Mark Charles, Prophet

Mark Charles at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D. C.

The prophet is a man [or woman] who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man's fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of  God and man. God is raging in the prophet's vision.

Abraham J. Heschel is talking, primarily, about Old Testament prophets here, but not exclusively. He's attempting to help us understand what we experience when a true prophet appears because prophets tend not to be invited to dinner a second time. They make us uncomfortable, even angry. They make us fiercely ill at ease. 

Prophetic utterance is rarely cryptic, suspended between God and man; it is urging, alarming, forcing onward, as if the words gushed forth from the heart of God, seeking entrance to the heart and mind of man, carrying a summons as well as an involvement. Grandeur, not dignity, is important. The language is luminous and explosive, firm and contingent, harsh and compassionate, a fusion of contradictions.

In Herschel's The Prophets, he might well have been speaking of Mark Charles, who, in a single appearance here last week, was "luminous and explosive, firm and contingent, harsh and compassionate, a fusion of contradictions." At once, Mark Charles reviles and loves: he hates American culture with an almost consuming passion, in great part because he wants so badly for that culture to be so much better, so much more true and rich and compassionate than it is. 

I've heard Mark Charles hold forth several times in the last ten years. What began as a crusade to impress upon his audience the injustice and suffering of Native America since Columbus, what began as a clarion call to reconciliation, has evolved into a passionate expose' of a broader slice of American culture. His earlier iterations were based in his understanding that white America knew very, very little about the injustice the founding fathers perpetuated on the Indigenous of North America. 

As I remember it, his earlier presentations tended to end with the kind of reconciliation that he maintained could likely only be attained in the blood of Christ. 

There was less reconciliation in a subsequent chapter of the stories he's told, less "reconciliation" because, he maintained--correctly, I'd say--that there could be no reconciliation because there's never been any conciliation in the first place.  American history--starting with Columbus--offered no moments of harmony, absolutely none, between the colonizers and those whose lives and culture their colony building totally destroyed.

Then, in 2019, Mark Charles ran for President of these United States. Just exactly how many votes he registered, I don't know, but, from the beginning, his campaign really wasn't about winning. His burden was to carry even further the heft of the revelation he feels deeply. Heschel might say it this way: "To us the moral state of society, for all its stains and spots, seems fair and trim; to the prophet it is dreadful."

Last week's presentation took aim at the country and culture itself, at its idols and gods, its profane character. Unlike the Supreme Court, Mark Charles sentenced that football coach from the state of Washington into ignominy and worse for not listening to Christ's own admonition to make our prayers a private thing. In the name of Christ, Mark Charles blisters the Christian nationalism he sees not only in Donald Trump but also in Joe Biden, the vapid zeal that created Manifest Destiny and perpetuates the sin of believing in "American exceptionalism."

His presentation at a church here in Orange City last week was not for the faint of heart. And yet, he out-pietys the pietists, for without a doubt his aim, like that of any prophet, is to bring a measure of righteousness back to a world that's lost its moral bearings. 

Remember, Heschel says, 

To the people, religion was Temple, priesthood, incense: "This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord (Jer 7:4). Such piety Jeremiah brands as fraud and illusion. "Behold you trust in deceptive words to no avail, he calls (Jer. 7:8).

Last week, right here in Orange City, the prophet descended for a couple of hours and held forth before a crowd some believed much bigger than expected. One strategy hasn't changed through his presentations: in the first few minutes he makes the claim that by the end of his presentations people will hate him, will want to throw him or his book up against the wall, will get angry just to listen to his rant--and they do.

But they also listen, in great part because of his talents as an orator, but also because they can't help but believe that he's not lying when he unearths the "unsettling truths" he does. 

I've heard him often enough to chart the character of his presentations. Earlier, his concern was with Native America; but on Thursday night, his concern was America itself. Both were "prophetic" in a Heschel sense, but Thursday's was, at least to this member of the audience, even more convincing. 

Just so happens we went out to dinner with him before the meeting. I'd be pleased to host him again.