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I return to Foster's non-exhaustive list of pitfalls in the practice of spiritual disciplines.

The fourth pitfall in his list of seven is the temptation to concentrate on spiritual disciplines and forget that the point of them is to open the door for Christ. If you are going along doing your spiritual practices, and you hear God telling you to drop the usual routine and go do something else, and you resist because you want to continue with your spiritual practice, you have forgotten the point of spiritual discipline.

The fifth is becoming fascinated with a single discipline to the neglect of others. Spiritual disciplines are "an organic unity, a single path." Put another way, describing the Good Life as abundant life means that you have been handed a whole lot of good things all at once. Allow each of them a place in your life. Trying to nourish your soul on one of them exclusively is poor spiritual hygiene.

The sixth pitfall is regarding any teaching on spiritual discipline as complete. "I have no exhaustive list of the Christian Disciplines," says Foster, "and as far as I know, none exists. For who can confine the Spirit of God?" The twelve spiritual disciplines in these books have been topics of broad discussion for a long time, which is why Foster picked them for Celebration of Discipline and its study guide. But they are not the whole picture. We were made in God's image, but being finite creatures, we are not a complete image, nor can we comprehend the entirety of God's grace. So there may be some other spiritual discipline that appears to you at the right time.

The seventh pitfall is stopping at discussion and study. You have to get off your cushion and actually do the thing. It's like reading about physical therapy versus actually doing it.

And that is where I stopped when I first picked up these books twenty years ago. "To step out into experience threatens us at the core of our being. And yet there is no other way. Prayerfully, slowly, perhaps with many fears and questions, we need to move into this adventurous life of the Spirit." I was too afraid.

This is not the place for my spiritual autobiography. I will say only that I was once instructed to make a detailed list of events in my early life for the benefit of someone else's therapist. I did so, concentrating on what I perceived as the root causes of my bad habits in my relationship with that person. The therapist spent some time reading over this list in complete silence (we were alone in her office), then looked up at me and said gently, "You weren't ever treated as a person, were you? Just a thing." And that's how I started crying in the office of a therapist who wasn't even mine. Because I had known this all my life, but no one had ever acknowledged it to my face.

I worked very hard to become a person, in spite of people who wanted to use, discard, or consume me. It has taken me a long time to arrive at a point in my spiritual journey where I can face the fear of being changed--of losing what stability I worked for, even though what replaces it will be better. But I want to live more fully in the entire real world, not only the small corner of the world that I carved out for myself. So I have returned to Foster's writings.

Anyway, Foster recommends the following Scripture readings on the topic of spiritual disciplines as the door to liberation. This is nowhere near the massive reading list of the introduction! Read in the suggested order and take your time.

The longing to go deeper: Psalm 42
The slavery of ingrained habits: Psalm 51, Romans 7:13-25
The bankruptcy of outward righteousness: Philippians 3:1-16
The pervasiveness of sin: Proverbs 6:16-19, Romans 6:5-14
The victory of Spiritual Discipline: Ephesians 6:10-20

Beginning with this chapter, Foster provides study questions for the reader. I won't list them here because they refer to the entire text, not my summary and paraphrase. But each could form the basis of its own post.

Foster quotes extensively from the saints in every chapter. In my next post I will provide the booklist he presents at the end of Chapter 1 of the study guide.

I am skipping between the main text and the study guide today.

Foster portrays the spiritual life, also known as the Good Life or as abundant life, as a narrow way, but not, as is often imagined, a gate. Instead it is a path. On one side is any attempt to get everything perfectly right through human will. On the other is the assumption that we need do nothing and God will sort it all out. Both of these go nowhere. Foster calls them sheer dropoffs; I prefer to think of them as thorns and heavy brush, because it is possible to get out of them and back to the path--not without looking silly or feeling pain, but possible. The path takes us from birth through death; it is a matter of both spiritual practice, and asking for God's guidance and transformational power. As we travel, we are changed. Ever beginners in spiritual discipline, we nevertheless find ourselves growing closer to "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ," as the King James Version poetically puts it. (Ephesians 4:13)

But oh, does the temptation to find a shortcut wind its way into every waking moment.

The section for Chapter 1 in the study guide goes into more detail about this temptation. Foster lists seven pitfalls along the way--"though, surely," he says, "there are more."

Legalism is often held up by American Protestants (and possibly others) as the pitfall we must watch for. It is certainly a pitfall. You don't have to do scary things, like trusting that God knows more than you do about a situation, or meeting everyone as an equal image of God, if you stick to a firm checklist of Do This = Good, Do That = Bad. Real virtues can be silenced and thrown out by properly written laws. You don't have to wake up and say, "Today I will do evil." Just pick a tiny snippet of Scripture to found an enormous system of laws upon. Ignore any way in which your laws increase human misery or your checklists exasperate and divide. After all, what you are doing is Scriptural! Then compound the evil by teaching it to your children and telling them they will go to Hell if they point out the inconsistencies in your laws and the inanities in your checklists. This, I firmly believe, is how you make angry ex-Christians out of your kids.

But that's just the most commonly discussed pitfall in the way.

Second, Foster points out that although spiritual disciplines are often an inward matter, if you practice them, the world is going to notice, and that notice must sooner or later be negative. He doesn't mean the artificial martyrdom of making an ‮ssa‬‎ of yourself to people who did not invite you in. Spiritual disciplines prompt us toward doing more justice, loving mercy more, walking more humbly in the presence of God, valuing our neighbors as equal images of God with us, and valuing the will of God above all things. When you do this where the powerful can see you, the powerful get angry. When you remind ordinary people by your actions that they can do the same, they get uncomfortable. Sometimes anger and discomfort lead to self-examination and change. Sometimes, however, they lead to trouble. But leaving the way because people are shoving you off it is a mistake. Do not assume that the way is always going to be easy.

The third pitfall is upholding spiritual disciplines as virtues. Virtue needs some explanation first. Popular culture tends to regard virtue either as not having unapproved sex, or as sitting around telling other people where they have gone wrong. Virtues are more complicated than that. (Nearly everything popular culture says about the Good Life is more complicated than that.) A virtue is something you do if you are the best person you can be.

The number and nature of virtues has been the subject of debate since humankind first learned to argue. Here are two lists that Foster certainly has in mind, because the authors he cites certainly did. The first list, often called the Seven Heavenly Virtues, consists of prudence, or thinking about the consequences of your action and inaction; justice, or the honoring of the rights of all; temperance, or practicing moderation in all things; fortιtude, or being afraid but doing it anyway; faith, or being willing to believe in what cannot be proven; hope, or acting in the assumption that what is wrong can be set right; and charity, or love without favoritism. NOTE that these are very rough paraphrases. The second list is called the Seven Lively Virtues (lively here meaning life-giving) or Seven Capital Virtues (capital meaning that they are very important). It includes chastιty, or not being led around by your sexual desires; temperance; charity; diligence, or being careful and attentive as you work; kindness, or doing good for other people without expectation of reward; patience, or not allowing the big and little troubles of life to lead you off the way; and humility, which means both owning your ‮tihs‬‎ and getting over yourself. Again, these are very rough paraphrases.

You can see that spiritual disciplines are not virtues. You can be an ‮elohssa‬‎ and practice every single one of the disciplines in these books without any improvement in your character, because you have decided that they are desirable to you personally. Or you can be an amazing person, an example to all--as long as things are going right. In other words, you can go through your whole life tidying up your living room without noticing that your house is rotting. The Lord walks in through an opened door and starts patching up your foundation and shoring up your roofbeams: and that's when you find yourself living a more virtuous life.

I will return to Foster's list of pitfalls in spiritual practice in my next post.

I am reading the main text today.

The loudest voices in modern media-oriented Christianity in the U.S. claim persecution so often that they have become the boy who cried wolf. Barriers to Christian practice do exist, but they are much more pervasive, and more dangerous, than being greeted over the coffee counter with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." In this chapter, Foster describes three of them.

After the opening quote by Donald Coggan, Foster says, "Superficiality is the curse of our age." Foster identifies superficiality with "the doctrine of instant satisfaction." So I would say rather that impatience is the curse of our age. We're always after results, the sooner and more obvious the better! The possibility that some things simply take time and effort to do properly has become so foreign that it's easy to bamboozle people into anything that looks at first glance like an instant solution to their problem. This is not purely a modern issue, but the ever-accelerating commercial cycle--invent a need, fill it, then invent another need, and so on--has worsened this tendency. So has the unending slithering of work into every waking hour of our lives. (Note that Foster wrote this book in the late 1970s. Consider the ways in which daily life has changed since then!) Impatience is paired with reluctance to accept that change can be inward and subtle. We have all seen the exaltation of weight loss for women--an immediately visible change--over better endurance, better flexibility, better sleep, more strength, reduced chronic pain, and other actual benefits of exercise. Consider also the plethora of ads for products that promise to help women lose that weight fast.

Impatience (or, as Foster puts it, superficiality) has infected American Christianity as well. But spiritual disciplines can't be packaged and sold like this. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods--even, perhaps especially, if it has a Jesus-fish logo. They are a matter of daily practice over a lifetime, each day anew. Foster calls himself a beginner years after his congregation began practicing spiritual disciplines together. The resulting transformation can be profound, but is generally incremental. Some of us have moments of sudden enlightenment; most of us need years to realize that looking back over our lives has become looking down.

When Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline, popular culture was still strongly materialistic in its views on the cosmos, although it had become safer for scientists to say publicly that "we cannot be confined to a space-time box," as he puts it. So Foster identifies this pop-sci materialistic attιtude as another barrier to Christian practice. I think that popular culture has changed since then. Instead of truth being seen as a matter of material existence only, truth has become a matter of emotional weight. If you feel very strongly about something, it's true. If you have to put your feelings aside and carefully study something, it isn't true and is probably an attempt to get at you somehow. If it doesn't make you feel at all, it is ‮bmud‬‎ and made up by a ‮bmud‬‎ person. Only fakes and patsies say, "Hey, wait a minute, let's slow down and think about this." We can see the results in the regime we are enduring today.

This too has infected American Christianity. Too many preachers train their followers to continually look for "the Devil, prowling around like a lion, searching for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8), not in order to resist evil in community with "fellow believers throughout the world" (verse 9), not in order to look forward to Christ's restoring, settling, strengthening, and grounding presence that is promised after troubles (verse 10), but in order to take part in exciting spiritual combat and claim victory--through Christ, of course. Christianity becomes a matter of looking for enemies in order to get that high of victory again. If there are no enemies at hand, it's easy to make some up. Meanwhile, real evil, which must be studied soberly and resisted daily and in community with patience, often goes ignored. Or glorified--if the evildoer promises enemies to gloriously defeat.

Even Christians who are not preoccupied by these snipe hunts mistake strong emotion for truth. As best I can tell--I was not raised in a denomination that talked like this--to be convicted of something by the Holy Spirit means to have a very strong feeling about it. As if God's voice only counted when God shouted!

Spiritual disciplines demand that you live in the world around you, even if it is not as highly colored as the world of strong emotions. This applies even if you are using emotional experiences to escape a world that is increasingly filled with dread. The people who first developed spiritual disciplines also lived through times of dread. Looking at the moment you are in now and the world within your reach, and quietly listening for what God wants you to do about it, is counter to everything the instillers of dread want you to do. Practicing it is good for you and for the world around you. And it ultimately helps you to satisfy the thirst for the presence of Christ.

The third difficulty Foster identifies is simply practical. He observes that the Bible has nothing to say about the basics of the spiritual disciplines, only the details. This was because everybody knew what the disciplines were. Most of us modern American Christians don't. When we hear the word meditation we think yoga. Fasting? Weight loss. Simplicity? Minimalist aesthetics. Silence? Monks. But for most of the life of the Church, they have been an ordinary part of that life. Foster wants to make them ordinary again. He has read a library of Christian classics and summarized them in Celebration of Discipline for us. Think of this book as the wiki for twelve spiritual disciplines: it is a jumping-off point for deeper knowledge.

I am reading the main text today.

Foster tιtles this chapter "The Spiritual Disciplines: Door to Liberation." He begins with a quote from Donald Coggan, who was a preacher, teacher, evangelist, and renewer in England:

I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think.

Coggan was Anglican. There are absolutists in every corner of Christianity, of course, human nature being what it is. However, Anglicans generally preach that there is no absolute "this, only this, and always this" answer to most questions. In other words, there is a very short list of things that all Christians must believe. This list is summarized in a form called a creed. Different groups of Christians at different times in the history of the Church have worked out various creeds; the longest one in an Anglican prayer book is about two and a half pages of large type, as best I can recall. Only choices that contradict this list are wrong. For all other questions of the form "Is A right, or is B right?" the Anglican answer is "Yes; now consider whether either is right for you personally."

I repeat that Foster does not quote idly.

Returning to the actual quote: Coggan summarizes the historic Christian attιtude toward the world and our place in it. The world of time and mortality is not our permanent home. Our lives here are a journey toward our true home. Although the mortal world was created as good, it now has a flawed and unsteady foundation; so also for us.

Anybody who lives in the United States will probably recognize the above whether they are Christian or not: it's entwined in our consciousness; it underlies assumptions made even by people who were never in a church--indeed, by people who used to believe, but claim to have freed themselves from Christianity.

But the second part may be foreign to someone raised in an American-grown denomination. They might expect Coggan to go on to talk about redemption and forgiveness--about getting right with God. What is this business about meditation, worship, and thinking?

It's the fruit of the many, many lifetimes of Christians seeking after God that took place before America was even thought of.

The first baptisms were on the bank of a river. People listened to a preacher who told them that they were being hypocrites and ‮selohssa‬‎. He told them that if they wanted to do better, they should be ritually washed in the river as a sign that they wanted to clean up their lives. And then he expected them to leave, and do what they said they were going to do.

Talking about redemption and forgiveness exclusively is like hovering on the bank of that river. It's like trying to coast on the spiritual high of a religious experience. But the mortal world is just as real as the spiritual. While we are mortal, we live in both.

As Foster reminds us continually, there need be no contradiction between living in the mortal world and seeking the spiritual world. It is possible to order our mortal lives in a way that helps us to be more aware of the entire real world and thus more able to hear and accept the guidance of God as we journey through the world God made. This journey is a series of everyday moments: Foster cites "hav[ing] jobs...car[ing] for children...wash[ing] dishes and mow[ing] lawns." It is not a solitary journey for most, but takes place "in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors."

The point is not to do it right. Spiritual disciplines are not a test to ‮deew‬‎ out the unworthy. They are not a duty or a burden you must take up. They are a means to "liberation from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear," as Foster puts it.

They are not intended only for spiritual athletes or people who have a lot of religious education. Absolute beginners in Christian life can follow spiritual disciplines as well as anyone else. "The primary requirement," says Foster, "is a longing after God." He quotes Psalm 42 to close this section. This psalm opens with a cry: "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for You." It goes on to describe the outpouring of God's power: "Deep calls to deep at the thunder of Your torrents; all Your waves and Your billows have gone over me." If this psalm resonates with you, I suggest getting your own copy of Celebration of Discipline.

More later.

I end my read-through of Foster's introduction to the study guide with a look at his recommended reading about the Good Life. Each chapter of the study guide includes a week's worth of Bible readings and a list of suggested books for further study; most also include a list of questions to think on.

Although Foster humbly gives thanks for the hard work of others that allowed him to do nothing but write in order to complete his book, he sometimes appears to forget that not everyone can do this. The week's Scripture readings on the topic of the Good Life begin with reading through all four gospels on a Sunday. The shortest assigned reading for the rest of the week is five chapters on Tuesday; some assignments are much longer.

The first time I got to this page, I said aloud, "Well, bless his heart." This is supposed to be a guide for a lone student outside an academic setting. Not even in my Education for Ministry class did we read this much in a day.

Nevertheless, if you want to follow Foster's plan, these readings, in this order, are a good start. But take as long as you need to finish them. They are:

1. All four gospels, beginning with Mark (the example of Jesus)
2. Genesis 12-25 (the example of Abraham)
3. 1 Kings 17-19, 2 Kings 1-2 (the example of Elijah)
4. 1 Samuel 16-27; 2 Samuel 1-12, 22-23:7 (the example of David)
5. Daniel 1-12 (the example of Daniel)
6. Reread the gospels, then Acts 1-5, 10-11, then (optionally) his letters (the example of Peter)
7. Acts 9, 11-28, then (optionally) his letters (the example of Paul)

If you are the sort of reader who can have a couple of books in progress at the same time, you could also start a book by or about someone from the following list. "There is nothing that gives content to the Good Life and fleshes out the meaning of our own spirituality," says Foster, "quite like reading the saints throughout the ages. They lift our spirits, free us from the cult of the contemporary, and give us models to imitate." Read a bit at a time, and choose a full book, not an article (although the citations in a Wikipedia article may be a good jumping-off point). Foster recommends the following saints as examples of the Good Life: St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Francis of Assisi, Dame Julian of Norwich, George Fox, Madame Guyon, Blaise Pascal, John Wesley, John Woolman, David Brainerd, William Carey, David Livingstone, Adoniram Judson, Georg Müller, Dwight L. Moody, J. Hudson Taylor, Rees Howells, Sadhu Sundar Singh, Jim Elliott, M. Louis (Thomas Merton), Fulton J. Sheen.

IMPORTANT NOTE: People make selfish decisions in these accounts. They ‮wercs‬‎ up, hold grudges, and yell. They fail to notice the harm they do or the need they are failing to address. They are blind to their own false assumptions about people over whom they have power. If you are looking for perfection, even in the Scripture passages, put that wish aside. The saints live in the mortal world alongside us. Even Jesus Himself got tired and ‮dessip‬‎ off sometimes.

Next, I will spend a long time in Chapter 1 of both the main book and the study guide. They are called "The Spiritual Disciplines: Door to Liberation."

I am reading only the introduction to the study guide today.

To review, Foster sketches the Good Life as having the things we need, knowing where and with whom we belong, and being at peace with ourselves--all in ways that allow everyone else the same. It's easy to describe, but hard to live. Why? The answer is endemic, pervasive, and perennial sin.

So what is to be done? Or what is the point of the disciplines outlined in these books--what are they pointing toward?

Willpower, perhaps? Willpower can carry a person through horrific adversity. But that's not the level Foster is writing about. The Good Life is made up of daily moments, from waking to sleeping, every one an opportunity to refuse the evil and choose the good. We can't consciously will our way through our entire lives in ninety-second increments. We collapse if we try.

What if we tap collective willpower instead? What if we make laws that cover every way that human choices can go wrong, and hold one another to the consequences? The rule of law is basic to modern society, and one of the primary reasons why (in times free of tyranny) most people can rest easy most of the time. Everybody knows that we don't do A, or else B will happen--so people don't worry about the disruption or danger of A.

So laws have their place. But they do not change human nature.

Law can fall short of its purposes even when those purposes are good. If the rich never have to pay a fine that actually hurts, if the cost of seeking justice is too high for the poor, if someone simply does not care about consequences, if people who should enforce a law lean back instead, the law falls short. Laws can also be used as mechanisms for sin. They can, to borrow a phrase from Frank Wilhoit, be set up to constrain but not protect the people without power, while protecting but not constraining their oppressors. Law alone cannot save us from sin.

What if we remove the constraining element and rely instead on force of habit? What if we invent rituals that reinforce right behavior? I do not mean only religious rituals. Politeness is a ritual. Applauding a child for bravely tackling three bars of music at their first school concert is a ritual. Wearing an "I Voted!" sticker on voting day is a ritual. We are really good at filling our daily lives with rituals! Surely we can create enough rituals that our natural tendency to make them into habits will carry us past all occasions of sin.

If only.

Like law, ritual can go wrong. A ritual can legitimize the infliction of pain and fear in the guise of jolly togetherness. Or a ritual that began as good can be hijacked: refuse to participate because the people who now claim to own the ritual are creeps, and they will accuse you of being a bad person, pointing to the history of the ritual as evidence of your anti-social ways. On a less fraught but more common level, rituals can be used to paper over a lack of community--a polite collection of selfish sons of ‮sehctib‬‎, as someone said.

If sheer willpower can't get us to the Good Life, is there any hope? Are we just stuck ‮gnikcuf‬‎ up and ‮gnikcuf‬‎ each other over in this ‮dekcuf‬‎-up world?

"Take heart," says Jesus. "I have overcome the world."

These words appear at the end of the 16th chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus has just been explaining to His disciples that terrible things are going to happen to Him and to them. Not long after He says these words, He goes to meet Judas. So this can't mean that the Good Life is right around the corner, or that Jesus is going to make all the bad people stop.

"Take heart. I have overcome the world." That's grace. When your willpower fails you, turn instead to the unfailing wellspring of the power of God. But making that decision over and over is a hard thing to remember and to do. The disciplines Foster summarizes in these books are a collection of thousands of years of observations of what helps us to that decision. Call them expressions of spiritual laws if you like; call them directions for beneficent rituals; call them a list of good habits--they are all that. But they began, not as theories or ideals, but as daily practice and discussion by people who wished to live in the real world around them.

Foster concludes, "Our work--our only work--is to place ourselves in the way of Christ and invite Him to work in our lives, individually and collectively." The disciplines help us in that.

Warms this old folkie's heart. "Grandpa Was a Liberal," by Sean Tobin.

Grandpa was a liberal/So was Johnny Cash...

https://www.tiktok.com/@seantobinofficial/video/7496599123509005610

I am reading only the introduction to the study guide today.

Foster summarizes the Good Life as "provision, place, and personality." I am looking at what he calls "personality" today.

The Good Life is promised to all, but the world is full of bad life instead. We can easily see one cause today. Tyrants and their imitators want, among other things, to make as many people as possible poor, frightened, vulnerable, weak, miserable, isolated, hopeless, and exhausted; even if they can't get material benefit from destroying the Good Life, it's fun for them to think about the harm they inflict on others--just listen to how they boast!

The potentates of this world stand between us and the Good Life, but there is another obstacle even in times of peace and freedom. "I do not understand what I do," sighs Paul. "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do... I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."

Paul calls this tendency "sin living in [him]." So what's sin? Pop culture says that it's the thrill you get from having sex when you weren't supposed to or enjoying something delicious although dieting is held up as the right thing to do. Some Christians teach that it's a long list of Do Not: if you don't do anything on the list, you aren't sinning. But what does Paul mean by it?

In his letter to the Christians of Rome, from which I quote above, Paul appears to assume that his readers know what sin is. But we need a working definition. So I will venture possibly further than I should, because I am not a preacher or theologian or scholar on this topic.

I learned in church that (per the first chapters of Genesis) this world was created as good, then wounded. Human will wounded it. Why? Because the first people decided that it was not enough to trust God to have their best interests in mind in the midst of the Good Life. It was not enough for them to have been made in God's image and to live in God's care. They must also have God's ability to tell the difference between good and evil.

So they took it, and suddenly they knew that something was not right. They were vulnerable, they were ashamed, they were scared. Why? Because we were made in the image of God, but we are finite. A pool of clear water can perfectly reflect a small part of the sky--it can be made expressly to do so. That does not make it the sky. If it says "Well, now I know when there ought to be rain and when the clouds should move on," it cannot follow that up. But it can make a Hell of a mess as it heaves and splashes around. And the mess doesn't go away.

I was taught that the loss of Eden was a consequence, not a punishment. It was no longer possible for humankind to live the Good Life without effort. Hard work, worry, and grief awaited us instead. But God keeps calling and promising, reaching out and guiding. Reaching back toward God, we find the Good Life for a while. Then we fall again, doing harm to others or to ourselves. The Bible is (among other things) a chronicle of this continual bleeding of the wound of the world. It is a record of sin.

What Foster has to say about personality is that there is a way out of this. With respect to my fellow Christians who believe in a single prayer that prefaces a great transformation, I agree with Foster that spiritual life is more complicated than that. Thinking and praying must be accompanied by working, giving, listening, and so on. There is no division: they are all part of the real world in which we live. Foster has written a distillation of many centuries of observation and testing of the ways in which we can, by systematic practice and habit formation--by discipline--more often succeed in living rightly in the real world. The disciplines enable us to reach back more often and more easily when God reaches out. They help to fit us for the Good Life.

Like everything else that humankind has wrought, the disciplines have within them the tendency to go wrong. That is Foster's next topic.

I am reading only the introduction to the study guide today.

The promises of the Good Life as recorded in Scripture, says Foster, boil down to "provision, place, and personality." I looked at "provision" yesterday. Today's topic is "place."

Foster defines place as "a mutually understood and accepted set of personal relationships that give identιty to one's life." (Italics his.) He specifies that the mutual understanding must indeed be mutual: everyone involved must have "the same expectation."

Place is more than physical location, as a neighborhood is more than houses. Place is one's identιty as a person among other people by whom one is perceived. Place is mutual connection, the ability to predict and plan, the knowledge of where help may be found. Place means having both a past and a future. Being homeless does not merely mean having no house. It means being displaced.

Making sure that everyone has a place that they can live in is a major concern of the Law and the Prophets. "Woe to those who add house to house and field to field," says Isaiah, "until there is no place left and they dwell alone in the land." (Isaiah 5:8) A place--a set of mutually understood rights--for people who do not have a family network to support them is defined and defended, and the consequences for trespassing upon--sinning against, displacing--the poor, the orphaned, and so on are just as clear. In the New Testament, the Church is also meant to have a place for everyone. Foster warns against both trying to enforce the New Testament teachings about place, and denying them altogether. The one is slavery and misery, a reservation of freedom and dignity to the people at the top of the heap and denial of full humanity to everyone else. The other is a denial of human connection and a refusal to honor human vulnerability. He wrote Celebration of Discipline before hippies had gray hair, and he saw firsthand the consequences that free spirits imposed on other people. It's all very well to talk about meeting and parting and meeting again in joy when you are a young adult with a childhood bedroom waiting for you if things go wrong.

Place is a description of human need, not a prescription for human perfection. The Disciplines described in these books are about that sense of place, about meeting people where they are.

I am reading the main text and the study guide in parallel.

The introduction to the main text was added for the twentieth anniversary edition. It is the author's spiritual autobiography. A spiritual autobiography is a way of laying out the events of one's own life in order to discern the working of God in it. Foster relates his initial foray into pastoral care, his realization that he was failing his flock in a fundamental way, and the urgency imposed by an influx of seekers who he describes with a quote from a Simon & Garfunkel song: "the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on." (Foster never quotes idly, so I urge you to look up the song, "Blessed.") In search of help, he reread the texts, spanning a thousand years or more, that he had been assigned in seminary. He found new understanding and new questions, because "daily [he] was working with heartbreaking, soul-crushing, gut-wrenching human need," and the saints who wrote those books had done--or endured--the same with confidence that Foster himself did not have. He was also blessed with the presence in his congregation of a professional philosopher, who was able to show the congregation and Foster himself how the spiritual classics connect with daily life. And other elders of the Church taught him how to pray and how to fearlessly practice what they were discovering in those old books, even if it flew in the face of modern understanding. And so Foster, with his teachers and the rest of his congregation, "hammer[ed] out on the hard anvil of daily life" the observations that became Celebration of Discipline.

Although the rest of Foster's spiritual autobiography is worth close study, I am trying to keep these posts short. I will turn instead to the introduction to the study guide, which is a good summary of what Foster's first congregation was yearning for. In classical texts it is called the Good Life. Some Christians refer to it as abundant life, paraphrasing Jesus (John 10:10).

Foster allows one page to a discussion of what the Good Life is not. The kind of Good Life that exalts "power, wealth, status, and freedom from all authority," says Foster, is diametrically opposed to the Good Life of classical Christian thought. But if we are trying to extricate ourselves from the modern notion of the Good Life, we also have to evict from our minds the notion that the Christian Good Life consists of a grim little chapel with " 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door." (Blake.) Both the have-it-all and the recoil-from-it-all versions of the Good Life have to do with appearances: look enviable and desirable; look pure and perfect. The Good Life Foster is talking about is something else. More on that in the next post.

Today I started another read-through of a book that I think is important. I was going to tackle The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups by Starhawk, but I took stock of my life and my resources first. I realized that when it comes to the work of organizing, my knowledge must remain that of D'Artagnan for now. I don't feel qualified to comment on that book, although I do encourage you to read it.

So I turned to another book, or rather a pair of books. I was happy to see positive recognition, even some dissemination, of my earlier read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. I expect that this one is going to get fewer, because it covers a topic that is uninteresting, even distasteful to some. In short, I am Christian, and I want to get better at that. Feel free to block me.

Richard J. Foster is a theologian, as well as a retired pastor and an author of devotional books. Back in 1978, Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth; he later added Study Guide for Celebration of Discipline. The first book became a best seller and both books are still in use.

Passages in these books suggest that at the time, he had never lived at the mercy of a corporation or landlord or had to run a household by himself. However, he does not often fall into the trap of assuming that his experience and opportunities are everyone's experience and opportunities. He also owns his mistakes. In short, he is not a self-anointed messianic figure or a puffed-up preacher. In fact, Celebration of Discipline is a sharp antidote to the kind of religious book written by someone who thinks that feeling strongly about something is the same as being divinely inspired about it. Foster draws on classical Christian thought, by which I mean the thoughts of people who had what we call a classical education. Classical education begins with grammar (how to communicate), rhetoric (how to persuade), and logic (how to avoid fallacy and ‮tihsllub‬‎). (These are very rough paraphrases in the interests of brevity.) These all demand slowing down and thinking things through. They also require checking primary sources, which Foster does with awe-inspiring frequency. He quotes people who died a thousand years ago alongside people who rode in airplanes, and he has read everything he quotes in context.

So what is Celebration of Discipline about? In short, it's about the methods, some devised long before Jesus was born on Earth, by which people can learn to live fully in the real world, which comprises both the material, temporal world and everything that lies around and within and above and beyond it. It is not a book for spiritual supermen, although it isn't for people who are living in emergency mode either. It is an inextricably Christian book, which, again, may not be what you want.

The main text is about 200 pages long, to which the study guide adds another 50 or so. I don't have a lot of energy or unencumbered time, so I won't try to tackle a full chapter all at once. I will read a little bit at a time and post about it at Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and Slacktivist, as before.

I am not turning away from activism. Remember that according to Snyder, who is conveying the painfully learned wisdom of survivors of tyranny, choosing to devote time to something like this is one form of activism. We must not stop being who we are--we must not stop living--because something horrible is happening. Tyranny wants us to think and speak and act only in its light. Look past its capering, stamping, shouting figure to what really matters. So many unholy holy emperors have died since the foundational text of Celebration of Discipline was written. Cruelty devours itself again and again. The real world remains. It's our world, so we should continue to live in it.

This is my final post on my read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. After this I am going to take some time to deal with events in my personal life before beginning another book.

Snyder's epilogue is an essay titled "History and Liberty." Now that I have read it, I suggest that anybody who is planning to read this book start at the end. Snyder gives names to the baffling currents in which I have been tossed for much of my life.

I remember laughing with joy when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union followed not long after. Suddenly the prospect of dying in a fireball had receded beyond the horizon. I still lived within sight of a military base, but the world had changed. I used to turn the radio up when I heard that single by Jesus Jones, just to get a rush of that feeling again: "Right here, right now/Watching the world wake up from history."

Snyder calls this fallacy the politics of inevitability. The assumption that tyranny is over and that the world can only get better, he says, leads to the failure to learn from history and the failure to teach history. It leads to a tendency to do nothing, because eternal good times are on the way regardless. Snyder calls this "a self-induced intellectual coma." He also calls it childish, noting that the political buzzwords of the previous decade--neoliberalism, disruption--describe minor tremors or adjustments in a great and perfect system in which all mess is tidied away as if by magic. We acknowledge that bad things happen, but we repose in the confidence that it will all turn out all right after the present unpleasantness is fixed by a fundraiser or something. But adults know that making something work actually requires work. "We own this mess," says Snyder.

The contrasting fallacy is the politics of eternity. Instead of a fake future, the politics of eternity dwells on a fake past. This past consists of only two things: national glory, and its enemies. It is "a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood." Eternity politicians are very good at getting people to do things their ancestors refused to do, in an attempt to regain a past condition that never existed. And of course, doing the work of solving problems that actually exist is not a concern of this kind of thinking--it can even get you targeted as an enemy of the people--because the pure, perfect, and powerful state has no internal problems, just enemies.

Fear can be used to induce people to submit to the politics of eternity: "the enemy is always at the gate." I think that a desire for things to be simple is much more powerful because of what that desire can get you to do. The number of real events and people and objects and places and so on and so on that you have to deny in order to believe in the simplified world of eternity politics is so vast that doing so unmoors you from reality. Snyder notes, "We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance--and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders."

Of course, most people don't put on the uniforms or pick up the guns. The habit of inaction is the same in the grip of both fallacies, says Snyder, and that's why we ended up where we are now after the politics of inevitability faltered. People tend to run on habit, after all.

"The only thing that stands between [these two fallacies] is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another...History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have."

Snyder calls on young people to study history in order to make history. I expand his call to anyone reading this. What to read next? Something by the authors cited in this work might be a place to start. Read a little at a time, and stop and think about what you read. Like the people who came before you, read, learn, reflect, and act.

Knowledge is power.

Thanks for reading.

I continue with my reading of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

This is my penultimate post in this series. I have hesitated to make it because this lesson is so short. Here is the entire chapter:

"Lesson 20: Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny."

Do not despair. Do not discount Snyder's words as hyperbole, but do not despair. Despair is the weapon of the enemy.

If you are planning to slowly read or listen to a book the way I have been, but flinch at political books for fear of setting off an avalanche of depression, please choose The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien had seen death come out of the night for people he knew; he had seen war; he had seen the teeth of tyranny. Here are two of his characters talking about what to do about recently uncovered evidence that tyranny is alive and well and on the march.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

It is easy for me to sit in my chair and talk about glorious martyrdom, so I'm not going to do that. I say only that the opportunity for you to act may appear at any time, and may not look the way you expected. Keep your attention on the world around you wherever you are. Refusing an order, locking or unlocking a door, telling a lie, keeping a secret, copying public data and hiding the backups, whispering or shouting a warning, blocking a street, speaking when silence is commanded, standing between people with guns and people they want to disappear, livestreaming something that is supposed to be happening invisibly--you simply don't know what may be given to you to do by your own observant conscience (or, as we say in my religion, by the prompting of the Holy Spirit). The immediate cost and benefit of your choice may be apparent to you, or not. You have only to choose and act on that choice.

Do not allow yourself to be so overwhelmed by the scale and pervasiveness of what is upon us that you refuse to do anything on the grounds of not being able to do everything. C.S. Lewis wrote this while bombs were falling nightly on London and the threat of invasion was keenly felt: "Real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible." And also, "Fear becomes easier to master when [one's] mind is diverted from the thing feared to the fear itself, considered as a present and undesirable...state of mind." Fear, under tyranny, is also the weapon of the enemy. Take it away from them. You don't have to pretend that you aren't afraid, but, in the words of Jason Isbell, "Be afraid, be very afraid,/But do it anyway."

And do not forget that we are stronger together. What are people organizing, near you? What are existing organizations doing to deny tyranny its mouthfuls? Can you join in?

Do not despair. Do not submit. They cannot conquer forever.

"Lesson 19: Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

"What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not."

In my recaps of this book, I have kept the precise antics of the current tyrant out of my posts. He and his ilk would love to dominate our thoughts in that way, as if witnessing them were more important than acting against them, and there are already plenty of headlines circulating online. So I will not quote all of Snyder's supporting examples. I will say that Snyder is dignified, restrained, and skilled in the use of the plain English literary style to make his intent clear. His litany of things that are not patriotic fills two pages, beginning with "It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes" and ending with "It is not patriotic to try to end democracy." Between them is a steadily increasing drumbeat of rage--more increased and deepened, I think, because this chapter was clearly revised for the second publication in 2021. Snyder never has to name the person he is describing--the one person who has done all of these things. If you know anyone who is wavering about how bad things really are right now, please purchase a copy of this book from Thriftbooks or the like and give it to them, with a bookmark between pages 112 and 113.

"A nationalist might do all these things," Snyder says next, "but a nationalist is not a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best...[that] the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others... A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained."

Nationalists who are not entirely mired in resentment will say "it can't happen here," because the failure of those parts of democracy that they still value does not fit into their imaginary world, in which they control reality through sheer will and strong emotion. Patriots, Snyder says, will look at the same signs and respond, "It could happen here, but...we will stop it."

So what does this mean for us?

Because tyranny loves to wallow in patriotic symbols and bathetic worship of a vaguely described ideal of greatness, it can be tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just yesterday I saw a post by someone confessing that they now expect the worst if they see a flag of our nation on the property of their neighbor. But remember Lesson 4: Take responsibility for the face of the world. Remember Lessons 10 and 11: Believe in truth and Investigate. Before all this claptrap invaded the 24-hour news cycle--before the time before that--before, let's say, 2001--what did patriotism look like? I am not speaking of a long-gone ideal: beware of that assumption! I am not trying to cover up the sins of omission and commission that have been done in the name of patriotism or by patriots. But before tyranny grabbed the microphone, what did it mean to be a patriot?

Look for the writings of people who got up and did. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to mind. Read beyond the snippets that are quoted every year. You could do this for anybody whose words you know only via a few quotes trotted out on national occasions. Do not be caught up by the need to worship and feel justified; understand that every one of these people is fallible and has done wrong, as have you and everyone you know. Look at what they have done right and at what they have to say, and put that into practice.

I end this recap with a quote from patriot and refugee Carl Schurz: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

I continue with my read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

"Lesson 18: Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on...do not fall for it." (Italics Snyder's.)

In this chapter, Snyder traces the parallel chronologies of real and manufactured emergencies in the tyranny that overtook Germany in the 20th century, and the one that is now settled in the United States in the 21st. He is writing in 2017. It may seem that his penultimate paragraph, from the perspective of 2025, is futile. But beware of American exceptionalism. Every tyranny follows the same arc, some longer than others, but all ending in a fall.

"For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our instιtutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so."

There will inevitably be more violent pushback and opportunistic mayhem as tyranny attempts to ooze into every home, commons, charity, and business in America. Do not let yourself be buffaloed into giving up more freedom because the tyrant promises safety. If you don't know what your rights are, learn them now. If you don't know what the legal or executive norm is for a given situation, learn it now. And call ‮tihs‬‎ ‮tihs‬‎ when you smell it.

I continue with my reading of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

"Lesson 17: Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notion of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary."

Or, in the words of an older text, "You know a tree by its fruits."

Extremism, Snyder says, always and only means something far from the mainstream. It could be anything. The danger is that--as Snyder has shown repeatedly--tyrants wish you to believe that what they want is the mainstream. So they call all sorts of things that are contrary to tyranny extremism, by which they mean that those things are bad and should be shunned or destroyed. Giving food to people who have no food and water to those who have no water have been defined in the media as extremist acts. When you see or hear the word extremism, consider who is talking and what they have done with their power. You know a tree by its fruits.

Terrorism is certainly an evil act, but tyrants want you to be so afraid of terrorism that you accept the tyrant's lie that you cannot be both free and safe. The goal of actual terrorism is to get people to react instead of acting. The goal of labeling something terrorism when it isn't terrorism, or talking a lot about terrorists who are surely on the way or among you right now, is the same. Or, as a certain tyrant supporter said of the subjects of his tyrant, "I hold up a lie and they jump through it" like well-trained circus animals. If someone says that you should change how you live because of terrorism, take a deep breath, look away from their faces, and look, again, at the fruits of their actions.

As for emergencies and exceptions, Snyder cites legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who he describes as the most intelligent member of his tyrannical party. "The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception...manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety."

And then there is the misuse of patriotism. We have all seen and heard it. I find it difficult to describe without ranting. I will say here only that in my experience, the politicians who make the most extravagant, expensive, and prolonged displays of patriotic fervor tend to be the worst at doing the work of democracy; and that I trust someone who refuses to stand for the national anthem on moral grounds far more than someone who flies an enormous flag from the back of his truck twenty-four hours a day and does not notice that when he stops his car the flag drags in the mud.

I continue with my read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

"Lesson 16: Learn from peers in other countries."

Snyder makes two points in this lesson. First, American exceptionalism was a major cause of the mess we now find ourselves in. Journalists in other countries, he says, were often able to predict what was going to happen here, because they had first-hand experience with democracy being infected and overgrown by tyranny, but also because they did not assume that America was uniquely immune. So, says Snyder, "keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries...no country is going to find a solution by itself." And consider adding to your reading list (Lesson 9) a work by someone whose name appears in his book.

Second, Snyder recommends that every family have passports for every member. He emphasizes that leaving the country would not be an admission of defeat, and that staying to go down fighting is not necessarily the best use of your life. "This fight will be a long one. Even if it does require sacrifice, it first demands sustained attention to the world around us, so that we know what we are resisting, and how best to do so." The resisters whose words he often cites throughout this book have a common history of leaving their homelands, only to return with more resources. Every member of my family has an internationally undesirable incurable condition and we are on the thin edge of poverty to boot, so leaving the country is not an option for me specifically. But I agree with him. Get passports, if you can.

I continue my read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

"Lesson 15: Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life... Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good."

Right now this may seem like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic--but Snyder, remember, is a pragmatist as well a historian. He focuses, always, on what works.

Václav Havel began the downfall of a regime by asking what might happen if the people of Czechoslovakia stopped going through the motions of glorifying the Party in order to escape its attention, and instead went on with their lives as if the Party were irrelevant. He advised doing something community minded--not necessarily political, but something that involved associating with others without the imprimatur of tyranny, talking with them about something other than tyranny, and increasing the supply of happiness. His go-to example was brewing good ‮reeb‬‎.

Pick something socially positive to do, and do it with little or no discussion of the tyrants, even if they want whatever you are doing to vanish or become subject to their power. What have you been meaning to get around to? Socializing cats at the pet shelter? Taking a free sign language class at the library? Learning how to mend clothes at the college? Joining a choir? Do not allow tyranny to so occupy your mind that you can't choose to live without reference to it even for an hour. Do not allow tyranny to so isolate you that the only company you have is at a protest.

If you can't get out and about, look for things to do at home. Somebody with a computer but no money might join a citizen science initiative that distributes packets of scientific data in volumes that ordinary people can analyze using a program that runs in the background. Somebody with money but no time might pick a good cause or two to support via automatic payments. Somebody with no money and an old computer can write the story they always wanted to read and put it on a free fiction site so that whoever needs it will see it. Somebody with a bit of money and a lot of social anxiety might put a little free library in their front yard. The point is to exercise what Snyder calls your "capacity for trust and learning," which is a foundation for government of, by, and for the people.

The beginning of today's lesson is actually the last paragraph in Lesson 13, as follows:

"The choice to be in public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen."

Yes.

Onward to Lesson 14: "Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around…Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks."

Snyder identifies two ways to do this. In short:

First, practice good online hygiene. There are many leaks in the standard-issue online access model. Some of them allow people who don't have your best interests in mind to eavesdrop on your communications, using automated software that searches for things that they don't like people to talk about. There are ways to be more secure, but ultimately it's best, says Snyder, to "have personal exchanges in person." Do not rely on simply being a good person. "No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive."

Second, try to stay out of legal trouble. This can be very difficult when laws are passed that are impossible to keep. It is doubly difficult when the tyrant proclaims what the law is and others obey him. But do your best to escape official notice, and also support human rights organizations. I add that if your existence is illegal or proclaimed to be so, and you join a public protest at which police presence is expected, read up on how to remain anonymous before you go.

It isn't only a matter of avoiding the boot. We are induced to admire it, even without realizing. Snyder notes what historiographer Hannah Arendt noticed about the tyrannies she lived through and observed. In short, "Our appetιte for the secret…is dangerously political." Making up a secret isn't even necessary. Pulling a private communication out of context and flourishing it in public "is an act of falsification."

This trick can be performed over and over. One goal is to force the person whose private life has been made public to either attempt to explain--further exposing their private life--or attempt to deny--which would be lying; either tactic makes them look weak, and as we all know, the tyrant loves to be the strongest one. (Winning!) But another goal is "to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories." The act of simply having a private life can be recast as conspiratorial. We begin to expect that the news won't be about what is actually happening, but instead about whose private acts have been exposed and what terrible hidden agenda that implies.

"By now the better reporters have understood all this, but," he says gloomily, "in the meantime millions of Americans have learned to substιtute sinking into the depths for thinking about the facts…this mechanism works even when what is revealed is of no interest. The revelation of what was once confidential becomes the story itself." (But her emails!)

Here is Snyder's blunt summation. "When we take an active interest in matters of doubtful relevance at moments that are chosen by tyrants, oligarchs and spooks, we participate in the demolition of our own political order." Or as someone said online (my paraphrase), we need to practice the art of reacting to irrelevant scandal-mongering with a simple, "Sounds juicy. But as I was saying..."

I continue with my read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

I warn you, first of all, that this may seem at first glance like more harrumphing about young people these days. But, as always, keep in mind that Snyder is a pragmatist. He describes what works, regardless of what button it may push. I will quote his first two paragraphs in full.

"Lesson 13: Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

"For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change."

Whoof. As someone who can't stand up for longer than five minutes without sitting down for an hour afterward to recuperate from the pain, I feel deeply ambivalent about this.

However, Snyder is right. So if you can't get out there, find a group that is getting out there and do what you can to help.

I add a warning that Snyder does not: If somebody in the group wants you to agree with something that was illegal before tyranny, such as vandalism, back away, warn the group, and block them; that's probably a cop.

Back to the book: Snyder fills most of this chapter with an outline of what he calls "the one example of successful resistance to communism." He means Solidarity. I am trying to keep my posts shorter because one of the sites I post at automatically makes longer posts disappear and there is no appeal, so I strongly suggest that you look up Solidarity for yourself. Snyder's points are simple: Solidarity was supported by people who disagreed about a lot of things; and it was supported by public action.

He also notes that after the crackdown on Solidarity, the movement regained power, not through a thrilling tale in which valiant people broke into a government office and proclaimed freedom in a day--but because Solidarity did not give up, continued to maintain its cross-group ties, continued to fight in every public venue that it could, and became ubiquitous. Eight years later, tyranny was faced with the choice of exhausting its resources in an attempt at mass repression, or compromising with Solidarity. Solidarity demanded elections, and got them, and won. And that was the beginning of the Revolutions of 1989.

Remember, also, that getting eight hundred thousand people into the streets is one way to do it; finding five people on your neighborhood social media page who are just as angry as you are about the latest thing the school board is doing, agreeing to disagree about everything else, further agreeing to stay on topic, and attending the next school board meeting together is another. Both of them matter. In the words of William Meek Widener, with whom I disagree about a hell of a lot: Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.