A Subversive Calendar of the Heart

Scholars have taken the dynamite of the church, have wrapped it up in nice phraseology, placed it in a hermetic container and sat on the lid. It's about time to blow the lid off.—Peter Maurin, Easy Essays

Now if we want to know when there's a crime wave of civil disobedience coming, we consult the liturgical calendar.—Oakland County sheriff's deputy joking to a reporter, Advent 1983

Something is happening and it isn't clear how far it yet may go. Communities of faith and conscience are rediscovering the church's liturgical calendar as a rubric for prayer, discernment, and public political witness. I come to this from a lower-church preaching tradition. And while there is in Protestantism currently a somewhat faddish renewal of interest in the lectionary, my own involvement "backs in" by way of the recent history of public witness.

The Detroit Peace Community, of which I am part, has moved prayerfully piecemeal into the cycle. We began by marking first those days in which the suffering and fate of victims were made visible. For five or six years, we faithfully walked the "stations of the cross" through the streets of our own city on Good Friday, stopping for prayer at sites of oppression—corporate headquarters, draft boards, the IRS; or compassionate ministration—soup kitchens, shelters for the homeless; or visible suffering—vacant lots, run-down apartments, welfare bureaucracies. As others do in similar cities, we exposed a local geography of Christ's passion.

In like manner we have remembered the blood of children on the Feast of Holy Innocents, seeing Herod's slaughter of the Bethlehem infants in the military violence of our time. And we have scattered the ashes of Hiroshima on that anniversary, which weighs in our hearts much like Good Friday.

Gradually the whole calendar has commended itself to us, beginning with the penitential seasons of preparation—Advent and Lent—which call so naturally for vigils and public conversion. Most remarkable of all, however, has been the discovery of power in the high feasts themselves, the seasons of intervention, liberation, and victory: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.

For several years the cycle ordered for us times of presence and liturgical incursion into the world headquarters of Bendix Corporation, then overseeing manufacture of hydrogen bomb parts in Kansas City. It always surprised us that Bendix executives were surprised. After all, it was Ash Wednesday or the first Monday in Advent, and we were there to repent, calling one another to conversion. But they were always stunned and unprepared. It just never quite dawned on them.

Williams International, however, appears more alert. It was making cruise missile engines near Detroit, and with friends we had been engaged in a similar campaign of presence and liturgically informed civil disobedience. Williams was far more careful in its security measures and aggressive in its surveillance. The company was quickly comprehending our rhythm. I have this image of a memo coming down from the front office: "Re: Beefing up security for the Feast of Polycarp."

THE IMPETUS FOR MUCH of this movement, certainly in my own experience, can be traced to the folks in and around Jonah House, the resistance community in Baltimore comprised of the wider family of Liz McAlister and Philip Berrigan. They first put Holy Week, Hiroshima, and Holy Innocents on a calendar of relentless exposure at the Pentagon, and, at the same time, they have experimented most rigorously with implicit liturgical forms as prophetic signs.

I believe William Stringfellow was the first to identify the burning of draft files at Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968 as a "political exorcism." And I have heard him remark that Daniel Berrigan, who participated in the action with his brother Phillip, was most influenced in his shaping of that event and its aftermath by previous participation in the liturgical renewal movement. He had simply come to understand the political meaning of sacraments for community and history.

The Kingdom of God
In the early '60s, Thomas Merton wrote a little essay in which he traced the meaning of liturgy in the classical Greek sense to political activity. "Leitourgia was a 'public work,' a contribution to the celebration and manifestation of the visible life of the polis" (Seasons of Celebration). In borrowing this word, which was originally without any real religious significance in the political lexicon of the Greek city-states, the church has planted an etymological memory that rises now and again to the surface.

Even Richard K. Fern, a sociologist with uncommon biblical sense writing on secularization, examines this same word root in Liturgies and Trials and concludes:

So to take part in the Christian liturgy is to take on one's role in a new kingdom: one that "shall have no end." It is the political act of all time and is therefore potentially seditious within the secular politics of a particular time and place. Caesar understood the political nature of the liturgy all too well ... Certainly it behooves all Caesars to know what vows are being taken by their subjects and what freedoms are being claimed in the name of kingdoms other than their own.

One of the secondary sources to which liturgical historians turn is a remarkable correspondence between Pliny the Younger, provincial administrator over Bithyinia early in the second century, and his lord, the Roman Emperor Trajan. It is of such note because the letter describes with a lawyer's care both what he was able to discover concerning the Christians' liturgy and how he compelled them, or not, to repent.

From fallen-away believers and some deaconesses whom he tortured, Pliny discovered, "They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath (sacramento ...)." Moreover, the Christians regrouped later in the day for a meal. "Even this practice they had abandoned," he says, "after the publication of my edict, by which, according to your orders, I had forbidden political associations."

Pliny was distressed. Attendance in the Roman temples had taken a big downturn. The sacred festivals were being neglected. His method of interrogation and enforced Roman evangelism, now famous, was to set before the believers an image of the emperor. If they would curse Christ and worship the image, they were let go. If not, the opportunity being twice repeated, the obstinate were executed. Trajan's even-handed reply basically concurred, and the correspondence became, I suppose, a kind of policy memo on the topic for some time. Caesar did indeed understand the political nature of the liturgy all too well.

The implicit conflict did not escape the first Christians. Among the more militant of the early church leaders was Tertullian. In De Idolatria, a long treatise on idolatry, he takes up the question of whether a Christian might serve in the Roman army. He is utterly strident, practically legalistic: "There is no agreement between the divine and human sacrament, the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, the camp of light and the camp of darkness. One soul cannot serve two masters—God and Caesar." Here is another etymological coincidence: "sacrament" was an oath of loyalty or allegiance and, in this case, the oath of military induction sworn to the emperor before the gods.

Among the prescriptive requirements for the baptismal sacrament, Hippolytus, of third-century Rome, numbers these in Apostolic Tradition:

A soldier with authority must not kill people. If he is commanded, he must refuse, and he must not take an oath. If he will not agree he must be rejected. Those who have the power of the sword, or a civil magistrate who wears the purple, must cease or be rejected.

The choice of ultimate allegiance was equally straightforward whether put by God or Caesar. And the choice was inherently political.

I should take care not to be misunderstood in my use of the word "political" throughout. I don't intend to define it narrowly as conventional electoral politics in, for example, the United States. Neither do I mean necessarily the brokering of power, nor the penetration of the state (or ideology), as we now witness, into every area of human life in such a way that all human decision is politicized. Which is also to say, I do not use it as a value word whereby anything, be it faith or the gospel, that is political is thereby redeemed from irrelevance.

I mean instead something quite simple: the authority and power by which human life is ordered in community. As the gospel has it, the kingdom of God is the coming order that thereby stands over against every power and authority of this world. So Christians challenge and rebuke and encourage and defy and submit to the passing order—all in accord with their first and final allegiance to God and the freedom granted by grace.

WORSHIP AND LITURGY are a celebration of the new order. They enact and embody and indicate the realm of God in our midst. That is precisely why they are now being employed quite naturally to challenge, rebuke, and defy the powers.

Liturgical direct action in time with the church year— such as an Easter sunrise trespass onto a Strategic Air Command base or an intercessory blockade of a military facility—are potent actions in part because they always imply a fuller life. Consciously or not, we insinuate an integrity by which this one act is offered in continuity with our prayer discipline, our service, and our ethics. More than our conscience or a political analysis, the weight of our lives is focused there, a living sacrifice.

An action is redeemed from one-shot isolation. It suggests a history and a community. Even a campaign becomes more than a campaign. It is the expression of a wider and deeper common life, rooted in the gospel. In fact, the whole church (and this should be cause for sober reflection and care) is implicated and, in effect, brought to bear.

In all liturgy, even the most widely ecumenical and informal, the church is gathered and bound. It is therefore to be expected that these actions will provoke discussion, complaint, and even counter-liturgies within the church general. This should not surprise or discourage us.

In a related time and issue, when the Confessing Church was taking so much heat from its detractors for pronouncing Nazism an outright idolatry and blasphemy, Karl Barth, the great church theologian and spokesperson for the confessing movement replied in The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day:

No one has the right to complain when he must listen to such a witness and confession, even though it is not at first his own! And he has no right to complain when he must hear and take notice that the other is not bringing forward what he has to say as only a personal—where possible "only" political—expression of opinion; but that he is bringing it forward in proper form, i.e. in unity with the confession of Jesus Christ, as he sees this, and hence in all seriousness as true and binding ... But what have these others to do? They have to set over against this witness, in the same binding-ness, a firmly grounded opposing witness. They have to rely on the strength of their own good cause and that of their opposing witness. And then they have to leave it to the witness of the Holy Spirit in the congregation, i.e. to the further common enlightenment through the Holy Scriptures.

Which is to say, actions like these turn quickly back upon the church, by intention and hope. When I join friends for prayer at the local missile factory, I go more and more consciously as a pastor and for the sake of my church. I go as a Methodist. Oh yes, the hope is to confront the owner and invite the workers and to raise the issue publicly in the press—but even more, to awaken the church. It is precisely a way of "taking the message to Jerusalem."

Say again: every act of worship is expressly political. To celebrate the Lordship of Christ is to supplant or obviate every other allegiance. But this is so little acknowledged in the churches, especially the American church. Could it be that public liturgical actions that raise the issue in high relief by their geography of risk at the gates, blocking the way or crossing the line, have the potential of pastoring the church general in a renewal of its sacramental and worship life? It is such a big and hopeful question.

THERE IS ANOTHER relentlessly perennial question that attends such actions: faithfulness versus effectiveness. Should our first concern be deeds that generate immediate and visible results? Or ought it rather to be unerring fidelity to conscience and gospel? Liturgical actions press the latter point. They exhibit a character that Gandhi would call "non-attachment to results." Since their intention is always toward God, as gift and offering, they permit a tremendous freedom. One would never ask of the Eucharist: was it successful or effective? It simply is. So it is with liturgical witness. Merton pulled a number of these ideas together in a reflection on Gandhi and the truth forces in The Nonviolent Alternative:

Politics had to be understood in the context of service and worship in the ancient sense of leitourgia (liturgy, public work.) Man's intervention in the active life of society was at the same time by its very nature svadharma, his own personal service (of God and humanity) and worship, yajna. Political action therefore was not a means to acquire security and strength for one's self and one's party, but a means of witnessing to the truth and reality of the cosmic structure by making one's own proper contribution to the order willed by God. One could thus preserve one's integrity and peace, being detached from results (which are in the hands of God) and being free from the inner violence that comes from division and untruth.

Merton concluded it was this very inner freedom and non-attachment that lent Gandhian politics its extraordinary spiritual force and religious realism. They have proven enormously effective. The same may be hoped of genuine liturgical action. Only if it is firstly a faithful activity of prayer and worship may it end being effective to an extent that appears very nearly shrewd. We are not likely to be granted the smashing success, say, of Joshua's liturgical action at Jericho, but we may slowly see something as powerful: a breakdown of entrenched political images, ideological barricades, and technological cults that have us in their grip.

Words have all but lost their power to do that. In our culture, they more distract and confuse, distort and deceive. We are bludgeoned with empty political overspeak. Liturgical symbols present themselves as a way of approaching life and death questions at a deeper, subterranean, subconscious, "subversive" level. Even granting that we live in a post-Christian era where the dominant power symbols are the bomb and technocracy itself, a deep and lively collective unconscious still exists in which these symbols of faith abide. Certainly they are waiting, buried, coded almost, within the church's biblical memory. The energy of archetypes waits to arise, but words alone have lost power to rouse them. They are simply more accessible at the level of risk and symbol.

Observing the Day
Bread and wine, water, fire, ashes, blood, hammers, light, the cross, the grave: these are not religious esoterica, but elementals that can express and move, especially in accord with the gospel drama plotted and rehearsed in the church year. I am by no means expert in that calendar, but what I understand encourages me in the depth and richness of the feasts. Such can only be hinted here.

Beneath the Christian seasons lie the Jewish festivals, which were in first ancient memory agrarian and ruled, as today, by the lunar cycle. Their roots are deep in the earth and its turnings. They celebrated natural events of life: the first-born lambs, the wheat harvest, and the new wine. Frankly, they were of Canaanite origin. It is no embarrassing coincidence that Easter should be named after an Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess whose rites were celebrated come spring.

With the first destruction of the temple, however, and the Babylonian captivity in which the Israelites were dragged off to live as aliens in a foreign land, the feasts were historicized and politicized. Torn from the land, their identity and very faith up for grabs, the Jewish people celebrated, often in underground resistance fashion, the memory of God's mighty acts.

Henceforth, on foreign or familiar soil, the lambing festival became Passover, recalling the big exodus walkout from under oppressive political authority. Pentecost (wheat harvest) remembered the giving of the law and covenant; the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles (new wine) enacted the wilderness sojourn.

INTO THIS, quite literally, walks Jesus. His example is substantially our authorization for public action upon the feast days. John's gospel presents Jesus making a series of forays into Jerusalem at festival times. His trips may be regarded as punctuation marks for a running commentary on the meaning of the feasts and their further transformation. Not so remarkably, at each mention or visit a controversy occurs (see John 2:13, 5:11, 6:4, 7:2, 11:56). The threats against him are almost invariably made explicitly in these situations, and Jesus is remarkably sentient about the timing and risk.

On one occasion in John 7, when Jesus is lying low in Galilee because of death threats, his brothers (no less) encourage him to go public in Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles. He declines because the timing isn't right and sends them on alone. But then he goes up quietly after all, observing the feast, mingling presumably with the crowd, hearing the assorted opinions of his work (mixed reviews to be sure), and staying clear of the authorities who are in fact expecting him.

Then suddenly in the middle of the feast (prompted by a prayerful re-reading of the times? a contentious challenge? a burst of prophetic freedom?), Jesus emerges to teach in the temple and openly discuss the plottings for his death. A spirited exchange follows. The people are divided, and the only reason he isn't arrested on the spot is because the temple police are overcome by his eloquence and their own fear of the crowd, for which they are in due course reprimanded. All in all, the teaching is in keeping with the feast, as Jesus offers living water akin to the saving water from the wilderness rock. The people attend closely to his words because of the context and the risk he exercises to utter them.

In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Jesus only goes to Jerusalem once, but it's a big trip. From Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16:13-16), Jesus has his eye on the city, and he is preparing the disciples quite self-consciously for what to expect there. The Son of Man will be delivered up. His arrival is timed to correspond with the Passover. He walks into a militarily occupied city on the eve of a liberation festival. That history is remembered and aroused. The people are astir and expectant, the authorities nervous.

All the events of that week—from the temple action and the public debate with the Pharisees, to the private contemplative upper-room prayer meal with his friends, to his own solitary prayer ("Lord, take this cup"), not to mention the arrest and trials and execution—are infused with the festival and against its backdrop. The Gospel writers even generate discrepancies in the precise day and hour in order to heighten the simultaneous coincidence of liturgical events in the temple and the crucifixion itself.

Which is simply to say, Jesus embodies and enacts and transfigures the Passover. He does not make the feast relevant, he makes it present tense. That is what we pray transpires in every celebration of the Eucharist. The sacrament is more than a remembrance, however passionate the memory may be. It is the efficacious presence of God here and now. It is the means of grace. In "Liturgy and Time" in Seasons, Merton says:

Whenever the Gospel is sung in the Liturgy it begins with the formula "at that time" (in illo tempore) and the formula, in effect destroys the passage of time, annuls all the time that has passed since "then, "for in the Liturgy the "then" of Christ's actions is "now" in the redemptive mystery of the Church's prayer.

This is the same present tense in which liturgical direct action lives and breathes.

Speaking of breath, do you notice when it is after the resurrection that the Holy Spirit strikes and the disciples go suddenly bold and public? At the very next festival in Jerusalem: Pentecost. Oh, the shrewdness of the Holy Ghost! It certainly is convenient that a crowd is present (and, as we have it, from every nation under heaven), a crowd particularly mindful of the covenant made on Sinai. The people are ripe for preaching and repentance. The disciples seem to pick up on Jesus' method.

IN FAIRNESS, it must be admitted that St. Paul was more skeptical of the feasts. Understandably so. His own sense of Gentile mission drew his witness to the secular market places, the schools of the philosophers, the gathering places and feasts of the imperial gods (see Acts 17 and 19). He was willing to undertake a straightforward confrontational evangelism of Greek and Roman religious and political culture. Moreover, he likely feared the Judaizers would impose the feasts on new Christians along with circumcision, a kosher table, and, in general, the Law. He saw them, through the eyes of a converted Pharisee, as legalistic ritualism. So at best he counseled tolerance (Romans 14:5) or preached against them (Colossians 2:16-21 and Galatians 4:8-10), even identifying the feasts with the principalities and bondage to elemental spirits.

This should give one pause. It might prompt honest mention of some manifest dangers of church-year liturgical action.

The year could be treated as a slavish rubric. Instead of stimulating prayer and discernment, instead of freeing imagination, it might in certain instances limit our imagination and response. Events that demand an urgent outcry might be neglected because they don't conform to the cycle. Or we could end up repeating a particular action year after year irrespective of events in our own history. We might lock ourselves in or out with legalism and forego really creative symbols that present themselves.

It is tempting, believe me, to cloak a position in liturgical garb and thereby secure a smug self-righteousness. We will most assuredly be accused of this in any event. That shouldn't prevent an honest, confessional self-examination to see if it's not true. Genuine worship would prompt such prayerful humility.

We could also hide behind the year, turning the freedom of unapologetic confessional action into a safe division that cuts us off from communities of faith and conscience with whom we would otherwise stand side by side.

Liturgy can be a convenient cover for actual shallowness, for not doing our homework, the hard research or clear political thinking. Any of these seductions would, in fact, be a true bondage to elemental spirits.

Granting all that, it must finally be said that the church year has the potential to be a kind of resistance calendar. It can be a steady, alternative rhythm to help us keep our balance in prayer and worship against the onslaughts of those elemental spirits of imperial culture, American or otherwise.

We are subjected to such an array of state and commercial holy days, to shopping seasons and professional sports, and we are assaulted by the political noise of the electoral messianic cycle. Each of these exhibits a powerful and explicit liturgical calendar of its own. Beside them, the church year, in both its contemplative aspect and its public enactment, is a counter-cultural rhythm, a different drummer, a subversive agenda for our hearts.

By it we remember who we are—and who we are not. By it we may see our history through gospel eyes. By it we intercede and intervene, praying to act with the Word of God.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann was a United Methodist pastor in Detroit, Michigan, and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.