The Wild Persistence of Life
Exploring the Unassuming Noncompliance of Common Life
Today, we’re turning our attention to something that resists easy definition—the quiet force that gives life its persistence. Not always joyful or content, but patient, enduring, and strangely unshakable. We’ll be exploring what we might call common life—the daily, ordinary rhythm of being—as it stands apart from the structuring forces of the military, politics, and organized religion. Let’s begin.
The Wild Persistence of Life
Exploring the Unassuming Noncompliance of Common Life
Common life has always been noncompliant by nature. It is the life of markets and fields, lullabies and kitchen tables, the stitching of cloth and the tending of gardens. Across the ruins of fallen empires and abandoned monuments, it has gone on. It is not a movement or an ideology. It simply is—an ancient, enduring presence, like the wildflowers and ivy that grow out of stone walls. Across centuries and empires, beyond the banners of armies, the speeches of politicians, and the sermons of preachers, people have never failed to plant gardens, share bread, cradle their children, and mourn their dead. The present is no exception. Though the languages of war, politics, and organized religion press in from every side, the pulse of ordinary life endures—gentle, steady, and strong. It does not need to win battles or debates. It needs only to take its next breath and go on living.
Common life needs little more than the space to breathe. It moves along with a wild, untamed grace — growing, grieving, celebrating, beginning again. Most days, it hardly notices the great powers that tower above it. But every so often, one of those powers demands of life that which it cannot easily give: a sacrifice, a silence, an allegiance. And when it does, the others are never far behind. The military, politics, and organized religion—the three pillars—lean together like an ancient structure, each lending weight to the demands of the others. What begins as a gentle life must suddenly answer questions it did not ask, fight battles it did not choose, and so common life stands still, interrupted. Sometimes the interruption is brief — a call to arms, a sweeping revival, a passing law, a storm of sermons. Sometimes it stretches across generations--revolutions, reformations, inquisitions, and crusades. Yet even through wars and plagues and general upheaval, the beating heart of daily life persists. In medieval villages, while kings marched to distant battles, and preachers summoned sinners to repentance, farmers necessarily tilled their fields and children played by the riverbanks, unchanged in their essence by the thrones or pulpits that rose and fell. Life, when left to itself, reproduces, mends, and renews.
The three great pillars often stand astride common life, asking it to pay homage. The military offers safety at the price of blood and obedience. In ancient Rome, farmers and conquered nations were taken from their fields and pressed into service to defend distant frontiers they would never see again. Politics promises order and demands loyalty. In every age, from Athenian assemblies to modern revolutions, the citizen has been urged to forsake home and craft for the sake of the state. Organised religion offers salvation while tightening its moral, motivational grasp. Across centuries, great awakenings and inquisitions alike have summoned the masses, swelling churches and cathedrals — often at the cost of the simple, unmeasured faith that grows best in quiet soil. Each pillar is a marvel in its own way. Each claims to hold a necessary place. But each, when untethered, forgets that it is meant to serve common life rather than command it.
The military stands solemn and sure, always whispering of danger. It offers protection, but it also asks for vigilance, sacrifice, obedience. It sees life through the eyes of threat and defence and easily forgets that it is not life that is fragile, but itself as common life refuses to be guarded by force and wilts away in the wildfire it causes only to re-emerge more glorious and fruitful than ever.
Politics meanders, endlessly busy, arranging the world into sides. It speaks of progress, justice, order — and often, it achieves relative good. But it cannot help but sort neighbours into rivals, strangers into threats. It sees life as a matter of winning and losing, forgetting that common life cannot be ordered, conquered or bargained for with a silver tongue. The sun rises and falls on nations and death-debts alike.
Organized religion — the most ancient of the three — walks proudly, raising its voice in the street. It offers meaning, belonging, and consolation. But it too is tempted by certainty and control. It sees life as a field to be harvested, a flock to be kept, often forgetting that the Spirit blows where it wills, and that life’s holiness cannot be caged.
When one pillar is shaken, the others quickly rally. A nation at war turns to politics for laws and taxes, and to religion for blessing and purpose. A political movement, unsure of its footing, drapes itself in military might and sacred language1. An uneasy church, losing its hold, courts kings and generals to restore its voice. In every century, the three have intertwined — from medieval crusades blessed at altars and funded by crowns, to modern regimes marching under flags woven with holy words. Their union is not always a tyranny; sometimes it is born of fear and an earnest search for safety, legitimacy and provision in all the wrong places. But even so, it is always an interruption — calling common life to rally, to march, to kneel, to shout — when all it ever wanted was to sing, to sow, and to dance.
Alone, each pillar might be harmless enough, even helpful — a protector, an organizer, a guide. But together, they form a living system, each giving strength to the others. The military points to dangers and calls for action; politics steps in to legislate that action; religion anoints it with meaning. The cycle repeats until what was once a single cry — “Be safe,” or “Be heard,” or “Be saved” — becomes a whole architecture towering over the fields of ordinary life. In their embrace, the simple pleasures and duties of living are no longer enough. One must also pledge, vote, believe, comply. And if common life hesitates, it finds itself standing not against one pillar, but against all three.
Yet common life has its own strength, older and quieter than any pillar. It does not organize itself into armies or campaigns. It does not need slogans or sermons. It answers every demand with the same quiet defiance: it continues. It plants seeds. It tells stories. It weeps, laughs, and dreams. It binds the broken, tends the weary, welcomes the stranger. It knows that life cannot be legislated into goodness, commanded into loyalty, or preached into holiness. It must be lived—freely, stubbornly, tenderly—one ordinary day after another. Common life is indelible—irremovable, and stubborn by nature. It is a reed that bends in the wind and rarely breaks. After bombs fall, markets open. After revolutions roar, someone plants beans and cabbages. After sermons thunder and laws are passed, children still chase each other through muddy lanes, and lovers still carve their names into the bark of old trees. In the ruins of Berlin, gardens sprang up between crumbled walls. After centuries of conquest in distant lands, folk songs outlasted empires, passed quietly from voice to voice. Common life knows how to wait, how to hide, how to heal. Like the river that seems to vanish underground only to emerge stronger downstream, it is never utterly lost. It endures not by conquering, but by remaining.
We are heirs of this quiet, noncompliant resilience. Though the pillars may rise and shout, common life flows on — sewing and mending, baking, and building, loving, and losing and laughing again. It does not need saving, only soil. It is not a project to be managed, but a mystery to be welcomed. Our truest work is not to conquer or command, but to garden, to listen for the old songs, to let the river run clear. For in the wildness of ordinary life, in stubborn, common joy, the future is always being born.
The pillars may tower and crumble, rise and fall, shouting their importance to the skies. But beneath them, common life flows on, finding its own way, wearing down stone by its gentle persistence and grace. It does not need to overthrow the pillars to be victorious; it needs only to remember that it exists, and that all else is a fantasy—a performance that for all its vain effort cannot outlast the heartbeat of life. In every hand that sows, every voice that sings, every table set in love, common life declares its quiet triumph: we are still here. We have always been here. And no fortress can hold back the tide of the unassuming noncompliance of common life.
As
reminds us in her book The Ballot and the Bible (2023) and Kristen Kobes Du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne (2021).
This one spoke to me deeply. It’s what I needed to read today. Thank you!