Spiritual activism: leadership as service
Alastair Hulbert welcomes a new book on activism and the Spirit
‘Activism is all about putting our highest values into practice in the world. Spirituality involves an awareness of where those values come from… our motives, passions and drives.’
This is the crux of the message of Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service by Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael. It is a life-enhancing book.
The authors write from their own intellectual and practical involvement in spiritual activism. Much of the book’s richness comes from their deep immersion in the spiritual traditions of the Gospels, Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and Shamanism, as well as more recent and contemporary sources: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Paulo Freire, Dorothee Söelle, RD Laing, Walter Wink, Starhawk, Pussy Riot, Quakerism – and many more. That is the wisdom they share.
Several chapters of the book lay out the foundation for what Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael have to teach: ‘Higher Consciousness’, ‘The Structure of the Psyche’, ‘Understanding Cults and Charisma’, ‘Nonviolence and the Powers that Be’, and ‘The Psychodynamics of Campaigning’. These chapters are presented simply and in such a way that they could be studied together in community groups, interfaith groups, Lent groups, and all sorts of action groups seeking hope and direction in the miasma of our world today. Indeed, at one point the book is described as ‘an introduction to spirituality for people disillusioned with, or uninterested in, religion, but open to life’.
Then there is a narrative element. This is sometimes drawn from traditions or other literature, but just as often taken from the authors’ own stories. ‘Hitching our campaigns to stories,’ they tell us, ‘and helping great stories to emerge out of our campaigns, is such an effective means of communicating and motivating’. That’s how the chapter entitled ‘Movements and their Movers’ begins, and it is full of stories.
Each chapter also ends with a short case study of spiritual activism: Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers; Anne Hope and Sally Timmel of Training for Transformation; Sojourner Truth, liberated slave turned preacher and activist; Gehan Macleod of the GalGael Trust; and others.
The final two chapters, ‘Tools for Discernment’ and ‘Into the Deeper Magic’, contain deeply moving reflections on truth, humility, dreams, curse and blessing, and the Om mani padme hum (‘God in unmanifest form is like a jewel in the middle of a lotus, manifest in my heart’), engraved on a Buddhist prayer wheel that Alastair bought from a pedlar near Darjeeling in February 1980 on the Olde Hippie Trail!
The stories in the book are beautiful, funny, honest and magical. ‘We are on a journey that reconnects to the life-force,’ Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael tell us. ‘To be an activist is… to seek to use our lives to give life.’
Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service by Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael, Green Books, 2015, ISBN: 9780857843005, £19.99.
