Voting Is a Spiritual Act

On November 7, 2000, I arrived at the polls at 7 am. Ahead of me in line was a heavy-set man, bearded and balding, holding a large document.

“I became a US citizen 42 years ago today,” he was telling the volunteers behind the table. 

“Exactly 42 years ago today?” I asked, “November 7?”

“Yes, today,” he said, beaming. He turned toward me and held up the faded green document. I saw a picture of him as a teenager surrounded by the ornate script of a language I didn’t recognize. He had a faint accent. I wanted to know what country he had emigrated from, but something kept me from asking.

It was obvious this man was already registered. He wasn’t required to bring his citizenship papers to the polling booth. He did so because he was proud he had the right to vote in the presidential election.

“You know,” he said to the registrars, “I could never have voted behind the Iron Curtain.”

I tried to imagine what it must have been like for him to travel to America from the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s. I wondered what his story was, what he had seen, what hardships he had endured. 

Why did this man bother to vote when so many others didn’t? Voter apathy in 2000 reached near-record lows. Barely half of the eligible public cast a ballot. Perhaps they thought one vote in a hundred million couldn’t make a difference. Or, dissatisfied with the choices presented to them, simply stayed home. But this man was not apathetic, he was enthusiastic. While others wouldn’t walk half a block to their polling place, this man had traveled half a world. In the razor-thin margin that decided the Bush-Gore election, I wonder how many realized the value of the gift they’d thrown away.

When I read the news each morning, I understand why people are cynical. Politics have become ugly, divisive, and fueled by a naked ambition for power. It’s hard to see anything uplifting or hopeful about our electoral process, and that can lead us into numbness and apathy. But voting is a spiritual act that reveals our inner character and our interrelatedness. We vote for a specific outcome, but there is a greater outcome as well.

My vote is infinitesimally small, like a grain of sand on the beach, and it is easy to believe it doesn’t matter. But it matters because my vote is a choice about the kind of future I want to live in, and that choice sets the light of my moral energy in motion. It matters because voting connects me with a vast network of others in the impossible endeavor of joining our mutual and conflicting visions of the future and vests me in finding a way forward with them.

And perhaps most importantly, it matters because it forces me to face the world as it is, whether or not the specific outcome I vote for is realized. Acceptance is a foundational spiritual skill that places me firmly in the present. As a person committed to spiritual growth and being a channel of light, I have to work with reality as it arises before me. No result in any election changes my ability to be a force for good, to model love, to work to bring about heaven on earth.

Isn’t that what the immigrant at the polling place was doing? Having lived under an authoritarian regime, he had the right to be cynical, but he wasn’t. He placed his faith in the ultimate goodness of our collective will, believing we can weather whatever storms may come and that, however long and messy, the journey will take us someplace better.

I have that faith too. I admire the man I met that morning with the faded green document and the beaming smile. I share his resolve to persevere for the greater outcome, regardless of the path it follows, no matter how long it takes. I’m voting with him.

Photo, Denis Farrell/Associated Press