Week 1, Day 2: (More) hope and the trouble with belonging

As I sit to write this, my brain is both buzzing and foggy - I woke up this morning with a flu that filled my head, ears and nose with cotton wool, and sent a slow ache through my heavy limbs. Nevertheless, I opened up ‘Devotions’, my book of Mary Oliver’s poetry (see reflections from day 1 for context to this) and landed on a poem called Logos, which reads:

Why worry about the loaves and fishes?

If you say the right words, the wine expands.

If you say them with love

and the felt ferocity of that love

and the felt necessity of that love,

the fish explode into many.

Imagine him, speaking,

and don’t worry about what is reality,

or what is plain, or what is mysterious.

If you were there, it was all those things.

If you can imagine it, it is all those things.

Eat, drink, be happy.

Accept the miracle.

Accept, too, each spoken word

spoken with love.

I could not have known, in those foggy early morning moments, just how relevant this poem would be for the day and the conversations that followed.

My final conversation of the day (which is fresh in my mind as I write this) was with Arlene Goldbard, a formidable writer, speaker, activist and artist living in New Mexico, USA. The byline of Arlene’s website is ‘Here to get your hopes up’ and I prepared myself to talk with her, amongst other things, about the relationship between ritual and hope. We discussed how hard it is to sustain hope at a macro level; whilst we might be able to access “micro” forms of hope, within our immediate communities or day-to-day settings, a wider and more expansive hope feels harder and harder to grasp. Yet we acknowledged that hope is needed to fuel social justice movements, and to keep us moving forwards in the face of the evil and destructive forces of our time, and that it is therefore one of the fundamental tools that organisers have to mobilise and sustain movements for social and environmental justice. Much like the community arts practices that Arlene has built, observed and participated in, we need to ensure that the threshold to participate in hope is low and that the invitation is strong. We also need to be clear that hope is not the same as expectation or entitlement: the opposite of hope is not disappointment; the opposite of hope is despair. Despair leads to apathy, whereas hope enables action.

And yet, in the face of social and environmental collapse, and under the weight of the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist powers that have such strong influence over the way the world works today, it is not immediately clear how we sustain a practice of hope… Even Arlene, with her ‘Here to get your hopes up’ website tagline, described herself as feeling distinctly more pessimistic than ever before. This is where I propose we might benefit from myth, story and spending time with the past...

Late this morning, after gently moving my body and waking up my brain for the day, I wondered down to the sea in the pouring rain. Having soaked up the waves (and soaked through my raincoat), I tucked myself into the corner of a cafe to dig into A Short History of Myth, a book recommended to me by the fabulous storyteller Clare Murphy. Picking up where I left off, I was startled to find myself in a chapter all about logos and myth, and it soon became clear why I was gifted the poem I was this morning (thanks, Mary Oliver!). In the book, Karen Armstrong discusses the difference between logos and myth. She says:

Unlike myth, logos must correspond accurately to objective facts. It is the mental activity we use when we want to make things happen in the external world: when we organise our society or develop technology. Unlike myth, it is essentially pragmatic. Where myth looks back to the imaginary world of the sacred archetype or to a lost paradise, logos forges ahead, constantly trying to discover something new, to refine old insights, create startling inventions, and achieve a greater control over the environment… From the beginning, therefore, homo sapiens… used logos to develop new weaponry, and myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile himself to the tragic facts of life that threatened to overwhelm him, and prevent him from acting effectively.

The episode of On Being that I listened to yesterday was echoing in my (bunged up) ears when I read this. In the episode, Kate Bowler and Wajahat Ali talked about the need to borrow from the past and the future in order to inform how we act in the present. Far from wistful nostalgia or trying to predict the future, spending time with the myths and stories of our past can ground us in a present sense of our own humanity, helping us to feel safe and a part of something bigger than ourselves. Meanwhile, thinking about the future with logos (or logic), can enable us to plan and strategise effectively, and stop us from feeling powerless or immobilised in the present moment.

* * *

In both of the conversations I have had today, we have also spoken a lot about belonging. I have always thought of rituals as practices that can cultivate a feeling of belonging, particularly when we live in diaspora, or are far from home, or have the sense of being outside of or straddling communities. The two women I spoke to today are both living in diaspora - Ewa Zak-Dyndal is a Polish singer living in Ireland, whilst Arelene is living in the USA as the daughter of a Jewish refugee who lived in the East End of London until the 30s.

When I asked Ewa what brought her to the work and research she now does (in the area of ritual song and chant, with a focus on Polish ritual music), she told me that it all began when she came to Ireland and experienced a profound sense of loneliness. She had never used the words “ritual” or “tradition” to describe the music she grew up singing at the harvest, or at weddings and funerals, but suddenly in this new place, she found herself drawn to them as ways of cultivating a sense of belonging away from Poland. I have had a similar feeling when singing the hebrew songs, particularly the nigunim I grew up singing in the Jewish communities I was a part of. However, on my call with Ewa I puzzled about what happens when people did not grow up singing songs as rituals. For those who did not grow up with religion, or singing the folk songs of the land they were raised on, do they simply not get to experience this same sense of belonging to a musical tradition?

This question was flipped on its head, only two hours later, in my conversation with Arlene. She told me that she had recently been invited to speak at a college in Utah, which, she explained, is a very conservative state. Many of the young women in the room she was addressing had left conservative families, some of whom were Mormon. She described the room of “young women with piercings and tattoos” and noted the specific feeling of cohesion that existed amongst them. She explained that, in many cases, these young women had been ostracised by their families and felt judged or watched by the people in the state around them, but safe with one another. Arlene suggested that this room of high school students represented a wider trend, in which we allow others to have huge amounts of power to either validate or challenge our identities. This often causes us to lean more fully and intensely into expressions of these identities, and makes us feel much safer in spaces with people we know will not judge, question or challenge our identities, and who we know will validate and affirm them. Reflecting on the talk, Arlene shared:

“that topic was very close to their lived experience, where they're constantly being challenged on their belonging not just you know, national belonging or any other type of belonging, but all the different ways that they might seek belonging in their lives when there are gatekeepers at every gate, sitting there wanting to say ‘no, you aren't good enough you can't come through’. And that's capitalism, right? That's the power here, that some people are authorised, some people can authenticate, some people feel completely comfortable judging your right to be you, because their entitlement to be themselves is so secure that [sense of] ‘I was born to be a gatekeeper’.”

I have seen this time and again in my personal and professional life - this need to hold on tightly to our identities, to bolster them or to prove them for fear that a gatekeeper will say no and thereby deny us the opportunity to be in community with those we identify with. Indeed, as Arlene said in a podcast I listened to shortly before our call, “Our chief cultural deficit is belonging”. It is so important that we feel like we belong, and so many of us feel we don’t, but the more tightly we hold onto our identities (which happens most often when we feel as though our identities are being challenged or diluted) the more isolated we become. We begin to wear our identities like “a too tight suit of clothes. [We] can’t breathe in it”, says Arlene.

It is my understanding that, in order for people to hold onto their identities more lightly, and therefore loosen the seams of these too tight suits of clothes, they have to feel safe and seen. They have to feel a sense of belonging that transcends the individual, that makes space for difference and that doesn’t ask them to show their credentials at the door.

So the question I’m left with at the end of today is, what part (if any) can ritual play in creating that safety? What rituals are there that transcend specific identities (race, religion, nationality…) and bring people together to have a shared, altering experience that enables them to see and be seen in their entirety?