Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy died on July 19 this year, but the Celebration of her Life took place at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on October 3, the eve of the Feast Day of St. Francis. Jane Goodall, lover of the animal kingdom and remaker of scientific attitudes toward animals, died on October 1. These great women died at 96 and 91 years of age, respectively.
What these two women left us was wise and heartfelt and needed. They are our ancestors, and they acted like it while they were with us, and they urged us to look ahead to future generations and to act accordingly. They were beacons of wisdom and living saints in the best meaning of that term, beckoning us to become our best selves amid perilous times.
I am proud to call Joanna a friend and co-worker and honored to have been invited to her bedside to offer her a final blessing in her last days.
I have often acknowledged how she inspired my term “deep ecumenism,” which came from a conversation we shared when I first met her about deep ecology. She explained how deep ecology was different from straight political ecology because it included the spiritual dimension to the work of healing the earth.
I felt that the spiritual dimension was too often missing in dialogues between religions, too, so I gave birth to the term deep ecumenism, which I first used in my book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi jumped on the term and said it named his life pursuit, which until then he lacked a name for.
What are some of the other golden teachings that Macy left for us?
In Joanna’s first book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, she dared all to face and wrestle with despair. She named the Via Negativa starkly when she said, “When your heart breaks, the whole universe can pour through.” I love how she connects our hearts to the universe, our psyches to the cosmos, and our brokenness to the big picture.
She honors gratitude, not as an act of politeness but as a grounding for our lives even in the hardest times. She connects it to our gift-giving. In times of turmoil and anger, gratitude helps to steady and ground us. It brings us into presence, and our full presence is perhaps the best offering we can make to our world.
She has more wisdom to offer regarding what the Via Negativa has to teach us when she says: Not knowing rivets our attention on what is happening right now. And this present moment is the only time we can act and the only time, after all, to awaken. The Now, what Eckhart called the “eternal now,” is happening at this present moment. It beckons us to awaken.
She adds, “It’s that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest powers.” Spend time with the darkness and the not-knowing to come most fully alive and most fully empowered. Furthermore, “Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.”
At a keynote address at the 2023 Bioneers Conference, she was told she had one minute left to speak and responded this way: “I have only one minute left. I am going to tell you how to save the world in one minute: be glad to be alive!” The power of the Via Positiva. The option and the conscious choice for biophilia. She was 94 at the time, and she had lived such a life, had walked her talk, and taught it for a very long time.
What can you say about someone who writes a book called World as Lover, World as Self?
Next week, I will share some of Jane Goodall’s teachings, but I felt it was valuable to name these two great women in one DM. Their gifts of wisdom are part of the fierce Divine Feminine calling out to us today to wake up and change our ways before it is too late.
Banner Image: Dr. Jane Goodall in a portrait by Katherine Holland. (C) Katherine Holland, October 8, 2024. Used with permission by the Jane Goodall Institute. Joanna Macy, On Being publicity photo by Adam AvRuskin, on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Which of these teachings from Joanna Macy inspire you most deeply? Which do you think are most needed for humanity to hear at this time in our evolution?
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest.
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation (by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox)
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action (by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jen Listug)
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
The Lotus & The Rose: A Conversation Between Tibetan Buddhism & Mystical Christianity (by Rev. Matthew Fox and Lama Tsomo)
3 thoughts on “Joanna Macy & Jane Goodall: Great Souls, Great Teachers”
Two great women indeed. Deep gratitude for both of them. May their spirit now give birth to eternal feminine in both men and women.
As these female spiritual warriors have shared and acted during their lifetimes, and now in Heaven, We are All and uniquely sacred parts of Our Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth and Cosmos with the All the Living and Loving Family of physical and nonphysical spiritual beings, children of Our Compassionate Source~Co-Creator’s Spirit of Divine Love~Light~Life… Present with-in, through, and among Us in the Sacred Flow of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
I am thankful that so many are feeling the loss of these two amazing women, two powerful light beams guiding us through the night. When I learned about Johanna’s passing, and then Jane’s (I use their first names because that is how aligned my soul felt to theirs), I felt huge sorrow. But when deep-felt goodbyes started pouring from thousands of people, some close to me, many not, I experienced the connection, the one-ness they both begged us to live by. My sorrow is becoming gratitude.