By Tess GC
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I was thinking recently about what we write the most about in this newsletter, and I think those things are dignity, and the lack of it for so many people and creatures in our world today; being there for each other (solidarity); and people’s right to self-determination (aka freedom, liberation). Each of these themes are spiritual ones for me, and I would argue that they are for most people. Since we (Tess and Ben) started this newsletter this past September, we’ve been wondering if the readers are more spiritual/religious, or just interested in liberatory politics, not so much the spirituality stuff. I have worried that we don’t write enough about explicitly religious or spiritual themes anymore, AND that if we write about it at all it might alienate some people.
I’ve been wanting to write something for a while that talks about why I think spirituality in particular is still a theme of this publication, and why I think there’s something to think about here for both religious and non-religious people. I articulated some of this a few months ago in “The Left Needs Spirituality,” but I want to come back to the topic I raised there when I wrote:
“I think the Left’s ideals of solidarity, mutual aid, and liberation are in fact a deep spirituality that the Left should recognize as such to help our movements.”
We began this publication writing explicitly about religion, spirituality, and leftism, and it has quickly become about the harm coming to our communities under our deeply exploitative economic system, and our deep need for social movements and bonds with each other that can combat it. We have a sense that this work taps into the very core of what it means to live, work, love, and die in this time, and that those questions are deeply spiritual. It’s also a reality that much of organized religion, and even a good chunk of alternative spiritualities have little to offer us when we wonder what spirituality has to do with people power, and with organizing ourselves so that we’re not always at the mercy of other people’s greed and other people’s immiseration of us.
A while ago, I was reading a newsletter by
, and in her discussion of sobriety she talked about a major factor in drinking and in sobriety being her “profound discomfort with and resentment towards societal systems that were totally outside of my control. Mostly capitalism, which I feel constantly brutalized by on the level of my soul. I am angry about it in a way that is religious. It feels like an affront to the sanctity of life.” An “affront to the sanctity of life” is how I feel about the conditions I see many people living in, the ones I myself increasingly deal with, and if we all thought about it, more and more of us would realize are part of our realities as well.Many of the problems of our society are also problems of the complete hollowing out of meaning, value, and personal and spiritual development. Living under capitalism doesn’t just make it harder to find a place to live or decently paying work, it also steals from us, from our spiritual, cultural, and communal lives and wellbeing. We desperately need mass democratic politics, but what each of us can do at the individual level, aside from starting to organize in our communities, is to figure out where we ground ourselves, from where we draw meaning and purpose. What are our spiritual and cultural groundings? And how can identifying and developing these groundings help us, so that we are up to the task of working across differences with one another? This is work that each of us needs to do with our own emotional and spiritual selves, or many of us will be too reactive or ungrounded to actually engage other people when the going gets tough. It is in this combination of questioning and developing ourselves, and working toward solidarity organizing in which spirituality is at its most political, but can also be at its deepest.
So we will continue writing about matters that are both spiritual and political in our eyes. No one is coming to save us from the conditions of our world but ourselves. That’s the way it always has been across time and place, and it’s up to us to make sure that we’re no longer victimized, but that we’re fighters, makers of a new world, companions and advocates for one another in this journey. That struggle seems worth our time and energy in this brief time that we have on this earth.