Finding our Voices as Spiritual Activists

We live in troubled times, perhaps unrivaled in human history. The trend I have witnessed, during my lifetime, has been toward increasing insecurity. The news about the future that we face tends toward the bleak, and you have to really search for portents of hope. Between the devastating results of globalization and the consolidation of corporate power, and the sheer weight of the environmental consequences of human actions on this earth, it is easy to feel despair. I even understand to some degree those who hope for divine deliverance in the form of a Messiah who will rescue us from the enormity of the problems we face. While I believe that the divine will have a part to play if we are to come through this in any kind of form that most of us will want for ourselves and our children and their children to come, I think that the divine works most often through our own frail and human hands.

I spent last weekend at the Sacred Activism conference in Lynnwood, Washington, organized by Wisdom University. It gave me great hope to see so many come together, searching for a way that the "Spiritual Progressives" among us here in America may come together to offer a different version of hope for the future than what we are offered by the Religious Right. I believe that Michael Lerner ("The Left Hand of God") is on to something--I believe that there is a spiritual crisis here in America. For so long, in order to survive in an increasingly harsh world, more and more of us have been forced into the tyranny of maintaining somebody's bottom line, no matter the cost to our families, our communities, and indeed our very souls. I think that there is another vision--that another world is possible. But I think that as spiritual progressives, or sacred activists, or whatever name you want to use, the world needs us, and we need to find our voice.

At the conference, Michael Lerner told a great story about a woman who had come up to him at one of his talks in Seattle when he was here recently promoting his book and his new Network of Spiritual Progressives. She said she'd met a man who she'd really hit it off with, and he'd asked her to go out on a Sunday morning picnic. She asked if they could meet a little later, since she was going to be in church on Sunday morning. He looked at her, shocked, and said, "But I thought you were a Democrat!" This parallels a story told by Jim Wallis, of Sojourners magazine, published in the American Prospect, where he was told on a book tour by someone in Boston that it was easier to come out as gay in the Democratic Party than as a religious person (link). I think it's sad, and I think it needs to change. As Michael Lerner said, we (OK, I can't speak for everyone--but most of us) don't want to convert anybody. It's not like gays came to the Democrats and said, "Hey, not only do we want you to be gay-friendly and supportive of us as we strive for equal rights--we also want you all to become gay!" As a person who is spiritually inclined, although not "religious" in any strict sense of the word, I think he's right. As spiritual progressives, whose faith impels us to act in the world to stand on the side of the powerless against the powerful, I think we need to come out of the closet.

It is time.

So may it be.