SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
Building Beloved Community Through Practices of Belonging in Times of Social Disintegration;
Or, How We Stick Together in Order to Live to Fight Another Day
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
Just this week, a meme showed up in my Instagram feed that I immediately recognized was conveying a powerful and deeply relevant message. Embedded in a block-print styled graphic of two flowerheads – daisies, most likely – were the words of the Welsh socialist writer, Leftist theorist, and cultural critic, Raymond Williams,
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”
This quote, to be honest, hit me where it hurts: that place in me where judgment, disgust, cynicism, and yes, despair – my attitudinal reactions to how I perceive the state of the world these days – keep popping up, like ugly and aggressive weeds that could easily overtake the bright bobbing heads of any daisy.
There’s a lot in the background of my life that primes me for reactions of judgment, disgust, cynicism and despair when I look out at the world as it currently is. Not the least of which is that I grew up in a particular “flavor” of Protestant Christianity (Calvinism – look it up, if you dare!) that really, really, really heavily emphasized “total depravity” as the perpetual state of human beings, the perpetual condition of humanity. (The term, “total depravity” is a theological term, but it also has anthropological implications that easily slip past and beyond the bounds of its theological meaning: when the only thing you ever hear about humans is our supposed “total depravity,” it really shapes how you see other people.) This theology that I grew up in and grew up around also asserted that humans could never ever ever save themselves – save ourselves – from this condition of total depravity which afflicts every human alive, past, present, and future. Salvation became a matter of importance almost solely in relation to the everlasting condition of one’s soul (i.e., saved, or damned), and had almost nothing to do with improving the material conditions of people’s lives, while they are…you know…actually alive.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because I want to honestly acknowledge that we – all of us – find ourselves living in a moment of time when some of the worst impulses of humanity – hoarding and abusing power; dominating and controlling people; devaluing, dehumanizing, and even genociding people – are showing up, aggressively and without apology – like ugly weeds – in our politics, our policies, and in our collective body (our cultural soma, our society). And I want to honestly acknowledge that I’ve heard plenty of folks, myself included, say in response to all this ugliness, things like, “F*ck it. What is the point?” Judgment. Disgust. Cynicism. So many weeds choking out the daisies.
I’m no longer a Calvinist, and I no longer believe in a theological proposition that damns humanity on the basis of a so-called “total depravity.” And I no longer seek eternal salvation in a heaven that certainly doesn’t exist in the way that it was told to me; instead I seek, in this lifetime, to save myself from the despair of the human ego (talk about a devil if there ever was one!), by practicing the practices of belonging with all who are and all this is, in shared co-creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. famously spoke about so powerfully: the Beloved Community.
Practicing practices of belonging; becoming beloved community. How do we make these immaterial words and concepts into material reality through our actual practices? How do we translate the notion of becoming beloved community into the actual transformation of the dynamics of power between all who are and all that is: transforming the hoarding and abuse of power (that is, domination – power over) into the free release and free movement of generative and generous power, which we can experience as power with and power for.
I heard a Reproductive Justice organizer, a Black woman, say today, “The world we are fighting for has never, ever existed. Ever. That is why [moral] imagination is so important to this work, to make what we are envisioning and dreaming into a new reality.”
Beloveds, what is the world that you envision? That you dream of? How do we practice those practices of collective belonging in order to manifest the material conditions of Beloved Community?
Over the past several weeks, we who are the staff on the AMSA Reproductive Health Project – Dr. Aliye Runyan, Becky Martin, and I – had the incredible pleasure of hosting two groups of students at our Abortion Care and Reproductive Justice Institutes. For each of the Institutes, we gathered in groups of about 10 people for a three-day weekend of dialogue and organizing for action for abortion access and reproductive justice, all while nestled in two lovely Airbnb homes surrounded by the beautiful mountains of North Carolina. The experiences that we shared and co-created in this protected – I would say, sacred – space-time were beautiful and profoundly impactful.
In the smallness of these short gatherings, we witnessed and experienced the emergence of something so significant: intentional community.
Intentional, in that we all came together for a specific reason and purpose. Intentional, also, in that we put into practice, those practices of belonging that manifest the material conditions of Beloved Community.
We will be hosting several more of these small-scale, home-based, retreat-style gatherings over the next academic year. Together, we’ll dream, scheme, imagine, and manifest the world we want to live in. This is hope. Hope isn’t just a feeling; it’s a discipline. It’s a practice. Hope is practicing the practices of belonging even when – and especially when – we find ourselves in an age of social disintegration, as we are right now. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
So, let’s be radical together. Let’s cultivate the most radical power we have: our moral imagination for a world that has never yet existed. And, with radical hope, let’s come together to make that world.
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #26: “A Vote is a Fire Escape” – Your Voice Makes a Difference! August 17, 2024
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