B has tracked with me through my whole masters program. He is a highly successful skilled tradesman and a brilliant entrepreneur. He experiences himself to be a non academic — yet he is a deep thinker and feeler. Nightly we discuss what I have learned and he reads every paper I write.
While I have done the work, he has been such a staunch supporter and co-labourer. It is safe to say that “we” will be graduating in 2020. We have a new foundational understanding of the horrors of human predation and oppression — with eyes fixed on the horizon of hope.
Abuse by elite deviants has forced a type of sight to which we were hitherto blind:
Power, patriarchy, and inequality.
Misogyny and malfeasance.
Predation, vulnerability, and deception.
The culture of silence and complicity.
Suffering, systemic oppression, and empowerment.
Let the blind say I can see.
Of late we have been discussing advent, the king we wanted and the king we got — and what exactly all this suffering means now. I just got off a phone call with him where he was listening to the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (I’m in charge of the Audible account) and he arrived at the same footings of faith and renewed hope as what I did a few weeks ago.
We have each agreed individually and together that though Christendom be part of the “pedagogy of big lies” we each definitively have chosen to believe that Christ be part of the “pedagogy of the oppressed.”
That there must be something majestic about entering into the suffering and degradation of others. Being with ameliorates some of the atrocity of abuse. It is a mercy to wait patiently while others find words for the board game of brutality. It is a gift to give others literacy to label their own losses.
A slow stirring of the spirit has emerged in advent and this nutritive academia. It has been a redemption and a resurrection of us — the ruined. With you are we. With you is He.