialists than the right wing and were called idiotic. And I’m drawn to that. I’m drawn to the “idiots” of this world.