If you follow me on Twitter of Facebook or Instagram, you might, from time to time, see me share something inspirational that I’ve read or seen, with a comment such as “Have  a subversive Saturday,” or “Truth and subversiveness, all in one package.”  I must admit, I have an intense obsession with the idea of subversiveness, and, as it naturally follows, with the use of the word subversive.

This focus began in the early days of my training in spiritual companionship.  Maybe you know how it goes — you’ve been asked to read a book to prepare for a class or a meeting, and there is this one phrase, a phrase that simply will not let you go.  Just such a phrase came to me while I was reading a required course book by Eugene Peterson called The Contemplative Pastor.  I was drawn to his use of the word subversive as a description for the life altering and sometimes sneaky action of faith in our lives.

For Peterson, every act of faith is an act of subversion:

Prayer is a subversive activity. It involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime….[As we pray,] slowly but surely, not culture, not family, not government, not job, not even the tyrannous self can stand against the quiet power and creative influence of God’s sovereignty. Every natural tie of family and race, every willed commitment to person and nation is finally subordinated to the rule of God (Eugene Peterson, Where Your Treasure Is).

Peterson’s is a gentle understanding of this word, but I am more interested in the meaning of the word at its very root.  Our modern ideas about the word come to us through Middle English and Old French, from the Latin root, subverto, meaning literally to overturn from beneath.

That, my friends, is the kind of subversiveness I am talking about, the kind where an idea or a belief system or a behavior pattern or yes, even a system or an institution, is overturned or transformed by the unseen and ever-present action of something that runs like a current beneath all of life.  Call that something the great Unconscious, call it God, or give it another name, it is something that works in our lives and our world even when we do not see it or name it.  Its work can be for what we would label good or ill, depending on our relationship to the outcome, but, it is working nonetheless.

A subversive act or thought is not, by my definition, a thing hidden because it is sneaky or bad.  It is a thing hidden simply because I am too blind to see it.  And when I do see, that is when the learning happens, that is when the mystery occurs. To see it in action is, for me, like that momentary glimpse of a beautiful butterfly — a chance to see change in myself and my world, if just for an instant.

I think that, over the years, we have allowed a sort of malevolent intent to attach to the meaning of this word.  I would like to push back against that meaning.  Just because we are not in control of something’s action, just because we do not fully understand the direction and meaning of that action — that lack of control or fore-knowledge does not signal (necessarily) evil or malevolence.  And that take’s us back to Peterson’s definition, in which his description of subversiveness is more like the description of an underground river — it flows, it forms the rocks, but we do not feel it, hear it, or see it.  But I think that it would be hard for many of us, given all the flooding around us this past year, to deny the great force of even the smallest amount of moving water.

Moving water, now that is subversive.  Light, now that is subversive.  And songwriters like Leonard Cohen (an ordained Buddhist monk, by the way) have tried to teach us that truth and the truth of the subversiveness of disruption: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in (from Anthem),” or “There’s a blaze of light / In every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah,” from the most known of his songs, Hallelujah.

Spirit does its very best work in that broken Hallelujah, because if we can find the strength to praise when all seems hopeless, when darkness is just about to overwhelm everything, then that is truest of subversiveness that our human selves can offer.

So next time you see me label some idea or some picture of some anything subversive, if that word challenges you, well, great.  But just know that to mean, the synonyms that I hear in that word are ideas like transformation, like healing, like love and most of all, like light.

Let that subversive water wash right over you, and be changed.  Again, and again, be changed and make change in this world.

That, my friends, is subversiveness at its very best.  Amen.  Let all God’s people say it again — AMEN!