Two Kinds of Prophecy
On not skipping over despair
I’m seeing if more people will open this if I send it in the afternoon. Will report back!
Oh friends. I tried so hard to get out of writing this one.
I have been doing a post for each episode of the podcast, We Are The Great Turning, that I produced for Jess Serrante and the incomparable Joanna Macy.
Our third, possibly final, meeting of the Podcast Club is on June 20 at 7pm ET! Don’t miss out, it’s been amazing so far. Just reply to this message if you want to join.
And now we’re at Episode 5, which is primarily about despair. And I had just about convinced myself that I could, I don’t know, kinda maybe skip that one? Just go straight to hope? I have to laugh at the strategizing my brain went through to get me there.
The truth is that it’s been a tough couple of weeks. I had to cancel a trip I was really looking forward to because a family member went into the hospital (they’re on the mend). I have four friends right now whose parents are dying, who I am checking in on by text and holding space for. I’m starting to feel old in the pettiest, joy-stealing ways, like I don’t like the way I look usually in selfies anymore. When I was on a couple of dance floors recently, usually a reliable sweet spot for me, I instead checked myself ruminating on how much older I was, and felt, than many of the other people there.
And that’s just my local brain weather. Then there is the world-pain. The air strike on a refugee camp in Rafah. Howler monkeys falling dead from the trees in the heat in Mexico. Catastrophic flooding in southern Brazil. 125 degrees in Pakistan. Civilians slaughtered in Congo. Presidential polls that have Democrats freaking out even though the Republican candidate is now a convicted felon. An iceberg the size of Rockwall County, Texas broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Louisiana, my home state, criminalizing abortion pills. A massive marine heat wave is killing untold sea creatures right now and may augur a very scary tipping point.
Every story like this injects me with a small, potent hit of despair.
So what then?
Joanna Macy tells us we need to 1) feel our feelings. 2) let the feelings connect us 3) don’t believe too much in the feelings.
1. Feeling the feelings - for me looks like staying with the thoughts when they come up, and maybe taking some time to cry. I hold on to the little human details, like the story of a grandmother who died of a simple infection because there is no real health care in Gaza. Or the story of this man, who almost absurdly, finds himself running a tea stall in the middle of a lethal heat wave. There’s no customers, also no electricity; he’s taking three baths a day to try to stay cool.
Letting the feelings connect us. Part of the suffering that compounds the world-despair, as we discussed at last week’s podcast club, is in not bringing it up to anyone else, at least not in a serious, sincere way or for too long, because it’s a huge bummer and they might have their own stuff going on and because no one knows what to say.
On the other hand, as we experienced at last week’s podcast club, it’s a relief like rain to make some space with dear ones, or open hearted strangers, to actually talk about it, while relieving them of the burden of trying to fix it for you.
Joanna Macy is also intent in asking that we use our own local weather, our own personal pain, to stretch us and make us more empathetic toward the pain of those who appear far-off in whatever way. Even the earth herself.
And this is crucial — don’t believe your feelings. That is, don’t believe what they say about the future. Every link I posted above is inherently and truly a bad thing in itself, but what really twists the knife is the what ifs. What if it stays this way forever? What if it gets worse? What if it happens in more places? What then?
“We cannot give our despair the power of prophecy,” Jess says in Episode 6.
But actually there are two kinds of prophecy. There’s the kind that straight-up predicts the future, often in gnomic, inherently tricky ways like the Oracle at Delphi or the Witches in Macbeth. Despair is a bad fortune-teller; don’t trust her with your life.
Then there’s the kind practiced by the Hebrew Nevi’im, and channeled by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This prophetic voice is a courageous call to action, grounded in a warning of an undesirable future if we don’t heed, and a corresponding vision of a beautiful future if we do.
So I’m thinking about in what ways my despair for the world can, if I stick with it, point to this kind of prophetic vision. The very thing that makes my my soul cry out “oh no!” also points with the feather of the arrow at the flip side: what I’m longing to see.
Some Links
In NYC? Come to a rally at City Hall Park on June 6 at 11am and advocate for green, healthy schools on the first anniversary of our wildfire smoke disaster.
Finding lots of good stuff in my fellow Subtackers, here’s 2 links for today:
