Obedience is Overrated
So join me in disobedience, won't you?
Dear Ones,
I’m serving some meat-and-potatoes for you today. Get ready. And know that heaping servings of love are there, too.
Now’s the time for us to rise up. Now’s the time for us to be here for each other. Now’s our time… to create the world we want.
With Love,
Cecelia 💗
When I was an undergrad student, I took a spring break service trip.
These sorts of trips are often heavy on the charity. I use that word fairly pejoratively here, in the vein of my post titled Why There Should Be No Charity.
As I wrote there:
The very idea of “charity” is at odds with the reality of loving our fellow humans.
Inherent in the practice of “charity” is helping those “in need” — as though those “in need” are over there, those other people, as though we don’t have our own needs, too. There is no sense of mutuality in charity. There is no sense of solidarity.
The oft-spoken tropes about “giving back” to the community, or helping the “less fortunate,” inherently create an “us” and a “them.”
But that’s an illusion.
When you look at what it is to be human on this blue boat home of ours, as we float amidst the Milky Way galaxy together, there is really no way to accurately understand relating to all of our fellow humans as anything but a part of “us.”
There is no “us” and “them” here.
There is only “us.”
Luckily, the “service trip” I chose wasn’t charity-like at all.
In fact, the trip I attended was easily one of the most life-defining experiences I’ve had — an opportunity to frame my relationship to the world around me in an entirely new way.
The title of this trip was Faith and Resistance.
Over the course of a week, I trekked in caravanning fifteen-passenger vans with a few dozen like-minded, like-hearted, values-aligned fellow college students, to the capital of our country: Washington, D.C.
We weren’t there to work at a soup kitchen. Or to plant a tree. Or even to build houses. All of these activities — perhaps more typical of these sorts of trips — are good and fine. But they are also a drop in the bucket.
We can do things like that until the cows come home.
And we will have to keep doing them… and keep doing them… and keep doing them some more… and that doing will never end… unless we address the bigger, systemic reasons why the needs are there in the first place.
You know the old trope?
People sitting along the river seeing babies in baskets floating down the river… and rushing to save them… one… by one… by one?
In a situation like that, as the story goes, there has to be a point at which you all stop, consider what you’re doing for a minute, and ask: “Shouldn’t we send someone upstream to see why these babies are ending up in the river to begin with?”
Yes.
We should.
Our Faith and Resistance trip was much more like going upstream to investigate the systemic causes of our community problems (i.e. the babies in the river)… and trying to stop the problems at their sources.
What more powerful source of systemic influences could we encounter than the federal government of the United States — an entity sending dynamic, far-reaching reverberations through our country (and world), to the tune of trillions of dollars worth of activity annually?
Our trip was about influencing that federal government.
Our means?
Civil disobedience.
Tiptoeing Through the Tulips
We were a bunch of Catholic kids.
We were at a Catholic college. And many of us had grown up going to Catholic schools and attending Catholic churches.
Obedience had been drilled into us.
Well, this is actually true for anybody who has come through a conventional schooling system. Beyond the academic facts and skills we’re being taught? More than anything, we’re being taught to be “good” and obey our teachers and elders, to do what we’re told to do, how we’re told to do it.
Those who get “A’s” are those who are best at obedience. Those who are “failing” or getting less-than-stellar grades? They’re probably more… creative.
In a Catholic setting, I think a lot of these dynamics are amplified. Catholic coercion and guilt have done a number on generations of students, over the years.
Yet, there we were:
a group of students at a Catholic school…
…gathering together for a Faith and Resistance retreat.
To explain, more to the point, what a retreat like that is:
The Faith? Christianity.
The Resistance? To the violence and injustice our federal government perpetuated worldwide.
Our guides? A Catholic priest and nun who met while protesting the Vietnam War, later left their religious vows behind, married, had a family, and continued their active resistance together.
They were legends in the pantheon of Vietnam War resistance.
Together — along with the rest of the members of their Baltimore Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community, called Jonah House, and the D.C. Dorothy Day community — they led a group of us college students from around the country in a retreat focused on the two things I’ve mentioned: faith and resistance.
We reflected.
We wrote.
We sang.
We prayed.
And we learned about, and practiced, civil disobedience.
Our direct actions?
A sit-in at the White House.
A march at the Department of Energy.
And the pièce de résistance?
Throwing human blood on the Department of Defense.
We worked our way up to that last one.
Liz and Phil and their colleagues were well aware that these activities were well beyond the experience of most of us students.
So they took us through a whole process of determining how we would participate. What was involved at each direct action. How we could contribute. And perhaps most importantly: what actions would mean we were consciously risking arrest.
They asked each of us to think carefully about whether we wanted to do that. They asked us to think about our futures, about how any arrest record might affect our plans. They asked us to think through all the implications.
The veteran organizers would be risking arrest repeatedly, of course. This was not new for them. Liz and Phil and their peers had been risking arrest — and actually being arrested — since they were dismantling nuclear warheads decades ago.
Some of my own peers were gung-ho.
They were going for it.
I, on the other hand, was still far-too indoctrinated and over-cautious and steeped in my straight-A persona to want to do so.
Each of the actions was powerful, but the one at the Department of Defense was the one whose imagery I’ll forever have with me.
Our day started with singing and chanting and praying at the Department of Defense, as legions of workers headed into a day on the job, creating God-knows-what forms of violence. I remember watching them hurry along, carrying their briefcases and bags, their heels click-clacking along the concrete and brick, trying to avoid us and any real acknowledgement of the reality of what they were heading in to do that day.
Liz and Phil and their comrades had prepared by drawing their own blood the day before. Their intention was to spatter the blood on the building — of course symbolizing the untold gallons of blood that those working within that building had spattered across the globe, over the decades.
When it came time to do so, those risking arrest needed to get close enough to the building to spatter their blood on its walls.
But there were gardens between them and the walls.
In those days of early springtime, the garden beds were full of tulips, a riot of colors, flowers whose inherent hopefulness belied the daily activities happening upon the grounds which they adorned.
Our comrades were peaceful folks — folks who often didn’t eat meat, their commitment to avoiding unnecessarily ending lives was so strong.
These were certainly not folks who would trample tulips.
So they tip-toed through them.
I can still see their crouched bodies, careful and slow, one tip-toe in front of the other, as the group slowly advanced to the building.
They finally arrived.
They threw the blood.
The gallons turned the walls bright red — the red of human vitality, strength, genius, creativity, and life, usually only spread like paint on a place such as a wall when that life has been snuffed out of a human body.
And the building became more honest, in that moment.
No one could avoid what was happening inside anymore.
The building was marked.
The truth was visible.
And a group of “good” Catholic kids learned a lesson about times when obedience means complicity in the dark underbelly of humanity — and about times when disobedience is actually far more “good” than “bad.”
Coloring Outside the Lines
I remember hating art, as a little girl.
I had been trained so powerfully to aim for doing things “right,” and/or “perfectly,” that art did not seem fun or enjoyable to me.
I always felt like I was grasping for the “right” answer.
I never knew what I was “supposed” to do.
I was militant about coloring inside the lines — and I mean literally.
In fact, I was very likely to rip up and throw away something that I was working on if I made a mistake like my crayon charging outside of a line if I sneezed.
How sad.
Yes?
Because here’s the thing.
Art is creative.
And creativity, by definition, is inventing things that have not been invented before — bringing into being ever-more innovative and fresh ideas and artifacts.
If you’re staying within the lines, you cannot be creative.
If you’re staying within the lines, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.
If you’re staying within the lines, you’ll keep simply grabbing babies out of a river… and you’ll never stop to ask what alternatives there may be to solving that problem, alternatives that are probably far more effective, in the end.
Art should be messy.
Creativity is never perfect.
And creativity is one of the most powerful forces that can come through us humans. In fact, I’d urge all of you who believe the teaching that we are “made in the Creator’s image” to consider that this is one of the truest ways that can be seen.
We are human.
And thus, we create.
We create new worlds.
We create beauty.
We create love.
We create joy.
We can create violence. Or strife. Or anger. Or cruelty. Or greed. Or pride. Or destruction. Or other forms of darkness…
… and we humans have been creating these latter things far too much.
In fact, I’d argue that these things are the lines.
These things are the “norms” we humans have created on this Earth.
These things are the “rules” and “laws” we are taught to obey.
And for what?
Why?
We don’t need to continue this.
We don’t.
We can create something entirely different.
But how can we do that… if we don’t start being more “messy” and “bad” and creative… and disobedient to what we’ve always been taught?
We Create This World
We create this world, folks.
WE do.
Not the meanest people.
Not the strongest people.
Not the richest people.
Not the political powers-that-be.
Yes, those are the types of people we usually cede our power to. We accede to being victims far too often and easily.
Stop that.
Seriously, stop that.
Friends, we are not victims.
We are not helpless.
We are not weak.
We are powerful beyond measure.
We can decide what kind of world we want to live in — and then create it. Moment by moment. Day by day. Week by week. Month by month. Year by year.
We create our world just like that, through how we live.
This is not theoretical.
This is not a nice idea.
This is a practice.
This is what we do and how we do it.
There are no right answers.
If you are breathing and walking in love, you shouldn’t care a lick about whether or not you’re being “good” or “right,” because love speaks for itself. We all know it when we see it, and we know what it feels like, even if that feeling has been pretty remote for us so far in our lives. When it’s there, “good” or “right” become irrelevant.
Laws have been written that do not bring love.
Norms in our society are anything but just.
Your family, your friends, your community may expect things of you that are closer to coloring in the lines than creating what you know our world needs.
Don’t let them sway you.
You know what you need to do.
So do it.
And watch our shared world come alive… with a whole new sparkle and shine.
Watch love reign.
Watch the darkness be overcome.
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💗