By Jim Perkinson, a ten-year retrospective on Radical Discipleship

What has significantly changed – in the world and in yourself? What/Who has inspired you or brought you hope? What are the forms of supremacy that you’ve struggled to break rank with?

So, yes, ten years from Obama through Trump to Biden and now looking the rump of the nation straight in the eye! But it ain’t about the leadership as much as the dealership.  The global grip of corporate armature and billionaire priority and militant supremacy grows apace.  The Elon Musk flush of political theater with digital warp and AI belches of algorithmic inanity seems virtually (!) unstoppable in the short term. In service overwhelmingly—though not exclusively—of white delusion and confusion that pallor is somehow valor and value, rather than weaponized trauma coming out of the European Middle Ages outfitted with a new weapons technology and an old lie! 

What has changed in the world is perhaps Time itself—or at least our relationship to it.  The onslaught of a pillaging of the more-than-human world into a technological commodification hell bent on re-engineering seemingly everything grabbable on the planetary surface into a human prosthesis, global in extent, accelerating in pace, arguably exercised by a hyperventilating “more” and “faster” that has no imaginable containment other than a resounding “Halt” trumpeted by a no-longer-patient biosphere speaking in the key of climate extremity.

What has changed in me is a night-sky shift towards the oscillating, incubating, jousting-and-composting Mystery of deep dark running from the planetary core to the astral holes centering galaxies and the song that reverberates between. In grief, I lament the loss of half of human life to the dragon’s tail (Rev 12:1) of light-pollution sweeping almost all the stars from urban vision looking for ancestral constellation and consolation above the flickering glow of now.  But then NASA has recently hipped us to a new recognition that Black Holes actually “sing,” echoing a B-flat vibe 57 octaves below middle C in a frequency wave 10 million years long, holding on tune for 2 billion years across that orange hazed horizon. So, thus: the Beauty that is—whether I can see it or not! Irreducibly in motion in complexities of gift-economy reciprocation so far beyond our ken that we fill entire blackboards with equations that “explain” something less than 4 % of all that is (chalking the rest up to “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter”)! 

And no surprise then that I still mark my deepest education as an on-going, 40-year baptism in another kind of “Beautiful Blackness” on Detroit’s east side streets, now being rhizomically linked with Native savvy and syncopation here in Anishinaabe smarts about Great Lakes water-wisdom. That combination is complemented by continuous learning (from my wife) of indigenous Ayta resilience on the sides of Pinatubo’s eruptive divinity.  And schooled by such, I am propelled back along my own ancestral root, to Celt and Nordic colloquies with Indo-European-profundities dating to pre-Roman humility still rooted in being taught-by our more-than-human kin before such was warped and decimated by imperial domination and rapacity.

So, the supremacy at issue?  A three-fold iteration across 5,000 years of elaboration, beginning in Mesopotamian re-organization of smaller-scale lifeways (hunting-and-gathering, subsistence cultivation, village-based pastoralism) into city-state coercion of labor, surplus extraction, imposed taxation, debt, drudgery, and disease evisceration.  Gradually elites began to assemble armatures of trade, technology, and architecture that effectively removed and buffered them from hands-on exchange with plants and animals in elevating themselves figuratively and literally out of reciprocal relations with such, to a controlling, plundering, and decimating accumulation of goods and status whose brutality was destined to be promoted and gaslighted ever after as “civilization” (built on the Latin word “civis” for male-propertied “citizen” players in in the on-going pillage).

Some 3,000 years down the road, that elite-anchored “species supremacy” insisting humans alone had status and worth, gave rise to its most potent religious offspring in the form of Christian supremacy, warping and re-configuring a Galilean back-to-the-land movement seeking to enflesh ancient Sabbath and Jubilee traditions of eco-reciprocity and co-communion into a monopolistic privatization of “truth” and of Earth itself.  This led after more than a millennium to Doctrine of Christian Discovery genocide (95% on average) of Native Turtle islanders and enslavement of African peoples as tools of produce and wealth assemblage on the stolen land.  Yes, in USA self-conceit—going underground and toxic as the spiritual underpinning of a newly-articulated visual regime of white-skin power and predation.  This still regnant supremacy continues to vaunt Euro-heritage and visage over all else, even as it remains ideologically and artifactually entwined with the civilizational and religious supremacies it (supposedly) superseded. 

And thus we face today, a biospheric blowback ripping the facade off the entire enterprise that will not much longer tolerate the evident fatuity and stupidity.  Inspiration towards life and “ways of being” otherwise—in the face of such—for me is a question of track record.  Who has the proven experience of living in place over generations without destroying either themselves or everyone and everything else in that place and without having to reach beyond that particular bioregional bounty to plunder an “elsewhere”?  The simple answer to such is “indigeneity” and ancestry.  How re-learn what they knew and know? And once again, become worthy recipients of—because co-participants with—such amazing Beauty and Magnificence as Life on this planet yet represents and obviously is.

By Jim Perkinson (above), a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Detroit, MI)

And he said to her, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” (Mk 7:27)

Note, right up front, how rapidly the subject shifts topic in this Marcan vignette. It goes from unclean spirit to bread to puppies and argues about priorities.  Pretty easy for somebody eclectic like me to open up, in response, a fire hydrant of ideas without any hoses attached.  So, my title is an attempt to organize the flow a bit. We begin (ha!) with the word “first.”

The sacred Jewish writing known as the Talmud (Brachot 40a) asserts: “It is forbidden for people to eat before they give food to their animals as it says (Dvarim 11:15), ‘I will provide grass in your field for your cattle’ and only then does the verse state ‘and you will eat and be satisfied’” (Rav Yehuda, teaching in the name of Rav, quoted by Halickman)[1]

But, but then in the Gospel of Mark today (as we read), Rabbi Jesus says: “Let the children first be fed; it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mk 7: 27).

And those “buts” (plus a bunch more) will be central in the riff to follow here—one thing going one way, and then suddenly the same thing going another way, or even a line of anatomy curving around against itself and in “cheeky” fashion, doing so twice.  There are buts and then there are “butts.” As we shall note.