Spiritual Resistance ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 2, 2023
Introduction
Typically when we think of the word ‘resistance’, it’s not at all in a spiritual context. Resistance usually implies an active response – pushing back at something or someone; refusing to go along with the demands of the culture or the political conditions.
Resistance is also commonly used in physical strength training. Think about the use of resistance bands in physical therapy – strong elastic bands that we push and pull against in order to strengthen our muscles. It works, too! Resistance exercises make us stronger.
So it’s a challenge to think of resistance in a spiritual or religious context. After all, spirituality tends to imply a lack of resistance – equanimity, letting go, going with the flow. So it might feel like a stretch to think of resistance as a spiritual practice.
Our theme for the month of April is Resistance. And while the word conjures up people rioting in the streets, or going on strike, it can mean so much more than direct actions. Resistance is also a way of the mind and of the heart. Resistance is often just our own quiet ‘no’ – to doing more work, for example, or a ‘no’ to pressure of other sorts to please others. Perhaps it is a commitment to non-violence. Perhaps it is a decision to dress in a certain way, or to forego driving a car in order to demonstrate our commitment to change. This, to me, is spiritual resistance. It is a moral commitment based on our religious and spiritual beliefs.
In a culture such as ours, with its striving, its emphasis on capitalism, on power and control, on winning at all costs, there is a strong need for spiritual resistance. From a simple ‘no’ to practicing gratitude for what we have, to practicing intentionality, a spirituality of resistance needs to be remembered and included in our list of actions in opposition to oppression, hatred, and power.
Today we will take a look at some different forms that resistance can take. The first is a new interpretation of an ancient story: the Palm Sunday story, and another meaning of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. The second is the quiet and powerful resistance of the Onondaga Nation in reciting their own values of gratitude and appreciation whenever they gather. And the third is a spiritual practice intended to help in converting our grief and helplessness into hope when we look at the magnitude of the climate crisis.
Palm Sunday as Resistance
There was always a somewhat mystical, or possibly supernatural, component to the Palm Sunday story. The story begins with Jesus instructing his disciples and giving them tasks to prepare for the entry into Jerusalem. One of the instructions was to go to the next village and take a colt that was tied up. If anyone questioned them, they were to simply say that Jesus had requested it. And so it was. How did Jesus know the colt would be there, and that the owners would let it be taken? He often seemed to know the future.
But what if there was a different explanation? Biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Domenic Crossan took a deeper dive into the story in their 2007 book The Last Week, and offered us a completely different context for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. It was always considered to be triumphal, but what if it was resistance: a response to the imperial power on display? And what if the resistance was planned in advance?
In the first century of the Common Era, life was extraordinarily difficult for the people of Palestine. They had been occupied by the Romans, who had completely upended the traditional way of life for the Jewish farmers and peasants. Their society had always been an agricultural one; small villages and small farms.
But now, there were rulers put into place by the Roman oppressors, rulers such as King Herod and his sons, who started building palaces and large cities, and a huge temple in Jerusalem. To finance all this building, the rulers taxed the residents of Palestine. Some scholars estimate that upward of 40-50% of small farmers’ incomes were paid in taxes – to the Romans themselves, to the local rulers, and to maintain the Temple. And then there came a drought.
Within a generation, people began losing their land. Former landowners were forced to move to the new cities, and to become day laborers. Families were fragmented, as there was no longer enough property to pass down to other children after the oldest son. Younger children in families were cast off, and were known as ‘expendables’, forced to fend for themselves as best they could. *
This is the backdrop, the context, for the public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus appeared out of the wilderness, a follower of John the Baptist. He began travelling from village to village, telling stories known as parables, stories that might have had multiple layers of hidden meanings. Perhaps the parables were actually quiet lessons about power, and how to resist. But taken together the stories Jesus told were intended to point to a different way of life: a spiritual path toward what was later translated as the kingdom of God. “They can have your land, and your bodies,” Jesus perhaps was saying. “But your spirits can pursue a different path. Your spirits can belong to God.”
The Palm Sunday story, through these lenses, can be seen as a double resistance: first, a subversive mockery of imperial power – one man riding a colt, with followers waving palm fronds, in contrast to the heat and noise and color of a powerful military parade. And second, a call to resist total control; a call to maintain a path forward for the spirit of these downtrodden people. We can see the intention of this resistance; the spiritual foundation of resistance based on determination and intentionality. And an offering of hope.
At this time of year we spend a great deal of time trying to understand what is true in these ancient stories. Perhaps this much is true: perhaps there is always a path of spiritual resistance to despair. Perhaps Jesus staged his entry to lead people from despair to hope.
* Source: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan, (New York: Random House, 2013)
Indigenous Resistance
Over the centuries, since the beginning of European colonization of what is now called the Americas, too often the goal of treatment of the Native peoples has been genocide. In our quest for land, all of the land, we turned a blind eye to the humanity of the people already living on the land. We helped ourselves, and in order to maintain control of it, we took away not just many Native lives, but also the Native ways of life; the cultures, the religions, the languages, the folkways. We destroyed families: taking children away to be enrolled in ‘Indian Schools’, where they would be indoctrinated and assimilated into the ways of European-Americans. As the famous 1892 quote went, the goal was to: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” (Wikipedia)
Imagine the despair. But somehow, despite the malevolence, despite the odds, Native culture has managed to survive. Where physical resistance such as armed uprisings largely failed, resistance of the spirit continues to hum quietly, carefully protected and nurtured.
Within New York State, just south of Syracuse, is the Onondaga Nation, a 7300-acre reserve that represents a tiny remnant of the Nation’s original land. They estimate that they lost 95% of their land holdings between 1788 and 1822. The Onondaga people maintain the traditions of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the original name of the five, later six, nations from the region, which we often know as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee is considered to be one of the oldest democratic societies on earth. And somehow, they have held on, and have maintained their spiritual beliefs in the importance of practicing gratitude, and in living in community.
Several years ago, on Thanksgiving Sunday, I led us in a reading of the Thanksgiving Address – maybe some of you remember. It takes quite a long time to recite the entire Address. We heard the first two stanzas of it in our reading just now. Here is another:
“We gather our minds together to send our greetings and thanks to all the beautiful animal life of the world, who walk about with us. They have many things to teach us as people. We are grateful that they continue to share their lives with us and hope that it will always be so. Let us put our minds together as one and send our thanks to the Animals. Now our minds are one.”
Notice how each stanza ends with the refrain: “Now our minds are one.” And isn’t this the goal of all spiritual practices: to help us to understand that we are a part of the Whole, at one with all life? “We Would Be One”, we sing. The Thanksgiving Address is a deeply religious litany, calling the people to a shared orientation of the mind and heart. It says, this is what we believe. These are our core values. And the 2200 citizens of Onondaga Nation, completely surrounded by the State of New York, demonstrate their resistance spiritually every day, by maintaining their language, culture, and values. “We won’t say your Pledge of Allegiance,” they tell us. “We will remember the spiritual wisdom of our ancestors, and give thanks for the gifts we receive and for the relationships and community that we create.”
Spiritual resistance to erasure, to elimination, once again, to despair. Resistance that offers hope for the future. Now our minds are one.
Active Hope as Resistance
In her book, Active Hope, Joanna Macy reminds us that hope is a spiritual practice. Hope is not something that we have, but rather something that we do. We decide what we hope for, and then we can orient ourselves in that direction.
Joanna proposes that in order to foster active hope, to strengthen ourselves for what she has named The Work That Reconnects, we visualize ourselves following a spiral. I love the image of spirals. So often we envision life as cyclical, as circular. But to be moving through life in a circle implies that we will always return to the same starting point. A spiral, on the other hand, moves us along a path, returning again and again to sources of strength and knowledge, but in different ways, further along the path. We do not end up at the same place, but can rise up and out of the same old ways of thinking, seeing, and learning.
Along the spiral path, Joanna has suggested that there are four stations. Like the Onondaga, we begin in a place of gratitude. It is gratitude that helps us to notice what we have been given, the richness of our lives, the bounty and beauty of the earth. When we start from a place of gratitude, we are more easily satisfied. We crave less, need less.
Gratitude can also make us aware of what can be lost, and so the second station along the spiral path is a place for us to honor our pain for the world. Acknowledge our fear, our sadness, take the time to actually feel these emotions that we might be trying to suppress. Let ourselves feel sad about the melting of the polar ice caps, the fragile circumstances of bees and Monarch butterflies. This will free our energy for caring, for feeling our connection with all the life within and around us.
When we regain the ability to care without being overwhelmed and frightened, we can begin seeing with new eyes, the third step along the spiral. We can be more open to all that is possible, be more creative, and respond to those around us who are suggesting actions and solutions to our environmental distress. We will find ourselves more receptive.
And finally, open, grateful, and less frightened, we can reach the fourth step along the way, which is the place from which we can go forth. From here we can decide on actions, find people to work with, educate ourselves and those around us.
The beauty of the spiral is that it is a way of moving forward through a frightening time, moving toward that which overwhelms us, but it can also be a personal spiritual practice. We can return to it over and over, daily even, and will see over time that although we encounter the same four steps, we will find ourselves in a slightly different place each time.
I invite you to take a moment now, to begin this practice. Let’s get comfortable, and quiet, and practice gratitude. Close your eyes and try to think of three things for which you are grateful. Don’t stop there if it is coming easily to you! Let’s begin. (pause)
Let’s come back together now. We’ve made a beginning together of a new spiritual practice. Following this spiral can be done for a few minutes each day, or it can be carried out over a longer timeframe, perhaps lifelong. Either way, by doing it we are building hope for the future, and hope that our intentions and decisions will serve to change the course of our climate crisis.
We can choose what to hope for, and choose how to act. By approaching our climate work as spiritual, we can be intentional – intentionally hopeful, intentionally engaged. We can stay on the spiral path, the path of spiritual resistance.
In the end, practicing spiritual resistance might simply be a fancy way of saying that we are engaged in a search for things to feel hopeful about. This is a practice of creating hope, for ourselves and for the future, and then finding ways to actively bring about the future we imagine. May we all find visions to hope for, and may we all find ways to act.
