This weekend, in Minneapolis, an American citizen was killed in broad daylight by federal agents. It was the second such killing this month.
Saturday’s murder claimed the life of 37 year-old Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked at the city’s VA medical center. Pretti was on the street documenting ICE agents with his cell phone camera, following them as they continued their weeks-long mission to capture and deport undocumented immigrants.
A few weeks ago, I finally watched the HBO/Max series Station Eleven, which is based on the novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. I first read the book ten years ago, just after it was published, and it has quickly become one of my favorite fiction novels.
The story follows an assembly of characters in the wake of a global pandemic that spares only one in every thousand people. Mandel begins the novel in the middle of the virus outbreak; we watch as characters realize with disbelief the scale and ruthless nature of the Georgian flu that besets the world–and soon claims many in the novel’s opening pages.
Then the novel leaps fifteen years into the future. Civilization as we know it has collapsed. There’s no more electricity, no more law or order, no more government–no more nations, anywhere. There are only the scattered survivors who adapted to this new way, mostly by living like those from pre-industrial revolution history.
I have been thinking about the differences in the ideas of faith and hope. Advent, our friend Blake reminded us last year, is a season that always begins in exile. We read the Old Testament prophets writing from inky darkness, their enemies terrifyingly close, centuries of disappointment collapsing downward in a crushing, overwhelming wave. Hopeless.
Even so, they write toward the only star in the sky they can see.
Advent is often described as a season of hope, but I wondered why it wasn’t thought of as a season of faith. Faith, after all, seems like the underpinning of all this about a Messiah born to save the world. All the things we believe. Hope, faith, belief–they’re all cousins, right?
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