Prophet and Loss

I'm thinking of the prophets of old quite a bit lately. Not any particular prophet, just the idea of them. Men (and they were almost always men) who had flown too close to the sun in a spiritual sense and found themselves so profoundly changed that they no longer had a place in society and spent all their time out in the wilderness.

Back then, they could only fulminate in hermetic solitude ranting to no one (or their livestock) about their revelations. I am picturing sweat, beards, staves, and hairshirts. They were separate because their ideas were so bat-shit insane that they made the local villagers uncomfortable and so isolation was their only real choice. Their audience was limited.

Today, these dimestore prophets make the same rants but rather than screaming into the desert air, their ideas flow into a newer kind of void: the internet. Time will tell whether they are divinely inspired, mad as a hatter, or both. I keep imagining Jeremiah's Youtube channel, Ezekiel's TikTok, Isaiah's Instagram.

"The virgin daughter of Zion hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.

Whom hast thou taunted and blasphemed? And against whom hast thou exalted thy voice? Yea, thou hast lifted up thine eyes on high, even against the Holy One of Israel!

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