Spirituality and activism
Not too long ago, I wrote a short essay for CounterPunch about how I’ve become more interested in spirituality in recent years. This interest was prompted by a number of things, including: the rising threat of fascism, the pandemic, and my daughter being diagnosed with severe autism.
As someone who has identified as an atheist for all of my adult life, my newfound spirituality is a little embarrassing. I tell myself that I haven’t strayed too far ideologically, that a vague pantheism isn’t so different from atheism. But the truth is I spend half an hour meditating — one might say praying — every day.
Given that my spirituality remains embarrassing for me, I’m most comfortable talking about it in somewhat cynical terms. I focus on how it can help activists. For instance: religion is the ethical language of most people and in learning to speak it we can communicate our message more effectively.
Similarly, the left can be a toxic place, in which we spend more time criticizing mistakes made by our comrades than dismantling the oppressive systems we’re nominally opposed to. While I know this isn’t unique to secular spaces, I’d like to think the emphasis major religious traditions place on forgiveness might help make the left more habitable.
I could continue, but the benefit spirituality offers to activists that I actually want to focus on right now is the ability to delay or ward off burnout. Unless you’re new to activism, you’re probably familiar with that sense of compassion fatigue. You just can’t do anything more; you need to take care of yourself.
When I first experienced this, after my freshman year of college, it took me out of activism for a number of years. But since then, I’ve gotten a little better at balancing different aspects of my life. As a result, I can stay involved in politics for longer periods of time. This is important, because — as the cliche goes — it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Previously, this has meant many things, but in general it’s meant being kinder to myself and realizing I’m not going to solve all the world’s problems and certainly not today. For almost a year now, it’s included meditation, as taught by my mother’s favorite spiritual writer, Eknath Easwaran.
His method is all about memorizing passages of sacred literature from across the world. You repeat these silently in your mind for half an hour every day. You can do another half hour session at night, but, honestly, I’ve got two kids, so there’s not a whole lot of extra free time in the day!
I like Easwaran for a number of reasons. He was a vegetarian who was sympathetic to animal rights, my political priority. Now, Easwaran wasn’t perfect. He was fond of telling romanticized stories about domesticated elephants from his native India, for instance. But his heart was in the right place and he didn’t pretend to be infallible.
Easwaran was also very open-minded in his teaching. If someone, like me, was skeptical of or rejected the concept of God, he encouraged them to think of God as their ‘higher self’ or ‘Nature with a capital N.’ It was in this way that I was able to accept traditional religious wisdom, memorizing invocations to the Lord which would have previously alienated me.
This is all a long way of saying that recently I have felt burned out. As has been my habit over the past some months when I feel this way, I’ve started looking over the passages Easwaran recommended for a fresh one to memorize. At this point, I’ve got about 12 minutes of material, so I go through my passages almost three times during a 30-minute meditation.
The Sermon on the Mount continues to be appealing, but the selection Easwaran suggests is so long. I wish he broke it up into smaller pieces. I’m not sure I can memorize that many words all at once. I mean, I could, but I don’t have the energy for it right now.
Unshakable Faith is nice. Easwaran must have been a big fan Swami Ramdas. He offered a lot of passages from him. I was thinking about You Are Christ’s Hands by Saint Teresa of Avila, but that might be too Jesusy for me. I don’t know if it’s just because I came of age during a period of intensely-conservative Christianity, but I’m a little allergic to that.
The Way to Peace by Swami Sivananda is good. It seems like a very compact version of the The Sermon on the Mount. I’m seriously considering In the Midst of Darkness by Mahatma Gandhi. I might like it the most of these, outside of The Sermon on the Mount. Whichever passage I choose, I hope it will give me new energy.