UNGOVERNABLE SAINTS: RENUNCIATION, SOLIDARITY, AND ECSTASY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Public domain.
“I’m jumping on top of a police car on fire. I’m ecstatic. My heart burns with ecstasy in my sadness.” - Dawn Lundry Martin, “A Black Poetics: Against Mastery” (1)
Despite claiming to be free from religion, politics today clamors for saints. The right wing of American politics has given itself over to the cult of St. Trump, the divinely chosen king who has waged and will return to wage again holy war against the socialists, the deep state, the cabal of Satanists and pedophiles who run the world from the shadows. And for liberals like Nancy Pelosi, George Floyd was not a man coldly executed by state-sanctioned paramilitaries but a martyr who gave his life as a “sacrifice” for “justice.” (2)
Liberals and the right paint halos on different figures, but saints do the same thing either way. They renew the nation. Sanctity would be about making America great again, whether through a bloody crusade against the unrighteous or a martyrdom that restores the nation to its founding ideals. But true sanctity exceeds power’s grasp. From the martyrs killed by Rome to the medieval women mystics whose intensity scandalized the priests seeking to control them, saints have always burned against the current order.
The present demands deep thinking on what it is to be a saint. Almost eighty years ago, as fascism threatened to engulf the world, the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil felt that her own present cried out for new saints: “Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the sanctity demanded by the present moment, a new sanctity, itself also without precedent.” (3) For Weil, saints are always needed, but what sanctity looks like is shaped by the particular demands of a particular moment. There’s no set formula to becoming a saint. What’s needed is to attend to the crises of the present moment and discern the sanctity that would meet them.
The defining crisis of our time is the climate crisis. We are currently on track for a 3-4°C increase in global temperatures by the end of this century, temperatures not seen in 3 million years (when the seas were 25 feet higher). (4) The simple fact of the matter is that avoiding total ecological collapse requires leaving the world’s remaining fossil fuels in the ground. (5) Our survival requires states and energy companies walking away from hundreds of trillions of dollars. It requires rich nations giving up, right now, comforts that can at times feel like actual needs - air travel, personal cars, two-day shipping, avocados in the grocery store in February. Any hope of a livable future requires that the world’s relatively comfortable renounce their immediate self-interest for the sake of others.
But the climate crisis is also the crisis of white supremacy. It’s a crisis not just of excess carbon dioxide but of stolen land, stolen labor, stolen lives. The renunciation called for by this two-headed crisis isn’t just about leaving money buried beneath the land. It’s about returning that land to the communities who originally lived there before they were cheated, robbed, and murdered for it. It’s about a nation built on labor extracted with shackles and whips renouncing wealth it has called its own and giving it over to the descendants of the enslaved. It looks like those who are accustomed to leading while others follow and speaking while others listen renouncing this will to mastery and instead learning to listen and follow.
Simone Weil gives theological shape to this renunciation. In her theology of creation, God’s creative act is not an act of expansion but of restraint, renunciation, self-denial. “God and all his creatures are less than God alone,” and so the love that founds the world is a love that accepts diminution so that others can arise into being. (7) And for Weil, the only proper response to God’s self-effacing love is to echo it in what she calls “decreation,” renouncing oneself so that others might be.
But this demand is not universal, as Weil’s reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear. The parable speaks of two beings: one a human being in full possession of their own humanity, the other “only a little piece of flesh, naked, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch.” (8) The demand placed on the one who is free is to renounce themself, to refuse to exercise the power that they could so easily exercise. The demand placed on the other is to found themself, to exercise the power that has been denied them and to step into their own freedom, to say with Frantz Fanon, “I am my own foundation.” (9) Sanctity looks different if one is on the road or in the ditch.
And yet the crises of the present moment are global crises, ravaging the vulnerable and discomfiting the comfortable but leaving none untouched. Wildfires, rising seas, COVID-19, authoritarianism, nuclear proliferation - today’s catastrophes are experienced locally but are webbed together across the entire globe.
The interconnectedness of present crises demands solidarity. We must discern the ways we are held by each other and to live up to them. To name but one example, for several years Black Lives Matter activists in the US and Palestinian activists have joined across their distance to discern a common struggle. US-made teargas was deployed in Palestine before being used against BLM protestors in Ferguson; in 2014, Palestinians on social media offered tips on protecting oneself from the gas. (10) And in the spring of 2021, Black activists called on the US left to embrace Palestinian liberation during the raids on Sheikh Jarrah.
Such practices of solidarity are of course politically savvy. The US gives billions of dollars every year to the Israeli military, (11) and Israel trains US police officers in counterinsurgency tactics. (12) The two states’ repressive apparatuses are intimately bound together, so the struggles against them are more effective together than apart. But as the Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland shows, solidarity is more than just realpolitik. It’s also the living out of the communion of saints.
In her book Enfleshing Freedom, Copeland explains what it means to say that in receiving the eucharist, the Church both shares and is the body of Christ: “Our daily living out, and out of, the dangerous memory of the torture, abuse, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ constitutes us as his own body raised up and made visible in the world.” (13) In the eucharist, the Church remembers and re-presents the lynched body of Jesus of Nazareth, and declares that it is this body. The rite proclaims that the Church as the body of Christ is knit to the crucified peoples of history. (14) It’s not that churches must decide whether or not to get involved in another’s struggle. The eucharist confronts the Church with the fact that, as the body of Christ, it is already involved. The Church’s task, Copeland insists, is to live out its vocation as the corpus mysticum, to make Christ’s body visible through concrete practices of “Eucharistic solidarity.” Like medieval saints bearing the wounds of Christ on their flesh, solidarity makes visible Christ’s mystical body as “a counter-sign to the encroaching reign of sin.” (15)
Renunciation and solidarity are demanded by the present moment, but they might not on their own seem to make a saint. We imagine saints as being somehow set apart, sacred figures standing out against the profane, lacerated by visions and ecstasy.
But what is ecstasy? What is the sacred? What is it that would set the saint apart? Scholar of religion J. Kameron Carter, drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, describes “the sacred” as having two sides. What is sacred can be what is highest, purest, most noble. This is what people usually mean when they call something sacred. But what is sacred can also be what is impure, lowly, dangerous, fleshly. This is not the sacred of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords; this otherwise sacred is an ecstatic threshold beyond which otherwise ways of living can arise. (16)
The word ecstasy comes from ek-stasis, to stand outside of oneself. Meaning both to be out of one’s mind and to be enraptured in mystical visions, ecstasy names the sacred otherwise that confounds the order of the world. Like Angela of Foligno eating a leper’s scab and calling it Holy Communion, or Julian of Norwich writing hideous visions of Christ as a ragged husk drained completely of blood, this impure sacred ecstasy defies the world’s valuations to wallow among the refuse and the refused.
Ecstasy, the sacred refusal of the world’s order, is much needed today. As the crises of climate change, colonial extraction, and capitalism accelerate towards catastrophe, the world’s powers and principalities work to impose ever-more brutal regimes of order and security. Asylum-seekers fleeing climate collapse are herded into concentration camps; (17) farmworkers are compelled to labor under ash-choked and sunless skies; (18) police murder Black people with impunity and lay siege to cities where dissent rises up. (19)
Carter calls for racial capitalism’s regime of order to be refused in ecstasy – in his words, “[a] Black flame mysticism of the riot.” (20) Like in the poem cited at the beginning of this piece, the person in ecstasy stands outside of themself to look upon the things of this world otherwise. Amid a world that sanctifies wealth, the nation, the supposed purity of whiteness, and the violence needed to uphold all three, ecstasy wrenches us from ourselves to see the holy elsewhere: in the flames of the riot, in those cast aside as useless and expendable, in the perdurance of Black life in an antiblack world. (21) Racial capitalism’s policing of the world in terms of “order” and “security” (and the mastery and submission that order entails) cries out for dangerous, ungovernable, ecstatic saints.
Renunciation, solidarity, ecstasy. Where are the saints today? Where can we see those in whose name violence is wrought renouncing themselves and those upon whom violence is meted standing tall? Where can we see the mystical body of Christ made visible by lovers of justice finding themselves bound to a stranger’s struggle? Where can we see hearts burning with ecstasy and sadness amidst the sterile lethality of racial capitalism’s order?
I believe we caught a glimpse of the new sanctity in the summer of 2020, when the US state flinched in the face of open Black revolt. A Black-led rebellion stood tall against the police, and non-Black rioters renounced their end of the racial contract to fight alongside them. Crowds spilled into streets across the world in solidarity, while in tiny white towns in the rural US protestors gathered in small groups or even marched alone. Ecstasy wedded grief, despair, and exhilaration amidst the flames consuming police precincts and luxury stores.
The rebellion has quieted for now, but its demands remain. Saints today will be the ones who can attend to those demands, who can discern the movement of the Spirit at the end of the world - not to renew the nation, but to burn with a mystical fire in which it too might burn.
Quoted in J. Kameron Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” in Otherwise Worlds, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Duke University Press, 2020), 178, https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012023-011.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed, “Nancy Pelosi: ‘Thank You, George Floyd, For Sacrificing Your Life,’” HuffPost, 40:58 400AD, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-george-floyd-thank-you_n_607f4d32e4b017537f0c1370.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), 51.
“RCP 8.5: Business-as-Usual or a Worst-Case Scenario?,” Climate Nexus (blog), September 22, 2019, https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/rcp-8-5-business-as-usual-or-a-worst-case-scenario/.
Bill McKibben, “Why We Need to Keep 80% of Fossil Fuels in the Ground,” 350.org, accessed July 9, 2021, https://350.org/why-we-need-to-keep-80-percent-of-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground/.
Dinah A. Koehler and Bruno Bertocci, “Stranded Assets: What Lies Beneath” (Chicago: UBS Asset Management (Americas) Inc., 2016), https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/ubs/global/asset_management/pdf/our-research/sustainable-investing-stranded-en.PDF.
Weil, Waiting for God, 89.
Weil, 90.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 205.
Thomas Gorton, “Palestinians Tweet Tear Gas Tips to Ferguson Residents,” Dazed, August 15, 2014, https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/21289/1/palestinians-tweet-tear-gas-tips-to-ferguson-residents.
Jeremy M. Sharp, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel” (Congressional Research Service, November 16, 2020), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf.
Mersiha Gadzo, “How the US and Israel Exchange Tactics in Violence and Control,” Al Jazeera, June 12, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/12/how-the-us-and-israel-exchange-tactics-in-violence-and-control.
M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 126–27.
As St. Augustine says in a sermon on the sacrament, “[Y]ou are yourselves this body.” Augustine, “Sermons,” in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, N.Y: New City Press, 1993), sermon 227.
Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 109.
Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” 164–70.
Eric Levitz, “With Trump’s Migrant Camps, the History We Should Fear Repeating Is Our Own,” Intelligencer, June 20, 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/aoc-holocaust-why-migrant-detention-centers-are-concentration-camps-explained.html.
Vivian Ho, “‘An Impossible Choice’: Farmworkers Pick a Paycheck over Health despite Smoke-Filled Air,” the Guardian, August 23, 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/22/california-farmworkers-wildfires-air-quality-coronavirus.
Jamelle Bouie, “The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.,” The New York Times, June 5, 2020, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/sunday/police-riots.html.
Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” 179.
Carter, 159.
