occupy wall street

Yes, your colleagues would laugh if you went out to protest. Marie Antoinette laughed too, until she found herself smiling up from the bottom of a wicker basket.

Throughout his 32-minute set, Mangum returned more than once to the sad fate of the teenage diarist, and in doing so he created a moment that seemed at once a communal high point of the movement and a peculiarly ominous sing-along, Kumbaya mashed up with catastrophe.

If I were CEO of Trinity Wall Street, I’d be alarmed at the idea of the “unspecified use” apparently demanded by the OWS protesters. But, of course, Trinity Wall Street does not have a CEO, it has ministers.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, people have considered which religious figures would or would not be joining the drum circle at their local Occupy encampment, were they alive today. Jesus? Ghandi? But what about other religious figures? A religion-nerdy parlor game…

The Times managed to find a Gandhi scholar who would argue that the greatest hero of radical resistance would endorse the critics of Occupy Wall Street.

Jesus was a businessman?

Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.

People love to stay immune from the connections between the sacred and the profane, holy space and “regular” space, tented space and the well-appointed space of a mansion. They try to tell us that politics and religion never meet. Or that money is “dirty” and therefore can get away with its meanness. Deliverance from these false dichotomies is our greatest need as a country. Money is holy and just and good when used for holy and just and good purposes. It is not “dirty” and therefore the property of those naughty boys of Wall Street.

Makana weighed, in an instant, the pros and cons of pissing off the president and possibly torpedoing a flourishing career. Sure, he’s unlikely to be invited to entertain Obama and friends anytime soon, but no one’s dragged him by the hair to the ground, “ nudged” him with a nightstick, or pepper sprayed him at close range. He’s certainly mindful of the difference between his stage and that of the protesters, but Makana sees the same spirit of aloha—a spirituality lost, like so many Hawai’ian protest songs, on many outsiders—as animating even angry dissent with love.

In order to restore meaning to the ideas of freedom and community, Rev. Billy exposes their current bankruptcy through a “religious” performance drawn from institutional, theatrical, and cultural realms. But make no mistake, it is real.