The body of Christ blocked traffic. It “read a litany of regime abuses, handed out leaflets signed ‘Movement against Torture,’ and sang,” according to William T. Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist, his 1998 book analyzing the church’s responses to the Pinochet regime. That day, twenty-four of the seventy nuns, priests, and laypersons who constituted the body of Christ were arrested.1

Above: “Disappear” by annalisa ceolin. Used by permission.

Two months later, the regime disappeared two children. Their father, in an act of protest and despondency, set himself on fire at the foot of a cathedral’s outdoor cross, confessing his sin to a priest who was drawn to the flames. The Movement against Torture, first seen exposing the prison, took on the parent’s name, becoming the Sebastián Acevedo Movement against Torture.

The movement grew to include more people than just Christians, and it was considered secular—that is, not an official part of the Chilean Catholic church. More sitings of this augmented body of Christ, sometimes involving close to 150 people, followed its initial prison appearance. Each of the body’s appearances, Cavanaugh says, was liturgical:

Until the Movement began, public denunciation of torture had been carried on primarily at the level of words and in doomed judicial proceedings. What was so different and disruptive about the Sebastián Acevedo Movement was its sense of liturgy . . .”2

In liturgy, symbolism matters, and “locations were chosen for their symbolic importance”—locations like courts, media centers, and more clandestine prisons. Also liturgical were the movement’s activities. Members might sing or they might read or recite a litany of the injustices surrounding a particular person’s disappearance.

Above: A stumbling sticker, designed by Sushmita Mazumdar, on an Arlington County, Virginia sidewalk indicating where ICE abducted an Arlington resident.

How have churches in the United States responded to their neighbors’ removals, and in some cases, enforced disappearance, refoulement, and subjection to state-sponsored violence in third countries?3

One church in Arlington, Virginia, recently participated in street liturgies on spots where masked ICE agents had abducted seven of its neighbors.

Arlington Presbyterian Church’s pastor, Ashley Goff, worked on the idea with an Arlington artist, Sushmita Mazumdar. Mazumdar and Goff drew on their past attendance at the installation of some of Arlington’s stumbling stones, small plaques honoring African Americans who had been enslaved where the plaques had been installed.

Arlington’s stumbling-stone initiative, in turn, was inspired by Germany’s Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” small plaques installed in front of over 70,000 Holocaust victims’ last-known residences.

Mazumdar designed stumbling stickers commemorating Arlington’s disappeared neighbors, and Goff wrote the brief ceremony for placing the stickers on or near the spots where Arlington neighbors were seen being disappeared or last seen before they were disappeared.

Excerpts from my interview of Suzi Wackerbarth,4 a member of Arlington Presbyterian Church who attended one of the ceremonies, suggest the ceremonies’ mix of prepared text and participant interaction:

The “stumbling” in stumbling stones implies a pedestrian’s initial physical interaction with the stones, which have offended far-right sensibilities here and in Germany. Gunter Demnig, the artist who creates the plaques in Germany, explains the “stumbling” reference: “You won’t fall. But if you stumble and look, you must bow down with your head and your heart.”5 This posture of curiosity and reverence applies to Arlington’s stumbling stickers, too.

The “stumbling” also suggests Isaiah’s “. . . he shall be . . .for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offense,” the prophet’s metaphor of a stone just below our line of sight that trips us.6 Isaiah’s rock of offense is often associated in Christian teachings with the Psalmist’s “stone which the builders refused” that becomes “the head stone of the corner,” or the “chief cornerstone.”7

Arlington’s stumbling stones keep us from forgetting the past. And Arlington’s stumbling stickers keep us from ignoring the present. Part of Goff’s liturgy makes this clear in the ceremony performed at the spot of each abduction:

A person was taken. A family was harmed. Neighbors faced fear.

We mark this place in mourning and protest – so this story is not erased. So ICE does not get the last word.

Arlington’s stumbling stones and stumbling stickers, as well as the ceremonies installing them, give public witness to the justice promised in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for those marginalized, imprisoned, or killed by the powerful or by the rich.

Power and wealth have gradually affected our culture’s receptivity to liturgy. The influential liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh complains that liturgy today, “hemmed in by state sacrality on one side and bourgeois profanity on the other, . . . attracts few and generates obsessive neuroses even among these.”8 Why not, then, let liturgy spill over into the streets, as it used to?9 Let it trip up and offend what Kavanagh here identifies as the worship of the nation-state and the concomitant and profane privacy of the bourgeois.

Street liturgy as some citizens of Arlington practice it not only helps to keep us from forgetting our disappeared neighbors. It also helps to keep us from disappearing from public space and from permitting rulers to dominate there instead. So by participating in street liturgy, we renew our public lives together as stumbling stones, as rocks of offense.

Above: “Venice disappear” by by annalisa ceolin. Used by permission.

The appearances of Christ’s body in Santiago were always quick, lasting usually “no more than five or ten minutes,” Cavanaugh says.10 They were even quicker if the police arrested the body’s members before they disappeared into the crowds or the street traffic.

But before the movement began, the body of Christ had been slow. Its first public appearance in front of the clandestine prison came a full decade after Pinochet’s CIA-supported coup. By 1983, most of the regime’s 3,216 murders and enforced disappearances had already happened.11 Church leaders and other members had done a lot of brave things, but they usually acted individually and through channels that the state had allowed to remain open for individuals or leaders to communicate with the regime.

The reason for the slowness? The body of Christ in Chile had not come to terms with who it was. Put in more academic language, it had to unlearn “a set of ecclesiological presuppositions firmly engrained in the Chilean Catholic church,” Cavanaugh says.12

Starting in the 1930s, due to the spread of Catholic Action, the encyclicals of Pope Pius XI, and the writings of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the Chilean church had come to understand itself as what it called a mystical body. Cavanaugh summarizes this self-understanding:

The Kingdom hovers above history, entering it only in the soul. Christians enter the temporal world as individuals; the church does not act as a body in the temporal realm. The church does not have a political body but only a religious body, a mystical body, which unites all Christians above the rough and tumble of the temporal.13

During the early years of Pinochet’s regime, the church therefore worked for “a mystical communion of Chileans above the party political fray,” a goal that coincided with the regime’s own goal—a united, depoliticized Chile. Consequently,

. . . the church’s stress on subsuming conflict into the organic unit of Chile had the effect of causing the church to identify its own interests with those of the nation-state.14

In fact, the church’s “. . . bishops assumed that the church and state stood in organic relationship as the twin guardians of the Chilean national heritage. The bishops assumed the imagination of the nation-state . . .”15 The church in Chile saw the junta as the nation-state’s body and itself as its soul.16 It fell into line with the nation-state imaginary.

This imaginary leads to rationalizations about disappearance and torture. “Torture isn’t everything,” one Chilean bishop argued, reasoning that focusing on the regime’s excesses would detract from its “accomplishments in achieving order.”17 One major 1975 statement by Chilean bishops claimed that “Jesus was a patriot.” Had Jesus lived in Chile, the statement reads, he would have been “one hundred percent Chilean . . . an authentic son of our people and our land.”18

But “the pedagogy of terror,” Cavanaugh writes, began to teach the Chilean church “how to be oppressed and thus become incarnate in opposition to the state.”

As long as the church limits itself to the care of people’s souls and supports the state’s claimed authority over people’s bodies, it submits to the nation-state imaginary and to the disappearance of itself “as a visible, social body.”19

But the Bible teaches that soul and body can’t be placed under separate sovereignties. The body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” and belongs to God.20 Disappearance and torture contest God’s claim to bodies.

Disappearance isn’t just an attempt by the state to enforce its imaginary territorial boundaries against immigration, which according to the Torah, is bad enough.21 It’s also an attempt to control its population from both a juridical and a psychological perspective.

From a juridical perspective, disappearances accustom a state’s population to the state’s claims that even within its borders, it may act lawlessly. The state starts its descent from the rule of law by asserting sovereignty over people who the state claims have no rights. Hannah Arendt describes this tactic as the first step to totalitarianism:

The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done . . . by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness . . .22

Many American Christians are taken in by this nation-state imaginary. They reason that, while the Bible specifically commands us to treat aliens as we would natural-born citizens,23 the logic of the nation-state trumps the Bible. “Face it: we live in a nation,” many Christians reason. “Fundamental to its sovereignty is the enforcement of its borders against undesirable immigrants.” But Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection demonstrate that only God is sovereign. In addition, the example of my ancestors and those of many others—people who came to America without the original inhabitants’ permission—should also make us question the nation-state’s logic from the perspective of both history and hypocrisy.

Once the state’s lawless conduct to a segment of its population is accepted, more segments become unprotected by law, as Arendt points out.24 One better understands German Christians singing in church as the gas chambers killed their Jewish neighbors.

Beyond its deleterious effects on a polity’s expectation of justice and the rule of law, disappearance by the state is a form of psychological control, and not just of those who are disappeared, as Cavanaugh explains:

The very occult nature of disappearance—the way it obfuscates knowledge of what is really going on—augments the fear and anxiety which separates people from each other. Disappearance works to discipline the family and friends of the victim. The relatives of disappeared persons, with no body to prove what has happened, live in a limbo world between fantasy and reality. On the one hand, to believe that the person is still alive is to prolong visions of torment to which the victim has undoubtedly been subjected. . . .

On the other hand, to decide to assume the disappeared person is dead is, in effect, to kill him in one’s own mind. In the face of official denials, the death becomes the family’s own invention. The dilemma is exceedingly cruel. It disturbs the normal processes of grief and mourning, and it often succeeds in buying the silence of the victim’s family and friends. Unable to know the whereabouts of the victim and thus unable to give up hope, hope is controlled for the regime’s purposes, as the relatives cooperate with the authorities for fear that their actions could bring reprisals on their loved ones.25

Kashmir mothers and wives protesting the enforced disappearances by the Indian government, however, treat their missing sons and husbands as if they were dead—in part because they almost certainly are. In monthly protests, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) often practices what anthropology professor Ather Zia calls “affective politics,” which is “a ritualistic public mourning, marked alternately by funereal silence and lamentation for the disappeared men.”26

By identifying themselves as mourners, these Muslim women create a culturally acceptable way of appearing in public spaces traditionally filled by only men. Their lamentation also “becomes part of the counterspectacle to the spectacle of enforced disappearances.”27

While Zia focuses on protest in terms of spectacle and counterspectacle, Cavanaugh focuses on protest in terms of liturgy and anti-liturgy. Cavanaugh understands disappearings and torture as a form of “perverse liturgy”:

Torture is liturgy—or, perhaps better said, “anti-liturgy”—because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power. It is essential to this ritual enactment that it not be public . . .28

But the imaginary of the Eucharist is different from the nation-state imaginary of disappearance and torture. The ritual of the Eucharist is public, not private. It involves a body’s appearance—the appearance of the body of Christ—not its disappearance. This is true even though “Christianity itself is founded in a disappearance,” as Cavanaugh points out in his book’s last paragraph:

The tomb is empty, the body is gone. At Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), Jesus blesses bread, breaks it, and gives it to His companions, but then vanishes from their sight. And yet the disappearance is not the last word.29

Disappearance is not the last word. This is the message of the street liturgies performed by Kashmir’s APDP and by Chile’s Sebastián Acevedo Movement against Torture. It’s also the message of the simple street liturgy performed recently at seven spots in Arlington where neighbors had been disappeared.

There will come a day. And as Paul never tires of reminding us, the presence of Christ’s body demonstrates that the day has also come.

Any appropriate and effective street liturgy for the disappeared will be influenced by a host of factors. The legality and social acceptance of protest, for instance, differed in Chile, Kashmir, and Arlington. The relationship of the protestors to the disappeared—fellow citizens in Chile, husbands and sons in Kashmir, and neighbors in Arlington—also differed. The culture’s religious dynamics and the protesters’ religious backgrounds and affiliations, of course, also matter a great deal.

But here’s a working model. It’s inspired by Imagining Argentina, a novel about Argentina’s 1970s-era disappearings. In it, after Carlos Rueda’s wife is disappeared, he gains powers of imagination to see into the struggles and sometimes the fates of many of those that Argentina’s regime disappeared from Buenos Aires. In one scene, Carlos is tempted while swimming to accept the generals’ narrative and to surrender to the current’s downward pull. But he realizes then that his death would also kill his wife, wherever she is. That’s because, at that point in the novel’s more faithful narrative, she was alive only in his imagination.

Imagining Argentina isn’t a “Christian” novel. But it speaks to the power of our collective imagination to involve ourselves in “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God,”30 including the imaginaries of nation-states.

This liturgy is written mostly in a Christian idiom because I’m immersed in that tradition. You might revise it for your own tradition, circumstances, and proposed action. I hope the occasion of revising it will lead to some fruitful discussion and action.

We come today to grieve,
to protest, and to demonstrate
the kingdom of God together.
The rulers of darkness
and their human clients31
have disappeared our neighbor[s]
[name the name or names].

[Sing a song together]

If you know our missing neighbors,
please share something about them
if you’d like to.

[Space for sharing]

We’ll be silent for a minute
and pray for our missing neighbors
and for their families and friends
and neighbors who love them.

[Silence and individual prayer]

If you’d like to, please lead us
in a prayer for our disappeared
neighbors and for our community.

[Space for public prayer]

We are here to stand and walk
in the public world we imagine,
a world in which neighbors
appear in public together
to care for one another
and for the earth.

We imagine a people who love
the immigrants among them,32 a people
who don’t disappear into their homes
when their neighbors disappear
from their own homes.

We also acknowledge and decry
the injustice of disappearings
and the harm they do
to our neighbors and to our community.
Sometimes we fear the worst
for our neighbors and for our community.
But we say that the worst
isn’t the first or the last.

So we climb the mountain together
where Moses and Elijah
—those who disappeared—
conferred with him who would
also disappear from a tomb.33

We stand together in that place
of death and disappearance where
Mary’s first question to Jesus
was “Where have you taken him?”
and where Jesus’ response
was “Mary.”34

So we say our missing
neighbors’ names again, too.
[name the name or names].

We may not know
where our neighbors are
or how they fare
or what is happening to them,
but you know them, Lord,
and their names remain on our lips.
Their lives stay here in our hearts.

We cry out, Lord, for your mercy.
We cry out for justice for our
neighbors. And as part of that justice,
we pledge to support our neighbors
who remain and whose lives
have been disrupted by disappearings
or by the threat of being taken.

[Network and organize
to help our community.]

Besides protest and public liturgy, we have many other nonviolent ways to support our neighbors threatened by the prospect of deportation or of being disappeared (or both). I’ve volunteered for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. Your state may have a comparable organization. Court watching is also supportive, and the Public Spaces podcast will have an episode on this soon.

Amica Center for Immigrant Rights (amicacenter.org) organizes visits to jails, staffs a detention hotline, and provides interpreters for the preparation of court cases. They also need help with letter writing, research, and transcription.

In Northern Virginia, La ColectiVA (lacolectiva.org), “an inclusive collaborative led by gentle Latinx who are committed to upholding social justice and equity,” organizes the community to, among other things, discourage ICE activities in Arlington and improve conditions at the ICE detention center in Farmville, Virginia.

Chicago is now the focus ICE arrests, and community members there have developed many nonviolent methods for supporting one another. Charlotte and Raleigh, too, have responded with creativity to recent ICE violence and disappearings.

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Above: “ghosts” by Patrick Marioné. Used by permission. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

We might point fledgling American democracy movements to, for instance, Francesca Polletta's Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, a book examining the innovations and flaws of several twentieth-century political movements. Or we might cite the successes and failures of our own century's movements by suggesting Vincent Bevins's 2023 book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. (So much sign waving, so little change, it seems.)

I've done this—given a movement a book. Last year, when my wife Victoria and I interviewed a student marshal at George Washington University's pro-Palestinian encampment, I donated Marci Shore's 2017 The Ukrainian Night, a sympathetic but honest portrayal of the Maidan Revolution's occupation of Kiev’s central square, to the encampment's library tent. I wanted them to see how their small student occupation could grow into a revolution.

Of course, so much scholarly work on political movements—movements either stateside or abroad—uncritically assumes what success and failure look like. They often focus on strategies and tactics relative to the movements' concrete and near-term goals, some set by the movements, but some inferred by the movements’ observers. Did an over-reliance on social media keep a movement from developing internal working relationships and eventually from overthrowing an unjust regime? Did its failure to develop leadership—indeed, did its principled rejection of any leadership—muddle a movement’s public message, causing it to miss its moment? Up to a point, questions like these fascinate me.

Sometimes, though, it’s important to see beyond a group's stated or presumed ends. Sometimes it takes decades to adequately take in a political movement's results. Nathan Schneider points out, for instance, that the eighteenth-century Pietist movement and its self-sufficient communities eventually outdid the Norwegian state at the state's own work, leading two centuries later to Norway's social democracy.2 And Rebecca Solnit likes to quote a Chinese official who, a few decades ago, was asked what he thought about the French Revolution. His response: "Too soon to tell."3

It's important also to assess a political movement not only by its effects on a government or on a polity's social consciousness but also by how it changes the lives of its participants. Shore's book gives an example, a quote from Jurko Prochasko:

There would never be a successful revolution were it not for the feeling that idealism lives not only in me, but also in him, and also in her, and also in her, and so on and so on . . . A wonderful discovery of what a person is capable of. It utterly, utterly changes a person. And afterwards, of course, there returns Alltäglichkeit and minor annoyances. Someone bumps into me on the street—“Hey, what are you doing? Look where you’re going!” “Look where you’re going yourself!” This is the return to normal life. But the experience of people’s revealing themselves as possessing such expansive souls—this cannot be replaced by anything else and cannot be bought for any price.4

Several such quotes come from interviews published in Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, an influential 2006 book (also worthy of an encampment’s library tent) edited by organizer and movement historian, Marina Sitrin. Here's one from Paula, a member of a feminist collective about the effects of the assemblies that sprung up after Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse:

If the assemblies disappeared, it wouldn't be so terrible. I say this because there's something happening in people right now—a real change. And this is really important for building whatever kind of future—it doesn't matter what kind exactly. I think the most important thing, with respect to the neighborhood assemblies, is that they've created a profound change in people's subjectivity. People who believed they were never going to do anything again, all of a sudden did. This is especially important considering our society, which teaches us that nothing done collectively matters, and that the only important thing is the individual. Just the fact that people have started to realize they can do things collectively is really important.5

It's nice to have access to well-resourced library tents, not to mention the advice and support of elders and veterans of past movements, but political movements and the people in them must find their own way. Sitrin understood this when she joined Occupy Wall Street's (OWS's) 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park/Liberty Square. She pointed out to Schneider, who had also joined the occupation, that the movement's early insistence on having real consensus in a park the size of a city block was untenable, "especially with so many new people." OWS would need a spokes counsel. But Schneider reasoned—and presumably Sitrin, after having edited Horizontalism, agreed with him—that the Occupy movement wasn't yet ready to change:

. . . with just a few weeks of practice, most people in general assemblies in New York and across the country were still just getting the hang of it, and they wouldn't let it go easily. Once one became converted to the GA's [general assembly's] power, once one had twinkled one's fingers6 with so many hundreds of others, the process became a precious ritual, the performance of which came before all else, because it was a harbinger of the future, a bulwark against compromises with the past.7

Such a tension between a compromised past and a promising future may suggest a simplistic generational impasse: older people offer advice, but younger people don't take it; younger people want a new world, but older people quote Ecclesiastes: "there is nothing new under the sun."8 For sure, we should learn from our elders. But the young are more right: a new political world is coming, and the only way to learn about it is to live in it now. Ponder the Norwegian Pietist movement.

The tension in some of these movements, then, isn't so much generational as it is prefigurative. A prefigurative movement "attempts to reflect political goals or values in social movement processes."9 A prefigurative movement, in other words, models its desired future. Their means are their desired ends.

The notion that we learn best from others' experience is grounded in (among other things) a more typical means-and-ends dichotomy. What are the best means to a well-defined future? John Locke, for instance, tells us how we may act in response to a recalcitrant government, such as a tyranny, that won't respect or defend our rights to life, liberty, and property. Karl Marx tells us how to get to a classless society where everyone owns the means of production. Neither Locke nor Marx, though, offers means to their respective ends that involve living out those ends. "The ends justify the means" means, of course, that the ends aren't the means. But a prefigurative movement realizes its desired future by living it out in the present.

Paul understands Jesus's assemblies as part of such a prefigurative movement. Paul's notion of the "final ‘kingdom of God’ is the whole world," N. T. Wright tells us, "rescued at last from corruption and decay, and living under the sovereign rule of God, exercised through the Messiah’s people . . ."10 If God promises to Moses that "all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord,"11 then Messiah’s assemblies, Paul suggests, constitute that fullness now:

Yes: God has "put all things under his feet," and has given [Jesus] to the church as the head over all. The church is his body; it is the fullness of the one who fills all in all.12

The church is the fulness of God who promises to fill the earth, Paul says. The church is the now of the now-and-not-yet reign of justice and peace.

But even before the church understood its goals (see the apostles' last Q&A with Jesus before his ascension13), the church began to enjoy its public life together. The teach-ins, the shared food, the prayer, the new public fellowship, the daily occupation of a portion of the temple courtyard as a people's assembly (as theologian Richard A. Horsley puts it)14—the church in Acts 2 reminds me of the GW encampment. For the early church, the process was the product. The present modeled the future.

Initially, OWS didn't really have goals, either. Before the occupation, "some wanted regulation, others revolution," Schneider says. Everyone did agree, however, on "the fantasy of crowds filling the area around Wall Street and staying until they overthrew the corporate oligarchy, or until they were driven out."15 But a few weeks into its occupation of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, OWS knew what it wanted, and it didn't involve Wall Street, at least not directly. Its means had become its goal. "The demand, so far, was simply the right to carry out a process—one in which people could speak and money could not,” Schneider says.16 Its Principles of Solidarity turned out to be "all matters of method." Schneider's conclusion:

. . . the occupation's first step was to make the experience an end in itself, while also prefigurative, while also inviting.17

Schneider noticed the same prefigurative emphasis in contemporaneous interviews he saw of the Arab Spring revolutionaries:

Experts in the United States were satisfied with attributing the uprisings to global food prices and Twitter, but the revolutionaries themselves didn't use the language of economic or technological determinism. In interviews, they seemed instead to talk about having rediscovered their agency, their collective power, their ability to act.18

Americans were once famous for their public freedom—for their collective power and their ability to act.19 In this sense, the Americans' revolutionary goal of public freedom made the march to revolution a prefigurative movement. Before and to some extent after the American Revolution, citizens practiced their desired future. After he toured America in the early 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville summarized how Americans prepared for political action:

The citizen of the United States does not acquire his practical science and his positive notions from books; the instruction he has acquired may have prepared him for receiving those ideas, but it did not furnish them. The American learns to know the laws by participating in the act of legislation; and he takes a lesson in the forms of government from governing.20

The goal of the American colonists and, later, of United States citizens was also their means, which was public freedom. They didn't have to learn it from books because they lived it.

But what about the role of political theorists, such as Locke? Didn't Locke's treatises teach Americans the means to their desired revolutionary end? Locke's theory of social compact was one of his means to the goal of protecting life, liberty, and property from government, but Hannah Arendt thinks the Americans taught Locke, and not the other way around. She thinks Locke learned his compact theory by learning about the colonists' democratic process in New England’s townships.21

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the politics of the New England township meetings "the school of the people, the game which every one of them learns to play."22 Emerson suggests that to learn and keep public freedom, we have to practice it.

Emerson's analogy of participatory politics to a game plays particularly well in Occupy Wall Street and some other prefigurative movements, such as the early church. In these prefigurative movements, the goals aren't set in stone beforehand and then lived out, as in many other prefigurative movements. Instead, such a movement's political life together modifies its desired future. Dan Swain calls prefiguration with fixed goals "ends-guided prefiguration." He calls prefiguration with provisional goals—goals that shift, informed by the movement members' political life together—"ends-effacing prefiguration."23 This second kind of prefigurative movement, Swain suggests, can be better understood by observing how children play.

By observing, that is, how children play without adult involvement. I'm not talking about Little League, travel league, and high-school league games and tournaments. In these games, the rules are fixed, and the object is to win. Parents drive their kids to practice and often scream their encouragement and critiques at their kids (and the refs) during the games.

Instead, ends-effacing prefiguration movements are like children playing games without their elders' interference. As sociologist Richard Sennett explains, the rules in such games are negotiated before and even during the games to reward risk, to promote equity, and to involve everyone. Their creativity comes collectively when they pause a game to adjust the rules, and they naturally gain a predisposition to participating in public life:

[Children] invest a great deal of passion in an impersonal situation governed by rules, and . . . think of expression in the situation as a matter of the remaking and the perfecting of those rules to give greater pleasure and promote greater sociability with others.24

For children, Sennett points out, creating, implementing, and revising a game’s rules are more important than winning the game. The public process is the public product, and the process isn't fixed.

Sennett calls such unsupervised games "social compacts" that allow for simultaneous frustration, sustained attention, and "some pleasure."25 Victoria recalls this mix of frustration, attention, and pleasure during her years watching her early elementary Montessori students negotiate the rules of games during recess. When the frustration got too great, Victoria would intervene, but only to encourage them to renegotiate the rules:

Victoria's students would renegotiate the rules for games such as marbles and soccer. Or they’d make up games entirely, including the rules. Older kids handicapped themselves, requiring themselves to kick the ball from a farther distance than the younger kids or allowing themselves fewer opportunities to score than had the younger kids. But as Victoria and I discuss here, rules would have to be followed or renegotiated for imaginative play as well:

Rules create the self-distance and the sociability that Sennett contrasts to our current individualistic adult culture. The children's shifting rules create self-distance since each negotiator doesn't focus on winning an advantage. Instead, rules become more and more complex in order to extend the game. This "malleability of rules," Sennett says, "creates a social bond."26

One can see similarities among the social compacts of children's play and the social compacts of the 550 New England township assemblies that were functioning in 177627 as well as in the Occupy movement's general assemblies in 2011. All involved public freedom—the group’s process and the individual’s agency, which Argentinians interviewed in Horizontalism call protagonism.

Similar to children at play without adult interference, people in prefigurative political movements rediscover the social bonds caused by the renegotiation of procedural rules to foster a more equitable democracy. A movement's means (public freedom) subsumes and refines its original goal (some fixed vision of social or political winning) as members live out that goal in public freedom. Like Victoria’s elementary children, they learn self-distance and, paradoxically, discover themselves by developing and operating in these new, self-distancing civic procedures.

Sitrin's book includes much corroborating testimony of self-discovery as part of Argentina's prefigurative revolutionary movements, including its movement of unemployed workers. Here's Martin K., speaking of his experience in a neighborhood assembly:

We're creating new ways of relating to one another. No one knows exactly how to do it. It's a collective process. No one's going to come and tell us how to do it, and it's exactly this process that is so beautiful. . . . I believe that there's more creative protagonism when there isn't so much focus on the individual. I say this, in part, because the person I am today isn't who I used to be. I'm still getting to know myself, and undergoing an existential transformation that's teaching me a different way of being in the world. I changed my relationship with the world, and because I'm basically in another world, I live differently, I see differently, and I can understand society differently.28

Swain says that ends-effacing prefiguration is like children playing at adult roles. Movement members, "in a sense, assume that something is possible before it is, in order to help make it so."29 In such a revolutionary account, whether a movement "wins" or "loses" means as little, ultimately, as whether children acting within their game's social contract win or lose. In such games, the children (in Swain’s analogy, the present movement) play at and experiment toward adulthood (the desired but provisional future). This relationship between present and future is not one of cause and effect but involves what Swain calls "messianic and eschatological notions of time":

. . . the individual, earthly event is not regarded as a definitive self-sufficient reality, nor as a link in a chain of development in which single events or combinations of events perpetually give rise to new events, but viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection with a divine order which encompasses it, which on some future day will itself be concrete reality.30

This messianic and eschatological notion of time exists also, of course, in the New Testament's political and religious movement, the kingdom of God. One thinks of Jesus equating the kingdom of God to children:

They brought children for him to lay his hands on them with prayer. The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me; do not try to stop them; for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” And he laid his hands on the children, and went on his way.31

We, too, will lay our hands on our children as they go into a public life and pursue ends that neither they nor we can fully know or imagine. And then, like Jesus, we'll remove our hands and go on our way.

Discussion Questions

1. Outside of scripture, what role have any specific books or other writings had in helping any communities of which you’ve been a member to function differently?

2. What have been your favorite political or social movements in your country’s history? What did they do well? What mistakes did they make? What obstacles or setbacks did they face? Were they ultimately effective in ways they might not have imagined beforehand?

3. Some people quoted in this article speak of entering another world. Describe the world you would like to participate in creating with others. How could your movement live in it as you create it together?

4. What’s keeping you from participating in creating it?

5. Are prefigurative political movements impractical?

6. Why do you think movements such as Argentina’s movement of unemployed workers in 2001 and the Occupy movement in 2011 became so taken with their own developing democratic process?

7. Generally speaking, do a group’s ends justify its means? In specific cases, have they?

8. Consider the book of Acts. How did the church begin to grow into its mission as set out at the book’s outset (Acts 1:8)? In the process, how did its mission shift?

9. Would Tocqueville or Emerson be able to make the same claims about the practice of American public freedom today that they made in the nineteenth century?

10. What’s the distinction between what Dan Swain calls “ends-guided prefiguration” and “ends-effacing prefiguration”? Is Swain onto something by comparing the latter to children playing at adult roles?

11. Do children get enough experience in unstructured playtime today? If not, how might that lack impact how prepared they will be as adults to live public lives?

12. How has your relationship with your children changed since they’ve become adults? Or how has your relationship with your parents changed since you’ve become an adult?

13. Do you sense a public calling you might have that you think might frighten or disturb certain friends or family members if they knew you were considering it?

Note: I admit that the following is a peculiar street liturgy—peculiar in the sense of particular if you can imagine using it once or twice, and peculiar in the sense of strange if you can’t imagine using it at all. But perhaps you might pray it (or something like it) for someone you know who never received a proper laying off of hands. And as always, modify this liturgy to suit your circumstance.

Lord, when you told your disciples
that it was expedient for them
that you would go away,32
Did they believe you?
Did they live to believe you?

We have our doubts and fears
about removing our hands from our children.
But from prayer and good counsel
and from your grace in our children’s lives,
we know it’s time for us to take a step back.

[If there’s time and opportunity, share your relationship with the person or persons you’re removing your hands from, where they’re going, and what you’re experiencing now as a result. Share any particular prayer requests, too.]

Lord, you left us in good hands
when you sent us into the world
with your Holy Spirit as our comforter,
our teacher, and our guide.33 Now
you’ve opened a door for our children,
and there are surely many adversaries.34
God be with our children and with
everyone they encounter.

We want our children to
be happy and healthy, wealthy and wise.
But we know now that you want something more:
you want them to live a public life as you did.

So we won’t ask that you take our children
out of the world to keep them
in safe, private spaces
of work and market and home alone.
They are strangers in the world
just as you were, and
as the father sent you into the world
so you are sending our children there.35

We lay our hands on our children in blessing.
We will be here for our children
and will help them in any way we should.

When we mourn this parting, comfort us.
When we doubt the Paraclete, help our unbelief.36
Help us also to grow in our prayer
and thanksgiving for our children.

We remove our hands from our children
in faith. Bless the communities they’ll join:
may they grow in grace and wisdom
together. Grant us also wisdom and community
to help us grow in this new and unmarked place
you’re opening for us in our children’s lives.

On behalf of ourselves and the world,
we thank you for the gift of our children.
We commend them to you
and to the word of your grace,
which has the power to build them up
and to give them their heritage
among all those whom you have made
your own.37

Program note

I’m beginning to structure these street liturgies to follow the basic pattern of a lectio divina practice. Michael Casey summarizes this ancient monastic pattern:

What begins as reading becomes reflection or meditation; this leads to prayer and ultimately to contemplative union with God. The Latin terms used traditionally are lectio > meditatio > oratio > contemplatio.38

We’ll begin with an essay relative to the topic (lectio), move to discussion questions (meditatio), and then to the spoken liturgy itself (oratio).

I don’t offer anything for contemplatio, however. Since this is a street liturgy, perhaps the lectio divina process here would lead a group to something involving both contemplation and action?

All my best to you this week! Please feel free to comment below about anything written here or about where any of it may have taken your curiosity, memory, imagination, or resolve.

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The audio version of this street liturgy includes the recordings from my conversation with Victoria that you can also access in the written text above. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Then [Jesus] said to his host, “When you are having guests for lunch or supper, do not invite your friends, your brothers or other relations, or your rich neighbours; they will only ask you back again and so you will be repaid. But when you give a party, ask the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. That is the way to find happiness, because they have no means of repaying you. You will be repaid on the day when the righteous rise from the dead.” — Luke 14:12-14 REB

There are two First Baptist Churches in Macon, Georgia. The original First Baptist Church, established in 1826, counted both slaveowners and their slaves as its members, as was common in the antebellum South.^⁠1 But in 1845 the church created a second First Baptist Church for its slave membership. These two churches, First Baptist Church of Christ, which is still white, and First Baptist Church on New Street, which is still Black, have sat on nearly adjoining properties from 1887 through the present. For almost a century and a half, they had little contact.^⁠2

But in 2014, their pastors met. They soon decided to work together to try to heal their churches’ divisions. They started with a joint Easter egg roll, and soon they invited each other to potluck dinners. They began to share their lives and their perspectives, and they honored, in author Robert P. Jones’s words, “the act of observing and making space for” important ritual differences in their respective traditions.^⁠3

Above: Travelers on a Mountain Path at Night by Hiroshige.

A year later, at a joint communion service on Pentecost Sunday, the two churches entered into a written covenant committing themselves to racial justice and healing.^⁠4

Complications came, some unasked for and some sought. Three weeks after the covenant, in Charleston, South Carolina, a white supremacist gunned down nine Blacks at a church Bible study. Not long after that, historians found and published records indicating that FBC of Christ likely paid for its new building in 1855 by selling twenty members of FBC of New Street.

Some four years after those unsought-for complications, members from both churches traveled together to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where they witnessed and responded to evidence of over 4,400 lynchings of Blacks.^⁠5 It was a tough trip.

In all this, the churches’ covenant shook, but it stuck.

Both churches attribute their covenant’s halting success to potato salad. When they were first getting to know each other, the churches didn’t swap pulpits or issue joint communiques. Instead, they relied more on “holiday potlucks, shared programs for children and youth, and service projects,” according to Jones.^⁠6 They had one another over for dinner a lot, and they demonstrated respect for one another’s cultural differences before they entered into covenant.^⁠7

Above: Poor Travelers at the Door of a Capuchin Convent near Vico, Bay of Naples by William Collins

Hospitality often precedes covenant. Abraham and Sarah demonstrate this progression, showing hospitality to the Lord and to two angels who show up at their tent in the guise of three strangers. When the strangers have eaten, the Lord affirms his covenant to Abraham and his seed, telling Abraham that Sarah will bear Isaac a year hence.^⁠8 Likewise, Rahab the harlot hides Joshua’s two spies in her Jericho home—a courageous act of hospitality—before they covenant to spare her and her family when Israel would attack Jericho.^⁠9

The writer of Hebrews may have been thinking of Abraham when he admonished us “to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.”^⁠10 Luke Bretherton, a professor of theological ethics, finds in this admonition the suggestion “that strangers may be the bearers of God’s presence to us.”

When Bretherton recounts the Bible’s angelic guests, though, he finds the hosts experiencing turbulence: Sarah’s laughing dismissal of God’s promise, Jacob’s wrestling with his identity and destiny, Mary’s incomprehension of God’s promise, and Zechariah’s unbelief, for instance, all come in the context of hosting angels. By extending hospitality to a stranger, the host opens themselves to the stranger’s gifts, some of which may have kept guest and host apart before then.11

In all four of these biblical examples, God’s kind of hospitality precedes the institution or elaboration of covenant, and that institution or elaboration involves the hosts’ displacement of sorts. Bretherton points out the loss of the familiar that we grieve in displacement:

The kinds of mutual transformation that just and loving hospitality involves necessarily entail loss, as the familiar and what counts as “home” are renegotiated. For new forms of common life to emerge, a process of grieving is necessary, as both guest and host emigrate from the familiar.^⁠12

This emigration and grief happened to Tim and Cathy, members of FBC on New Street and FBC of Christ, respectively, as they sat together and cried among the National Memorial’s columns for lynching victims:

The racial complexity of this moment . . . was thick for Tim. He later confessed to Cathy that he couldn’t help but think about what the evidence all around them demonstrated: that the simple physical proximity of a white woman and a black man was precisely the catalyst for the torture and murder of many a black man remembered on the columns suspended above them.^⁠13

For Tim and Cathy, hospitality to one another was slowly replacing distance, and it was painful.

Hospitality always acknowledges inequality. Guest and host never meet on equal terms. Hospitality “refuses the fantasy of neutral ground on which all may meet as equals,” Bretherton says. Instead, hospitality is “a way of framing how to forge mutual ground in a context where the space—be it geographic, cultural, or political—is already occupied and no neutral, uncontested place is available.” In other words, in an unjust setting, hospitality creates public space where no public space seems possible. Inherent in hospitality, then, is the movement from injustice to justice.

Above: Ienno-Guio-Dia — Friend of Travelers by Nicholas Roerich.

It’s helpful to compare hospitality to toleration, another means of interacting with strangers, but one with which moderns have far more experience:

With the advent of the modern state, public and mutual recognition between strangers becomes increasingly mediated and guaranteed through law and bureaucracy—with toleration replacing hospitality as the primary virtue governing relations with strangers.^⁠14

In our political and economic culture, we may limit our relations with strangers to mere toleration. The kind of hospitality Jesus describes to his host—the kind among strangers—is outside many Westerners’ experience. But this broader hospitality is political in the best sense of the word;^⁠15 as Bretherton says, hospitality among strangers is “a non state-centric form of relation.”^⁠16

Toleration needn’t be state-centric, either, of course. Toleration’s origins predate liberal government and what liberalism was, in part, intended to fix: a repeat of the religious conflict and wars of sixteenth and seventeenth century, the centuries when many liberal theorists, such as John Rawls, locate toleration’s origins.17 German philosopher Rainer Forst, for instance, contradicts “the widespread notion that toleration is a child of modernity.”18 Harvard professor Eric Nelson similarly argues against the “misconception . . . that toleration depends upon, and emerged out of, a conviction that church and state should remain fundamentally separate . . .”19 Both writers as well as other scholars locate toleration’s origins before modernity—at least the Western version of it—in Christianity itself.20

Toleration and hospitality generally address different political contexts. For toleration to work, the tolerant and the tolerated must be part of the same community. But while “toleration presumes a common life already in existence, hospitality does not, seeking as it does to generate one between strangers.”^⁠21

Toleration and hospitality also have different goals. Toleration seeks a greater good shared by both the tolerant and the tolerated—a good, such as common life, worth tolerating a perceived evil to achieve: “One tolerates the objectionable out of love for those goods that are a condition of human flourishing,” Bretherton says.^⁠22 The contrapositive is also true: if common life loses its value, then a polity’s toleration collapses. Hospitality, however, doesn’t seek only the maintenance of common life. It seeks new common life by finding God in the stranger. It seeks the kingdom of God in an unjust land.

Don’t get me wrong: toleration is biblical. Paul encourages disciples to tolerate one another’s views on meat eating and holidays^⁠23 and on meat offered to idols.^⁠24 But toleration merely maintains the churches’ unity. It doesn’t directly advance God’s reign of justice and peace.

Finally, unlike most modern instances of toleration, hospitality isn’t an abstraction that permits people to avoid one another. Hospitality as Jesus envisions it involves an “I-You” encounter, to employ Martin Buber’s concept, in which host and guest experience Messiah in each other while practicing the rites of inequality—rites that, despite themselves, give birth to public space. Jesus, the unknown Other and guest of his Emmaus disciples, suddenly becomes their host and becomes “known to them” at table when he breaks the bread. The disciples’ hospitality to the stranger is repaid with the revelation of the Messiah in the stranger.

The two Emmaus disciples don’t keep their encounter private. They immediately return to Jerusalem’s public life that they, with disappointment, had left earlier that day, and they compare their experiences with those of the other disciples.25

Hospitality between strangers, even Rahab’s secret hospitality, is never without public impact. The happiness that Jesus claims to be inherent in hospitality is rooted in God’s future public space, “the day when the righteous rise from the dead.” Hospitality is one of God’s chief means of experiencing resurrection’s new creation in this present evil age.

A liturgy for hosting strangers

Lord, we don't know these people well.
They're strangers. Or at least,
our society doesn't see them
as people we might host.

[Talk about in what sense your guests are strangers and in what sense they're not.]

But we’re strangers, too, and not just to our guests.
We were strangers to Israel's covenants of promise,26
and yet you invited us in.
Now we invite you in.
Fill the empty chair at our table,
the empty bed in our home,
the empty place in our hearts.

Fill the empty heart at the center of our community.
We've closed our doors to you for so long.
An oppressive empire made your parents travelers
when your mother carried you.27
Your hometown shut you and your family out
when you were born.28
You fled to Egypt as a refugee
when the king tried to kill you.29
When you were older,
proclaiming and living God's public life,
you still had no place to lay your head.30

We've invited our guests as we would invite you.
Help us prepare for our new friends' arrival
as part of preparing for your return.
Help us demonstrate to our own hearts
your living presence in the other—
your living presence as the other.

Keep us from congratulating ourselves,
from indoctrinating our guests,
and from participating in our society’s project
of alienating our guests from themselves.

Thank you for the gift of our guests.
May our merry hearts join our Martha hands.31
Help us wash our guests’ feet,
cleansing from their journey some of the disrespect
and even violence that our race or nation or tribe or gender
has practiced on theirs.
As we wash their feet,
we honor the journey that their feet have taken them,
and we associate ourselves with it.

Help us to learn something
of our new friends' perspectives.
Help us to give them time
to share in their way and in their time,
even if their way and their time
aren't what we might be used to.

Help us to give them place
to broaden our perspectives and enrich our lives.
Teach us something through them
that we would now think unimaginable.
Prepare our hearts to receive from our guests
something unexpected,
something troubling,
something not quickly or easily
resolved or understood.

Let our new friends find here
a stream to drink from on their way,
and more courage to hold their heads high.32

Help us to solicit and receive our guests’ critique
to make us better hosts. Help us also
to solicit and receive our guests’ blessing.

Help us sit with our guests’ gifts and their blessing
long after they have gone from us.

Bless and protect our guests as they come and as they go.
Bless their coming in and their going out
now and forevermore.33

Discussion questions

1. Do you understand the conflict in this devotion as one between the two First Baptist Churches’ history and their hospitality?

2. What is the relationship between hospitality and covenant? How do the cited biblical examples, and perhaps other examples, develop or contradict your thinking about that relationship?

3. As a practical matter, how can we follow the advice Jesus gives his host in this devotion’s epigraph? What challenges might we face before, during, or after such a meal?

4. Do you find the same significance in the inherent inequality of the guest-host relationship that Luke Bretherton finds?

5. Describe a time when you tolerated strangers, and describe a time when you hosted strangers or were hosted by them. How were the experiences the same, and how were they different?

6. In what sense is hosting a stranger a public thing? Can hosting a stranger amount to a form of justice?

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Above: The Beggars by Honoré Daumier. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Walking is also part of Jesus’s greater calling:

“I must give the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, for that is what I was sent to do.”2

“The Son of Man is en route,” Joseph Fitzmyer says; “he lives the life of a homeless wanderer . . .”3 Fitzmyer’s commentary here involves an instance of Jesus on the street. Jesus tells a would-be disciple who has stopped him there that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”4

Sometimes walking almost seems part of Jesus’s point. I doubt Jesus would have stopped walking if someone had donated a car—or even if the areas he walked through were built for cars.5 Even if he walked streets in areas zoned for a single use—residential zoning in suburbs, say, or commercial or agricultural zoning6—zoning that typically makes cars indispensable—Jesus, I like to think, would still have made connections with people.

One of Jesus’s parables seems to compare what I might call automobile and pedestrian mentalities. In the parable of the big dinner, three people refuse the host’s invitation because they’re in the middle of things. These three are the automobile people—on the move, and sealed off from changing plans. The host ends up sending his servant to pack out his party with street people.

What does the dinner party threaten to interrupt? Nothing inherently bad:

One after another they all sent excuses. The first said, “I have bought a piece of land, and I must go and inspect it; please accept my apologies.” The second said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out; please accept my apologies.” The next said, “I cannot come; I have just got married.”7

These people are in their zones—commercial, agricultural, and residential, respectively. And they’re all, as Wolterstorff points out, “in the middle of some incomplete project.”8 They won’t be interrupted, so they never enter God’s public kingdom.

Cars prevent interruptions to one’s private or commercial pursuits. One can travel in any public area with windows raised and doors locked. And drivers must look straight ahead; a driver noticing the public life around them might, after all, draw a citation for failing to pay full time and attention.

Hannah Arendt, the last century’s great champion of public freedom, thought that the scariest moment of freedom is crossing our homes’ thresholds into public space.9

Susan Etherton with Arlington Presbyterian Church in Virginia would agree. For many years, abetted by the automobile, her church avoided crossing their collective threshold into their neighborhood.

Susan describes Arlington Presbyterian’s former self-understanding as a “destination church,” one that members drove to attend, and one that had no sense of its place in its neighborhood:

We were happily introverted as a congregation, and happy to stay behind the closed, red doors.

But when some church members, including Susan, got a vision to sell the church’s building to make way for affordable housing, those members realized that they didn’t know if the neighbors even wanted or needed affordable housing. These members needed to meet their neighbors to find out.

I was actually afraid to do it. I didn’t have any idea how. I didn't talk easily to strangers, and I didn't want to.

But Susan was willing to help lead the congregation into their neighborhood streets, two by two, to help its members get to know their neighbors and their needs.

Over time, we recognized that . . . it wasn’t scary after all. It was a beautiful thing to be able to have a simple conversation with someone and talk to them about things that you love and get to know them.

These itinerant pairs regularly told the stories of the people they met to the rest of the congregation. Those stories about their previously unknown neighbors helped to persuade many church members that God wanted them to sell their building.

Now that Arlington Presbyterian holds services on the ground floor of the new affordable housing building, the congregation routinely meets with their neighbors. They do it for a few reasons: to inform their annual budget process about neighborhood needs, to create and maintain community partnerships, to find out what’s going on around them, and to help out with whatever.

When Jesus sends his disciples to walk in pairs, he permits no provision but sandals and walking sticks. Maybe he wants them to walk as he walks—with an openness both to give and to receive along the way.

Such openness can make a single walk into a series of anecdotal experiences. I think Jesus’s walks account for a lot of the Synoptic Gospels’ structure. I read Mark’s Gospel the other day for how Jesus gets from place to place. His movements read like this:

After some days he returned to Capernaum . . .10

Once more he went out to the lakeside . . .11

As he went along . . .12

When Jesus was having a meal in [Matthew's] house . . .13

One sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they went along . . .14

On another occasion when he went to synagogue . . .15

Jesus went away to the lakeside with his disciples.16

Then he went up into the hill-country . . .17

He entered a house . . .18

These quotes cover Jesus’s movements just in chapters 2 and 3.

If Jesus were purpose driven, he might have driven a car. But he’s Spirit driven. When he’s not up some mountain praying, he’s walking (or sailing), and he’s initiating and responding. He leaves lots of room for life to come to him.

Cars and single-use zoning ordinances aren’t alone in making us alone in public. Society also gives us labels involving our work and family life that limit our curiosity about others, and limit others’ curiosity about us.

As Jesus walks around, though, he always seems to be discovering strangers’ stories, some of which belie their subjects’ labels. A poor widow gives more to the temple’s treasury than everyone else combined.19 A tax collector gives half of his possessions to the poor.20 A Roman centurion turns down Jesus's suggestion that he visit his sick servant, and he turns out to have more faithfulness than anyone else Jesus meets in Israel.21

Without these discoveries, the disciples may have never learned anything about these people beyond their societal labels (poor widow, tax collector, soldier of an occupying army) and the stigmas those labels carry.

Jesus’s disciples know that their Master is more than the societal labels he comes with, such as itinerant rabbi22 and carpenter.23 Most of Jesus’s followers today see beyond those labels, too.

But Jesus makes plain that he is the Other, including the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.24

And those street people in Jesus’s big dinner parable carry stigmas, too. The servant finds “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” and takes them to the dinner.25 Wolterstorff explains that Jesus’s audience of Pharisees would expect the poor to come to God’s messianic banquet, which the Pharisees understand Jesus to be talking about. But they wouldn’t expect the presence there of “the crippled, the blind, and the lame,” who were “excluded from full participation in society because they are defective, malformed, or seen as religiously inferior.”26 With these street people, Jesus challenges his audience to see past societal labels.

I wonder, though, if cars put distance between us and any of Jesus’s parables about public life. There’s this other street in another parable where robbers leave a guy half dead. At least the priest and the Levite notice the injured man before crossing the street to avoid him.27 If they were driving, they might not have seen him at all. Would their cars have made the injured man any less their neighbor?

Feel free to revise the following street liturgy for your and your congregation’s situation and needs!

A liturgy for walking the streets

O Lord of heaven and earth,
You are everywhere
but we're still inside this building.

You have blessed us here.
You have met us here many times.
You have inspired us here,
taught us here, and comforted us here.
We love it here, but we've been content
with being only here.

Now you are calling us from here
to learn your public ways
from the Gospels' pages:
ways of hospitality and healing,
discovery and acceptance,
justice and the joy of finding new friends.

May this building now serve
as the disciples' upper room
where they prayed and waited expectantly.

You send us out, two by two.
Be in the midst of each pair
walking in your name
to learn our neighborhood and
to meet our neighbors.
Show us things to love and appreciate
among the landscapes and streetscapes we walk.
Make us denizens of our public world
as we have been of this building.

Teach us how to talk to strangers,
as we remember that we were strangers
once to your covenants and promise.28
Help us love our neighbors
as we naturally love ourselves.29

Surprise us. Give us boldness to act on
your Spirit's nudges
and to speak outside of our comfort scripts.
Let us return as Jesus's first disciples returned,
sharing our surprises, learning new lessons,
and gaining new perspectives.30

Make your public "there" our new "here."
Here we go, Lord. Watch over us
and everyone we meet.

Amen.

Possible discussion questions after a walk

What observation, experience, or interaction stood out?

Does our neighborhood have a predominant demographic or use? What things in our neighborhood serve that demographic or that use?

What was our neighborhood like 5 years ago? 50 years ago? 500 years ago? Did you see any evidence of these pasts?

Did you see or hear anything that you think someone didn’t want you to see or hear?

How much of what you saw appeared to be designed for a pedestrian’s perspective? What was it like to walk by things you saw?

Was there a shift in the neighborhood’s tone somewhere as you walked?

Whom did you see? How might society label them in the setting in which you saw them?

How does our neighborhood accommodate or encourage various forms of transportation?

How did the time of day, the day of the week, or the season or the weather affect what you saw or heard?

Zillow gives neighborhoods a “walk score.” With 0 being the worst and 100 being the best, what score would you give our neighborhood, and why?

If you were a city planner, what would you have put in place years ago that might have led to a different neighborhood today?

How can we serve our neighbors? How can we help to make our neighborhood feel more like a neighborhood?

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

I didn’t check social media that morning to see what anyone was doing. I got up, constructed my sign, and left our Virginia condo for the White House.

As it happened, I met two women there whose mornings had been similar to mine. One had driven from Maryland, the other from Pennsylvania. The two had met a few minutes before I showed up. Our signs began the day as one another’s signals.

We spoke for a bit. We would separate, walking along the iron fences with our signs, and return. We were heckled a little, not much. Many tourists, mostly from overseas, took pictures of themselves and their families standing with us. When things were quieter, we told one another something of our stories. It was a lot of fun.

In the process, the three of us became a temporary, purposeful community of sorts. We didn’t happen to discuss our faith or even our politics. We didn’t discuss the president or his remarks made the day before. We just did what strangers often do when they create public space together: we connected, we planned a bit, and we stood out. We enjoyed the connection. And each of us that morning discovered something more about her or his public calling.

After a couple of hours, when it started to rain, we came back together for the last time. My new friends told me about that evening’s big rally. It would be the second of many nights of protests in front of the White House in response to Helsinki. "I'm coming tonight. Are you?” And we left.

At the rally, an overseas media outlet interviewed me. Maybe the overseas interview was a step up from the overseas tourists, but it didn’t feel like it. There were television cameras, a short speech, chants, and a longer speech by a big-name speaker that, with its pacifying drone, made the crowd restive.

I didn’t see my new friends at the rally that night. I felt certain they were around somewhere. Afterwards, I remember sitting in the Metro station next to a stranger, also with a sign at her feet. We sat silently until we walked into separate train cars.

I’ve often reflected on the difference between my morning and evening protests at the White House. The morning felt like community. It felt like we were creating public space together. I could feel a certain resistance in the atmosphere around us to what the three of us were doing—and to what, even temporarily, we were becoming.

And I’ve wondered if the personality-oriented rally that night—big-name speaker, admiring audience—at its core didn’t follow the same model of public life being practiced inside the White House.

Protests and public associations of all sizes are vital, I think. Large protests can become revolutions—large communities with a tacit commitment to living in public freedom and with a penchant for extending its spirit in small public spaces.

But there’s something special about participating in even a small protest community, about exercising public freedom even if only two or three come together.

I don’t think a protest makes a point so much as it is the point: it’s an expression of public space that can help us move from individualism to ways of living public life together. What happened at Helsinki was, of course, more than sufficient reason for me to protest. But for me and my new friends, Helsinki also served as a fillip to public space.

The spiritual roots of protest

My time at the White House inspired me to write my first street liturgy. But my experience is thin: participating there and in a few other protests doesn’t make me an activist. So I’m calling in some heavy hitters—some 1960s peace activists—to give my liturgy more bottom.

I just finished Gordon Oyer’s meticulous reconstruction of a 1964 ecumenical conference of peace activists hosted by Thomas Merton, Oyer’s 2014 book Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat.

In Oyer’s book, activist theologian Ched Myers summarizes the confluence of Christian approaches to protest at the conference. Christian activists, he says, “are profoundly shaped by [Daniel] Berrigan direct action and Merton contemplation-as-resistance; by [John Howard Yoder] Anabaptist pacifist, disestablished ecclesiology; and by [A.J.] Muste’s engagement-oriented Protestantism.”1

Myers says that “every time any of us get together in a retreat setting to figure out what the hell is going on and what we should do about it, we are walking in their footsteps.”2

Elias Crim of Solidarity Hall would agree: he attended such a retreat recently with about forty peace advocates, and his inspiring account of the retreat pays tribute to both the 1964 retreat at Gethsemeni and Oyer’s book.

Here’s some wisdom I gleaned about protests from Oyer’s book on the 1964 retreat (sprinkled with some thoughts from Merton’s 1968 book Faith and Violence):

For Merton, the spiritual roots of protest lay with our ability to accept an intercessory gift through our encounter with the stranger, the abandoned and despised other. For these encounters to yield fruit, he recognized that we must resist inclinations to preserve our privilege. Instead, healthy spiritual roots will lead us into an ongoing personal conversion that empowers us to offer spiritual and intellectual refuge to our fellow humans.3

My encounters with “strangers” at the White House made me resonate with Oyer’s summary of Merton’s position. I was struck also by Merton’s connection of protest with our personal spiritual growth.

While serving others is a good motivation for protest, despair isn’t so good:

A protest that from the start declares itself to be in despair is hardly likely to have positive or constructive results. At best it provides an outlet for the personal frustrations of the one protesting. It enables him to articulate his despair in public. This is not the function of Christian non-violence.4

What other attitudes would be appropriate for protest?

This opening day [of the conference] had encouraged a tone of humility and caution regarding one’s ability to calculate and achieve the ends they sought in their protest. Likewise, they heard skepticism about their ability to engage social ills from a high ground of moral superiority, free of deep entanglements with the social dysfunctions they protested.5

On reflection, I may realize that I’ve benefitted from, or I’m still benefitting from, the same or similar injustice that I’m protesting. That should keep me humble.

But what gives me the right, in God’s sight, to protest at all?

. . . the day’s conversation had also affirmed their warrant to protest as something inherent, something that came from within and represented an expression of their personhood, their humanity. To protest was to respond in harmony with the Creator’s intent for creation.6

As a balance, though, Jim Forest, another Gethsemani attendee, recalls Merton’s warning:

. . . protest wasn’t simply an almost casual human right, but rather a terribly dangerous calling that, if it lacked sufficient spiritual maturity, could contribute to making things worse.7

One way to make things worse is to make the protest hateful. Yoder describes protest as affirmation, as love for our enemies:

Yoder addressed the question, “Against whom do we protest?” We do not protest against a particular person in power in order to “remove him coercively from his driver’s seat and put a better man on top.” Rather, as Gandhi would advise, we instead “love him, and let him make us suffer. We are on his side. It’s because of our love for him that we get in his way. Protest means affirmation. We stand against what we stand against because of what we must stand for as church—for the enemy, the poor, the truth.8

The “for” is always more than the “against.”

The “for” and sometimes the “against,” too, is a big message to get across, and maybe we won’t get it across ourselves. Oyer summarizes Yoder on protest as a sign, not as a ready-made message:

[One] manifestation of hope comes through offering “signs” to those around us, actions important not for what they tangibly accomplish but for what they signify—steps that need to be taken in confidence that Christ (rather than we) will ultimately use them to communicate some sort of message.9

Protest isn’t about our effectiveness, anyway, but about our witness of God’s just kingdom:

Merton’s guests were therefore free to act, resist, and protest without regard for personal consequence or apparent effectiveness. But they could only sustain those actions, as Merton put it, when grounded in a hope offered by “the mystery of [God’s] will to save man and his promise of a reign of peace.”10

Messiah present in his assemblies is this “hope of glory.”11 Myers finds in Yoder’s statements at the conference a call for Jesus’s assemblies to grow into alternative political communities that herald God’s just reign:

Myers observes a . . . prong of biblical resistance in the gist of John Howard Yoder’s call for Christ-imitating obedience that will “let the church be the church.” It reflects a call to form distinct, alternative identities that contrast with those grounded in aspirations toward domination, oppression, and socioeconomic power.12

Myers also suggests that we keep the faith and keep experimenting, learning, and comparing notes:

But we can be incarnational in the midst of it all, always holding out hope. The work of organizing is to keep experimenting with gatherings and actions and conferences and retreats and practices and demonstration projects in hopes that some of them will be strategic and yield incredible imaginative work in the way that the ’64 conference did.13

Okay! I’m ready to use my White House encounters and my reading to create a draft street liturgy:

A liturgy for protesting with strangers

Oh Lord of of heaven and earth,
help us make this bit of earth on which we stand
a manifestation of heaven.

We’ve come to protest against injustice.
[Summarize the injustice here]

We confess here how we feel about this injustice
and how we feel about protesting here today.
[Take turns confessing]

We know you’re in our midst
though only two [or three or state the number] of us are here.
Be in the midst of everyone else, too,
who’s coming here today to protest.

We long for justice in this matter
as a manifestation of your coming kingdom
of justice, peace, and joy.14 We pray that
your kingdom come, your will be done
on earth as it is done in heaven.

Find us this day some others here
from whom we can learn,
with whom we can work,
and whom we can bless.
Help us connect with people who
might not share our creed
but who cry with us for justice.

Lead us not into the temptation
to engage with those who oppose us
or to respond to them in anger.
We remind ourselves that “human anger
doesn’t promote God’s justice.”15

Instead, help us bless those who may resist
our witness. Bless the perpetrators of this
injustice, and teach us how to use your
weapons16 to help pull down the strongholds
of injustice17 that support the perpetrators.

We take comfort in your own passion for justice.
[Summarize a story or two of how God or
someone else worked justice in the Bible]

Develop in us today a taste for your public life.
We long for a revolution when we can spend
each day in public, when we can make our homes
in public, when we can share our stores
as the saints did after Pentecost.

And when we finish here today, be with us as we talk
about our experiences here so we can learn and grow.

Why street liturgy?

I’ve written several street liturgies, and this is the first I’ve shared. These street liturgies are inspired in part by Douglas McKelvey’s popular series called "Every Moment Holy.” The liturgies in the series’s three books cover both the difficult and mundane moments of our private, familial, social, and work lives. Some of the liturgies’ titles suggest the almost comical range of the quotidian that might otherwise play outside of our spiritual ambit:

• To mark the first hearthfire of the season

• For the morning of a yard sale

• For the loss of electricity

• For those experiencing road rage

• For waiting in line

One of the three books contains liturgies involving only death, grief, and hope. Victoria and I are so taken with this book that we wrote our own liturgy based on it to cope with our need to factory reset her late mother’s beloved iPad. We read the liturgy together before we did the deed.

Good as they are, the “Every Moment Holy” books cover little of the public life of Jesus’s assemblies, probably because most Christians don’t think Jesus’s assemblies have a public life or, for that matter, should have a public life.

But they must, you know. “Kingdom” in “kingdom of God” isn’t a metaphor. The phrase asserts God’s claim to a realm of justice and public life against every earthly sovereign. Jesus’s assemblies are called to demonstrate that claim until he returns.

Liturgy, strictly speaking, is the public work of a people, not the private devotion of individuals. Liturgy is a form of worship, and worship, Mitchell Reddish points out, “is a political act. Through worship one declares one’s allegiance, one’s loyalty. . . . [Public worship] is a statement to the world that the church will bow to no other gods.”18

Street liturgies, like people, are always a rough draft

Liturgy assures us that we’re not alone in any public moment. Our public present is blessed with the presence of past and future—the communion of saints over centuries and the hope of new creation. Liturgy, then, is a way of making the present public moment fully inhabitable through the context of the past and future.

Liturgy discovers the public present also through the community of interpretation. As the work of the people, written liturgy is always a rough draft, waiting for the people’s revision in the moments of public space and worship.

Liturgical truth is neither fixed (as in an authoritarian regime) nor relative (as among disassociated individuals, the foundation of an authoritarian regime). Instead, liturgical truth is interpretational: liturgy is the process and product and process again of a community of interpretation. In semiotic terms, liturgy isn’t dyadic: it isn’t a fixed back-and-forth between leader and congregation. Instead, liturgy is triadic: the people testify, interpret the testimony, and interpret the interpretation. Then they interpret that, too.

Liturgy—even liturgy in a prayer book—is a rough draft. Street liturgy is, too. If you use this sample in community, you’ll find the need to revise it beforehand for your particular community and its situation. You’ll wish also to insert spaces for the community to revise it further as it prays and professes its way across the liturgy.

Liturgy helps us acclimate to newly created public spaces. But liturgy can also spark our public imagination. Even reading liturgy by ourselves can suggest ways in which our public testimony and interpretation can go beyond what, to this point, we may have encountered.

Maybe this week’s draft liturgy will help acclimate you to a new public space or spark your public imagination. In any event, if you find yourself revising the liturgy, even in your head, I think I’ve done my work.

Some resources for street liturgy

• The Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context by Stanley P. Saunders and Charles L. Campbell

• Jewish Liturgical Reasoning by Steven Kepnes

• Torture and Eucharist by William T. Cavanaugh

• Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice by Thomas Merton

• Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation by Michael J. Gorman (I refer the reader to portions of the book that address Revelation as worship and liturgy)

• The Word before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching by Charles L. Campbell

• Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat by Gordon Oyer (my thanks to Elias Crim of Solidarity Hall for this reference)

A city state literary salon and other site news

This month I’ve enjoyed interacting with people who commented on my article in the Elysian, “It’s time for Thomas Jefferson’s village-states.” The comments about the article got me thinking in fresh ways, and responding to them often gave me opportunities to discuss things that I wanted to bring up in the article but couldn’t get them to fit there.

On May 1, the Elysian will host an online literary salon discussion about my village-state article and the other nine articles that make up the Elysian’s city state investigation. The discussion starts at 7:00 P.M. EDT, and it’s for Elysian paid subscribers only. Please join in if you’re a paid subscriber.

You can support me and the six other writers involved in the city state articles by buying a pdf or print version of the city state anthology.

Join me and lots of great writers using Substack’s Notes. Notes is like Twitter except palatable. To check it out, head to substack.com/notes on your computer or phone, or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app:

You’ll see my notes as well as the notes from the authors of the other Substacks you may subscribe to. You can also write and share your own notes even if you don’t have a Substack. People can follow you, too, whether or not you have a Substack.

More news: I’m now the proud owner of two registered trademarks. That means I can put the little ® beside each of them and make them appear quite official: Political Devotions® and Public Spaces®.

Back to street liturgy. To find our latest street liturgies, go to streetliturgy.com. (You’ll find only this first liturgy there for now.) I was happy to find that the URL was still available.

Feel free to comment below about protest communities, our first street liturgy, or anything else this post brought to mind.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.