Image description: A hand is holding a tiny tarot card, #6, the lovers by Sam Spetner. The card depicts two hands—one copper and one gold—with their fingers woven together in front of a red background.
The first thing I thought about when I opened my laptop to write this Offering was social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró’s essay “The people: Toward a definition,” from his book Writings for a Liberation Psychology. When I read it for the first time last summer, I’d been thinking about belonging as I often do.
I’d been wondering about the connections between feeling alienated, boundaries, private property, and a cultural refusal to be inconvenienced. There’s a quote at the end of the essay from revolutionary Che Guevara, who said that “one does not belong to the people of one’s birth, but rather to the people for whom one struggles and dies.”1
In times of atrocity—have you read this letter from the Jewish Law Students at CUNY on occupied Palestine? It is one of the most poignant I’ve seen—it’s easy to think that whatever small thing one might do won’t be enough. And therefore won’t be worth it.
If you are in the U.S., it might be making calls to Congress people to demand an immediate stop to the genocide in Gaza, purchasing tickets to this incredible Art & Book Raffle to support medics in Palestine, showing up to a protest, or making a donation to urgent relief organizations supporting the people of Gaza.
But I’ve been learning something that a lot of people around me know already, and have known. Which is that to remain sustainably in struggle requires the ability to accept the partiality of individual efforts. In other words, to know that whatever I do won’t be enough, and still do it. Because not enough isn’t the same as not worth it.
One of my favorite parts of Becoming Divine by Grace Jantzen is when she talks about what it takes to commit to action when there’s no guarantee of definitive solutions or favorable outcomes. To do this, an individual must reject the hero fantasy and embrace the partial nature of every knowledge and effort.
I won’t be a hero. I won’t be all knowing. I will be a participant in “a communal matrix of resistance.” As Jantzen writes, “We do not know everything. Certainly there are ambiguities. But we know enough to join the struggle; and if we joined it more we would know more.”2