The Stations of the Cross, Political Marches, and Walking as Struggle

When I was much younger, my family would attend, every Easter, a Passion in the Park performance. It was a live dramatization of the biblical passion narrative, starting with the Last Supper and ending, of course, with the resurrection. I was very young, 10 or 11 years old, and I distinctly remember being quite scared by the whole ordeal. For a devout child, who truly believed that Jesus was the son of God and had been sacrificed for our sins, and who truly believed He rose on the third day, the performance was an intensely disturbing one. Looking back now, I'm sure even if I weren't so religious I still would've been frightened: it was never quite The Passion of the Christ, but it certainly didn't shy away from the brutal realities of crucifixion and the gruesome anguish Jesus experienced on the way to Calvary Hill.

I bring this up because our discussion about the Stations of the Cross this past week reminded me of it. My family was never Catholic, which meant we never revered the actual Stations, which meant the actual reenactment of Jesus's path of suffering would have to do. But, like the Stations, this play — for lack of a better term — wasn't a motionless affair. We, the audience, moved alongside the actors, participating in the action just as much as they did. I remember members of the crowd shouting at the Roman guards, I remember my father being pulled aside to assume the role of Simon of Cyrene, taking hold of the cross when Jesus was too weak to carry it any further. It was a mobile ritual, from one end of the park to the other. It was, in other words, a walk: an elaborate, collaborative, and, yes, disturbing walk.

I was particularly fascinated by our conversation about the layers of symbolism we've added on top of the pilgrimage, how we've morphed that very real practice of suffering — of attempting, in some way, to experience what Jesus experienced — into traditions like the Stations and church labyrinths. I was even more fascinated in the line we drew between those rituals and the ways we march, and, indeed, suffer, for a purpose secularly. I'm not so religious now: as interested as I am in the Abrahamic faiths in an academic sense, and as personally affecting as I still find the gospels to be, I don't feel any responsibility or desire to experience the suffering the historical Jesus did. But I do have causes I believe in, causes I have been to willing to, in some sense, struggle for.

I'm not so interested in relating any lengthy story about any protest march I've taken part in. This isn't to diminish my own experiences, which I believe were important in their own right, but to highlight instead those experiences we discussed in class: those varying protests against authoritarian regimes Solnit foregrounded in her chapter on the subject, the marches from Selma to Montgomery Martin Luther King, Jr. organized and sermonized about in "Our God is Marching On!" . I'm thinking, now, of a line in Wanderlust which I think defines these public movements fairly succinctly: "The streets were no longer antechambers to the interiors of homes, schools, offices, shops," Solnit writes, "but a colossal amphitheater." 

There's few moments wherein the body becomes so much more part of the social than in these overtly religious and political practices. Even as modern religion focuses more and more on the self, becoming less and less a public display of reverence, the physical engagement of the body in the act of walking — to a pilgrimage spot, through a labyrinth, among the stations of the cross — is an inherently social practice in its affirmation of the social institution of religion. And, of course, one needn't even explain why a protest march is a fiercly communal activity. Naturally there's an element of the political in the religious practice as well: demonstrations of one's faith have always been a political act, and a Passion in the Park performance, though not literally an act of defiance, is intrinsically political.

Here, then, we begin to understand that though religious allegory functions as simply a useful rhetorical tool for the Reverend Martin Luther King (here it's useful as well to think of Martin Luther, the Protestant reformist) in transforming his speeches into sermons, it acts too as a symbolic indicator of the history of walking as a subversive struggle.