Re-imagining Our Stories
Spiritual Practice in Apocalyptic Times
by Theodore Richards
What Makes an Apocalypse?
Amid the rising seas, burning forests, and superstorms, with inequality and fascism threatening just and democratic societies, ours is an age of denial, fear, and, above all else, loneliness. In a word, it is an age that can be described best, perhaps, as apocalyptic. This is a word that is thrown around more than it should be, a tool for sensationalism and panic rather than a means to understand our moment. But it is, I believe, useful not only in describing our historical moment but also in inviting us to new ways of seeing our world – and new practices for navigating this time of crisis and transition.
Photo: Wikipedia
To understand how this is a moment of apocalypse, it is useful to grasp the historical apocalyptic tradition, its context, and how it relates to us today. The tradition emerged during the Roman occupation of Palestine.
Three factors influenced the Jewish response to this occupation. The first was economic. Thrust into a more globalized economic system, many Israelites were faced with increased debt, leading to destitution and even slavery. The second was political. The Israelites had lost political power and control over their own land due to Roman imperial might. The third was cultural. The eastern Mediterranean was dominated by Greek culture, threatening the worldview of the Jewish people. The stories that once held them together, given them their place in the cosmos, were unraveling. Each of these factors are present today as global economic, political, and cultural forces leave much of our planet unmoored and imperiled.
The cultural unmooring and unraveling of story exemplify the true apocalypse. The apocalyptic tradition wasn’t exactly about the literal end of the world; rather it was the end of a worldview. So, it came to pass that a new tradition arose among the Israelites. It spoke not of a political solution to their struggles as in the prophetic tradition that preceded it. Rather, because the unraveling was so consuming, so profound, it sought restoration in cosmic terms. An end of this world and the revealing of a new one was the only way forward.
An apocalypse therefore has two key components. First, it is holistic and therefore requires us to look upon our crises in cosmic terms. Second, it relates to the unraveling of the myths and symbols that culture offers as a way of understanding our place in the world, requiring us to completely re-imagine those stories.
Loneliness – the Inner Climate Crisis
The nature of today’s crisis makes it difficult to see things holistically. We are taught – through an education system modeled on factories or on the “free market” – that we are fundamentally alone in the world. This is the ethos of capitalism. It is the worldview that allows us to burn our forests and create systems of exploitation. Capitalism requires loneliness; for it is loneliness that spurs us to compete with our kin for resources, loneliness that compels us to keep buying what we don’t need. Lonely people, people without a story that gives them a sense of their interconnectedness, put fascists in power. Loneliness is the interior expression of an extractive and exploitative economy and the destruction of the living planet. It is the inner climate crisis.
Photo: Unsplash
It is important to note that the culture of extreme individualism is an anomaly in human history, commonly held for only the last 500 years. At the same time the Protestant Reformation placed an increased emphasis on individual salvation. Capitalism, arising simultaneously with the global slave trade and colonialism, meant that individuality became fundamental to the Western worldview. Capitalism and “freedom” are so conflated that what is usually meant by freedom is the freedom from community, the freedom to buy and sell other people or the natural commons. The logical extension of such a notion of freedom is loneliness.
Our spiritual traditions offer many counterexamples. The Buddhist worldview is rooted in the notion that the fixed, isolated self is an illusion. Rather, the concept of anatman reveals a self – literally “no self” – that is fundamentally interconnected and relational. Indigenous traditions have always understood that our most fundamental identity is rooted not in the individual but in community –human and more-than-human. The pan-African concept of Ubuntu teaches us that “a person is a person through people.”
So the challenge of our apocalypse is spiritual. By this I mean that it requires us to re-imagine the way we experience our relationship to the whole, through our myths. It’s also a problem of education. We teach not merely through exchanging ideas, concepts, and skills. Most of what we learn is through the formation of space. A learning space is a metaphor for our world.
The word apocalypse comes from the Greek, meaning “unveiling.” To see – truly see – we must remember that this is a problem of story. But how can we practice a re-imagining of story? What can we actually do? The solution to our climate crisis isn’t as simple as reducing emissions to mitigate changes in our climate. Our loneliness and disconnection is the inner climate crisis, which cannot be separated from the climate of the Earth. Remember, it’s all interconnected.
The Act of Re-imagining
“Re-imagining Our Story” is a process I developed through my work at The Chicago Wisdom Project, an organization I founded ten years ago. Our mission is to empower youth to re-imagine the stories they had about themselves, their communities, their world, and to create spaces in which a transformative and caring learning process could occur.
Today, we have evolved into a collaborative national organization, Wisdom Projects, Inc. Our work still focuses on youth, but also has grown to include others. People often talk condescendingly about “at-risk youth,” but what about our at-risk planet, our at-risk species? Indeed, we all need to re-imagine our story. This comes out of the realization that our troubles cannot be solved merely through technology or politics; rather, we need to re-imagine what it means to be human. We need new stories, new poetics, new ideas – and need to put them in action. This work requires more than action on the part of world leaders. It necessitates the wisdom of those at the margins and those with the courage to imagine a new world.
How can we learn this new way of being human if all of our systems are rooted in the same stories? A story, a deep story, tells us who we are, how we relate to the world, and what, ultimately, is sacred. To re-imagine such a story is to confront the apocalypse. Re-imagining Our Story is a process of taking deeper look at the stories of the modern world in order to re-imagine our place in it. These practices and process are rooted in seven concepts.
1. COMMUNITY: Sharing the story
We begin by recognizing that we are already in community. The loneliness, isolation, and individualism of the modern, capitalist world is actually a delusion. We are deeply connected and interconnected not merely to other people, but also to the web of natural relationships in which we are embedded.
Stories have always arisen in community. An individual story is the intersection of these communal and natural relationships. And stories come alive when they are shared. Indeed, a story’s meaning isn’t static; rather, it’s brought forth in the liminal space between teller and listener.
This is where we must be humble enough to listen and brave enough to share. Our practices must be rooted in community building. We are all in this together – there is no individual salvation.
2. INTELLECT: Critiquing the story
Photo: Wikimedia
Of course, not all stories serve us well. Certainly some that served us in the past are no longer useful. This is why it is important to understand, through inquiry, dialogue, and genuine intellectual discernment, the roots of our shared narratives in order to dismantle them. Power-hungry leaders have used stories of hierarchy and separation in order to control. The story that teaches us we can grow and keep growing on a finite planet – Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax called it “biggering” – needs to be critiqued. The story that conflates our value with what we can buy needs to be critiqued.
Critiquing requires genuine intellectual work and the spiritual practices of reading, questioning, and dialoguing. The notion that being “spiritual” means rejecting the intellect must itself be rejected, for anti-intellectualism gives rise to fundamentalisms of all sorts, which feed off of and into the isolated, lonely individual.
3. SOUL: Feeling the story
At the same time, we must acknowledge that the intellect alone cannot overturn a deep story. Such stories are embedded in culture and consciousness, and deep work is needed to overcome them. Meditation, rites of passage, and restorative practices all can help us work through the trauma of harmful narratives, empower us through the wisdom of our emotions, and offer a more mindful and compassionate way to engage the world.
4. HANDS: Embodying the story
Our bodies are not separate from the Earth itself or from our emotions. Much learning happens in the body and through hands-on experience. Moreover, we experience trauma in the body and therefore part of the work of re-imagining our story must involve meditative, embodied practices. This includes getting our hands dirty, being outside, building, and planting. Engaging with the body means engaging with the natural world of which we – our hearts, our minds, and our bodies – are a part.
5. ECOLOGY: Expanding the story
Photo: Wonderlane, C.c. 2.0
My story isn’t just my story; it’s part of an interconnected web of stories. It’s relational. This is what an ecological consciousness teaches us. This consciousness has been buried by our individualism and loneliness, but we have the power to unearth it. We can begin to do so by engaging in mindfulness practices and in practices rooted in nature.
For example, we can contextualize our personal stories through the mandala, a spiritual and cosmic symbol found in many Eastern religions. It is a reminder of our intimate relationship to the infinite. The entire cosmos is contained within us, because there is nothing that we are not in some way connected to.
6. CREATIVITY: Re-imagining the story
Creativity is where the student becomes a teacher, where the story gets re-imagined. Through storytelling and symbol-making, we participate in the process of creation. Just as the Earth creates itself through evolutionary processes, we humans make and re-make our world through story creation. Stories are conveyed through speech, song, dance, image, and symbol, the best being grounded in creative interpretations and imaginings
7. THE WHOLE: Integrating the story
Our stories are brought forth in the holistic experience of all the elements of learning, self, community, and cosmos. But the story only comes alive when it interacts again with the community. We teach by creating a space – a community – that is a metaphor for the world we want to create. Worlds are made and remade in community, and stories imagined and re-imagined. In many ways, a deep story only exists when it woven into our lives.
** ** **
So here we are, at the moment of crisis and opportunity. Of apocalyptic upheaval and unveiling. The stories of modernity, of capitalism, of the isolated individual, have left us without a sense of place in the world. We’ve become a lonely species, seemingly intent on destroying our only home. In order to rediscover our place in the cosmos, we must use the two great gifts of our species: our capacity to make worlds through language and symbol, and our ability to create communities of care in which to bring those worlds to life.
Header Photo: Unsplash