I had never heard of a small group of resisters to Nazism called the White Rose until I read about them in an article in Plough Quarterly (Autumn, 2014). The White Rose passed out leaflets calling for subversive activities against Nazi war efforts in early 1940’s Germany. Eventually, the resisters were caught, tried, and executed.

The article was written by Maximilian Probst, grandson of one of the resisters. “Heroism,” he wrote, “will always start when people turn away from their own persons and place themselves in the service of a cause, a cause that may often only affect them indirectly, a cause in the service of others, of the disadvantaged, the persecuted, the oppressed, the tortured, the murdered.”

Not all of us, Probst said, are called to be heroes, but we can remember them by taking up “our mundane and daily task of living an upright life.”

To me, this means practicing quiet subversion against the dominant culture of the day, which reckons pleasure and the amassing of wealth as the chief ends of life. Christians in the West are, as theologian Walter Brueggemann expressed it, exiles, an inconvenience to “consumer oriented capitalism.” (Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, Walter Brueggemann.)