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 Such a particular people would travel without[,] a prayer.28 (As the man—who would, since Soconusco, take neither her dollars nor her sarcastic “Senhor Wilie E. Coiote”—stands watch under a thousand thousand apathetic points of someone else’s light in the otherwise heavy, well-woven blackness of an Imperial Sonoran Desert night, the woman who holds her baby close is above all prayer.)29
In the face of the prospect of such disaster it is understandable that we would in our anxiety crave a panoptic vision, a world view, which would take in and hold all that we have discerned and might ever discern,30 a ground for proper action and passion,31 a foothold off of which we might push to make our way into an otherwise paralyzingly uncertain future in the face of an otherwise inhospitably untamed natural world. Besides, we are people who wonder,32 we have a longing for rational unity,33 and we are driven by an aesthetic desire for a vision both coherent and adequate to the broad range of our experience or an erotic urge for far-reaching intellectual satisfaction.34 We are people who desire a grand, integrating vision.35
Surely no one could fault the pious