The impossible will take a little while 8 comments

12 Nov 2005 @ 00:53, by Uncle Remus The passing away of Rosa Parks comes as a reminder of another time, a bygone era when strong connections still used to link activism and spiritual practice. A connection that is not gone, maybe, but which has lost a lot of its momentum, and which is even sometimes frowned upon in certain contemporary spiritual circles. The new spiritual movements of our era, like the New Age, which begun as a rather dynamic, promising eclectic, free-flowing, counter-cultural spiritual movement, have, it seems, easily, happily, and sometimes eagerly allowed themselves to be absorbed and mollified overtime by the dominant culture of their era. And those, which haven't, see themselves as separate from society and do not want to have anything to do with it. No more Gandhi, no more Rosa Parks. Just don't pay any attention to the merchants in the Temple. Mind your own business. Transform yourselves. Absorb all the energy you can from that crystal around your neck. Just don't try to change the world. Mark Haris examining the use of New Age buzzwords such as "empowerment" and "prosperity consciousness," in an article, dated November 1999, that he wrote for Conscious Choice, ( a piece about Paul Loeb’s book - Soul of a Citizen,) noted that "it is rare that New Age writers, ministers, or others who use such concepts ever apply them to community issues or social campaigns to improve peoples' situations": You Create Your Own Reality — Sort Of "You are your own reality," proclaims Deepak Chopra. "You create it. You carry it around with you." Such thinking, Loeb notes, reduces the world to nothing but individual problems, accompanied by what he describes as a "willful insensitivity" to social context. How else could a woman attending a Seattle New Age conference explain that welfare recipients "just need to wake up and realize their mythic selves?" It's a common limitation in the self-help mindset. "You are not the victim of circumstances," writes "New Thought" minister Eric Butterworth in Spiritual Economics (Unity Books, 1993). "Admit to yourself that your present experience, even the condition of your bank account, reflects your present level of awareness....If, however, the cause is "out there" in people or circumstances, then there is little you can do." Of course, it's healthful to cultivate a positive, stress-hardy outlook. And we all have to take personal responsibility for our lives. Yet why if the cause is "out there," is there then "little you can do?" If a person cannot afford health insurance, is this only their individual problem, demanding only an individual solution? Might it also have something to do with a certain social reality, namely, that 45 million other people also cannot afford insurance? And is there no political solution to that problem? "The most troublesome consequences of this type of thinking," concludes Loeb, "is that it exempts even the most powerful economic, political, and social institutions from all responsibility for the state of society. Take the extreme case of slavery. Who created that reality? Was it the slaves or the slave masters who needed to wake up and think about their actions? Such contemporary social problems as unemployment, discrimination, and inadequate health care may not be as dramatic as slavery, but no amount of positive thinking or self-actualization is going to solve them without common public action." If the only reality is the one you personally create, and the challenge is only that of "saying no to negativity," then there is no room for legitimate anger at injustice in the world. Indeed, some would argue that anger is always a spiritual detriment, always negative. Imagine, Loeb wryly notes, if Jesus had proclaimed in Chopra-like fashion, "I was going to throw the money changers out of the temple, but I didn't want to be a negative person." Without the capacity for anger we "tolerate the intolerable," as the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a Yale chaplain who became one of the leading theologians to oppose the Vietnam War, once said. The larger challenge is not to avoid or deny our anger, but to express and channel it, appropriately and effectively, into positive action on behalf of human dignity and justice. (...) If Peace Begins with Me, It Continues with Us If peace begins with me, as one popular New Age slogan proclaims, then it continues with us, in our ongoing efforts to refashion the world for the good of all. For spiritual transformation, in its most holistic sense, cannot be separated from social activism and change. Mark Harris: Social Activism in Cynical Times - Self-Help for Society The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a phrase borrowed from Billie Holiday (Crazy He Calls Me: "The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.") It is also the title of Paul Loeb’s last book, published Aug. 2004.

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