NEW YORK (RNS) — Judith Lynn, who has lived close to Columbia University for two decades, marched beside pro-Palestinian students when campus protest against the war in Gaza erupted two years ago. “I was right there yelling with those beautiful students, but to see that squashed,” she said. “I’ve been finding ways to go beyond the protest.”
She has found her voice, she said, in silent vigils.
On either side of Columbia University’s main entrance on Broadway and 116th Street in Manhattan, Lynn, 74, stands with a large group dressed in black. Some of the group hand flyers to the steady foot traffic in and out of the campus. Others hold a steady gaze into the middle distance. On this day, Lynn clutches a black-and-white portrait of Yunseo Chung, an international student from Korea detained by immigration agents in March.
“It is solemn and elegant,” Lynn said. “It is a direct statement, but because it is silent it is very powerful.”
The vigils, organized by CU Stands Up, have taken place every Monday at noon for more than nine months, drawing dozens of faculty and staff in addition to students and Upper West Side neighbors. “By being silent, we are maintaining the spotlight on the portraits we are holding,” E.Y. Zipris, a doctoral student and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said. “The focus is on the fate of these students.”
Across the United States, vigils have been adopted as a way to build community around a principle or to grieve outside of expressly political or religious gatherings organized by institutions. While religious language or symbols are not necessarily present, the rituals are unmistakably spiritual.
In Rio de Janeiro in 2013, an estimated 2 million people inundated Copacabana Beach for a Saturday night vigil before Pope Francis said Mass on Sunday. In South Korea three years later, some 12,000-30,000 marchers held a candlelight vigil in the streets in Seoul to protest government corruption, leading to the president’s impeachment.
On New Year’s Day (Jan. 1), hundreds gathered near the Constellation bar in the Swiss resort village of Crans-Montana to mourn those who died in a fire.
CU Stands Up, the vigil organizers at Columbia, conceived of its protest in April, when students began to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Faculty and staff felt a sense of urgency, according to Jennifer Hirsch, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, who co-founded CU Stands Up.
The group considered several responses but was inspired to hold a weekly vigil in part by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who for years held silent vigils holding photos of sons, fathers and others who had been imprisoned by the government. Rules about organizing on campus did not allow the group to register the event as a vigil; without a religious figure present, it could only be a protest.
But they kept the vigil format, said Hirsch, because it would attract more people. “It was powerful because people who came wouldn’t have necessarily come for an action they saw as more explicitly political,” Hirsch said. “People showed up just to express our horror, dismay, and lack of institutional action.”
Charmaine Willis, a political science professor at Old Dominion University who has studied vigils as a form of protest, said that candlelight vigils especially have become an important part of the protest repertoire because, as opposed to a traditional march or protest, vigils can be “softer.”
“Vigils not only boost your numbers in terms of the protest, but also get more support from people that are not typically protesting,” Willis said, adding that the recent interest in candlelight vigils could be attributed to their power and ubiquity on social media.
The earliest vigils can be traced back to the Greco-Roman era. The Rev. James Sabak, a Franciscan friar who is director of divine worship for the Diocese of Raleigh, in North Carolina, and the author of a book on vigils, said the classical-era rituals were celebratory, all-night affairs. As the former Roman Empire was Christianized, vigils were absorbed into the Christian tradition but retained their joyous, dusk-to-dawn outlines.
That changed during medieval times, when vigils became reserved for the priestly class, said Sabak. “We lose out on what that festive nature of a vigil is; it becomes this solemn, evening moment that you begin to endure. It kind of destroys the real powerful nature.”
The Middle Ages are also when vigils gained power as a way to remove sins. In many ways, this is the version that gets adopted by modern society.
“Whether it be Christian or not, society and culture adopts the word as something that is done at night and has a seriousness to it and is connected with something sad,” Sabak said. “It gets connected to these moments of grief and tremendous suffering or pain experienced in society.”
But the somber tone of vigils is also an effective way to get people to focus on an issue, said Hirsch.
“It’s funny to get people’s attention without talking, because ordinarily you would yell at them to get their attention,” Hirsch said. “Particularly, a bunch of faculty not talking — that’s what we do. For faculty and staff to be out there in silence, it’s supposed to be arresting as you walk by. You see the juxtaposition of faculty standing in silence and these dark portraits and you think to yourself, ‘What is going on in my country right now?’”