"To offer a proposition: the state of resistance as a state of life itself. Since like it or not, this is the shape of things. We will not again know sweet normalcy in our lifetime. What seems outré now, outrageous, disruptive of routine and pattern, is simply the obscure shape of things unknown, as far as we can discern any shape at all. (We can.) Shapes we can no longer cringe from, run from (very far), bribe out of sight (for very long). All of which, it seems to me, once the admission is made, clears the air. When the future needs no longer be resisted, the true form of resistance can be spread out before us, analyzed, dealt, losing hands and winning. All to the good. It being pernicious and lethal and against the right order of things that we should cling to the past, sanctify what we have known, give our hearts to it, sell our souls. No.
"Everything begins with that no, spoken with the heart's full energies, a suffering and prophetic word, a word issuing from the nature and direction of things. No. A time to tear and pull down and root out. A time for burning out the accumulated debris of history, the dark noisome corners of our shrines, a universal spring-cleaning. So that the symbolism of Catonsville may become a permanent method and symbol. Of what?
"Of moral process. Not of escalated ethical improvement, or social engineering of American dreams, or exportation of techniques. We have had enough of that; we must speak of something other, closer to the dark roots of our existence, to beginnings, to the heart of things.
"The Bible has many powerful images to bring reality to our shocked attention once more. Exodus, metanoia, conversion, a new way for man. The mysterious, stormy, jealous, destructive, heartbreaking Other keeps propping the rotten fabric of human invention and arrangement. He will not indefinitely allow man the sweet slavery into which he sinks like a flaccid complaisant lover. No, every slavery is an invitation to another exodus; every exodus is guided by a dark promise. In the course of journeying and hunger and thirst and sin, the bribe comes upon its identity by a singular act of grace. The rites are performed during a pause on the march; they are bloody and primitive, and exact communal and personal remorse, and win forgiveness. Amnesia, forgetfulness, distraction, the lost way, are repaired — by a mysterious choice, by man's choosing to be chosen. The journey continues once more, toward the promise, and its land. And always, by implication, the promise is hedged about with the unknown, the human quantum. Every promise of God continues unkept; the promised land is only one stage of things, infected with the threat of human betrayal. Will systems again captivate man — a new rhetoric, masking the old injustice, lead man to a new enslavement?"
