When I graduated with a degree in engineering, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was 2020, and I thought PhD had a nice ring, so I went to grad school. Sometime that fall, I saw a Facebook post from a friend recommending Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. I was intrigued by the quote he shared. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which quote it was, or why I was so fascinated. Nevertheless, I ordered the book.
When it arrived, I started reading it. I didn’t get far. Brueggemann was bewildering to me; I’d read a page, be confused, then consider whether to forge ahead or to reread. After a few days, I lost steam and tucked the book away in my nightstand drawer. It stayed there for a few years. I looked at it every now and then but never had the brain energy to tackle the thing. More on Brueggemann in a bit.
In the summer of 2023, I began taking acting classes. At this point I was seven years into my engineering education, so a subject with less mathematical analysis sounded refreshing. Our class started working on Jen Silverman’s play Witch. The play follows a junior devil named Scratch as he goes about a medieval village purchasing souls.[1] The titular witch, Elizabeth, is visited by Scratch. However, despite the muttered accusations of the local villagers, she’s not a witch. She’s just an outcast. And unlike the rest of Scratch’s customers, Elizabeth does not immediately sell her soul. She is contemplative; Scratch visits her many times to make offers for her soul. Eventually, Scratch and Elizabeth develop feelings for one another.
Throughout the play, Elizabeth considers what her soul is worth. At the end, after some drama, Elizabeth concludes that the world is too far gone. (Interestingly, the characters of the play tear each other apart without Scratch’s help.) Elizabeth decides that the best thing to do is to “pull the plug” (Silverman 85) on the world. Everything should be swept away; let’s just start this thing over.
It is a moody work. The opening monologue from Elizabeth states, “Here is the single thing you should be asking yourself: Do I have hope that things can get better? And if you do, then ignore me. You’re fine. But if you don’t … then maybe this is where we start” (Silverman 1–2). At the time, I was cynical about Elizabeth’s cynicism. Sure, the world is dark, blah blah blah, but that’s not the whole story. I was one of those that Elizabeth said should ignore her, and I did. I couldn’t allow myself to really engage with the questions of the play, with brokenness and hope and whether things ever do change for the better, so I brushed them off with pat answers. As a person of faith, those answers were mainly: “Jesus … so … yeah.” When we finished working on the scenes for my acting class, I put the script away and didn’t think much about it.
Meanwhile, I was in the middle of my PhD (which was objectively going well) and was deeply depressed (which I was denying). I was meeting program milestones and wasn’t even being persecuted as a woman in engineering. So why was I so sad? This is adulthood, baby! I suspected part of the problem was loneliness, which I thought would eventually go away. I was taking acting classes! I was in a book club! I was working remotely at hipster coffee shops! What’s the problem?
But by that fall, things were worse. There were occasional radiant moments — my older sister was baby-bumping; I got to pet a horse — but mostly I was sad. There were too many solitary evenings and too many mornings anxiously lying in bed convincing myself to get up. I couldn’t tolerate being alone at home, so I went to coffee shops and tried not to cry at my laptop. Increasingly, I felt like a hot-air balloon tethered to earth with a million gossamer threads. Every day more threads were broken, and I couldn’t get enough new threads placed to make up for the losses. One day I’d float away.
I was also angry. God was silent. I’d been promised a “still small voice,” or comfort, or something! Something! Some token from God that he heard my prayers, some small tendril of his peace or his presence to weave through my soul and hold it together. Church seemed to imply that the solution was to try harder. You need to go harder putting your identity in Christ (whatever the hell that means), or pray more, or read your Bible more, or feel more grateful, you ungrateful—! How much more faithful could I have been? I wasn’t rejecting faith altogether; I still believed in God. But life seemed dumb, full of meaningless misery and mean people. I didn’t want life to feel that way.
If you’d asked me then, I’d have said, “Yes, absolutely — mental health is similar to physical health, deserving of care. You don’t just pray the illness away.” Yet, I had a hard time making the connection for my own mind. It felt more personal — the problem was that God was a mysterious, silent meanie head, not that I was anxious and depressed. I see now that I was, in a way, asking to dissociate from my experience and feel ok despite my emotional needs not being met. I thought that if I worked really hard, I could either distract myself or prepare a fail-safe script that would plug all the brain holes that kept letting in The Sadness. Unfortunately, there were too many holes, and The Sadness would seep in. So I alternated between the depths of despair and anxiously looking for a way to talk myself out of my feelings.
Sometime that autumn, post–Witch, I reopened my nightstand drawer and picked up The Prophetic Imagination. I figured sure, life’s a vale of tears, but I can still be an intellectual. I thought it would keep my brain occupied to read dry analysis of Old Testament prophets and laborious descriptions of ancient Near East literary techniques. The book is not what I expected. It’s about the role of the prophets and their task of “prophetic imagination.” Prophetic imagination is a way to energize God’s people toward the hope of Jesus. I’m not sure I understand all of Brueggemann’s nuances, but that fall, I understood enough to be deeply touched. I know people tend to frown on “reading yourself into the Bible,” and that’s a fair point. I’m going to disregard it. Truth is often fractal. What applies to a people may also apply to a person, and vice versa.
That fall, I was frustrated. I was trying to keep going, to find something new or different, and I felt like I was spinning my wheels. So when Brueggemann states, “We do not believe that there will be newness, but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns” (Brueggemann 23), I was able to take it in. He was speaking here about the “royal consciousness,” which is inherently in opposition to the “prophetic imagination,” which enables newness. After several years of depression, I was beginning to suspect that maybe life doesn’t get better. In a way, it was incredibly validating to hear that life can and often does feel like this, and that it is hard to hope for something better.
Later, he says again of the royal consciousness that “passion, as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality … its (imperial) politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God” (40–41). Yes, he’s commenting on an “imperial society” and the big-picture social woes that occur when society views life as a zero-sum game. He’s also hinting at passion as a way to bring change. What struck me most was that we are allowed to feel, to grieve, to be miserable in miserable circumstances. God also grieves; he’s not mad that I’m sad and can’t shake it off. It is not God who says all grief is inappropriate or something we’re not supposed to feel.
Throughout the book, Brueggemann also highlights imperial reality’s “denial of endings.” This denial is used to help with the denial of our feelings and the denial of grief. Again, on page 60, Brueggemann says, “Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that only grievers can experience their experiences and move on.” I was beginning to hope that Brueggemann was right. That maybe allowing myself to feel wasn’t a never-ending loop of wallowing, but it could be a part of a journey.
Another central theme in the book is the ability to imagine something new. Brueggemann asks, “How can we have enough freedom to imagine a real historical newness in our situation? … We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable” (44). Here is where I started to notice that Brueggemann’s language felt familiar. Where had I heard this before? I thought about it then went to my bookshelf and pulled out my script for Witch.
Toward the end of the play, a villager named Winnifred decides to sell her soul to the Devil. The pregnant and newly widowed Winnifred offers her soul in exchange for “more of the same.” Winnefred asks for this in front of Elizabeth, the witch. Elizabeth pushes back:
ELIZABETH. If you’re gonna sell your soul, sell it for something better.
WINNIFRED. (Gestures to their surroundings) What, like this?
ELIZABETH. So pick something different. Pick a new / thing—
WINNIFRED. There are no new things! There’s a certain set of things, and whether you’re in the castle or in a hut — they’d still be the same thing. And what’s more, you know that. (Silverman 83)
There are no new things — there’s only a certain set of things — no new things.
This echoed in my head. Returning to Prophetic Imagination:
The inability to imagine or even tolerate a new intrusion is predictable, given the characteristic royal capacity to manage all the pieces. It is so even in our personal lives, in which we conclude that the given dimensions we have frequently rearranged are the only dimensions that exist. To imagine a new gift given from the outside violates our reason. (65)
Elizabeth, at this point in the play, has had a while to think about this. What does she want? Now it’s a bit different, as Elizabeth is contemplating a bargain with the Devil rather than a gift from God, but the idea is similar: if you can have anything, what do you want? What would change your life? Winnifred asks for a “rearrangement of the pieces.” What else is there to ask for?
Continuing in the same scene, after Winnifred says “There are no new things … ”
ELIZABETH. So we have to imagine one, we have to imagine things differently.
WINNIFRED. I can’t. Everything I can think of, it looks like what I know. I can’t see what a new world would look like. (Really asking) Can you?
(A beat. ELIZABETH tries. She really tries. And … she can’t. Her silence says it all.) (Silverman 83)
After this exchange, Elizabeth tells Scratch to burn it all down. The world is too far gone, and she can’t imagine how to make it better. During this read through, the idea that there is no hope after all struck a chord. Both Witch and Prophetic Imagination acknowledge that there is a lot of awful in the world, and it is really hard to imagine anything better. Witch seemed to imply that the options are to 1) take what you can get and make the best of it, or 2) burn it all down. I was hoping that Brueggemann would offer another option. Please, Lord, let there be a third option.
Bruggeman begins to hint at an alternative when he says, “And as Israel is invited to grieve God’s grief over the ending, so Israel is now invited to hope in God’s promises” (Brueggemann 68). There is an invitation to hope in God’s promises. What is promised? What are we being invited into? He says, “Jesus had the capacity to give voice to the very hurt that had been muted and therefore newness could come. Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into pain and giving it voice” (Brueggemann 88).
In the end, the diagnosis I took from Prophetic Imagination was to grieve. Only the mourning can be comforted. I liked the idea that something new could happen, that maybe there was something new already happening. That maybe, counterintuitively, I was perpetuating my own misery by denying it. It was a relief to think that there was something on the other side of this, though I couldn’t imagine it yet.
However, time passed, and things seemed to get worse. Witch or Prophetic Imagination? became a kind of shorthand for me. Do I choose to believe in hope and that maybe I could taste and see and feel the goodness of God in the land of the living? I wanted to imagine a better story, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what else to do. I looked back at the opening monologue of Witch:
ELIZABETH. Do I have hope that things can get better?
And if you do, then ignore me. You’re fine.
But if you don’t …
then maybe this is where we start. (Silverman 2)
What to make of all of this? I didn’t know. The Lord and I were at an impasse. Some stubborn root in me didn’t believe there was no hope, despite the emotional turbulence. Another part was hurt, overwhelmed, and didn’t quite dare to believe. Time kept passing. That spring, many good things started to happen, though it took a while to feel their effects. Tangibly, I got a roommate and started therapy. I watched Ted Lasso. I told my friends I was sad. There were innumerable other helpful things, and I slowly began to see sparkles of light in my foggy mind. This part is harder to track; seeds grow underground first. Tornados and their desolation are easier to see.
So what am I trying to say? I’m not sure. Though they’re different, I don’t even see Witch and Prophetic Imagination as entirely contradictory anymore. When Elizabeth gives voice to the longings suppressed by the patriarchal powers of her own world, newness does come. This is the pattern Brueggemann describes: expressed pain allows for newness. Elizabeth expresses her grievances to Scratch, and he hears her. A strange love (Scratch is a devil, after all) springs between them. Maybe the problem in Witch was the means; folk wisdom says selling your soul never leads to anything good.
I think I could ramble on forever. Yes, I can write mathematical proofs, but at heart I’m a wanderer, a meanderer, a circler-backer. In the book of Exodus, God sends the prophet Moses to the Israelites to guide the people from slavery in Egypt to life in the promised land. The Israelites wander through the wilderness for 40 years, struggling through liminality and frustration and sameness. Somehow, they come through the other side as the people of God. Graduate school during a global pandemic is not 1:1 with the biblical account of Exodus. Obviously. Meanwhile, I’m learning not to dismiss all pain just because it’s not the absolute worst-case scenario. The biggest thing I needed in graduate school was to integrate my big dumb brain with my “big dumb heart,” (á la historian Kate Bowler). On some level, I knew this. Big feelings were easier to avoid, until they weren’t. When I was finally ready to deal with things, the witches and devils and prophets were there to help. I’m grateful.
[1] Coincidentally, that summer, my book club was reading C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, also about devils strategizing for souls.
