Is it really possible to be spiritual and resistant to the world’s destructive forces at the same time?
The short answer is yes. For the next several weeks, we’ll be exploring what it means to practice a spirituality of resistance. This week we focus on the need for inner work, that is, finding ways to sit quietly with God in order to grow closer. It sounds complicated, but I believe that we can do this by simply trying every day. Some days will be better than others. But as we’ll see, everything we need rests within us and our community of fellow resistors.
I’ll be recommending some great resources along the way. The first is A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth, by Roger S. Gottlieb. While his book speaks directly about action to save the environment, we can apply the same concepts to all of our social crises. The method serves as the common denominator. We’ll consider Gottlieb’s understanding of the spirituality of resistance in just a bit.
Ours is a life of meaning-making, not constant comfort
Gottlieb distinguishes “meaning-making spirituality” from “feel-good spirituality,” a form of escapism from all that hurts or scares us. Many of us seek a constant state of comfort from the problems of life, and many even feel a sense of entitlement to comfort-only living. The trappings of white privilege often shore up this sense of entitlement.
Complicating things further, we often view much of the world’s woes as too huge, and out of our control. Therefore, we feel justified in pretending these massive problems don’t exist through the emotional responses of avoidance and denial. Failing to deal with our discomfort perpetuates the major “isms” like racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.
In the words of Job,
Certainly, sorrow doesn’t come from the soil,
and trouble doesn’t sprout from the ground.
But a person is born for trouble as surely as sparks fly up from a fire.
(Job 5:6-7, italics mine, NOG).
A spirituality of resistance involves two things in roughly equal proportion:
- The ongoing work of spirituality, meditation, prayer, and a longingness for God above self, the inner work;
- Acknowledging what is wrong in our world from personal, national, and global perspectives, and then doing something about them. This is the outer work. This mission of resistance may stem from a full-time or part-time vocation or as volunteer work. The format does not matter. What matters of course the doing of it.
I have found that meditative prayer and acting for justice go hand in hand. Prayer anchors us by creating a sacred space where we can grow closer to God our Creator. We discern our vocational call and where our passion for justice lies. This essential inner work inspires our essential outer work.
Conversely, our mission draws energy and power from our prayer life. Prayer and mission have a symbiotic relationship in many ways. Without prayer, we lose focus and ultimately burn out. Without mission, we give injustice permission to prevail and even worsen.
That “Divine Spark” lives in all of us
The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote that God places a “Divine Spark” within each of us. Prayer fuels that spark and ignites it. In the course of this divine and brilliant stillness, we become better able to discern our purpose, our mission. This heart-knowledge serves as the blueprint for our action as we recognize the need in our world.
It’s not about “feel-good spirituality”
Actually, feel-good spirituality without a mission can harm us. Avoiding discomfort makes it easy for us to either avoid or deny mechanisms of ignorant destruction or downright evil in the world. Gottlieb defines feel-good spirituality as concerned only with the acquisition and maintenance of our own solace.
Yet, as we replace feel-good spirituality with one grounded in reality, we repurpose our life force. This is about acknowledging that while life is full of little and big miracles, much of life presents hardship and pain. Job certainly knew this. We can think of the divine spark within us as our super power to absorb the earthly sparks that fly at us. Our inner spark needs prayer to stoke it and empower it.
When we find a way to live within this tension, we redirect our energy into proactive efforts, and we become change agents of the challenges we face as mortals.
Name it and shame it
I’m a big fan of naming things that are wrong. By naming a problem, some of its mystery disappears. Naming something inspires thoughts of how to address it, and often we discuss the situation with someone we trust. Addressing the wrongs of society grows community.
So, how do we do the inner work?
That is where meditation comes in, finding a prayer practice that works for you and then sticking with it. The manner of meditation is personal, and perhaps a combination of techniques will serve you best. I’ve also found that meditation practice is cyclical. I’m better at it in some seasons of my life rather than others. But I don’t give up. It is a constant, like a pulse, sometimes steady, sometimes amped up, and sometimes slow and plodding. But the beat goes on.
Every so often I need to walk a labyrinth for greater insight on my lifetime pilgrimage. As an Episcopal/Anglican priest, I am especially drawn to Evensong and Compline from our Book of Common Prayer. Designing our prayer life draws from our individual life experience. It is as unique as each of us are. So I recommend experimenting with these various types of prayer in order to embark on or continue on the spiritual journey.
Gottlieb writes of what the prayer of our inner life brings.
If we want, as we so often say we do, to be happy, to experience a little peace, to feel at one with ourselves, then we must undertake an inner journey: toward gratitude and acceptance, toward opening our eyes to miracles instead of closing them to everything but our own desires, attachments and resentments; towards compassion for others instead of jealousy, contempt, competition and fear (11).
Next week, we will explore how avoidance and denial of social problems and crises actually inhibit our spiritual growth and squelch our fuller participation in our communities and society at large.
Blessings on your journey.
