Certainly, as a devout woman with a history among ecclesial people holds her baby close, as they cross the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean or the Sonoran Desert, powerful memories and hopes carry her.4 Perhaps these are “beliefs” in some archaic sense of the word.5 However, to the extent that she is savory, to the extent that she does believe, she is moved otherwise than by psychic acts that might be graphed on a Divided Line or by electrochemical events some centimeters behind her anterior cranium or by “subjective”6 impulses racing down tracks laid by habitual association amidst the welter of sense impressions; she is moved otherwise even than by her “meu bem,” toward whom she travels and for whom she aches.7 The memories and hopes journeying with her north, say, from Brazil, are not her private property, as if they could be counted among her assets on a credit application. One would speak more faithfully, both of them and of her, were one to say that she is in them rather than that they are in her.8 These are the memories and hopes of a work that over disrupted time aligns by hospitable anticipation (even if unevenly) all she is about to think, perform, and speak, one in which she has come to live and move and have whatever goods she carries in the mochila on her back and the plastic grocery bag in her hand.9 And so if, under the glaring, bare bulb of cross-examination, we determined that her “beliefs” are anything but clear, that she could never articulate them to Socrates’ satisfaction and ours, it may only be that we have pressed ourselves upon her too hard, that we have been too swift to make determinations, that in our aggression we have not opened ourselves to her, that we have not loved her.
Were we to love her, we would not too quickly leave her side. We would wait with her.10 We would lean in toward her as novitiates, probationers. Love asks that much of us. We might walk with her, as she prays. We might attend to the prayers dancing on her lips. In time we might come to suspect that they and she are connected in ways we had not in our haste previously imagined. Even if only briefly, we might now wonder if these prayers were less borne by her and much more have borne her and bear her still, so far from home.11 Were we to abide with her, we might find that her prayers have marked her, have inscribed a passage across the movements of her hands, back, legs, and face, as one might with one’s finger inscribe an elusive message across the dust of the ground.12 We might in spite of ourselves learn from her how she remembers and hopes still with the assembly of the faithful from whom so many steps have separated her. She may in the heat of the moment join her petition13 and re-petition with theirs that this time in this lonely desert, too, will have been honest and true to the work into which she was born, that this time, too, will have been an outcry evoked from her throat, opened by a fair wind that blows without consulting your forecasts or mine.14
The prayer in which she and they still touch does not—by definition cannot—float intangibly either above them or us. It is situated in a time and place, as are all human works. Though it is indeed marked by the names their mothers and lovers call them, we are more tempted than they to point and call it theirs. Even as it happens, this is an event that will not be held fast to be owned. It slips away with deference. It defers indeed particularly, across an ugly, broad ditch.15 It defers to a transient moment, so disposable, so distant, so inapprehensible. It defers to an event so free and so forward that, in spite of ourselves, it comes alongside (para) us to make its appearance (doxa), all the while no less ranging beyond the horizon line of the most farsighted extrapolative retrospection. That is, the prayer they and she voice defers not to a cause or an idea or an exemplary champion of fair virtue (investment opportunities, kept in mind, to which only a backhanded deferral is possible). It defers rather to “one particular thing.”16 It defers beyond our line of sight (of all things) to the trace of an already departed vagabond, to a laborer (no[,] less), to a dark-skinned peasant, a no-count wonder-worker and prophet, to an elusive short life and prolonged death. It defers, i.e., in the mode of witness, even (perhaps especially) when good work cannot use either circumspection or compensation: em nome de Cristo.17
Thus in him (and even saying that little strikes us as excessive, if not unthinkable) the assembly, the liturgical avowal by which they assemble, and she concur. When in loneliness or defeat they cry out, it is his outcry they would repeat—articulated in two contrasting, but by no means mutually exclusive, phrases: (1) “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) and (2) “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).18 They pray in order to pray his prayer—his prayer that opens a way through the stone wall of his tomb—that a way may be opened for them, too, and for all, that in his abased and exalted body all things will one day shine.19 They pray that the logic of this new life—the logic of crucifixion/resurrection—will be given them, that they will be gifted with metanoia.20 There are even immodest moments when they pray that they, too, might join him in his sufferings, i.e., bear witness to his resurrection.21 That is, they pray toward and through his death and theirs. They pray not to push, not to coerce, but to give thanks, to react well to an action that they could never forestall. There is a yea-saying preventative, a precedent, an already, in the work of these people, like the warm memory of what is yet to occur, arriving before any imperial chess master could collect his thoughts to set up her best defense against it. They work in this way that they and their work may not collapse under their own weight.
When the people gather, they are supported by nothing more solidly weight-bearing than a parable, an icon, a prayer.22 They are supported by an indeterminate future that they acknowledge as having priority over what they are and have been. Certainly they and the prayers they perform are flesh—“muscles and blood and skin and bones.”23 These are people with a past. They have always left tracks. Nobody has to plant forensic evidence on them in order to charge, convict, and sentence them. The professional staffs of both theoretical and applied sciences turn their attention to them with ease, to manage them, conceptually, programmatically. Philosophers, too, attend to them, to their structures and their doctrines, their creeds and their holy books, their “God” and their “Paul.” With little disquiet they wrap their minds around their ideas, finding about them nothing seriously anomalous.24 That, in gathering, these people might have a particularity, a particularity like and secondary to the particularity to which they prayerfully defer, a particularity that would elude all apprehension and exhibition, we are tempted to say, is unthinkable.25 A truly radically elusive particularity, one that would not stay nailed down, would at best be undetectable. If it proliferated, however, it could only like cancer unmake, only tear down, we think. The masters of good and evil could not hold it in their hands, could not tame it. Its future could not be ours. It would bode “nihilism,” we say.26 It would, if spread, turn every accomplishment into rubbish, into excrement.27
