Activism and Contemplation: United

(Written for Participating in God’s Power, a program of School of the Spirit)

Acorn, the community grown in Octavia Butler’s Parable series, is the activism of Lauren Oye Olamina Bankole. Earthseed is the belief system which made itself known to her and which she is destined to spread. Acorn without Earthseed and Earthseed without Acorn are partial, incomplete, either rootless or ungrounded, respectively. Activism and contemplation unite and breathe life into one another.

Too often, people bifurcate activism and spirituality, thinking or acting as if the two are opposed to one another. This is a false dichotomy. And the more we engage with these two essential elements as parts of one another, the greater will be both our contemplative and activist lives as well as our contribution to a world in sore need.

While I had known this for some time, I witnessed it powerfully during the 2009 offering of Sabbath-Jubilee, a hybrid programmatic offering to Friends from New England. In preparation for their “jubilee year,” these Friends wished to learn more about the Biblical practice of jubilee. I had been studying the connections between Sabbath and jubilee – a time devoted wholly to the Holy and a time when that holiness is soaked up by every aspect of life for a day or for a “year of the Lord’s favor.” Throughout the program, we witnessed members of Peace and Concerns Committee sink more deeply into Spirit and members of Worship and Ministry stand with their feet planted a little more firmly, ready to take up the work in the world for which worship prepares us.

Since that time, the interpenetration of these two aspects of vital life have repeated like a coda for me. They’ve been nurtured by several group processes with which I’ve been blessed to be engaged: Quaker Social Change Ministry and various iterations of what I call mutual accountability groups. Come and see some of what we discovered and the possibilities you foresee from our humble beginnings.

Quaker Social Change Ministry
The Quaker Social Change Ministry (QSCM) is a product of American Friends Service Committee in partnership with Unitarian Universalists. Lucy Duncan has done much to develop and disseminate the model which intends to ground activism in a spiritual experience and, in so doing, both incarnate our faith and have our world embody Spirit’s invitation to redemption. I’ve been privileged to teach QSCM in relation to human migration during the 2017 FGC Gathering and experience QSCM in two on-going settings (Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting’s Racial Healing and Wholeness Committee and Green Street Friends Meeting’s EMIR Support Group).

With both groups, we formed a covenant, as is part of QSCM. The covenant speaks of our mission and values: for what and how we wish to be. Reading our covenant at the start of each meeting, we root ourselves in the sacred and in our shared vision. My experience has been of feeling connected to Spirit, to the groups shared work, and to one another in ways that I do not in many other settings. I attribute this to a conscious, consensually-held paradigm replacing what otherwise may be unspoken norms – often simple assumptions of the dominant culture which govern individual and collective behaviors. Through the creation, review, and uplifting of the covenant, I’ve seen disunifying individualism shift to shared focus, greater interpersonal compassion, and inspired outcomes.

There’s far more to QSCM, about which you can learn more here, but, with the covenant, we are united in the Sacred and have “laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: ‘Whoever believes will not be in haste.’” Isaiah 28:16

Mutual Accountability Group
A practice, adapted by Marcelle Martin from one used by the Shalem Institute for spiritual directors, has been another valuable resource for me. I learned this process as it was being trialed for teaching with School of the Spirit’s The Way of Ministry in 2008-2009. Mutual accountability groups (MAGs) or faithfulness groups are small groups, ideally four people, who accompany one another for a period of time and for a particular purpose. MAGs meet regularly rotating the focus persons so participants serve as elders for one another. Marcelle’s book A Guide to Faithfulness Groups describes the process and related material that helps them serve their members well.

I have been a member of several MAGs in the past 15 years and taught elements of them consistent with Marcelle’s work while introducing topics and technologies considered by some to be less spiritual or more secular. For example, I’ve borrowed from organizational development to teach about group formation, from Otto Scharmer’s Theory U to unite presencing with action, and from coaching and adult development to better understand how to help myself and others grow and manifest that to which we are called.

In one MAG, the demographics of our group has called forth activism in ways that I’ve not previously known these groups to do. That group has two women members who are faced with life conditions that require them to exercise a degree of daily activism that makes me weary simply witnessing it. By activism here, I simply mean standing in one’s authentic Black woman self in the face of misogynoir and racism – covert and overt, systemically and individually-inflicted. Witnessing these women’s levels of faithfulness has strengthened my own faith as well as fortified my commitment to continue to actively struggle for racial equity.

Another MAG grew from a larger Quaker meeting group reading Me and White Supremacy and using the Circle Way. After completing the book group, four of us began meeting for the purpose of walking with one another as we reshape ourselves more in God’s image, freer of white supremacy, which legal scholar Frances Lee Ansley defines as “a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.” Here, our focus is exorcising racism and serving as instruments in our daily and longer-term lives to undo racism in and around us. In the process, we’ve shared with one another learnings and resources, inspired each other to not only continue the work but to challenge ourselves to more fully embrace it, and reflected back to one another places where we might flourish as we grow.

In keeping with Earthseed’s tenet that “God is change” and “we are shaped by God,” as a life coach, I’ve reshaped MAGs as “communities of practice.” These work, in the areas of rightly-led discernment and action, with people focusing in particular areas, such as encore careerists (second or third chapters), mental health practitioners, and clergy and lay ministers. Countless authorities and personal development methods have found that groups of this sort can increase accountability to one’s goals significantly, offer invaluable support, and foster our ability to meet challenges, as we see others do so. Additionally, these groups provide alternative “plausibility structures” to help us challenge some of the maladjustments of society and grow into the people we are meant to be.

Have you ever wondered who  George Fox, founder of Quakerism, would be without the Valiant Sixty? Jim Corbett without the Sanctuary movement? Octavia Butler’s Olamina without Acorn? I do. And I know how much more faithful, wise, and strong I am as a result of being a member of such a group. LifeCalls and Marcelle Martin support these groups to form and flourish as they foster both our personal autonomy and interdependence for the benefit of the individual group members, the group as a whole, and the world at large.

Another article about my experience with such groups, “Questions of the Grail” is available here.