Exile, Imagination and Belonging

Psalm 137: 1 – 6
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion. There on the poplars we hung up our lyres, for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour."

Isaiah 61: 1 – 4
"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me as a herald of joy to the humble, to bind up the wounded of heart, to proclaim release to the captives, liberation to the imprisoned; to proclaim a year of the Lord's favour and a day of vindication by our God; to comfort all who mourn - to provide for the mourners in Zion - to give them a turban instead of ashes, their festive ointment instead of mourning, a garment of splendour instead of a drooping spirit. They shall be called terebinths of victory, planted by the Lord for His glory. And they shall build the ancient ruins, raise up the desolations of old, and renew the ruined cities, the desolations of many ages."

These two pieces illustrate two different perspectives on the Babylonian exile. The first, from Psalm 137, is the anguished cry of those who had experienced severe trauma and were anxious to preserve the memory of what they had lost. The second, from Isaiah, looks forward to their homecoming – imagining their release, return, and renewal.

For those who might not be familiar with this episode of biblical history, the exile began around 586 BCE when the city of Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian army. The upper echelons of Judean society were deported to Babylon, where they remained until the edict of Cyrus allowed them to return in 539 BCE.

Reading Reem Mojahed's On Exile: A Journey of Fear, Guilt and Nostalgia, I was struck by the similarities between her story of exile from Yemen, through fear, guilt and nostalgia, and some of the biblical stories of the experience of exile and its relationship with belonging, almost 3,000 years before.

The exile had a significant effect on the development of Jewish spirituality, culture and identity. The destruction of the temple of Jerusalem and subsequent exile destroyed the pillars of the Jewish faith as they were at the time, causing a spiritual crisis. The temple of Jerusalem was believed to be the eternal dwelling place of Yahweh. Yahweh was the god of the promised land of Canaan. He had promised that there would always be a King from the line of David on the throne. When the kingdom of Judah was overrun by the Babylonians, they lost their temple, their city, their dynasty and their land.

Trauma studies show that an ability to flexibly retell our story is an important factor in developing resilience after trauma. The Jewish people had to reinvent their religion in exile – to create a new way of being with their God, without the land and the temple. Jewish law specified that some forms of spiritual practice, principally animal sacrifice, could only be performed at the temple in Jerusalem. In exile, the people were no longer able to do this. They created the synagogue as the focus of their communal spiritual life, shifting the focus of worship from animal sacrifice to the study and teaching of the Torah, communal prayer and the singing of Psalms. Even when they were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, they continued the synagogue services alongside the temple practice.

There are parallels with our experience of church in the pandemic. We were exiled from our church building. We have reinvented the way we do church to fit our current circumstances. Our sense of belonging to the church community has shifted from gathering in the building to gathering online.

Even when we are able to gather again in our building, our gatherings are going to be quite different to how they were before the pandemic. For example, those great pillars of Unitarianism, communal hymn singing, and tea and biscuits, will be unavailable to us for some time. When we do resume in-person gatherings, not everyone will be able to join us and we will endeavour to continue online gatherings alongside in-person gatherings to ensure that all our community is included in our communal worship life. All this is part of flexibly retelling our story and building resilience as a spiritual community.

The Babylonian exile, like many of the stories in the bible, is not only the story of one incident in the history of the Jewish people, but an archetypal story that plays out again and again throughout human history, revealing spiritual truths on the inner level.  Biblical scholar Walter Brueggermann defines exile as a sense of not belonging and of not wanting to belong in the place where we are. Many of us have had some experience of such a feeling of alienation and may be experiencing this feeling more strongly as a result of the pandemic. I am finding that the pandemic has increased both my sense of alienation and my sense of belonging.

I have often felt a sense of alienation, of not wanting to belong to a world built on systems of domination, where power over the many is in the hands of the few – from neoliberal capitalism to systemic racism. The pandemic is exposing the injustices of these systems as never before.

In recent times, I have often felt a sense of alienation in my own country, of not wanting to belong to a society where government policies are driven by economics rather than a genuine concern for public health and wellbeing.

In my early adulthood I often felt lost and had a sense of not really belonging anywhere. It took me a long time to realise that this sense of alienation was a sense of alienation from myself – a feeling of not being comfortable in my own skin.

Belonging in community and belonging to myself are intertwined. Since I have found a place I call home in the Unitarian community, I have become more comfortable in my own skin. During lockdown, thanks to the wonders of technology, I have connected with Unitarians all over the world and my sense of belonging in the Unitarian movement, from the local to the international level, has strengthened. Lockdown has also provided me with the opportunity to reflect on how I understand myself and my place in the world, and to try to practice self-acceptance.

Professor of Leadership and Management Brené Brown says, “Belonging is being part of something bigger than yourself. But it’s also the courage to stand alone, and to belong to yourself above all else.”

In his paper, Exile and the Creative Imagination, Professor of Art and African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Olu Oguibe, discusses the art of African exiles. He says, “Exile is an in-between place where nothing is firm. This is why exile may only be lived down fruitfully in that embattled yet mobile and secure territory called the Republic of the Imagination. In exile every act is an act of faith, and only projects of the imagination may exist in the present tense. Art, and faith, therefore, are the only possibilities open to the exile because they transcend the strictures of the existential. Like little safe havens, art and faith provide a space from whence dream and determination may battle the myriad traumas of survival away from home. Through art the exile is able to escape the burden of circumstance, even the temptation of bitterness and recrimination, and thus question, explore, ruminate, and attempt to repossess fragments of that which is lost. Through art the exile may return, in a manner of speaking, by reconstituting the past, participating in the present, as well as envisioning a new world.”

As Chorlton Unitarians in exile, we are participating in the present and envisioning a new world through sharing our creative arts, such as our collective poems.

On a global scale, are experiencing a collective trauma with the pandemic, which has to some extent exiled us all from the life we once knew. I believe that the pillars of the societal structures of domination are crumbling and we have the opportunity to envision a new world. There seems to be a collective will not to go back to 'normal' and a recognition that this is our opportunity to use our creative imagination to envisage a new way of being, with ourselves, with one another, with the Earth, with our God – a way of being that is based on a recognition of our common humanity and of humanity as part of nature.

To quote Brené Brown again, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequality, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”

I do want to belong to a world where all of humanity and nature are held in love, peace and justice. I do want to belong to the world Reem Mojahed wrote about, where “the soul is the first homeland and representation of the idea of belonging and the ultimate identity is above all human.”

Guru Arjan Dev Ji, fifth Sikh Guru, wrote, “Seeking and searching, I have found my own home, deep within my own being.”

If exile is a state of feeling we do not belong where we are, homecoming is coming back to feeling we do belong – not to something or somewhere eternal, but to our hearts and the love that lies at the core of our existence. When we experience this homecoming, we belong to ourselves and to one another, wherever we are.

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote,
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”