Raze and Raise

Your building columnist raises hell about hell.

“Sometimes there’s hell to be raised, and other times there’s hell to be razed.” 

Rev. Julian DeShazierRev. Julian DeShazier, a young black hip hop artist, preacher and pastor of University Church at the University of Chicago, spoke at our regional church meeting last week and encourage us to raze some hell.

Hip hop is not my first language, or tenth.  I heard a fair amount of hip hop on the car radio with teenage kids, and despite my best efforts to be the hip Mom, I found myself repeating my parents’ complaining questions from 30 years earlier – “Where’s the melody?  Why are they yelling?”  (And my parents were asking about the Rolling Stones!)

But listening to Julian (hip hop name Jkwest) I did figure out that I share with these artists a love of words and word play and quirky rhymes.  The one that struck home for this decidedly un-hip hop preacher was “raise” and “raze,” especially when applied to hell.

“Raising hell” is making trouble, acting out.  When adolescents raise hell it’s often dangerous, like driving and drinking in excess.  We hope it’s just a phase and they’ll grow out of it. 

Julian said usually we Christians disapprove of hell raising.  When Jesus says, “Unless we become like children we’ll not enter kingdom of heaven” we often picture sweet little cherubic kids smiling and listening to their elders.  No hell raising there. 

But he told the story of going to a discount clothes store with his wife and young son and seeing some other kids, not at all cherubic, but rather tired and frustrated waiting for their shopping parents.  The kids were tugging at the massive racks of cheap child-labor clothes, pulling stuff off, crying in frustration.  Julian identified with those kids and imagined maybe Jesus meant this kind of child could also show us what God’s kingdom is like.  Kids who are “bad,” disobedient, who want to be outdoors and free.  They let their parents know by pulling some stuff down.  We all remember that frustration, wanting to be free of stuff and expectation. 

Maybe, he suggested, God wants us to be like those kids too, raze a little hell, say no sometimes to decorum and expectation?

Notice Julian’s word play?  He surely knew that we mostly white Californian Christians, as hip and liberal as we were, were not going to sign up for hell raising as our Christian duty.  So he did a nice quick hip hop turn of phrase and said he meant that we, like those kids, should raze some hell.  We should be tearing down, like those clothes racks, the structures of injustice that are hell to the poor and even the rich.

Small diversion into some word derivation: (This is me, I’m not sure hip hop artists consult etymology.com, maybe they do.)

-“raise” comes from rise, and even rear – to bring up, come up, lift up.

-“raze” – comes from a totally different word, to scrape, like razor, and has come to mean to demolish or destroy.

So raise is good, right?   Bring up, rear a child.  And raze must be bad, demolish, destroy.

No, more complex than that.  Remember Picasso said, “Every act of construction begins with destruction.”

And what exactly is the hell that we are raising or razing?

I looked for the history of the phrase “raising hell” and it’s pretty vague.  A more common phrase with a similar meaning is “raising Cain.”  It seems that Cain, the Biblical first murderer, embodies the hellish - chaos, being bad, disobedient.  You could say that Cain was hell’s first resident (if you are a Biblical literalist, both about Cain and hell.)

In addition, etymologists say that the “raise” part of the phrase raising hell or raising Cain is not really raise like rise up or rear, but “summon or cause a spirit to appear,” like “raise the specter” of something.

So the first phrase, raising hell, means summoning up the spirit of hellishness, a spirt of chaos and lawlessness, personified in a person (Cain) or a place (the realm known as hell.)  I know I as a teenager enjoyed summoning up the spirit of hellishness.

But hell in the second phrase is different.  If you “raze” hell you are talking about a structure, hell is a structure or a building.  Julian was telling us that some buildings are so bad, so corrupt, so hellish, they need to be razed, torn down.

Could this distinction apply to this week’s political news?  One might say that the crazy populist forces behind Trump and Brexit are hell raisers, lawless lovers of chaos who summon up (successfully) our disobedient ignoble natures. 

And Clinton, and those behind Remain – maybe they are trying to raze hell.  Not hell as a place over there, on the other side of the wall, scary demonic others, immigrants and Muslims.  But hell as structures.   That systemic hell must be torn down, and then rebuilt as something different.  Would the Remainers say that, granted, the EU has problems, needs some tearing down and some rebuilding, but not totally rejected? Here in the US both Sanders and Clinton have been saying we need to raze some walls and structures of inequality, not build up Trump’s new walls.

Trump does seem like an adolescent hell raisers.  Kasich tried to sell himself as the only adult in the room, and got 3% of the vote. 

But it is old folks who are acting adolescent, voting for Trump and for Brexit.  The young polled that they want to stay and rebuild – are they just more mature than their elders?  Why don’t more of the young vote, for Brexit, for Sanders?  Is voting just a futile old attempt at shoring up a building that needs just to be razed and rebuilt? 

I fear for our nations and for crumbling structures.  We’re already living in hell.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter