Renegades pay a price: Christ was crucified, Dr. King was assassinated, Mother Teresa lived among the lepers, Lincoln was hated, Gandhi was killed, Monet was destitute, and Whitman was the lonely spokesman of body and soul. These icons did not “heap up what is called riches” (Sec. 11 of "Song of the Open Road"). These heroes received “an irresistible call to depart,” and they were treated with “ironical smiles and mocking.” The call to become a renegade isn’t enjoyable; it’s not made easy. Jessie’s judgment upon the inwardly tortured Whitman opens the conversation to the meaning of Whitman’s call, the truths in Whitman’s poems. The end result has been realized: to be a renegade is to pay a heavy price. But this realization only begs the question, what is to be renegade?
Urban affection seems to characterize Walt Whitman. As he traveled through the hospital tents during the war he lavished his love upon numerous wounded soldiers. But urban affection does not encompass the “destructive” way of all renegades; it does not capture the common voyage of all artists, the voyage to the “untold want.” To discover Whitman’s underlying principal the other heroes must be dissected. The field of renegades is wide. Gandhi, for example, did not write an awe-inspiring novel or book of verse, but Whitman would undoubtedly laud him. Dr. King tormented racism with civil disobedience. Mother Teresa, despite all that is in human nature, literally gave up her life for lepers. Christ was appalled at the “jeering” (“Song of Myself” pg. 41) of the religious elite to the adulteress. Monet’s revolutionary strokes challenged the traditional norm of painting, a norm that had stood firm since the Renaissance. Lincoln, a figure to whom Whitman wrote numerous poems, sacrificed public image for the unification of a nation.
So much of Western culture is directed towards the self. When you sit down to watch television you are bombarded with advertisements that say you should lose weight, you should eat McDonalds, you should work out more, you should drink Starbucks coffee, you should buy an Apple computer, or you should go the Cubs game. The ironic and circular nature of such advertisements is that they promote the trivial “well being” only to the point that the seller’s well being is fulfilled. We are engaged in a cycle of self-satisfaction. We are constantly indulging in every possible fantasy in search of the “untold want.” We pursue sexual gratification, monetary stability, and traditional ideals in the hope that we may be filled. Whitman challenges these traditional modes of pursuit and proposes a deeper calling to life, a higher nobility crucial to the existence of mankind. The heroes mentioned earlier are pitted against such a cycle. Because of their passion they stand above such hopelessness. Their passion exists outside of their own desires. Renegades have passion for something outside themselves; they long for something deeper.
But, as Whitman would have it, the conversation does not stop here. Like most conclusions this one has only brought more questions: Why? Why do these renegades have passion? How do they see outside themselves?
I'm supposed to be a writer. I'm supposed to write to America, the country I love. (Please, if in the years to come this doesn't happen, don't quote me. I know God leaves things subject to change.) People here have been told time after time that money and sex and drugs won't make you happen. But they don't really change. Maybe the 50's was a time when they thought they had changed. But really the same thing went on and nobody said anything. People still did drugs and had sex and aborted babies and put needles in their bodies and dropped small white pills in their mouths. Fitzgerald tried to tell people in America that big houses don't fill empty hearts. They refused to listen. They refuse to listen. We refuse to listen. How do I make us listen?
In an amazing scene in The Great Gatsby we see the terror of the American Dream come to corrupted fruition. Gatsby knows he is going to die. He puts a mattress on his shoulder (just as Christ put the cross on his back) and walks to the pool, where he is shot. "The holocaust was complete."
That's what it is. It's a holocaust. It weighs people down. It weighs you down, doesn't it? It weighs me down like Atlas. Everything on the TV and in the classroom and on the internet tells me to take care of myself. It tells me that money will put a smile on my face. It tells me that money will put a smile on my wife's face. That's bullshit. All of it. There are six billion people on this earth, how many of them do you think about? I think about one. I think about the 19-year-old who stares back at me every day. You know part of the reason we do this? A small fragment of the eternal nature of mankind? We are afraid. We don't want to be renegades. We all slide in to our pathetic subcultures and fall asleep, never to wake up.
God says feed the poor. God says take care of them. What do you do for the poor? What do I do? We say we care about things but then we don't do anything. Forgive me if you actually take action for people who can't take action themselves. I know that there are amazing people (Americans, Christians, and even Republicans) who care for the poor so much more than I do. But as I challenge you I challenge me. We need to wake up, but before we do we need to realize that when we wake up it won't be pretty. We'll lose our lives or our dreams if we decide to be renegades for Christ. But we gain His Kingdom. We gain the privilege to bask in the glorious intimacy of our father. So I challenge you, I challenge me, to take the Bible in hand and read it like a book that is alive and morphing to the demands of our culture. The church is leaving America, my friends. But that doesn't mean we should curl up and pretend like culture doesn't exist. Let us join our Lord in the pursuit of love.
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