A liturgy for protesting with strangers

Inspired by Thomas Merton & our three-person D.C. protest

It was July 17, 2018, the morning after Helsinki. The president had stood with Vladimir Putin and accepted the Russian president’s word over the findings of the United States intelligence community that Russia had interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

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.

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

1. Gordon Oyer, Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), 225. Italics in the original.

2. Oyer, 225-26.

3. Oyer, 86.

4. Merton, Faith and Violence, 26.

5. Oyer, 127-28.

6. Oyer, 127-28.

7. Oyer, 196.

8. Oyer, 158.

9. Oyer, 152.

10. Oyer, 208.

11. Colossians 1:27 REB.

12. Oyer, 213.

13. Oyer, 228.

14. ". . . for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but justice, peace, and joy, inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Romans 14:17 REB.

15. James 1:20 REB.

16. Ephesians 6:10-20.

17. 2 Corinthians 10:3-6.

18. Michael J. Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation ([S.l.]: Cacade Books, 2011), 56.