I have been attending a “mindfulness meditation” class on Mondays recently. Last Monday, the teacher brought up the horror weighing heavily on our minds, of the separation of families along the southern border. Our teacher raised the question, what does the practice of meditation have to do with injustice in the world?
Although I feel like I've been thinking about this question forever, in my midlife, I find my thoughts about this are changing. I used to agree with the conclusions of my teacher--that the whole point of spirituality is to open us to non-harming loving kindness, which leads us to action in the world. She quoted Gandhi a few times, who said, in essence, "those who think spirituality has nothing to do with politics don't know shit about spirituality."
I remember my Religious Studies major in college, for which I took classes like "Religious Belief and Moral Action," and "The Problem of Religion." These classes were nearly entirely all about how different religions have theorized the relationship between political action and spirituality. I used to think that any spiritual life one could lead would be narcissistic if not connected to politics. Chalk this all up to my own Quaker background; the Quakers are nuts for using religion to rationalize progressive social justice agendas.
But over time, my thoughts have changed on this. For one, I've become much more cynical about using religion or "morals" or "spirituality" to justify any political agenda--on the political right and the political left.
But what I really want to write about here is something else that bugged me about meditation class last week.
One of the reasons I stopped attending Quaker meeting is because I don't want my spiritual spaces coopted by political proselytizing. Which isn't to say that spirituality has nothing to do with politics. It just rubs me as fundamentally devious to sneak in political agendas while people are contemplating the meaning of life. It's manipulative.
Also, are Buddhism and Quakerism only available to liberals? That can't be right.
The small-mindedness of thinking that these spiritual approaches must inherently lead to a certain political bent is troubling to me. It can't be that if you're X religion, then your politics must therefore be Y. Doesn't this just add to the problem of tribalism we're all being crushed by right now? Isn't this at the very core of what led to what's happening on the border?
In addition to not liking to have my spiritual life hijacked in favor of anybody else's politics, even if they're in line with my own, I bristled at being told, once again, that if I really believed in loving kindness, or God, or whatever, I would do more things.
My teacher's lecture seemed to assume that everybody in the room was so privileged that they must not actually do political or social justice work in their lives. If they were in that room, then they must not be already engaged enough. This assumption just reinforced my own anti-meditation bias. I am sure I have avoided pursuing a spiritual life not just because I have no time, but because I have thought of it as privileged, as a luxury only people who are not paying enough attention to the apocalypse we're experiencing would care to seek.
However, the whole reason I ended up in that mindfulness meditation class is because I am suffering from burnout of doing too many things, and I've come around to thinking that a spiritual life may in fact not just be necessary for recovering, but also for keeping myself resourced for a lifetime of this work.
After the 2016 election, I turned up the volume of doing more things even more, thinking I wasn't already doing enough. I have turned to mindfulness and meditation precisely to recover, to find rest, to re-source myself so that I can figure out how to keep working for social justice without depleting myself.
My teacher's conclusion that we should all support organizations more, call our congresspeople more, reach out to our neighbors more, is all fine and well, but what I want to hear about is the value of meditation to keeping up one's reserves for the long haul of this work.
I agree with her that spirituality should not be an escape from politics. Meditation is not only a navel-gazing exercise. But I crave a much more sophisticated, complex lecture on how one's own spiritual vitality is necessary for sustained engagement in the world--no matter what that engagement looks like. It may be calling politicians, but it may be what we do every day for our jobs, then come home and do with our families.
Adding more for us to do on top of our first and second shifts is precisely what is not needed. And fueling the divisions between "us and them"-- what Tara Brach in her most recent podcast calls "unreal othering"--is not what I want from my spiritual life or teachers.
It's not that I want an escape from politics; I want an alternative path of action not driven by anger, fear, and negativity about people and actions I feel powerless to do anything about, and a practice of right action and right intention that helps me focus on the realms I do have control over.
I'm feeling more like Audre Lorde than Gandhi right now.
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