Abraham J. Heschel's "The Prophets: Two Volumes in One" had been taunting me from my Amazon wish list for quite awhile. Thanks to my laziness towards the holidays, a mass distribution of said wish list was all it took for the tome to end up under my parents tree and, soon after, snugly riding towards my home in a backpack. Almost two-weeks past Christmas and five days into the New Year, I have only to tackle the first two chapters (dealing with the prophets Amos and Hosea, respectively); my immense enjoyment of the work means I tend to neglect reading it when any substance or distraction has wandered into my orbit, for fear of Heschel's work being lost on me. Combine that with an incessant need to immediately comb through each chapter's prophetic reference book (in a new NRSV Bible gifted in tandem with "The Prophets") and you end up with a tedious read.
"What manner of man is the prophet? A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to an area of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the market place. Instead of showing us the way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums...Why such immoderate excitement? Why such intense indignation? The things that horrified the prophets are even now daily occurrences all over the world."Years of offering only the snide glance of youth towards religion, in general, and theology, in particular, was a reflex bred partially from teenage rebellion as well as a detail-obsessed flirtation with Marxist-inspired radicalism. However, one can only focus on the claim that religion is "the opiate of the masses" while ignoring the equally relevant statement that religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature" for so long. After dipping my toes in the waters of Maoism, Third-Worldism, anti-imperialism and the stratum of -isms and post-whathaveyou's, my search for a language in which to express the frustrations and desires of the disenfranchised and exploited classes brought me to the same spiritual texts and movements from which I had originally fled.
This wasn't as obvious of a transition as it seems in hindsight. I bought a copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" sometime in 2011; my purchase guided more by an affinity for black nationalism and the ideological development of the Black Panther Party rather than any interest in the underlying revolutionary currents of Abrahamic faiths. The book sat on the shelf for a month or two and then was picked up one day and its pages cracked open. An easy and captivating read, to say the absolute least; it would become the most important book I had yet read the moment I finished it. Four or five more complete readings over the next few years (along with Manning Marable's incredible biography as a much-needed supplement) left me standing far from my original atheistic and materialist leanings and looking over the precipice of a revolutionary fervor situated in the longing of humanity for the Divine.
Of course, the Autobiography wasn't the sole gospel to turn my eyes upward (or inward?). The Qur'an naturally followed, garnering its own series of non-sequential readings and perusing. Malcolm's ideological roots in Islam illuminated the modern historical "contradiction" that radicals had been struggling with since Sultan Galiev's role in the early Soviet Union and now was more relevant than ever; why has Islam manifested itself as an ideo-social rallying point for large sections of the global working class?
There were a multitude of answers from the dialectic materialist view to which one could subscribe; some of them more influential upon me than others. By this point, the cold rationality of Euro-liberalism had incessantly grown more annoying and frustrating to me and the increasingly alienating liturgy of Science and Technology felt more oppressive than ever. "Sure, religion 'created' the religious wars that killed millions but didn't science give us the atom bomb?" I found myself pondering more and more often. What I perceived as two separate roads both had their share of gold stars and graveyards.
