A recent Wednesday was an especially hard one for my spirit. Not for personal reasons. The day started off like most others, with me curled up on the couch with a mug of hot coffee in hand, scanning the trees and field out my back window for signs of wildlife awakening with the rising sun. Eventually I opened my laptop to take in the morning’s headlines. I didn’t even brace myself. I don’t need to anymore. I’m generally prepared for the worst.
But on that Wednesday morning, I was not prepared for the depths of inhumanity that called out from the New York Times headlines. I was not prepared for the horror that lodged in my gut as I read detestable, dehumanizing quote after quote from the tirade President Trump unleashed during a cabinet meeting the day before, targeting Somali immigrants in our country–most of whom came to the U.S as refugees from the brutality of civil war.
New York Times White House correspondents, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Shawn McCreesh called Trump’s outburst a “xenophobic tirade” and described it as “shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.” Adding to the horror is their reporting that Vice President J.D. Vance banged the table in encouragement as Trump spewed his abhorrent vitriol.
My horror soon metabolized into a painful feeling of grief, more acute than the generalized grief I’ve been carrying around now for months, even years. As I asked myself why, I remembered the time I spent with a young man
originally from Somalia, a refugee who came to Massachusetts as a teenager, and whom I met at an event my home church hosted in 2017 to celebrate World Refugee Day. Boyah Farah was a budding young writer at the time, working on a memoir about his experiences coming to terms with the reality of racism in the country he now calls home. It was published in 2022 by HarperCollins to considerable acclaim.
I recalled Boyah’s kindness and gentle demeanor, even as he spoke with force and conviction. I recalled the beauty of his language, his uniquely evocative turns of phrase and vividly descriptive details of his experiences coming of age in a desolate Kenyan refugee camp. His recollection of the sugary sweet taste of a frosted Dunkin donut upon first arriving in our neighboring suburb of Bedford, where he graduated from the public high school.
I wondered how the headlines were landing in Boyah’s body and spirit, and I felt sick.
Sometimes in the beauty of the morning light, in the comfort and peace of my home, and the relative stability of my family and work life, I still forget for moments at a time what’s happening to our world, to the human society grounded in principles of freedom, democracy, justice and equality that we’ve been striving to build and perfect. Far from perfectly. Far too slowly. But even still, there’d been progress.
These days it’s impossible to deny the unraveling of that progress, and the real-life horror that this unraveling is inflicting on marginalized and targeted communities in our midst, especially Black and brown immigrants
striving to live, work, raise families, and contribute to our shared neighborhoods, businesses and institutions.
What am I to do with this grief? What are we to do?
In the book she co-authored with Chris Johnstone, Joanna Macy outlines three potential responses to our grief over this planetary and societal breakdown. Macy and Johnstone contend that there are three stories being “enacted in our time,” and we get to choose which story we will invest our energy in.
They call the first story Business as Usual. It’s a story of denial. According to this story, “There is little need to change the way we live. The central plot of Business as Usual is “about getting ahead,” economically speaking. Taking care of me and mine, with little regard for the consequences imposed on the planet and wider civilization.
The second story is called the Great Unraveling and it “draws attention to the disasters that Business as Usual is taking us toward, as well as those it has already brought about. It is an account of the collapse of ecological and social systems.”
The third story, The Great Turning, is “held and embodied by those who know the first story is leading us to catastrophe and who refuse to let the second story have the last word.” The Great Turning is a story about “the Epochal transition from an industrial society committed to economic growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the healing and recovery of our world… The central plot is finding and offering our gift(s) of Active Hope.”
I like to think that I am a consistent participant in the third story, The Great Turning. That I am finding and offering my gifts–my energy, my spiritual resources, my time, my courage, my abilities–to the movement to create a new world order centered on love and healing. Sometimes, I do live that story. But sometimes I fall into Business as Usual. I put my head down, look away from the big picture, and get caught up in old imperatives about getting ahead and taking care of my own. Other times, like last Wednesday morning, I wallow in in the second story, the Great Unraveling. I lament, feel sick, fret, worry, and get stuck in the overwhelm of it all.
I suspect it is impossible, as limited human beings, for any one of us to perfectly and completely embody the story of the Great Turning. But we can try. And try again. And again. As people of progressive religious vision, we must keep trying. Even when the odds are stark.
Because, what are the odds that any singular, minuscule mustard seed, smaller than a freckle on my hand, will settle into a nurturing place in the earth, germinate, sprout, survive and grow into that bountiful shrub that gives shelter to God’s creatures?
Still, there is hope in that seed. Not a passive hope that asks nothing–not even a crumb–of us. But rather a hope that calls out to us to do what part we can to sow that seed in the field, to give it the light and water and tending it needs to increase its chances of growing into the fullness of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Beloved Community of collective flourishing.
What is the good of a hope that sings a song of comfort but doesn’t ask a crumb of us? The danger of such a passive form of hope is that it comforts us just enough to allow us to look away from the threats and carry on with Business as Usual; or numbs the symptoms of grief and pain we experience when we confront the truth of the Great Unraveling, so that we remain mired in a muted but helpless despair.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Emily Dickinson’s little poem about that thing with feathers is meant to make us feel uncomfortable about getting too comfortable with the song of hope. Does it really feel good or gratifying or right to be someone who doesn’t have a crumb to give to make hope real in the world?
What happens when we give the bird the crumb or better yet a feast of our collective crumbs? Maybe, just maybe, we give the bird the strength it needs to take its song of hope out into the world, to perch in the branches of the mustard tree, and offer its song to the Beloved Community of all beings.
Alternatively, active hope inspires, motivates, and moves us towards new ways of acting in the world that bring us closer to our longed for vision. The song of hope reminds us that greed and cruelty are not inevitable. That love, compassion, generosity and mercy are real and at hand. That we can cultivate the world order that we’ve been dreaming of since Jesus preached it, and before, and still, by sowing the seeds of possibility harvested from within our beings, out in the world. The crumbs – the seeds – of kindness, creativity, ingenuity, beauty, healing and love that are abundant in every human soul, but need to be sown and nurtured in the light of the world to grow to their full potential.
What are your gifts of Active Hope to offer to the Great Turning? Even if you think you don’t have any, I promise you do. And, it’s best we get comfortable with naming and celebrating the gifts you have to give–we all have to give–because our world urgently needs givers, more than it needs consumers.
Joanna Macy was an environmental activist and deep ecologist, whose teachings and activism centered on the crisis of climate change and inspired healing responses. Yet, her teachings are every bit as relevant for the intersectional social crises of our time. It’s becoming increasingly clear that they are all connected. They all stem from a world view that prizes competition as a path to individual and tribal prosperity, and that increasingly justifies strategies of greed, extraction, and exploitation that are destroying the sustainability of the planet for countless forms of life, including humans, as well as the social structures we need to thrive.
The Great Turning is about environmental sustainability and also about social healing. When we turn toward an ethic of healing and sustainability, we prize strategies grounded in compassion, inclusion, care, and shared well-being. Strategies that move us from a world view centered on competition to one centered on collective flourishing.
We are already giving our gifts of Active Hope to hasten the story of the Great Turning. You are already doing it. I see as much in your acts of generosity and care to one another, and in your commitments to racial healing, immigration justice, LGBTQ inclusion, and resisting authoritarianism. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep sowing the seeds of hope tucked away in our hearts and souls, so that they can grow in the light of the world.
When the so-called leaders occupying the highest halls of power in our nation unleash, justify, and fuel flames of hate, cruelty and division to secure their own power and wealth, we must sing our song of love and belonging, out in the world, in word and deed.
If you’re not sure what part you can play, what crumbs you have to give, your social action leaders can connect you to opportunities to create a welcoming culture of belonging within our walls at First Parish; and, beyond our walls, to show up in love for our migrant neighbors, at the ICE facility in Burlington, at Hanscom air field, and right outside the doors of our Sanctuary.
During December, we will be hosting a temporary outdoor art installation, in the tradition of Christmas nativity scenes, that uses the motif of road signs to draw attention to the issue of immigrant justice. This is a joint initiative of four neighboring UU congregations – the first parishes in Lexington, Lincoln, Concord and Bedford. You can also join members of the Immigration Justice Task Force, your ministers, local clergy, friends and neighbors for a vigil on our grounds around the art installation. We will deflect the hateful headlines with prayers and songs of love and hospitality. We will share ways to get involved in directly supporting detained and targeted immigrants in our very own communities.
Collectively, we will offer up the seeds and crumbs of love, resistance, strength, commitment, compassion, and kindness that give life to the great hope of the Great Turning. No matter how small or seemingly humble, taken together, our offerings have the potential and the promise to change the world.
May we make it so.
Rev. Jennifer Beth Johnson is Lead Minister at First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts. Rev. Jennifer’s ministry is grounded in the vision and promise of the Beloved Community, and she holds a Master of Divinity in 2020 from Meadville Lombard Theological School. Prior to ministry, Jennifer spent a decade building and directing the Communications and Outreach department at Advocates, a leading nonprofit social services agency in Massachusetts. A lover of all things literary, Jennifer holds degrees in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire (a Bachelors) and Tufts University (a Masters). With her husband Dave and their two daughters, Amelia and Carly, she has laid roots, and together they enjoy hiking New England’s woodland trails; sharing their eclectic music and movie tastes; and engaging in lively dinner-table debates.