The Production of a Mourning Machine

Lent 1: Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:1-2, 12-172:1
Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming, it is near-
2:2 a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.
2:12 Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
2:13 rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
2:14 Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the LORD, your God?
2:15 Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly;
2:16 gather the people. Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy.
2:17 Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep. Let them say, "Spare your people, O LORD, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, 'Where is their God?'"

I find two things interesting in this text. The first is a not so surprising surprise, as it is a kind of tradition in its own right: it concerns the day of the Lord. The day of the Lord, here as in Amos, is not the day of redemption, but the day of judgment – and the prospects for a positive judgment are grim. This is not a day to be awaited with hope, but the day to be anticipated with dread.

The second issue is the universalism that this judgment occasions. There is a call to public worship that does not discriminate; and there are no exceptions that would exempt one from service. All are called and instrumentalized, to some degree, in that call. It is something like military conscription: the nation is at war against an enemy too great to be defeated by normal means, a volunteer army will not do. Each is called to do their part, but the equality is absolute. The part of each is the same as every other: they are all to weep and plead for mercy. This “state of exception” has occasioned a universal interpellation of each individual into a national mourning machine. The prospects are not as dark as they look, however. The universal conscription in the face of universal judgment will result, soon enough, in a universal redemption: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.” (2.28)

An analogy: The scandal of having my 1 year old daughter marked with ashes – a mark that signifies both transience and penitence, a feeling all too obvious (in the former) and altogether inappropriate, or better, inappropriable, for an infant (in the latter) to warrant its physical inscription. “You’re the youngest person I’ve ever put ashes on” said my priest to my daughter (i.e. to me). In other words, “how could you do that to an innocent child?” How could I conscript her in an act that was not hers to appropriate? But after the ashes came the bread of heaven – the sign of eternity and redemption, a sign both inappropriable and obvious to my daughter and to me.

The repetition of a cycle, now, that institutes another practice of time, the inscription of another temporal order. If the fiction of individual agency is betrayed, the truer fiction of eternity is commemorated.