Practicing holy foolishness

It was about a year into Covid, mid-lockdown, and unlike any time before, when I felt fear pressing in all around us. Too much social media, not enough genuine connection. Too much entertainment and too little prayer. Distraction, distraction.

There was yet another crisis demanding our collective attention. I don’t remember if it was a conflict overseas, a call to local action, a fallen ministry leader, or a new social media movement. I don’t remember what the conflict was, but I remember how it felt.

My chest was tight and deep breaths weren’t enough. I stood at the kitchen table, head in my hands, and felt like my psyche was on fire. I couldn’t understand what was happening, why people were acting the way they were, or how to navigate the complex social dynamics at play. Communities I had been a part of for more than a decade were splintering and fracturing overnight. New lines were being drawn. New factions were forming. People were angry. People were hurt.

Sitting on the sidelines was no longer an option. Liberal or conservative, religious or secular, it seemed like every side was demanding party loyalty: “Silence is violence.” “Stand up for the truth.” “Take our country back.” “Be on the right side of history.”

Taking sides

All ways of asking the age-old question: “Are you for us, or for our enemy?”

Maybe you’ve experienced such a moment. How does a Christian respond in such a time? How can we seek “the things that make for peace” in a culture of wrath and division?

In his 2018 conceptual album, A Short Story About a War, Canadian artist Shadrach Kabango describes a world of conflict, with multiple parties at war with each other. The conflict described is both foreign and familiar. The Establishment casts a dark shadow over ordinary people, controlling lives through manipulation and resource management. Some join the Revolution, attempting to fight the system with nothing but stones to throw, while “Snipers” take the individualist route, attempting to climb higher and higher up the towers of the world – giving them the perception of perspective, and the illusion of safety.

War is on all sides and everyone is afraid.

But there is one character who doesn’t fit neatly into the factions of the world. To quote Shad, there is one “fearless, foolish guy who doesn’t believe in the power of bullets. He just doesn’t believe they have the power to take a life. And so, he just walked around with no weapon.”

“The Fool” lives free. He isn’t afraid to die because he doesn’t believe these weapons have real power. He moves as the Spirit leads him, blessing all sides, singing and dancing, loving and serving. He lives without force and without a place to lay his head. He doesn’t flee from the pain of life, but learns to attend to the trials and tribulations that come with being human. He is foolish enough to believe that tragedy plus time equals comedy. If God is eternal, the Fool has faith that, no matter how great the set up of suffering, there will eventually be a cosmic punchline.

In this short story about a war, the Fool becomes a symbol of hope.

Fool as archetype

Church tradition has long elevated the archetype of the “Holy Fool.” A quick Wikipedia search will give you a long list of those who challenged accepted cultural norms in order to serve a higher purpose. Fools like Brother Juniper gave away all they had, even their own clothing. St. Simeon Stylites lived on top of a pole for 37 years. St. Simeon overturned tables and dragged a dead dog through the street. (Talk about performance art!) Fools have always had a flair for the dramatic but, to quote a contemporary American Fool Nathan Fielder in his excellent television drama The Curse, “Sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to make your point.”

Holy Fools are not content to tell. They must show you what radical devotion looks like. In so doing, the Fool sidesteps the material conflicts of the world, and thus engages in spiritual and symbolic warfare. Flesh and blood cannot be the real enemy. The Holy Fool walks in the way of our Christ, confronting the power of the enemy not through military victory or strategic plan, but by offering up his own life as sacrifice. He has counted the cost, faced the enemy in the wilderness, and come to realize “these bullets aren’t real.”

The Fool is willing to be misunderstood. Willing to be rejected. Willing to be embarrassed. Willing to die. In so doing, the Fool joins Christ in making a mockery of the powers of this world, joining in Christ’s inverted victory procession, where captives are triumphant (2 Cor. 2:14).

Pragmatism

We could contrast the Fool with an invention of the modern world: the Pragmatist. The word comes from the Greek praktos, meaning “to pass through, travel.” The Pragmatist prefers to pass through the world. He is very practically minded. No need for any new adventure, no meaningful exploration left to pursue, only a dogged commitment to the necessary road ahead. Provided he is able to continue to avoid the most dire circumstance, the Pragmatist would prefer to simply relive the past again and again.

The Pragmatist fears nothing more than the loss of his physical life, yet does not realize the enormous cost of his practical decisions. He runs the risk of becoming an unconscious person with a coal psyche, growing cooler and dimmer each day like a dying star. Esau traded his birthright for soup; the Pragmatist his soul for a smartphone (Lord have mercy). The Pragmatist isn’t a particularly bad person, but like a practiced instrumentalist, out of love with the music, in his quest for competence he has forgotten beauty.

Manipulation

The danger of the Pragmatist is that she is easily manipulated. Should routine be threatened or unconscious assumptions questioned, the Pragmatist will bend previous convictions, beliefs and routines toward whatever new way is demanded to maintain their standards.

There are establishments in our world (and Shad’s). Those at the top have always attempted to control the masses. Be they Communist Propagandists or Silicon Valley Sorcerers, the few-who-control-the-many rely on the Pragmatist. This is all the more true in 2025. Now that the Snipers are in the cloud and in your back pocket, how can you ever hope to break free of the propaganda? The Powers-that-be are so far above the Pragmatist that she doesn’t even believe there are Powers-that-be. She doesn’t prefer to think about such abstractions. What does that have to do with bread or circuses?

The perfect foil

The Fool is the perfect foil to the Pragmatist. She isn’t practical but works on instinct. “Don’t think, just do.” Intuitive, impulsive, quick to turn back, to lean in, to laugh, to be both lost and found. Wendell Berry told us to “be like the fox, who makes more tracks than necessary / sometimes in the wrong direction.” Tender, trusting and utterly free, the Fool cannot be tracked, is utterly unpredictable and needs neither bread nor Netflix.

The Pragmatist thinks only of tomorrow; the Fool only of today. The Pragmatist grumbles in beauty, the Fool smiles in suffering. The Pragmatist may be open humans searching for God, but the Fool knows that God is searching for us. And that, it turns out, is a fundamental difference.

In a world steeped in pragmatism, how then shall we live? Devices offer convenience, political games promise power, artificial intelligence promises expedience, and yet no tool or technique can ever set us free. The only way to inherit eternal life, the only hope for a world crushed under the weight of the Powers-that-be, is to live by a fundamentally different playbook than the one this world has to offer.

GK Chesterton once wrote: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.”  The same is true about the way of the Fool.

Open hearts

Few of us will become Holy Fools; we’re far too steeped in this world, have too much to lose, and trust God too little. Yet there is value in even attempting to play the Fool, to acting “as if” it’s true. To the degree we practice it, a holy foolishness sets us free from the concerns, troubles and pressures of the world. It stills our mind, opens our heart, and fills us with wonder.

And it’s contagious. In a world hellbent on pragmatism, even a little foolishness can work through the whole, like yeast in dough.

When the world reopened after Covid I remember feeling free. So much of the conflict in my city, in the Church, had existed on the internet, where factions are formed with algorithmic assistance and party lines felt impossible to cross. In reality, in person, I was reminded that I loved these people, the kind and the cruel; those who acted in good faith and those who reacted from their pain. Is anything not a cry for help? Everyone was doing their best with what they had been given, and even if they weren’t, had I ever lived without sin? If “the measure with which you judge others will be used against you,” I’d better judge sparingly.

The Psalms insist there are those who are righteous and those who are not. I believe that with my whole heart . . . but how could I know who is which? Do I know the heart of another human being? All I knew is I wanted to forgive everyone of everything wrong they ever did. More than that, I wanted to be found wrong so that I could be forgiven. In my most foolish moments, I felt like the elder Zoisima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “Let me be culpable before all, and then all will forgive me, and that will be paradise.”

Who wants to spend their life separating the wheat from the chaff? Have mercy on everyone and let God sort ‘em out.

“Are you for us, or for our enemy?” Joshua asks the Angel. “Neither,” God’s messenger responds. “But as a servant of the LORD, I have come” (Josh. 5:13-14).

Lay down the culture wars, the strategies and schematics. Lay down your weapons and your armour. Lay yourself down in green pastures, and allow the unforced rhythms of grace to rule the day. It may seem foolish, but in a world gone mad, it may be the only way.