What if we did something for the greater good...

what's motivating enough for us to do something crazy?

Tomorrow Mercury moves into Pisces: Mercury is not a natural swimmer. They struggle a bit when thrown into the wide open ocean of Pisces, unsure which direction is the right direction to start swimming.

This place is the opposite of Virgo, Mercury’s favorite place to be in the sky. Virgo offers clarity. In Virgo we are able to do a little research, or a ton of research, and follow those threads of confusion all the way to their ends. We untie the knots and are left with beautiful strands that can be woven into something useful. In Pisces we have a sopping wet knot.

The traditional astrological advice would be to treat this time until March 3 a little bit like a prolonged retrograde. Double check your contracts and keep your phones charged. That’s not bad advice ever. It could also be a good time to let yourself really entertain the associative and the nonsensical. Go to an art museum and just stare at something. Spread a message of love and connection without knowing what you’ll get in return. Turn some loaves and fish into a feast for everyone in your neighborhood. Vibe.

In this week’s newsletter:

• The fading glow of my birthday and Go Birds distractions

• What two mystics suggest to me about the

• News that has pissed me off this week

Two mystics who used their faith/belief to help feed people.

Considering the news this week (some notable articles listed at the end), the glow of my birthday and an Eagles Super Bowl win has finally almost completely faded. By the time the parade wraps up tomorrow night, I expect everything will feel cold and grey and mean again. It was only ever an illusion, but, for a little bit, I wasn’t holding the evil work being done by these men and their accomplices in the front part of my brain. It’s not that you ever fully screen out that reality, but those moments of pleasure are important.

What are we supposed to do about this news? I won’t bore you with all the recycled advice. Yes call, yes vote, yes yell. Since this blog has shaped up to be pretty much about spirituality (I’m not forgetting my astrology roots, just always figuring out the best ways to present it), I’m going to focus on that today. On belief and what to do with it, or what the mystics might call “contemplation and action”.

My friend Kathryn said in a comment on one of these blogs recently:

This idea of belief being anti-intellectual - my thought is intellectualism is rooted in wanting to have truth. Belief can be hard like that because sometimes we believe in things that are not provable as true. I also think there’s something here about collectivism and belief, but too early to form that thought

I agree with this assessment of belief and intellectualism and I also think there’s something about collectivism and belief. Obviously this is true in the sense that, if you want to elect a certain leader to power, you need to collectively believe in them. When you want to achieve certain changes, you need to collectively believe in those changes or at least overlap in your beliefs enough that you can get together as a mass of people and shove this ocean liner of a society we live in toward something better.

Still, I think there is something to be said about another kind of belief, one that is spiritual, and its necessity for doing big collective work. It doesn’t have to be God, or even something truly theistic or that suggests an “intelligent design,” I don’t think. I think it is enough for your belief to be organized around something bigger than the human. Like Kathryn, I don’t have this thought formed into a conclusion just yet, but I’m at least starting to pull things together.

Lately I have been going primarily to the mystics to understand what religious belief can look like. This has been really valuable in reframing my understanding of the religious, moving it from a purely moral framework to something simultaneously cosmological and mundane. While reading Modern Mystics by Bernard McGinn I’ve found a significant portion of these lives have been oriented toward service and enacting positive change. Granted, in some cases, their orientation has been flawed and damaging, primarily as it pertains to their appetite for colonialism, but even in these cases their actions, the small and daily efforts, have focused on doing no harm and making immediate improvements to the lives surrounding them.

Of his motivation to venture out of France and into North African trade line communities, Charles de Foucauld, an early 20th Century mystic and priest, said:

How wonderful it is to have the faith that inspires the believer’s every action. Such faith is supernatural, and strips the mask from the world and reveals God everything. It makes nothing impossible; it renders meaningless such words as “anxiety,” “danger,” and “fear,” so that the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy… (Charles de Foucauld, 99)

Foucauld is interesting. He was a wealthy and lonely young man who experienced a sudden conversion around the time of his first Saturn Return. At twenty-eight, he threw himself wholeheartedly into religious life, eventually becoming a priest and organizing his entire life around the simple goal of living as Jesus did. He wanted to be among the poorest, the most humiliated and disenfranchised, and to just be of service to them.

Unusually, he also did not have interest in proselytizing to them. As he built a center of action and prayer in North Africa, he spent most of his time with non-Christians, Muslims and other people with their own or no faiths. To a visiting doctor, he once said, “I am here, not to convert the Tuareg in a single stroke, but to try to understand and improve them. I am certain the Lord will welcome in heaven those who have led good and upright lives, without their having to be Roman Catholics.” He welcomed the idea that these people might be inspired to convert, and had two individuals over his decades of living there who did, but that was incidental. Instead he spent time praying and serving. He fed who he could, taught who he could, housed who he could, and, eventually, was killed within the walls of his hermitage by an army under Sultan Ahmoud.

The quote I shared above shows his purpose and how he used his beliefs to enable his work. It would be fair to accuse him of delusion, I think. He was constantly working himself out of good health, he tried to grow communities in the least connected parts of often violent trade routes, and he pieced together fluency in regional dialects because he needed a way to get to know (not convert!) the people who he served. Still, he did so happily because of his “faith”. It made him capable of continuing on, even when that faith was seriously undermined as it often was by a Catholic bureaucracy that was not always supportive of his humble goals.

He is probably one of the biggest offenders when it comes to these 20th Century mystics embracing values that should be abhorrent to us today. He believed that France’s incursion into the continent of Africa would have a positive impact on the people there. This is wrong. It’s probably appropriate that, although his hermitage was invaded because of a rumor it contained guns and treasure, that the invading force was largely seeking to push European colonialists out of Africa. He got his final wish, to die in service to God, which meant to die in service to people.

Skipping ahead some decades, another modern mystic profiled by McGinn is interesting to consider in this light. Dag Hammarskjöld was born in 1905 and lived until 1961, when he died in a plane crash while doing what was supposed to be peace work on behalf of the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not a priest, not a monk, not even a Catholic, but a Lutheran and the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Hammarskjöld is an interesting mystic voice.

Hammarskjöld models almost the inverse religious belief of someone like Foucauld. While Foucauld led with his deep and obsessive belief, enacting service as a kind of public face and consequence of it, Hammarskjöld was notoriously quiet about his personal beliefs and feelings while he lived. It was only after he died that a manuscript he’d written over the course of most of his adult life revealed his simmering mystical passions. I say “passions,” but it shouldn’t be misconstrued--while his writing has an emotional depth and awareness, often presented in verse, there is a practical Nordic tone throughout. By sitting with these aphorisms and short essays, the underlying motivation for much of Hammarskjöld’s work in the world becomes clear. It was all for his God which means it was for all the people of the world.

If you’re getting spooked (like I am) that this series of blogs is veering dangerously into territory that will justify placing it in the “Christian Religion” sub-section of Substack, I want to give you some reassurance. I know that I need to spend a lot more time understanding these concepts in a less Judeo-Christian sense. I don’t want to feel hamstrung by an allegiance to overly Western and “rationalized” versions of religion.

At the same time, it feels important that I focus frequently on my cultural inheritance, both as a means of staying authentic and to avoid continuing that colonial bent that so many well-meaning white people have in spiritually inclined places. This is the symbolic language I know most intimately, so it’s where I start. That said, it’s an important goal of mine to better interrogate that language and to open it up as much as possible.

As I’ve said, I’m beginning to feel more strongly that there is a necessity for something spiritual in our lives. It seems that there is some way that we are blocked from doing our best work to take care of each other and make change without the divine. Maybe a supernatural and unprovable force is what it takes to accomplish something really crazy, to keep a change in motion when the forces of Capitalism try to slow it down. But I’m not ready to go all in on this belief. I’ve got a lot more work to do here to pull in the psychological, the philosophical, the political, and to contextualize it for myself in what I experience in reality.

In the meantime, I appreciate what Hammarskjöld says about the interplay of spirituality and doing good work. “In our era, the road to sanctification passes through the world of action.” (Markings, 122) Assuming sanctification is something you want, Hammarskjöld says, you’ll have to do something good. There is no Holy Spirit to be found locked up in a dark room of prayer, at least not until all the hungry are fed and the sick are healed.

Thanks again for reading, I’m starting up Paid Subscriber benefits again next week, get ‘em while their hot!

Some things to read:

1. Read about USAID and how we have a president empowering a random man born into significant wealth to waste millions of our tax dollars and kill hundreds of thousands of people globally through neglect.

2. Tr*mp is constantly finding specifically ugly ways to torture the queers among us, to use us as highly flammable fuel in his hate bonfire. Hate that guy.

3. Read this satisfying and educational rant about the disgust that the wealthy and undereducated among us feel for public services, unless they benefit from them, in which case surely they’ll be protected. Published on a worker-owned blog, Defector.com.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.