I sometimes sign online petitions.

Not that I sign all that come my way, and I don’t sign frivolously. Since I have once or twice walked into online hoaxes, I’m careful to check what I support, and I avoid petitions that strike me as extreme or merely inflammatory. I’m as skeptical as anyone else about the potential for effectiveness of some of the petitions I sign, and I don’t delude myself by thinking that I’m participating in grassroots democracy. But I think I have at least a couple of good reasons for signing petitions for causes I think are good.

One reason is, of course, that I think some causes are good. As a rule I support causes online to which I also contribute financially. It seems to me that very confusing and chaotic times such as ours call for the opposite of quietism. I sometimes think that it may be immoral not to take positions in times like these (perhaps even in the best of times as well). Certainly if one takes no position one has no skin in the game, as it were. It’s been a long time since I participated in an act of civil disobedience, but in lending my support to various small Internet insurrections I voluntarily assume a certain political risk.

For political hazard is different from mere financial risk, because it involves what Kierkegaard termed the suspension of the ethical. It has the potential to put one at odds with one’s friends and acquaintances. I’m squeamish about “sharing” my political participation online at Facebook, Twitter, etc., because in doing so I lay myself open to flaming replies from folks I know who disagree with me. And the most common reproof I receive accuses me of engaging in thoughtless, mob action—a charge to which I am sensitive. But it’s interesting, to say the least, to be accused of failing to stand up for one’s beliefs because one stands up for one’s beliefs in a public manner that makes use of one of the tools of popular culture.

Last evening a friend and I listened with absorption and pleasure as Richard Cohen and Morris Dees spoke of their work with the Southern Poverty Law Center to an audience at the Sheldon Concert Hall. I needed such a reminder that the work of preserving and extending the gains of the civil rights movement continues and sometimes succeeds. As my friend and I drove out to the League of Women Voters office to pick up my beloved for dinner afterwards—she had to skip the speeches for a meeting—we found ourselves remembering the work of another hero of the era of civil rights, Pope John, XXIII whose work, like that of Dr. King, is a favorite right-wing target. My friend (a Jesuit priest and one of God’s soldiers if ever there were such) and I surprised ourselves with the conviction that the work of John XXIII will survive present attempts to undo it.

The Jesus of Luke is said to have claimed in last Sunday’s gospel (Revised Common Lectionary) that “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” I take this hard teaching to propound a choice like that of Abraham, when God demanded that he sacrifice his son, Isaac. In order to accede to God’s command Abraham must not only sacrifice his beloved son, but he must also abandon the ethical universe wherein dwell parents and spouses, children and siblings, friends and neighbors. It’s the call to heroic action, easy enough to deconstruct as hubris or self-will—or mere silliness.

I’m willing to be silly in a good cause, I guess. For Abraham gains the ethical by renouncing it. The justice envisioned by liberal hope is unattainable on its face. But as Kierkegaard’s Abraham morphs into The Knight of Faith, his choice proclaims that with God all things are possible. There was a good deal of snarky criticism of last month’s reenactment of the March for Jobs and Justice. If I were ten years younger, I’d have gone to Washington to stand in solidarity with others there. As it was, I contributed financially and expressed solidarity virtually. I continue to believe in the possibility, however remote, that our collective choices might turn towards the good in us and the world we have been given—in this life, on this planet.

None of us, after all, is here forever. But the world, and the gift of it, a gift that Robert Frost called “The Gift Outright,” though they may not be forever, will remain long after we and our categories are gone.