It’s easy to get overwhelmed by discouragement. Whatever field you’re working in, whatever problem you’re trying to fix, you probably have ideas about what
you want to see happen. You want “success” in what you’re doing. And you wish you had more.
But how do we decide where the bar of success is? What is the standard we should use to decide whether to be encouraged or discouraged? Sometimes our ideas about what we want to accomplish are vague, and sometimes they are hopelessly unrealistic. When we are not seeing the results we hope for, we get
discouraged. If the numbers aren’t as big as we’d hoped, we get discouraged. If the changes we’re hoping to bring about in people's lives aren’t evident to us, we get discouraged. If we are beset by problems and complications, we get discouraged.
The German theologian Dorothee Soelle, writing in the aftermath of Nazi Germany, thought and wrote deeply about the intersection of spirituality and political
engagement (often in the form of resistance). She was an outspoken critic of the arms race and the war in Vietnam. And, as we'll see shortly, she struggled with the seeming futility of these efforts.
In her book "Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance" she talks about coming to terms with questions about "success" and discouragement in the face of its absence. Who decides what "success" means? Often our measures come from the very mindset and structures that we are trying to resist! Soelle points to the spiritual path as the way out of this struggle. Pursuing the path of ego-lessness (dying to our "old self" or "small self") and letting go of our attachments informs our work in the world in important ways.
"What do ego-lessness and becoming unattached mean in connection with today's mystical way in the form of resistance?
Concepts like asceticism, renunciation of consumerism, and using less and simpler ways of living make it apparent that the way of conscious resistance has to lead from ego-fixation to ego-lessness. ...
"Decisions about possible actions are weighed in a world governed by market considerations by one and only one criterion: success. Is it necessary now to boycott certain
aspects of consumerism, to blockade nuclear waste transports, to hide refugees threatened with repatriation, or offer pacifist resistance against further militarization? Whenever such topics are raised, questions like the following are regularly heard: 'What's the use of protesting, everything has been decided long ago?' 'Can anything be changed anyway?' 'What do you think you will accomplish?' 'Whom do you want to influence?' 'Who is paying attention?' 'Will the media report it?' 'How much
publicity will it have?' 'Do you really believe that this can succeed?'
"Sadly and helplessly, many people say; 'I am with you, but this symbolic or real action is of no use against the concentrated power of the others.' Questions and responses like these nourish doubt in democracy, but worse, they jeopardize partiality for life. Behind questions like these lurks a
cynicism that shows how powerfully the ego is tied to conditions and relations of power.
"Martin Buber said that 'success is not a name of God.'...To let go of the ego means, among other things, to step away from the coercion to succeed. Without this form of mysticism, resistance loses its focus and dies before our very eyes. It is not that creating public awareness,
winning fellow participants, and changing how we accept things is beside the point. But the ultimate criterion for taking part in actions of resistance and solidarity cannot be success because that would mean to go on dancing to the tunes of the bosses of this world.
"To become ego-less, unattached, and free also involves dismissing the agent of power within us who wants
to persuade us that given the huge power of institutions, resisting has no chance of succeeding. To become unattached means, in addition, to correct the relation of success and truth."
Soelle then goes on to talk about her own experiences of offering resistance to nuclear arms buildup in the 50s and 60s, as well as a variety of efforts at working for economic justice,
concluding that "They have not succeeded. Discouragement over this is a bitter and undeniable reality."
She then turns to Merton:
"Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and leading opponent of the Vietnam War, wrote about the mystical foundation of this freedom (from attachment to
success) in a letter to James Forest in 1966: 'Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truths of the work itself.'
"He advises the younger pacifist to become free from the need to find his own affirmation. For then 'you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.' [This mindset] represents a conversion to the ground of being. And this conversion does not nourish itself from demonstrable success but from
God."
