Déjà Disparu
Xenia suggests a song to listen along with your reading experience…
‘Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing? But now be strong, Zerubbabel,’ declares the Lord. ‘Be strong, Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land,’ declares the Lord, ‘and work. For I am with you,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ‘This is what I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt. And my Spirit remains among you. Do not fear.’
Haggai 2:3-5
I loved Hong Kong cinema before I knew how exceptional it was (and exceptional it must be because my filmmaker fiancé probably fell in love with me when I told him that I’d watched most of Wong Kar-wai’s work). I loved it because it conveyed every little ache that I felt in every HongKonger I’ve ever met, and it helped me feel like I belonged.
Before I lived in Hong Kong, I knew the ache (a friend tells me it’s because I grew up listening to Cantopop). In my doctoral studies, I turned to theory to explain that ache. Before, I could only say that it was a sour pain, half-melancholy, like after you’ve had one too many injuries in the same spot—and your bones know. An ache that feels liturgically appropriate during Lent. Ackbar Abbas calls it the déjà disparu, a grasping of something that is always on the verge of disappearing, leaving us to hold a handful of clichés.[1] And that was part of it, certainly; the ache felt at once more solid and also disjointed. Because time, in the little suburb I grew up in, was disjointed and seemingly outside of time.
Jean Ma tells us that if we were to survey the topography of Chinese art films, we would discover that it is a landscape of “haunted spaces and spectral glimmers, of restless pasts that invade the boundaries of the present, of nostalgic longing and melancholic fixation, inhabited by characters who endure and resist the experiences of loss, mourning, and trauma in idiosyncratic ways.”[2] Life, reflecting art, seems likewise.
In this landscape, time is suspended in a way, not just constantly disappearing. And the space within that time? HongKongers named commercial spaces after home—Taikoo Shing (Pacific Mall), Times Square, Aberdeen Centre—and took comfort that the names of streets and places here in Canada mirrored those in Hong Kong because of our shared colonial past. We are left unmoored in the suspended chronology, as reality gives way to inner worlds of fantasy and desire and as memory (the momentum around specific sites of trauma illuminating the difficulties of testimony and representation) competes with history—nostalgia ossifying who we are, and who we were, and who we could be.[3]
Coming again to Hong Kong film and poetry has prompted a lot of reflection on time and space as I feel out my own aches and pains. Some of it has been because I spent last summer in East Jerusalem. A monk I met while I was there called the Holy Land a palimpsest, a manuscript that has been written over with something else, because of the numerous layers of history present there. Each layer is important, and I’ll suggest, each layer has been weaponised over the centuries—some, more than others, to ideological and destructive ends; a deadly commingling of history and memory in which we have become complicit.
I’ve been thinking about time and space also because I have been feeling a thing when it comes to the Canadian evangelical church, one that burns in my bones: sorrow, frustration, anger, disappointment, and bitterness in turn; spinning in a nostalgic turn that makes me wonder if we ever knew what we were a part of to begin with. And if it’s in my bones, it, too, is an ache.
Today’s lectionary reading takes us to the Book of the Twelve, Haggai, to be specific. It’s probably one of my favourite books in the Bible, standing at two chapters long (or short). I wonder how the ache manifested for the exile returnees and those who stayed in the land. Scholars have speculated that the unwillingness to rebuild the temple stems from unresolved trauma of having seen it destroyed–Jerusalem destroyed.
The psalmist writes, “By the rivers of Babylon / there we sat down / and there we wept / when we remembered Zion” (Ps 137:1). I wonder what it would be like, to look at a gaping, festering wound, day in and day out—the core of the community hollowed out, a ruin of the promise of God’s presence, their sustenance for life—a reminder of their failures to be God’s people and the re-membering of the utter disaster that fell upon them as a consequence to the breakdown of the covenant. The ghosts that peep out around every corner and the paralysis at the beginning-middle-end of a story that seems to trail indeterminably towards the abyss.
Or perhaps I do not have to wonder very hard at all. I hear it every time someone asks me if I can offer practical advice, or a solution, to the church’s problems. I hear it every time heaven is proclaimed as a telos, without understanding that there is no heaven without earth. I see it every time we argue about the paint on the walls, or the carpet (or lack thereof) on the floor. I see it in beloved bodies, broken in conflicts caused by our inaction and greed. And here, I am tempted to follow Qoholeth in exclaiming, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccl. 1:1). My bones ache, and I wonder if yours do as well.
We do not share the Judeans’ powerlessness. Though nostalgia and memory rupturing through to our historical narratives might tempt us toward the narrative of the (false) victim. But this is not the only tale. At its best, our ache can direct us to a different story, one Haggai is keen to help us re-member.
God was present in Egypt, in the escape through the Red Sea and through the wilderness, and also in the exile (Hag 2:5, 22). Where natural disasters once heralded covenantal breakdown, Haggai pronounces the earthquake as a sign by which the whole world will come to experience God’s presence. And where divine favour was once taken away from David’s line (Jer 22:10-11), it is restored in Zerubbabel and his descendants (Hag 2:23).
The building of the temple is a visible sign of God’s presence, we are told—where once it was the glory of Solomon, now it is the glory of God, in partnership with the community and people of God, where the visible marker is God’s shalom/salaam (that is peace, flourishing, safety, justice), where humanity is dignified and re-grounded in the land, and where healing can begin to take place.
If my bones ache, it’s because I want this for us. Our pain does not have to lead to death—metaphorical or physical. Instead, if we follow the ache, maybe we can find the path through loss, mourning, and trauma. It might meander; we might be taken to the wild places. But where God is, there our healing begins.
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