A few weeks ago, Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel after boarding The Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s demonstration to bring needed aid to Gaza. In response, she said, “The world needs more angry women.” This week, we lost one of ecology’s most prolific voices, who gave meaning to the anger and grief that comes with facing the climate crisis: Joanna Macy. Perhaps in studying Joanna Macy, we can learn to hold our own anger and grief for all of the degradation of our world; for the hungry, the unhoused, the rise of hatred, and the war-torn places that burn holes into the topography of our planet.
Macy, whom you can read more about here in this gifted article, offered in her life’s work a reminder that we are connected in the web of life. Therefore, we are connected equally to the suffering of the world and also the joy of it; we are connected in the hopelessness and in the hopefulness; we are connected in the hurting and the restoration. She spoke of a way to use our grief toward action, speaking of the spiral of connection where we: acknowledge gratitude for the world; express pain for the world; “see with fresh eyes”; and “go forth.”
Perhaps in this, we too can find the courage to say yes to expeditions like Greta Thunberg did, where we take risks to stand with the hungry, the hurting, the disenfranchised, and the voiceless. We don’t have to go further than our backyards to make a difference, as the very soil cries out for refuge from the scorching temperatures affected by our greed.
So let us take our grief, our anger, our homage to ancestors like Joanna Macy as we participate in the great turning of our world toward flourishing. Today, Macy’s will be our benediction into this kind of work:
Grace and The Great Turning
-Joanna Macy
When you act on behalf
Of something greater than yourself,
you begin to feel it acting through you
with a power greater than your own.
This is grace.
Today, as we take risks
for the sake of something greater
than our separate, individual lives,
we are feeling graced
by other beings and by Earth itself.
Those with whom and on whose behalf we act
give us strength
and eloquence
and staying power
we didn’t know we had.
We just need to practice knowing that
and remembering that we are sustained
by each other
in the web of life.
Our true power comes as a gift, like grace,
because in truth it is sustained by others.
If we practice drawing on the wisdom
and beauty and strengths
of our fellow human beings
and our fellow species
we can go into any situation
and trust
that the courage and intelligence required
will be supplied.
Living into the Great Turning With You,
Pastor Lauren
Photo: First red tomato of the season, a celebration of the joy of our planet.