The Spirit Comes in Crisis
I’m cracked open now / No longer drifting
Running past their hate and mine / Tipping past “Come here, gal!”…
I’m cracked open now / looking for myself,
Maybe I spilled into the cleft of the rock / Hiding from the slave catching dogs
Maybe I died trying too hard / To birth myself sane
I’m cracked, not broken / Still searching for me
Amid the shards of God’s broken heart.
—Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable
In season four of The Cosmic We, Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes and co-host Rev. Donny Bryant discuss “crisis contemplation.” Holmes believes contemplative experience can emerge in times of collective crisis.
Donny Bryant: Crisis contemplation begins with what you call the communal, village, or tribal experience of crisis. Many times, we tend to deal with crisis at the individual level. We tend to look at what’s happening to me, what I have lost, what I feel, how this impacts me … or my emotional stability. Experience of crisis at the individual level is critically important, and we don’t want to discount that. But you are inviting us to frame and understand how crisis can be experienced at the communal, tribal, national, and global levels.
Barbara Holmes: When you’re experiencing crisis as an individual, that’s what St. John of the Cross calls “the dark night of the soul.” You’re wrestling with God. You’re doing what you need to do to handle what’s coming up out of you that you don’t understand. It’s personal. You’re getting a divorce, your child is ill … or you’re just having the catastrophe of everyday life.
But that’s not the same thing for a group of people. I use three categories to talk about crisis contemplation—the event is without warning; the people upon whom it is inflicted can’t do anything about it. There is no recourse. You’re caught. There is no place to go in the hold of a slave ship. There is nothing to be done when you’re walking from North Carolina as a Native American to Oklahoma. Something else has to arise to keep you going, to enliven your spirit, to help you survive—if survival is in the cards.
Crisis contemplation is that spirit that emerges when the breaking occurs. We find it in every single culture. The Chinese call this spirit chi (qi), the Egyptians call it Ma’at, and Hindus call it prana. Kuzipa Nalwamba writes of the concept of Mupasi, which is an African description of a spirit that dwells within all of us. [1] It’s individual but also communal…. When you are all suffering, Mupasiis that vital spiritual voice that weaves the lives of all of us into an inseparable bond. It makes reality one whole. It gives kinship to all of us. When you think about it, that means that loving our neighbors is not just a little anecdote or possibility. With the moving of the Spirit, it’s inherent to our being, for where the Spirit abides there’s always unity.
Slowing Down Is the Solution
It’s in the darkness, it’s in the moment of crisis when you have fallen through all of your own expectations that there is the opportunity for rebirthing.
—Barbara A. Holmes, “Contemplation,” The Cosmic We
CAC teacher Barbara A. Holmes calls contemplation “a soft word in a hard world.” In this episode of The Cosmic We, she differentiates between crisis contemplation and contemplation as it’s usually considered:
Most of us think of contemplation as something we do voluntarily. It’s an entry into deep and sometimes sacred places. We’re usually safe and comfortable, and this type of contemplation is more personal. But when we’re talking about crisis contemplation that has communal impact, we’re talking about a completely different type of contemplation. For me, it’s a breaking and a shattering of expectations. It’s the experience of your worlds colliding. Everything is happening that shouldn’t be happening. So the question becomes, how do you contemplate when you’re devastated? When you’re under siege? When you’re beleaguered by ecological catastrophe, injustice, and oppression? How do you contemplate then?
Crisis contemplation begins, Barbara Holmes shares, when we relinquish our usual approaches to problem solving:
When we’re in a crisis situation, the question becomes, “What’s the answer?” and “How does contemplation help, if it can?” No one is going to like the response because there isn’t a response in the ordinary ways. Everyone is going to want a clear process to resolve something. What do we do? How do we do it? What’s going to make us all feel better? There aren’t any answers like that. When there is nothing to do, some of the things that can be done are things we don’t want to do. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe says it most clearly. He says the first thing you do is slow down:
To ‘slow down’ … seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through the same patterns we are used to. Of course, there isn’t a single way to respond to a crisis; there is no universally correct way. However the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved…. It is about staying in the places that are haunted. [1]
Holmes describes the challenge of “slowing down”:
In order to love, you have to slow down. There’s no such thing as “drive-by loving.” You have to give attention to the object, to the person, of your love. There has to be reciprocity and mutuality. It is giving ourselves over, letting go so that something else can do the loving through us and for us, because we’re not capable of it.
[47] No One Loves Because He Sees Why
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downward.
Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
