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I ended the last article by describing how the prophet, one of the archetypes within each of us, is never satisfied with the status quo. Prophetic people feel disloyal to themselves and to their higher calling whenever they have to succumb to “the way things are” especially when “the way things are” are unjust and cause unnecessary suffering. They feel for the “little guy,” the “underdog” and are attentive to peoples’ grief before it becomes a statistic. The homeless one, the addict, the unemployed, the hungry, the one suffering mental illness is always and forever a person and never a number. At least, that’s the way the prophet sees it.

I realize, in my own life, how easy it is for me to “normalize” injustice, shrug my shoulders, and inwardly say, “That’s just the way things are.” In those moments, I have acquiesced to something that was once shocking but is now simply the “new norm.” The very first thing I ever remember watching, on our black and white T.V., was people killing each other in Palestine. It was 1969, and I was 4-years-old and wondered why someone from the adult world wasn’t stepping in to tell “those people” this was wrong. It’s not the loss of naiveté or innocence that I mourn. It’s the numbness to peoples’ pain and the reduction of human life to mere statistics that is the root of my mourning now. Once that sensitivity shuts down in me, the prophet is basically silenced.

The late Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us that the prophet is always disturbed–in a good way, not a destructive way. It’s the disturbance of intimacy. He writes, “The prophet has gotten too close to suffering to explain it away and too close to God’s vision for the world to settle for anything less.”

Prophecy always pushes back. The narrative the world often gives us is says:

The economy is normal.

This violence is necessary.

This despair is your own fault.

Justice will come tomorrow.

The prophet says “no.”

No, this is not normal.

No, this is not necessary.

No, this is not yours alone.

No,the time to address it is not tomorrow.

The “no” of the prophet is always held in a deeper “yes.” Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is a classic case of a prophet speaking his deep “yes”. His vision of what “should be” (God’s Kingdom) is also his critique of what “currently is” (the new normal we quietly accept). Like all prophets, Martin Luther King made it to the mountain top. From there prophets bring the vision of God to the valley. It is a vision of hope not doomsday. Peter, James and John were to the Mountain of Transfiguration (Mount Tabor). They, too, saw a vision of how things ought to be. They couldn’t pitch there tent there but had to bring that vision of light down into the valley of peoples’ darkness, pain, and suffering. Thus, they became—without even knowing it—prophets for their time.

~Fr. Phil