When the pandemic began, we knew this would be a transformational moment—a portal. Building a “next world” better than the one we’re leaving requires essential, ongoing, collective learning—and our people are showing up for it.
This summer, over a hundred of us from the Nuns & Nones national network enrolled alongside thousands from around the world in Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project's “Course Correction.” During four MG sessions and dozens more conversations among our community, we considered what it will take to change course—to protect, defend, sustain and nourish all life.
By exploring a “Just Transition” framework during pandemic and uprising, climate change and economic crisis, we have come to an important lesson: this is not just about the frenzy of rapid response, but the long-haul of commitment. This transformational moment will be many moments; we need to show up and prepare accordingly.
Course correction is about re-patterning ourselves, our stories, and our interactions—upending dominant power dynamics and our common purpose. This means examining and shifting our values, our priorities, and the basics of our daily lives; it is about our deepest beliefs, and what we are willing to risk and sacrifice for the good of all.
As a community that spans generations and traditions, we are in a unique position to remember and contend with where we come from, the radical traditions underpinning our values, and the complexities and grief of our lineages. We are reimagining what is possible, centering the voices that we lead us into more just futures.
Over many hours of collective learning together, we’ve developed shared language and practice to help take us from where we’ve been to where we’re going. And whether we call them pamphlets or zines, we all love those short, sweet, do-it-yourself micro-publications. So we made you a zine: The ABCs of Course Correction! As we keep unpacking these ideas, putting them into practice, and learning together, we hope it’s a supportive snapshot of some tools for growing the world that is possible.
Here are some of the juiciest take-aways, not just from the course, but from our experience of passing through this portal:
1 - This moment requires responsive listening. Pandemic and uprising are waking people up to systemic inequities more than ever before. One course participant shared, “I’m listening differently...there are some visions out there that I really need to pay more attention to.” The call to listen is not just to change our hearts, but to change our actions and habits. This is what Brother David Stendl-Rast calls responsive listening; it means taking in the reality as we find it, listening for what the world is calling for and what we are called to offer of ourselves, and then lovingly responding to that call.
2 - By bringing together new listening partners, we expand our sense of what is possible. With an intergenerational cohort of Course Correction participants, our learning was deeper because of our different ways of seeing and understanding the content. Breaking out of our usual groups gets us to the fundamental questions that help us discern what is possible. As one sister put it, “Movement Generation picked up on strands of social justice...from new angles than I had ever looked at them from. It was extremely challenging for me, but it was right on. I’m ready for that.” This doesn’t make the work easier, but in bridge-building we are also movement-building, creating relationships of trust so we can move into powerful action together. This cross-pollination between movements, sisters, and seekers creates the fertile ground from which new possibilities emerge.
3 - It’s gonna take commitment. Franciscan Richard Rohr wrote, “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” Coming out of Course Correction we are inviting one another to commit, explicitly, to new habits that will form new understandings of our shared life and enable new, more just and thriving futures. We’ve been in a years-long conversation with sisters about how their vows form the container of their lives. We wonder, then: How might a Vow of Repair become our container to deepen, expand, and broaden our commitment to ecological, economic, political, social, and spiritual healing? Might this vow, and a community of care to hold us to it, carry us not only through this pivotal election season, but forward into the much bigger, and longer term work we have ahead of ourselves?
Five months later, we are still in the portal. It looks like we might be here a while. So let’s reimagine what commitments we might make now, to help us live into the more just world that we imagine on the other side. The frenzy will keep being the frenzy; we know that transformation is never an easy or smooth process. But we’re here for the long haul. Let’s listen lovingly, co-create compassionately, and commit radically to the new world we know is possible.
Down for the journey? Download our zine here and join us in this continued exploration.