For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.
But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.
And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.
There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed.
And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.
They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.
And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord. Is. 65:17-25
The passage above has been a favorite of mine since childhood. In fact, it is bound up in what I consider my first aesthetic experience. Early in my life as a reader, my mother found me alone in my room, reading a library book and weeping. The book was Faithful Elephants by Yukio Tsuchiya, a picture book that tells the story of three elephants in a Japanese zoo during WWII. With Tokyo at risk of bombing, the elephants must be killed, but no needle will pierce their skin, and so they are simply left to starve. Small wonder five-year-old me wept. When my mother tried to take the book away, though, I resisted. I had discovered art.
It can’t have been long afterwards that I found a version of the above passage in a children’s Bible, illustrated with a collection of animals likely inspired by Edward Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom. After weeping over the hurt and destruction of those poor elephants, I again encountered beauty in this vision of the mountain of God, in which not just the elephants but those who govern their lives would be faithful. If that vision of peace among animals moved me as a child, in this year of devastation I find new meaning in the hope that no old man will lack his fill of days.
Advent is a season that looks forward to the Second Coming, mostly in a penitent key. “A day of wrath is that day. . . . A day of clouds and thick darkness.” For this one Sunday, though, the church turns to a vision of the end things highlighting God’s mercy and renewal as well as his judgement. Gaudete Sunday, the rejoicing day, promises us that the Lord comes not just in wrath but in restoration, bringing peace and concord where now there is strife.
So much of our experience in this life is heartbreak and loss. We plant trees that lose their crops; we slaughter animals, wringing our hearts even as we are grateful for the meat; we labor to no purpose in jobs that do nothing to better the world; we lose family and friends out of their time. Even something as simple as moving houses carries in it the sting of death. My sons were both born at home, but that home was a cheap apartment I have now left far behind. I was grateful to leave it for a house that better met my family’s needs, and yet to abandon such embodied memories leaves a smart that will never fully heal. Isaiah’s prophecy speaks to the deepest longings of the human heart for a peace, a harmony, and a permanence we never achieve this side of the grave.
Those of us who try to garden and live according to permaculture (permanent agriculture) can talk as if our regenerative methods will allow us to achieve this paradisaical vision here and now. Of course, this is not true. While it is certainly good and right and just to live as regeneratively as possible, such living will not save us from the lurking influence of violence and injustice. In making this claim, I am not just straining for a Christian conservative pessimism about our efforts to save the world; rather, my reading of post-Nietzschean thinkers like Foucault and Derrida persuades me that we cannot escape violence in this life. It is encoded even in our language and in the ecosystem processes that give us life—we are all part of the food chain, kill or be killed.
Gaudete Sunday does not promise us an escape from this violence here and now, no matter how regenerative our land management practices and just our social systems. Our only hope is in the eschatological coming of the one truly peaceable, truly permanent kingdom, in which no elephants die and no little children weep for their loss. Only with the coming of this new Jerusalem will we finally have a home imperishable, a way of living that puts away our bone-deep violence, in which we can finally, truly sing with the Virgin: “My soul magnifies the Lord.”