Of Holy Obedience and the River of God

In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President and in Jan. 1981, as a student on office campus study in D.C., I watched his administration come to town.  Thousands of Republicans swooping down on the city, with special hats and buttons, celebrating that “happy days” were coming again.  I watched in horror and shock as the streets were taken over on inauguration day by the military, including tanks, and it felt like a coup de tat. This was followed quickly by an avalanche of legislation to cut social services and the safety net of the poor, and his new budget came out proposing cuts that would take services back a decade or more.

The Community for Creative Non-Violence, a Catholic Worker house that served the poor in Washington, DC called for national days of actions, people getting arrested for days at the White House to protest these cuts.  I felt drawn to this action, but also nervous about the idea of getting arrested having never done civil disobedience.  I was leaving town soon and was mainly concerned about possibly needing to come back to town to attend court.

As part of wrapping up my stay in D.C., I did something I had intended to do for all the months I had been there: visit the Smithsonian Museum of History.  A friend dropped out the day we were to go, so I went alone.  I went through an inspiring exhibit documenting political protests in the US of many eras.  But then I went through an exhibit I will call “This American Life” although I don’t know what it was really called.  It started with a panorama of Native American images, then of life in the colonies, and on decade by decade showing the dust bowl, the great depression, many wars, etc.  Each a room of a home – some desperately poor some modestly middle class, some even opulent.  Slowly technology enters in and transforms.  My journey through it felt like a deeply mystical experience.  At the very end was a bench which I sat on for about 10 minutes aware that I was deeply centered as if in Meeting for Worship, aware of what I have come to call “the River of God”- the deep, eternal journey of humanity across all recorded history.  Of how people have always struggled for survival, for dreams, for a better life for their children, against wrongs real or imagined, and slowly, but surely eeked out a better world even while creating our next set of problems.

In that quiet on that bench I knew with absolute clarity that I would indeed participate the next day in the civil disobedience, that I was part of this eternal chain of humanity struggling for a better future.  I knew I was also part of the chain of protesters who had won the safety net for less advantaged and that it was now my turn to help protect it.

The next day I took public transit to the CCNV house, and met an affinity group from Buffalo who welcomed me into their group to be arrested.  Mitch Snyder drove of us in a Volkswagen bus over to the White House to wait in the tour line, because like a weeks worth of protestors before me, we were to go through and pick a place to sit down and be arrested.  Our group had decided to go all the way through and come out onto the lawn to be arrested.  To our surprise the Secret Service responsible for security at the White House, stood beside us (and no one else in the group) moving with us through the tour.  Clearly they had followed up from the CCNV house and knew who today’s arrestees were to be and were poised to pounce before we would “disrupt” people’s tourist experience of the White House.  I started to feel in this cat and mouse game like I was playing the game Clue:  “Will it be in the parlor with Mrs. White, or in pantry with Professsor Green?”   I think however by the time we got out the front door they thought we had lost our nerve and wandered off briefly, only to come rushing back when we veered onto the lawn against posted rules.

As we sat down in a circle on the lawn I quickly found myself in deep and centered prayer, with a sense of White Light all around me, really in one of the most holiest of moments in my life.   Faintly behind me as if coming from some other reality I could hear the voice of one of the secret service reading the rule against being on the lawn and warning us that if we did not leave within 5 minutes we would be arrested.  I almost laughed out loud because it seemed so funny to me that in this deep place of Holy Obedience that I found myself that this mere mortal thought he had the authority to move me from the place I was so anchored.

We were arrested, held for a few hours and released to our own recognizance, and a week later at our trial plead nolo-contender (meaning I do not admit guilt but do not contest the truth of the charges.)  We were given suspended sentences and sent on our way.

Today almost 30 years later as I study the economic crash of 2008, and the slow destruction of the middle class that has taken place over that time, of the ever widening inequality gap in this country between the rich and the poor and the very deliberate strategy on the part of the Koch brothers and other members of the most rich elite of this country carried out over those thirty years, I see that indeed that moment in time was a turning point.  I am once again convinced that Spirit led me to just the right spot and the right moment on the White House Lawn.

As we face Climate Change we are again at just such a pivotal time and some of us will again need to heed our place in the chain of protestors who have acted to protect life, and we will again need to find where
spirit would have us sit or act to say No to destruction.