thoughts on spring, gandhi and social repentance...

All around me are signs that spring is truly here. Yes, while it snowed this past Saturday, zapping the magnolia tree once again, it is unlikely we'll have another frost until October (we hope!) The woodlands that were brown and gray just two weeks ago are now tinged with every shade of green imaginable. The lilacs, too are starting to bud. And I've had to cut patches of the lawn twice this month. The equinox has come and gone. Gradually this neck of the woods has become bathed in an increasing light. The peepers are going crazy in the wetlands, I saw brother woodchuck race through the bramble yesterday, and for a moment it feels as if all is right with the world.

In reality, despite the the anguish of the contagion, all is right with the world. The virus is doing its job. After being forced into contact with humans by our ever increasing invasion of the wild, we are now sadly experiencing the natural consequences of our avarice. As the late Tom Hayden wrote back in 1972, "the love of possession is like a disease with them." He was quoting Sitting Bull from an address given in 1877. In 2020, we have been forced into doing what had once been our choice: shutting down an economy and way of being that was killing the planet, engorging the wealthy and devastating indigenous peoples. With over half of the US workforce now unemployed - and the forces of capital aching to renew our addictions - we are at a crossroads. And while the transition to a sustainable economy is neither inevitable nor painless, our lock down has created the opportunity to change direction. It will be resisted and compromised in ways too ugly to imagine. The love of possession IS like a disease for many. And yet we will never have the freedom to repent on an international level like the present so now is the time to act.

Economists and social scientists almost never speak of repentance: retooling and refashioning, yes, but not repentance. And yet that's what is needed. In Judaism the word teshuva, literally "to return," is the mandate to return to a life in harmony with the heart of the Holy. It is a change of direction and thinking that restores all that is vibrant, life-giving and creative to creation. In the Christian traditions the word metanoia, literally a word salad meaning "to perceive in the mind afterwards," involves the intellectual, moral and emotional realization that an action violates God's love - and must be healed. Both ways of articulating repentance require a new way of thinking/feeling as well as actions that are restorative.

As I gaze upon the wetlands and the woods surrounding our home, I keep thinking of Gandhi's spinning wheel and my garden. After his career in South Africa as a lawyer, he returned to his home in India. Over the next three years, he traveled throughout the nation, studied, listened to the stories of ordinary Indians, prayed and began to craft a new/old way of living that embodied resistance: the Satyagraha ashram. From this simple living compound that abolished the confines of race and social class, Gandhi began a "do it yourself" movement that simultaneously taught India's poor how to weave fabric for themselves while resisting payment of an English colonial tax. Nearly ten years later, he executed his march to the sea to challenge the English tax on salt. As he walked through village after village, holding conversations with citizens and offering new ways of thinking, a revolution of the imagination started to grow. The march to the sea campaign altered none of the laws of colonialism yet showed people long oppressed what freedom looked and even felt like: British imperialism was not the only reality possible for India.

I can't help but think of Gandhi's revolution of the imagination at this moment in time. The eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, has observed that: “Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.” The columnist and Unitarian pastor, Carl Gregg, put it like this in his article, "The Spirituality of Spring."

Gardening connects you to the passing of time, the seasons, and the source of your food." This impulse is what led Gandhi to champion the “Do-It-Yourself” method of using a spinning wheel to make your own clothes in an age in which many of us are deeply disconnected from the sweatshops where so much of what we wear is made. Growing our own food, cooking our own meals, sewing our own clothes, and creating art are all some of the life-giving practices we can learn when we embrace the springtime seasons of our life — although doing them all at once, I will confess, sounds exhausting! (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2013/04/the-spirituality-of-spring-creativity-as-spiritual-practice/)

There are clearly those already poised and positioned for the political  challenges of this moment: in the US the next phase of repentance will include bailing-out the states as they care for the 20+ million people currently thrown out of work by the pandemic. These moral warriors will not let the states slip into bankruptcy so that our social safety net is dismantled. Nor will they give up on maintaining a radical commitment to social distancing and re-opening the economy incrementally and safely. At the same time, however, I cannot help but think that we need a revolution of the imagination like unto that of Gandhi's era if we are to genuinely seize this opportunity for social repentance. 

Once upon a time I was sitting in a still East German living room sipping strong tea as pastors and lay people spoke of their work under the double whammy of German stoicism and Stalinist communism. Having consciously chosen to remain in Germany after WWII, these believers spoke of their commitment to repentance as a life time of small and quiet acts. Cumulatively, they told us, there would come a time when theses small acts overwhelmed the evil. Until then, however, it was necessary to rewire the way everyday people thought - a revolution of the imagination - that was realized when the wall was torn down in 1991. I hold on to this memory, as well as a commitment to both hope and repentance, as the age of contagion evolves. Vaclav Havel once wrote: "Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons." This will be a time like no other - and it will likely become darker and more uncertain, too before a deep repentance transpires. I think Paul Kingsnorth got it right when he wrote:

Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?...if you don't feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair, too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road....I am going to pick up [my scythe] and go and find some grass to mow. I am going to cut great swaths of it...I am going to walk ahead, following the ground... I am going to breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that knowledge is not the same as wisdom. (read more from this English thinker @ http://paulkingsnorth.net)

And at the same time I trust - and even sense - that the whole earthy cries "glory" and that the wisdom of God's steadfast love that endures forever is greater than human greed.