The laying off of hands: a liturgy

Letting our kids become their own political protagonists

You already know—or you won't be surprised to learn—that for a half century or longer, a great body of scholarship has grown up around America's social and political movements.¹ The scholarship often addresses how the movements functioned internally. It also often addresses strategies the movements adopted and whether or not they worked. Thanks to this scholarship, I suppose, a movement rising today wouldn't have to repeat its predecessors' mistakes.

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.

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Dibakar Roy on Unsplash

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.

1. Since they overlap quite a bit and arguably are much the same, I’ll hereinafter refer to both social and political movements as political movements.

2. Nathan Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 88.

3. Rebecca Solnit, “Foreword: Miracles and Obstacles,” in Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, by Nathan Schneider (University of California Press, 2013), x.

4. Shore, Ukrainian Night, 268-69.

5. Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Edinburgh: AK, 2006), 216.

6. According to the Activist Performance: Gestural Notes blog, "Twinkles" are the "most widely understood gesture of a whole set, included as techniques for consensus-based decision making." When one twinkles, one raises one's hands, waggling one's fingers, to signal agreement with a speaker. kevgillan, “Twinkle,” Activist Performance: Gestural Notes (blog), July 26, 2013, https://activistperformance.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/twinkle/.

7. These and other early Occupy movement struggles are found in Schneider's Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. Schneider, 62. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which arose out of the 1960 black student sit-ins, was wary early on of receiving help from older interracial civil rights organizations, such as the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), for the same reason. SCEF’s Anne Braden said that SNCC people were “suspicious as hell of organizations. . . . they want something new. Their concept of what this new thing will be is vague, but they are convinced that its has to be different from the disillusionments of the past.” Quoted in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, 4. print (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), 52.

8. Ecclesiastes 1:9 NNAS.

9. Luke Yates, “Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements,” Political Studies 69, no. 4 (2021): 1033–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720936046, 1033.

10. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), vol. 1, 367.

11. Numbers 14:21 KJV.

12. Ephesians 1:22-23 (Wright, Kingdom New Testament, 392).

13. “When they were all together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time at which you are to restore sovereignty to Israel?’ He answered, ‘It is not for you to know about dates or times which the Father has set within his own control. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will bear witness for me in Jerusalem, and throughout all Judaea and Samaria, and even in the farthest corners of the earth.’” Acts 1:6-8 REB.

14. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow, 115-16.

15. Schneider, 4.

16. Schneider, 56.

17. Schneider, 56-57.

18. Schneider, 7.

19. On what public freedom is (quoting from my Elysian article “It’s Time for Thomas Jefferson’s village-states”): “We Americans love our private freedoms, which allow us to work, play, buy, sell, and travel as we wish. But private freedom isn’t public freedom. Public freedom isn’t even civil rights, which protect us from discrimination and governmental overreach and oppression. Instead, public freedom, political theorist Hannah Arendt said, ‘is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm.’"

20. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 259.

21. Arendt, On Revolution, 160.

22. Mumford, The City in History, 332-33.

23. Dan Swain, “Not Not but Not Yet: Present and Future in Prefigurative Politics,” Political Studies 67, no. 1 (2019): 47–62, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717741233.

24. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 315.

25. Sennett, 315-21.

26. Sennett, 317-19.

27. Arendt, 295n46.

28. Sitrin, 217-18.

29. Swain, 58.

30. Swain, 56, quoting Erich Auerbach. For similar understandings of “messianic and eschatological notions of time,” see my article on Giorgio Agamben’s view of the early church’s notion of messianic time as well as my article on Luke Bretherton’s account of the ancient church’s concept of secular time.

31. Matthew 19:13-15 REB.

32. John 16:7 KJV.

33. John 16:7-15.

34. 1 Corinthians 16:9 NNAS.

35. John 17:13-16 REB.

36. Mark 9:24.

37. Acts 20:32, modified from the Revised English Bible translation.

38. Casey, Sacred Reading, 57.