The last few weekends with a friend I’ve been manning a voter registration table at a local farmer’s market. As masked market goers follow the designated routes to visit stalls to buy unusual mushrooms, fresh-from-the-farm Central American coffee, frozen duck breasts, thick bunches of beets and carrots, ears of fresh corn, artisanal hummus and gluten-free pastries, and more, some stopped by our table.
We offered online registration, registration sign up forms, confirmations of voting status and voting site, info about ballot drop boxes and early voting sites, deadlines for action, as well as answers to other questions people have in this unprecedented election season.
There weren’t many who registered, but every one felt like an occasion of rejoicing: the one my age who apologetically had never voted before; another with a Spanish accent who shyly had not known how to register; another, with his young daughter in tow, who rushed up to say he hadn’t been able to get his online registration to work; another was registered but had voted out of anger at the relocation of his usual voting site, and others.
Each one walked away glad, but not more happy than my friend and I: we had signed up new fellow crewmates for the good ship Democracy. To be able to vote and do so is to sign on to the voyage of the nation through the adventures of the years ahead. To be able to vote and to do so is to take part in the shaping of our common res publica.
Each of the several votes over time of the many voters across the land in aggregate determines where the country will go, what the nation will be.
So too each of our encounters is a vote in the transcendent realm concerning the course and configuration of what will be the consummation of creation, whenever it arrives.
No encounter is lost, spoiled, naked, rejected, disputed, or invalidated; all are counted, those of today and all the eras of yesterday, those of tomorrow however far in the future, those of all nations, all people, all cultures, all languages, men and women, young and old. Who knows if other species on this planet or others also encounter and so also vote?
The specifics of that consummation are unpredetermined but the general lineaments will be those of freshness, which is common to all encounters and manifest in the sense of beyondness, interestingness, unsuspected/unexpectedness, and commitment to common cause with the livingness of others and othernesses. The color and texture of that consummation will be the lived encounters of each of the many participants. The strands of connection will be the many entanglements of the participants and encounters with one another and over time.
Is there a ‘critical mass’ of encounters? Will there be a ‘chain reaction’? Will there be an sudden event of some kind of ‘light’ or ‘heat’, or something gradual? Will new things come into being? Will a new ‘universe’ ensue? Time will tell. But surely what makes encountering special here and now will characterize whatever is to come.
We might call this a democratic transcendence, and all of us are automatically registered to vote as often as we want, where and when we choose, by accepting and making invitations to encounter.
That peculiar uplift I’ve experienced these last Saturdays helping people participate in the upcoming election, and the glow I’ve often felt when encountering may have much in common, and all of it good.