Something Clicked

“[…] Something… in me clicked.  I became much more prayerful, much less concerned with what I “should” be doing with my life, and much more concerned with my soul’s purpose.  Some deep bunker of knowing within me called out and said, “We cannot think our way out of this.”  Many of our spiritual and religious traditions beautifully teach us that the Divine cannot be understood without the mess of human life, death, and suffering.  We feel that the Sacred is made manifest in our hearts and bodies when we open ourselves to divine healing, and it is made manifest in the world when we act for social, economic, and political liberation.  This is at the heart of yoga and PROUT: the healing of our bodies and the healing of our world.

We often think of activism and organizing as something that is separate from our spiritual practice.  We separate the two: meditation is how I reconnect with Spirit, and activism is how I do the work of Spirit in the world.  What I’m starting to realize in my own journey is that there is a dynamic relationship between them: though I need time for solitude, prayer, and reflection, my spiritual practice is incomplete without my organizing.  Each one informs the other.

Any community organizer worth their weight will tell you that the most basic building block for a movement is self-interest.  The delicate art and slight science of organizing’s most elemental unit is the story of self.  Who am I, and who is my family?  How have I been wounded? What is my stake in the game?  We cannot build a committee, an organization, a campaign, or a movement without tapping into this raw intersection of the personal and the political.  We cannot resist until we have identified how these massive systems of death and destruction have wounded us in our own bodies.  Breaking this silence and sharing our stories with each other is the first step.”
________________________________________
~ Anna Girresch worked to build the labor movement as a rank-and-file union member in Indiana and Georgia from 2012-2015. She has also supported racial justice work. She has just started this fall at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis and loves living at the intersection of faith and social justice.

~ PROUT is an acronym for the Progressive Utilization Theory which was propounded in 1959 by Indian philosopher Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. PROUT presents a viable alternative to the outmoded capitalist and communist socio-economic models.