No Kings Day in Retrospect: Let’s Hear It For All This Foolishness

I did my aging bit for democracy by sitting on a folding chair along the main thoroughfare in Norway, Maine, for a couple of hours on No Kings Day. No big deal, for sure, but absolutely essential for our way of life, in my view. Call it Trivia versus Trump. Every little bit helps. We may still end up living in a fascist dictatorship. But in the absence of such trivia, in all likelihood we will.

Consider the story of the Communist Party during the Weimar Republic. Infamously, they decided to sit on the side-lines to wait it out. They believed that the rising movement of Hitler and his National Socialist party would eventually fizzle out and that they, the Communists, would then take over. Their slogan was nach Hitler kommt uns. Of course, that didn’t happen. The Nazis subsequently went after the Communists with street-fighters and bombastic propaganda, and the Nazis won.

I have observed, however, that some who aspire to be Christian intellectuals these days, in whose ranks I would number myself, don’t always get it. We know all about all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We know how self-serving and politically ineffective – even counterproductive – popular protests can sometimes be. We, or a significant number of us, tend to consider such things a flatus vocis, a pointless breath of air compared to the ineluctable forces of history (Marx) or the principalities and powers of this world (St. Paul).

I agree – on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But on any given Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, I’ll sit on my folding chair along an ordinary street with several hundred others, in behalf of what I consider to be the foolishness of the Gospel. Why not go for the hope?

It will help, however — this has been my experience over the decades – to get yourself to Church on Sundays, too, as often as you can. Join in all that strange and wondrous liturgical foolishness. Sing your heart out with hope. Feast on the Bread for the Journey offered you there. Then Go In Peace – Serve The Lord. Even if you end up the next week, comically, sitting in a folding chair waving the V-sign with your arthritic fingers – for me, it was for Christus Victor – smiling at the passing cars, more than a few of whose drivers apparently couldn’t care less.