Early Advent: Voting Your Values

It isn’t yet Advent, but I’m already in waiting mode.

That’s because all life is Advent. Even when whatever we’re waiting for comes to pass, it’s only a discrete chunk of time, an occurrence dropped into the great pond of Possibility.

Looming just over the horizon is the midterm election. We all have been waiting, hoping, dreading, fearing, expecting, doubting, praying, working, daring, in one great mass of nervous energy. What will the turnout be? Will the polls prove more or less accurate, or will they turn out to have been grossly wrong? Will we have a shot at stopping the incessant craziness, cruelty, and incredulity which is our daily fare?

We already know that voting may be over when November 3 fades in the rear-view mirror, but the election will go on and on and on in some form.

We know that the current regime has laid the groundwork for ramming its weight against any results they don’t like. Some seeds of distrust will have fallen on fertile soil and will sprout in fights and fury.

We also know that something significant has shifted in the last twelve months.

People have begun to form new alliances.

New faces and new voices are emerging, many with fresh ideas and courageous determination.

We are seeing the implosion of a regime of hubris and profound stupidity.

We’re watching some politicians of both parties join in denouncing unfit candidates.

We’re seeing demonstrations of millions in the streets transform into determination to get people to vote.

And yet...

And yet we don’t know what the future looks like.

I will not live long enough to see what the next half-century will reveal.

Nor am I a seer.

But I am a student of history and of human nature.

I can predict that no solution will be permanent.

I am certain that turning a corner always leads to more corners to be turned.

I am totally certain that there is no silver bullet, no knight in shining armor, no human messiah, no conquering hero who will stride in and save the day.

The past has produced a Lincoln, a Theodore Roosevelt, a Franklin Roosevelt, a John Kennedy, a Martin Luther King. Three of those mighty leaders were felled by assassins. Two died along with scores of others. Their legacies have sometimes endured, sometimes fallen to wrecking balls.

The everlasting Advent is hardly a time to sit on hands and wait for redemption. It is time to put our shoulders to the wheel and our hands to the plough, to use quaint metaphors. Democracy only empowers people who empower their own democracy.

That means wake up.

That means be conscious.

That means to stop doing nothing and start doing something positive.

It means that there is never a pause, never a break, never a time to assume that some ephemeral “normalcy” will return and remain.

Why?

Because the confluence of greed, ignorance, and moral laziness has brought us to this crisis. That triad has never rested and never will. It is as sure a part of the human experience as charitableness, intellect, and moral fortitude. We are neither one thing nor the other, neither completely lost nor completely redeemed. We are a species in process, and our planet will sustain us and our universe will support us only so long as we allow our inner angels to empower us to resist our inner demons.

In a few weeks, Christian churches will again begin the Christian Year. Have you ever wondered why we keep repeating it? Why does it never end?

We sometimes pretend that we are moving forward, but inevitably we are caught in backward reflection.

Advent, it would seem, is looking forward to the future, towards a timeless universe when justice will be clothed with might and every hurt be healed. We sometimes pretend we are waiting for the coming of Christ in power and great glory. Perhaps we are.

But often, the long wait is trivialized into something we can grasp, understand. We transmute waiting for a new world order into waiting for Christmas.

That’s not all bad. In fact, it isn’t bad at all. But it is a testimony to how hard it is for us to believe in the new, the strange, the unforeseen, the fuzzy proposition of a world we fear we can’t inhabit or won’t be at home in.

If you think I’m talking about “heaven,” as in life after death, think again. Because the issue isn’t where we are going after we die, but how we can rearrange, indeed renew, the world we are living in at this moment.

Advent, if anything, is the anticipation of neither something foreign nor something familiar. Advent is the audacious proposition that something, some reality, some Being, is already in our midst. If there’s anything to await, it’s for the dawn of consciousness that eternity is and always has been present. Or, to put it another way, if there’s anything to wait for, it is the recognition that the Eternal One is nowhere but everywhere: synonymous, in Paul Tillich’s phrase, with “the eternal Now.”

When Jesus came on the scene in first-century Palestine, he is reported to have proclaimed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand;” or, to put it another way, “the Presence and Rule of the Holy One is here and now. It isn’t up to us to produce it, but rather to recognize that rule or realm as an alternative way to live.

Modern Christianity’s problem is that we keep believing that there is some reality other than what is here and now. The past is gone. The future, whatever it may be, is yet to arrive. As Marcus Aurelius once put it, “The present is all that we have. Therefore, it is the only thing of which we may be deprived.” [Meditations, Book II, Chapter 14]

What does all this have to do with the election on November 3? Or any election?

Quite simply, democratic voting allows the possibility that we express as best we can, not just what we desire (that too) but what we value. And if our values are informed by this “realm” of the Sacred—this holy Presence that is waiting silently to be recognized—then the ballot is one important way to throw our personal power into bringing our world in line with that sacredness.

In case you’re wondering, I’m trying to think through what that looks like in a way we can grasp and possibly learn by heart. It comes down to choosing character over expediency, charity over greed, kindness over cruelty, neighborliness over strife, peace over warfare, integrity over duplicity, justice over inequality, truth over lies.

You get the drift.

But do you see what I see? Every once in a long while, I would say once perhaps in every generation or maybe once a century or two, there is a burst of energy that aligns with living in a sacred manner, namely making those choices I just named and others consonant with them. In my view, this is one of those times. Maybe.

But be very sure that although we can seize this moment, we can’t realistically assume it will last. To believe otherwise would be to lapse once more into the fantasy that stuff like our choices themselves have the quality of eternity, and can last permanently.

It was true when it was first said by Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran, true when it was distilled by the abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1852, and true now: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” That points to a deeper truth. No human efforts, however noble, are guaranteed to last forever. “Nothing gold can stay.” If we are conscious, we will remember that there is no point where humanity will have arrived at that longed-for age of glory. The present is never followed by the future, but by the next present, and the next, and the next, and so on to infinity. The present is what we have. The “kingdom” is “at hand.”

The likelihood is that the election on November 3 will be followed by a period of chaos and confusion. We have virtually been promised that. I point to January 6, 2021, as an example of what I mean. The Powers hungry for more power are not about to slink away without pulling out the choke and throttle to the full extent.

So what are we to do? How are we to be?

The common wisdom of Advent is, “Be ready. Be prepared.”

Only a slim slice of the population will be equipped to go to bat for true fairness and democratic integrity. Meanwhile, we can be sure that trustworthy organizations and individuals are already on top of election safety and integrity.

The National Election Protection Coalition, the largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition in the United States, comprises over 300 national, state, and local partners. The Coalition’s core function is to coordinate nationwide field programs, poll monitoring, and immediate voter assistance.

Common Cause and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law work together to monitor and defend election integrity.

Legal defense and civil rights organizations field teams of litigators ready to file emergency motions on Election Day (e.g., keeping polls open during long delays, addressing equipment failures) and challenge improper certification refusals or illegal post-election interference. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) deploys nationwide litigation networks and poll monitoring through its state affiliates to protect voting rights and ensure election results are certified.

Likewise, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) focuses heavily on preventing voter suppression, voter intimidation, and disenfranchisement in key target States through its Prepared to Vote initiative.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) specializes in federal and state voting litigation, fighting anti-voter barriers, and defending lawful election procedures.

The Brennan Center for Justice is providing legal analyses, monitoring threats to election officials, and supporting litigation to prevent election subversion or unlawful interference with vote counting.

In addition to non-governmental organizations, key official bodies oversee statutory compliance, such as State Attorneys General and Secretaries of State. They are the chief state election officials responsible for enforcing state voting laws, managing certification procedures, and dispatching law enforcement or legal teams if polling access or ballot counting is disrupted.

None of that relieves us ordinary citizens of the responsibility to remain focused on our own core principles. I hope my point in listing all these safeguards is obvious: anxiety is understandable, but unnecessary and unhelpful. I encourage you to support one or more of these or similar organizations that work to safeguard voting rights. I also urge you to defuse talk in the vein of “nothing we do will matter”; “they” are going to make sure the election is invalidated, etc. Does that kind of talk ever lead anyone to constructive action?

I hope I don’t need to say that the last thing anyone should do is urge violence. That will only play into the hands of those who would love to invoke martial law, whether legally or illegally.

Advent makes no bones about the real power of the forces of darkness. The Prayer Book Collect for the First Sunday of Advent prays, “... give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light....” If that language doesn’t grab you, try thinking in terms of recommitting and recentering. Focus on the Holy One whose self-expression includes everything in the universe, including this strange and wonderful species on a smallish planet in one of myriad galaxies, the species that calls itself homo sapiens, who keep struggling to become conscious of just how much potential they have for Good.

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