Exodus

We need to get out, W. says. We need to leave, just leave. Have I ever felt that?, he asks me. No, of course not. I lack the vision. I lack a sense of the horizon, and what is beyond the horizon. I lack thirst. I lack hunger – spiritual hunger.

My frustration is never expansive, as W.'s is. It never takes, as its object, the whole of my existence; never gives unto that sense of abandonment that makes of the world, and the things of the world a series of illusions. 

Oh, he knows I have a Hindu sense that time is a circle, and the world will be destroyed and remade anew, but I don't have the Christian sense of wanting to escape, of making the exodus to a promised land. Exodus … why does W. find this word so moving? Exile … Expulsion … He knows about these things. He knows what it is to be outside, to be excluded.

Didn't he lose his job last year? Wasn't he cast out, into the outer darkness? And now he has been reinstated – now his redundancy has been rescinded – hasn't he come to understand that the experience of being inside and at work does not surmount, but carries with it the whirlwind from which he has escaped? That at any moment it might happen again, his expulsion, his exile that, in each case, are only the mirror of a larger expulsion and a greater exile: of that Fall which is at the root of the Christian conception of things.

For the Christian (for Kierkegaard), we are fallen. We are sinners. But our despair must also be the ground of hope. It is a sign of what we have lost, and what we might find again. This is why exile, for him, is also an Exodus; why the promise of paradise has awoken in him.