In February of 2015 I went to the Unitarian Universalist Ministerβs Association Institute for Excellence in Ministry, and I had the opportunity to spend a week in a workshop with activist, ecoβphilosopher, writer, and spiritual elder Joanna Macy.
Joanna is wellβknown in spiritual and ecological activism circles. Her work focuses on Work that Reconnects, naming ways that we have been disconnected and how that feeds despair and apathy, and working to build community and connection in response to the reality of ecological devastation and destruction.
We know that our world is facing a climate crisis. And there is much that could be said about the science, the statistics and the rising temperatures and the extreme weather events and the NASA reports and parts per million. Iβm not here to talk about any of that. My own eyes start to glaze over at the numbers, and when I zoom out, I just feel my own helplessness and overwhelm welling up inside me until I want to shut it all out and push it away, pretending I never heard any of it.
So here was Joanna Macy, 84Βyearβold spiritual elder, grounded in the Buddhist tradition, brilliant and effusive and leading this workshop alongside the young activists of Movement Generation, an environmental justice organization led by low income young people of color committed to a just transition away from profit and pollution and toward healthy, resilient and life affirming local economies.
Throughout the workshop, Joanna kept saying βWhat a wonderful time to be alive!β And I found myself thinking βYeah, right, Joanna, have you read the news lately?β
Joanna had us begin in her fourβstep process of the work that reconnects, which begins with gratitude. And let me tell you, I wasnβt feeling too much of that, so I thought it was a particularly annoying place to start. Mostly, what I was feeling was anger.
That anger was primarily directed at my parentsβ and grandparentsβ generations. The generations immediately preceding me had not left things in better condition than they had found it. I felt a sort of βWhat on earth are we supposed to do with all this mess?!β
So gratitude wasnβt quite happening for me yet.
Then Joanna asked us to honor our pain for the worldβand that I could do. Pain at the ways we see violence and oppression destroy families and communities, pain at the ways that we see suffering all around us, pain for the ways we are so disconnected from one another, from our natural world, from God, from our own deepest desires.
And then, Joanna announced that we were going to time travelβwe were going to talk to a descendent from seven generations into the futureβwhich is estimated to be about 200 years. She assigned half of us to be present day beings, our own selves (I was in this group) and the other half of us would be seventh generation beingsβhumans from around the year 2215. She then facilitated a conversation with imaginary ancestors and descendants, talking together about this time we live in.
We presentβday ancestors began. The future beingsβour imaginary descendants, asked us a series of questions about the time we, all of us, live in here and now. The questions were along the lines of βancestor, Iβve heard stories about the critical time you live inβhow much of a crisis your world was in. What was it like for you to live with that knowledge every day?β and βYou must have felt confused and lonely at the beginning. How did you get started in helping our world to heal?β and βYou must have felt scared and discouraged throughout it. Where did you find the strength to continue?β
Those of us embodying the role as presentβday beings each answered these questions, and then we got to hear from these pretend future beings, reflecting back what they had heard about these hard times we live in.
This was when my moment of personal transformation happened. Because in my answering of these questions, I felt defensive, like it was me, my generation, young adults who wonβt be young adults forever, trying to offer an explanation for the world we might leave to the future beings. And yet all of these people in the workshopβthe ones roleΒplaying our descendants, who in reality were older than meβwere part of a generation of people I had just hours before felt that flare of anger toward. And then, all of a sudden, I had this rush of compassion, a flood of transformative understanding and patience and deep knowledge of the critical questions the next generation might hurl toward mine.
My point is this: none of us alone created our climate crisis, and in part it was created by a very short view of timeβa view that expects immediate profit or loss, a view that canβt fully comprehend the consequences of our choices beyond our own lifetimes. And it wasnβt until I was invited, albeit skeptically at first, to literally converse with our descendants that I had an emotional connection to the future that allowed my moral imagination to take root.
We need a moral imagination of the possibilities we hold if we are going to stop ourselves from exporting our problems to the future. We need this sense of deep time when we think about problems that span across generations, and when we are making choices that will affect future generations.
In this, there is cause for hope. Joanna Macy again: βPassive hope is about waiting for external agencies to bring about what we desire. Active hope is about becoming active participants in what we hope for. Active hope is a practiceβ¦it is something we do, rather than have.β Joanna makes very clear that active hope does not require optimism, but rather a clarity about the outcome we would like to see, letting our intentions and our values, rather than our calculations of likely success, be our guide. Active hope cannot be discovered in an armchair or without risk. In active hope, we choose our response and act on that choice. In active hope we not only envision new possibilities, we create them for ourselves and for generations to come.
Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110184122/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_11/04.mp3