Dear friends,
Many of you have been joining in Movement Generation’s #CourseCorrection classes this summer. We’ve loved learning alongside more than 100 of you in this four-week “digital dream tank” about real solutions for a regenerative economy. We hope to see you - newcomers included - for a Nuns & Nones community conversation about the course tomorrow, July 7 from 6-8pm. Sign up here.
You might be wondering: Why this intergenerational, interspiritual community is taking a class about...the economy?
As Movement Generation reminds us, the roots of the word economy - “oikos” and “nomos” - mean “home” and “management.” So economy is management of, or care for, home. The call to spiritual community and the call for a regenerative economy are deeply interwoven - each is an invitation to a world that holds life and home as sacred, not expendable.
On every level, humanity is buckling under the consequences of an extractive economy, from rising sea levels to the cascading crises of pandemic, to Black lives taken by police and prisons in the name of order. "Profit at all costs" has seeped into the way we live, love, and pray. It is time to tell a new story about what is sacred in this world.
In the course’s latest session, Carla Maria Perez called on the virtue of humility - of “knowing your place, and knowing your role in the circle.” Humility doesn’t mean making ourselves small, but rather, right-sizing our role in relationship to the sacredness of all life.
Echoes of this are found in Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB’s writings about the virtue of humility: “Right use, generous care, and the open hand are what humility is all about. It is about knowing who we are in the sight of God and demanding no more place than that.”
Thankfully, we have no shortage of elders and examples to call us back to our place in the circle, whether it is indigenous wisdom offered through this course and beyond, or the “shared possession-less-ness” inherent in the vow of poverty, or our own neighbors’ daily acts of resistance to a culture of extraction.
Sr. Joan continues: “The challenge is to live prophetically in a world that thinks only in terms of getting more rather than of having enough. Humility, real humility, demands that we hold only to give and that we gather only to share.”
Breaking up with capitalism is spiritual work, and it’s the work of a lifetime. We know that discipline, relationships, and commitment can help. That’s why we’re here, and we hope you keep walking with us - including our #CourseCorrection Community Conversation tomorrow, July 7th from 6-8pm! Don’t miss it.
❤️
-the NN team