My ballot arrived today. It’s clean. It’s neat. It’s convenient. I can fill out the ballot at my leisure, alone, unobserved and unbothered by election signs and polling booth lines. A signature. A stamp. And I have voted. It is, in a word, a symptom, a symptom of the illness of our culture and our time.
Most thoughtful people have by now come to the agreement that social media encourages a base spirit. We are alone before the screen, unobserved and unbothered by human faces, human voices, the sights and sounds of human need or human beauty. We can be as nearly anonymous on screen as it is possible to be in a Ring-doorbell-security-camera world. We feel unleashed to type the hateful words and send them out, rhetorical bombers who do not have to see the far distant faces of our targets.
I recall walking into the (late) Lincoln Elementary School gym on Election Day. It smelled of sweat and processed meats and rang with the sounds of children playing outside and trying not to run inside. On some election days I could hear the orchestra practicing and the sounds of teachers directing their students’ attention “back to the board, please.” There was almost always a bake sale to benefit the Lincoln PTA and there were lines and some confusion by those new to town as to which precinct line to join. There were volunteers waiting to check the rolls and make sure of one’s registration and more volunteers to hand out the ballots and explain the voting machines or the process for marking the ballot and direct each of us to a small curtained booth. And, once I emerged from the booth, sheathed ballot in hand, more volunteers were waiting by the ballot box with an “I Voted” sticker, a smile and a word of thanks.
The whole process took time. Time to find a parking spot. Time to wait in line. Time to visit with friends and acquaintances. Sometimes it took too long, though I can’t now remember from a single in-person election trip to the polls just what I was in such a hurry to do. What I do remember is that voting disrupted the daily schedule, as it should have done. Because voting is a privilege. Voting is momentous. People have fought and died, do fight and die, for the right to vote.
At the polls I would always see people I knew, neighbors. It is a solemn thing to look in the face of a neighbor and understand that my vote affects him or her as well as me and mine. It is a solemn thing to look at the children and the teachers and the volunteers and understand that my vote is, or should be, for the common good and not just my own. I would walk inside the booth, draw the curtain and stop. Say a whispered prayer for wisdom. Open the ballot and reread measures I had already read. Look again at the names and think again of my choices. It was the people all around me who made me slow down and deliberate. It was the power of the civic ritual that was Election Day.
I know the arguments against the ritual, chief among them that many people can’t get off work. Yes. That’s why Election Day should be a civic holiday and time off to vote a civic right for a civic responsibility. Absentee ballots should be reserved for those who, by reason of illness or disability or employment or service that requires travel, cannot physically be present at the polls.
As a Roman Catholic, I am aware of the power of ritual. Imagine a proposal to make Mass easier and more convenient in the hopes of upping the numbers of Sunday communicants. A consecrated Host bubble wrapped and mailed to Catholic households for private reception would, indeed, still, be the Body of Christ. But who would we be? Who would we become, alone, isolated from our brothers and sisters, bereft of human voices joined to ours in song and prayer, bereft of human faces, of the sight of the elderly, the ill, the children, the babies, our friends, strangers among us who are also, however much we might wish to deny it, our brothers and sisters. It is a solemn thing to turn to the man in the pew you had wanted to yell at in the parking lot and wish upon him the peace of Christ, the peace for which you long. It is a solemn thing to confess, with all and before all gathered, that “I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” It is in the faces of the others — the grieving woman I have promised to visit and failed so to do, the man I have casually slandered by gossip and innuendo — that “what I have done and what I failed to do” is most clearly revealed.
I once heard a nun say that we come to Mass “because we forget who we are.” We come to remember, to be re-membered to our true names and our true calling as children of God, as parts of One Body, living and true. We are not alone. We are brother and sister, again and again, over and over, in this place and in this city and in this country and out into the world and across space and time, an endless weaving that makes us one.
Ritual matters. Ritual gestures matter. The time and energy ritual requires is a gift. The power of ritual is to call us back when we forget who we are. The power of election day rituals is to re-member us to our duty to one another as citizens and neighbors. It is to re-member us to the reality that we share these streets and parks and schools and hospitals and police forces and courthouses and that we share responsibility for their health and vitality.
There is no more ritual to filling out a mail-in ballot than there is to writing a check to the credit card company. Isolated from one another, we forget who we are. Waiting in line to vote, we remember.
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