The Great Turning


www.joannamacy.net
The Great Turning
An interview with Joanna Macy
from YES magazine

Sarah Ruth van Gelder: I want to ask for your reflections on change at a larger level, what you're calling the "Great Turning."

Joanna: The term "Great Turning" is just one way to name the vast revolution that's going on because our way of life cannot be sustained. There are three main dimensions of it that I see. The first involves holding actions that slow the destruction caused by.the industrial growth society. This economic system is doomed because it measures its success by how fast it uses up the living body of Earth - extracting resources beyond Earth's capacity to renew, and spewing out wastes faster than Earth's capacity to absorb. It is now in runaway mode, devouring itself at an accelerating rate.

Holding actions are important because they buy time. They are like a first line of defense; they can save a few species, a few ecosystems, and some of the gene pool for future generations, But holding actions are not enough to create a sustainable society. You've got to have new. Social and economic structures, new ways of doing things. And these seem to be springing up at a faster rate than.at any time in our human history.,

Alternative structures and analyses constitute the second dimension of the Great Turning. People are wising up to the assumptions and agreements that allow a few to get richer and richer while more and more people sink below the poverty line. Fresh social and economic experiments are sprouting, and new alliances are forming too.

But new coalitions and new ways of production and distribution are not enough for the Great Turning. They will shrivel and die unless they are rooted in deeply held values - in our sense of who we are, who we want to be, and how we relate to, each other and the living body of Earth. That amounts to a shift in consciousness, which is actually happening now at a rapid rate. This is the third dimension of thi Great Turning and it is, at root, a spiritual revolution, awakening perceptions and values that are both very new and very ancient, linking back to rivers of ancestral wisdom.

Of course, a consciousness shift by itself is insufficient for the Great Turning; you also have to have the holding actions and the creation of alternative structures. These three dimensions are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. I love seeing it this way because it gets us off that dead argument: is it more important to work on yourself or more important to be out there on the barricades? Those are such stupid arguments, because actually, we have to do it all. And as we do it together, it gains momentum and becomes more self-sustaining.

You know, I often imagine future generations will look back at us and say, "Oh, bless 'em. Those ancestors were right there in the Great Turning. There was so much they had to change, and they didn't even know if they could pull it off."

And we might not pull it off. There's no guarantee that this tremendous shift will kick in, before our life support systems unravel invtrievably.

Actually, the very fact that there's no guarantee of success is what will draw forth our greatest courage, creativity, and chutzpah.

We could wait around forever before we act, trying to compute our chances of success. But our time to come alive is right now, on this edge of possibility.

From our own life experience, we know there's never a guarantee &endash; whether we're we're falling in love, or going into labor to birth a baby, or devoting ourselves to a piece of land by turning the soil and watching for rain. We don't ask for proof that we'll succeed and that everything will turn out as we want. We just go ahead, because life wants to live through us!

Sarah: In social movements of the past, it seems to me that people looked to a leader or to some doctrine to lead them forward. Now, people seem to take the responsibility upon themselves; they seem to want to know in their bones what needs to be done and how they can, authentically, be a part of it.

Joanna: Yes. Everywhere I go, talking with folks of all ages and walks of life, I sense this search for authenticity. People are wanting to take responsibility for their lives, both politically and spiritually. It's beautiful.

At the most fundamental level there's an appetite for reconnecting with the sacred. Instead of depending on anyone else for that connection, we want to be able to know it and embody it ourselves.

What is the sacred? It's the ground of our being. It's the wbole of which we are a part. It's what imbues our life with meaning and beauty. Of course, there are different ways of perceiving our relation to it. Mainstream western society has, by and large, related to the sacred by projecting it outwards, setting it apart as a God "out there" to worship, and obey. We made the sacred transcendent, and in its honor created ziggurats, cathedrals, masterpieces of art, and choral music &endash; perhaps our greatest cultural achievements.

But after several millennia of assigning the sacred to a transcendent dimension removed from ordinary life, the world around us begins to go dead and loses its luminosity and meaning. The Earth is reduced to a supply store of material resources and a sewer for our wastes. And in such a world, devoid of the sacred, anything goes - buy up, sell off, consume as much as you can!

What's so beautiful about being alive at this moment is that the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. We are retrieving the projection. We are taking the sacred back into our lives. The swing is from transcendence to immanence. The most vital movementof our era involves making the sacred immanent again. I see it happening in every spiritual tradition - in the Jewish Renewal movement, in Creation Spirituality, in women's spirituality, and, in the resurgence of Wicca, and the teachings of ancient indigenous peoples. We are reawakening to the sacredness of life itself, in the soil and air and water, in our brothers and sisters of other species, and in our own bodies.

I spoke of this as a swing of the pendulum, but a metaphor I like even better comes ftom Ludwig Feuerbach, a German theologian of the mid-19th century. He said that our apprehensions of the sacred have a rhythm like the pumping of the heart. Just as the heart pumps blood out from the center of the body, we project outwards our sense of the sacred so that we can behold its majesty and fall on our knees before it in wonder and awe. Feuerbach reminded us that the heartbest is a two-way action - systole and diastole: the pumping out is followed by drawing the blood back through the heart. When the sacred becomes too remote, you take it back in, to lubricate your life. The retrievel pf the projection is not an endpoint either. When we get stuck too long in immanence, the sacred becomes indistinguishable from anything else; it becomes bland, taken for granted. So the heartbeat goes on, ever renewing our sense of the holy. To perceive it this way frees me to see that they need each other, these two movements of the heart.

It's okay for me to be here. It's okay for me to hurt, even, because I belong, I am part of the sacred, living body of Earth through all time!

Sarah: Tell me a little more about how it affects someone to start seeing the sacred as more immanent.

Joanna: To see all life as holy rescues us from loneliness and the sense of futility that comes with isolation. The sacred becomes part of this encounter &endash; part of you sitting in front of me, present in that stgand of bamboo, and even in myself. I don't have to go to Chartres Cathedral to be in the presence of the Divine. It's right there.

This means that our sorrow is sacred too. Within us all is grief for what is happening to our world &endash; the despoiling of Earth, the extinction of our brother/sister species, the massive suffering of our fellow humans. But when we feel isolated, we stifle that sorrow and rage in order to fit in better and to avoid aggravating the loneliness.
Experiencing the sacred as immanent helps people to befriend their pain for the world and not fear that it will further isolate them. This is a matter of practical urgency, because to repress and discount the grief and dread we feel on behalf of all beings locks us into the status quo. In the work I do with groups, we reframe our pain for the world, recognizing it as the capacity to "suffer with," which is the literal meaning of compassion. It is not only honored in all spiritual traditions, it also serves as wholesome feedback, necessary to our survival. To recognize this brings us back to life: "It's okay for me to be here. It's okay for me to hurt, even. It's okay for me to weep for people who aren't even born yet. That's because I belong, I am part of the sacred, living body of Earth through all time."

This sense of belonging is spreading with the "new story of our universe" Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Sister Miriam McGillis, and others are bringing in now. Drawing from the latest discoveries of science, they show how each of us is an inseparable part of this ever unfolding. story since it first began in the primal "flaring forth."

Everywhere I see people starting prayer groups and healing groups, sacred circles and home churches. They don't wait until they have Masters of Divinity degrees, or are ordained. They're ordaining themselves. They are gathering together because they find they can experience this sacredness better in groups.

When you act on behalf of something greater than yourself, you begin to feel it acting through you with a. power that is greater than your own. The religious term for this empowerment is grace, and we conceived of it as coming from God. Now, we are feeling graced by. other beings and by Earth itself. Those with whom and on whose behalf we act give us strength and eloquence and staying power we didn't know we had.

Sarah: Let's circle back now. How does this shift toward experiencing the Divine as immanent relate to the Great Turning you spoke of earlier?

Joanna: That's a great question. I think the felt presence of ihe sacred willbe like fuel for the Great Turning. It will help us hang in there through a tough time. In the breakdown of the Industrial Growth Society, things will get a lot harder and scarier for a while. And when we get scared we get mean. We turn on each other. I think our greatest danger is fear and the blaming and scapegoating that fear arouses. To hold the conviction that all life is holy will help us withstand the temptations to demagoguery and divisiveness.

Sarah: So this implies a different way of treating those whom we consider opponents.

Joanna: Yes, Yes. There's no private salvation in this. The people,who don't agree with us become like a noble adversary, challenging us to develop our smarts and courage. We still have to walk together into the future. They're like brother/ sister cells in the larger body of life. We may have to take some pretty strong, surgical steps to limit their exercise of greed, hatred and stupidity. But those three poisons, as they're known in Buddhism, are the problem. We want to liberate our adversaries and ourselves from these three. We're not really free until they're free too. Our real enemies are greed, hatred and delusion. Delusion or ignorance means the notion that we are separate, that we can be immune to what we do to other people.

Sarah: One of the major sources of conflict around the world is differences in ethnicity, cultuyre and religion. If this sense of the Divine becoming immanent &endash; if that is happening across religious traditions - could that be a sign of hope for conflicts among religions?

Joanna: Mmm. My mind flies to Afghanistan and the resurgence of a totalitarian patriarchy where the sacred is seen as punitive. Yet, out of the same religion comes Rumi and Hafiz and the Sufi tradition with its celebration of the sacredness of all life.

Fundamentalism rears its head in all religions now. It's a reaction against the radical uncertainty of this moment in history. In such times, we tend to revert to the securiy of rock-bound belief and vent our anxieties in scapegoating others. The temptation to take refuse in our own self-righteousness is strong. But now there's also a strong current in the other direction. Last June, when my husband Fran and I were in Israel, that land so epochally torn by competing claims to the sacred &endash; what we heard most of all from the Jews and the Arabs was their spiritual hunger to reconnect with each other. Clearly, those to whom the sacred is becoming immanent have a role to play in easing the hatreds bred by the fundamentalists. And they are playing that role already.

People are sick and tired of being pitted against each other when there's already so much suffering and the Earth itself is already under assault. They're ready to reconnect and honor the life we share. That is the great adventure of our time. And it's happening.

Reprinted from the Spring 2000 YES! A Journal of Positive Futures. &endash; P.O. Box 108 18 Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.
See a list of ways we can help, by going to Joanna Macy's website at www.joannamacy.net. She has lots of lists of positive things we can do.