Into the Wilderness: Tracing the Steps of a Birdlike Wisdom

Abstract

This paper draws on the threads of Wisdom spirituality that were explored within the context of the history of capitalism and its underpinning ideologies in two papers previously published in the Kenarchy Journal: The Spiralling Dance of Wisdom and Hidden in Plain Sight: reconsidering the value of social reproduction, work and nature. Envisaged as occupying the centre in what I have come to imagine as a Triptych, this third paper works with and through two, sketching an outline of Divine Wisdom, both figurative and as praxis, to add further dimension to what was glimpsed in the earlier papers. Sight of a multi-faceted feminine divinity is first sought out through Walter Brueggemann’s interpretation of the Exodus account as a journey to the common good in an existential struggle against empire forces. To this is added Catherine’s Keller’s “dreamreading” of John’s first-century CE text of Revelation and the “great sign” of the woman clothed with the sun who flees an imperially-charged Dragon to the refuge of the wilderness. Both texts are read together for insinuations of a complex, grammatically feminine figure of Divine Wisdom, whose cosmic and everyday dimensions can be traced in struggles for the common good in opposition to centralising forces of domination. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s feminist biblical inquiry which formed the foundation of the inquiry into Divine Wisdom in the two previous papers is developed by A. Paige Rawson’s queer postcolonial reading from a socioeconomic perspective that further unties Wisdom from masculine/feminine binaries. Correlating with the Shekinah-Hochma-Ruach presence of the two wilderness accounts, the political nature of wild Wisdom is further explored via the Black Studies of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The central theme of their work, “the undercommons,” suggests a wild, unregulated and ungovernable realm that lies beyond institutions of control. The concept of the fugitive is key to the understanding of space where the colonised, queer, and otherwise marginal make meaning with each other; for the undercommons is not a settled location, but something always there, a way of life in antagonistic relationship to colonialism and capitalism. In particular, Jack Halberstam’s introduction to Moten and Harvey’s book is drawn upon to form a bridge between the wild spatiality of the divine, dynamic, agent and guide who merges from the two wilderness accounts and the politics of the undercommons. The nature of generative struggle – identified in the Exodus and Revelation accounts – is further explored in relation to the politics of the undercommons as outlined by Catherine Keller in The Political Theology of the Earth. The strategic importance of the work of social reproduction, of re-enchantment and re-connection to the earth as sites of social, economic and political transformation is emphasised as part of the concluding section that connects the wilderness divinity to Jesus and the kenarchy project of recognising a loving God who empowers forms of living for the good of both people and the earth.