September 13, 2026: Turning Toward Active Hope

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Let’s explore Joanna Macy’s teaching on the “Spiral of the Work that Reconnects” and how it offers a practice that can help us nurture active hope. Macy says this is the work that can help us “face the mess we’re in without going crazy.”

View the video archive of this service here:

Sermon Text

Turning Toward Active Hope
Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray
UU Church of Bloomington
September 13, 2026

SERMON Turning Toward Active Hope

Our theme this month is Active Hope, but I want to start with the question:

What do we do when we don't feel hopeful?

This whole year as we explore what it means to be seeds of change, let's remember that hope is an essential ingredient for making change. If we don't believe that things can get better, if we don't have hope that something can be different - what is our impulse to make change?

But, what do we do when we can't find or feel hope? When we take in the reality of our world today, it can be hard to feel hopeful. From the climate crisis, to ongoing war, to the more recent threats of Al and the hastening of the climate crisis through data centers, through the rise of far right authoritarianism around the globe, to the economic strains driving families and young people into poverty and hunger here and around the world - it can feel pretty bleak. It is bleak.

But that doesn't mean it's over. In The Book of Hope, renowned naturalist, Jane Goodall, reminds us that “we cannot accurately predict what the future might bring. We simply can't.” This is a good call back to our theme of Embracing Change last month. For the only thing that is constant is change, the only certainty is change. None of us can know all of what the future might bring. We can know it is going to be difficult and have heartbreak - but we can't know all of what's possible.

So, today as we begin an exploration of active hope, we'll start with a tool that was developed by ecophilosopher Joanna Macy, may she rest in peace. She died just last year. The tool is called the “Work that Reconnects” spiral and she presents it in her book, Active Hope,co-authored with Chris Johnstone. If you want to learn more, I shared the book title in the Friday update and website with the service description. And there is training online that uses the tool we'll talk about today if you want to use this in your own life. How many people are familiar with Joanna Macy and the “Work that Reconnects?” It's powerful. How many have felt changed by it?

Picking up on the theme of change in the book, Macy and Johnstone begin by framing the time we are in. They talk about three stories unfolding at once right now. One is “Business as Usual” - a doubling down on the industrial-era extractive capitalism and a society that is hyper-individualized and exploitative of the resources of people and planet. It's also a doubling down on “might makes right” and the military industrial complex as a driver of the economy and foreign policy.

The second story is “The Great Unraveling” and this is the severe impacts of business as usual coming to the undeniable forefront. It is the climate devastation wiping out communities with fires and floods and storms. It is the mass extinction event we are living in. It's the breakdown of community. While they don't mention this, this unraveling is also leading to the rise of far right fascist and authoritarian movements.

Then there is the third story - a story we as Unitarian Universalists very much want to be a part of which is what they call “The Great Turning.”

When they wrote their book in 2012, this seemed a bit closer, with more cooperative work happening on climate change, including the work that ultimately led to the Paris Climate Agreement. There were also dramatic gains being made in human rights and the number of environmental and social justice groups were growing across the world. “The Great Turning” may feel further away than it did a decade ago and it likely is. But there are still millions of people around the world organizing, changing farming, building networks of climate resilience and mutual aid, trying to invest in what could come next.

And something you will hear me say again and again when we talk about hope - hope is not attached to outcomes. Hope is about recognizing regardless of what is to come, that each of us still has a choice about how we live, how we show up, where we give our time, our attention, our love, how we raise our kids, what we foster in our communities. And in the end it is our choices that matter. Because the choices we make have so much power - in our lives and the lives of our loved ones and communities. And we never know what all of us doing what we can - working together - can make happen. That to me is hope - not the guarantee, but the effort and the choices and doing it together.

So, today, I am not going to blame you if you are finding it hard to have hope. I get it and I have those days too. But knowing that we need more of us in the struggle - as active participants if we are to create a great turning, Joanna Macy's work may be a tool to help you re-engage in active hope.

This tool or pathway is what Macy calls the spiral of the “Work that Reconnects.” The spiral, the path, begins with gratitude.

Macy and Johnstone write, “Recognizing the gifts in your life is profoundly strengthening. By savoring these gifts, you add to your psychological buoyancy, which helps you maintain your balance and poise when entering rougher waters. Gratitude enhances our resilience, strengthening us to face disturbing information.” (p.43)

One of the most insightful pieces of Macy's spiral, is the importance of beginning in gratitude. Facing the challenges of our world - or even our individual lives can be overwhelming. So often, we turn away, because the pain, the fear of reality is too much.

Have you ever had that experience of trying to hold yourself together because you think if you let yourself feel the grief or fear that is in your heart, you'll never find your way out? This is compartmentalization, where we close something up and cut ourselves off from the depth of our emotions. Sometimes, we need to do this. Hear me say this again, sometimes we need to do this. Listen to yourself on this. But, this is not a long term strategy. Because over time, when we compartmentalize too much, we can begin to separate ourselves from the fullness of who we are and even from our relationships with others, because we are not in touch with or able to share our full selves.

So, in this spiral, you see that we don't start with our pain. We start with our gratitude - gratitude remembering all the gifts in our lives, feeling the power of wonder, of appreciation, of gratefulness for the people in our lives, for the blessings we know, for the blessings and beauty of the earth. This practice of beginning first with nesting ourselves in gratitude gives us a container to then turn toward our pain. It gives us a spiritual and what Macy describes as a "psychological buoyancy" to hold us as we then make space to honor our pain.

This is so insightful, recognizing the importance of being in touch with our pain, but holding it in a foundation of gratitude. Sometimes our grief and fear - whether it is about the climate, the future, or the circumstances of our own lives - ends up isolating us, making us feel alone, disconnected.

Despair does this - depression does this. But this practice of beginning in gratitude helps us remember our connections. Because when we welcome all we are grateful for, this is inherently relational - reminding us of friends and loved ones, people who helped us or mentored us, but also of the earth and the gifts of life that sustain us.

When we begin from this container of connection, of gratefulness - and then welcome our pain - it allows us to honor the depth of the emotions we have. Joanna Macy uses the term “honor our pain” specifically - not just feeling it, but honoring it. She writes, “The term ‘honoring’ implies a respectful welcoming, where we recognize the value of something. Our pain for the world...reveals our profound caring. And this caring derives from our interconnectedness with all life. We need not fear it.” (page 38)

The word that comes to mind for me with this process is a kind of alchemy - a transformation that can happen when we first begin in gratitude and then make space to honor and welcome our pain for the world. It becomes something more powerful and perhaps productive than just feeling our heartbreak. And from here, Macy invites us to move through the spiral to the next stage that she calls “seeing with new eyes.”

She writes, “In this third stage, we...[recognize] our pain for the world as a healthy expression of belonging to life.” She is reminding us of how to honor our pain, how to be with it and not cut ourselves off from it, or turn away, but honor it in a way that connects rather than alienates us. This is powerful. It reminds us that we are not experiencing this pain - or the reality of this world alone.

People around this room, around this country, around this globe are experiencing this pain around the climate crises and wanting to find ways to make a difference. In realizing our interconnection - that our pain comes from our caring and belonging - we can draw on insights from others, including inspiration from those who have come before us or are inspiring us today to see that there is possibility and that we all have something to offer in this time - ways that we can contribute to a great turning in our world from greed and exploitation and hyper individualism to generosity, care for the earth, and support for community.

This helps us move to the final station on the spiral, “going forth.” Macy says this station “involves clarifying our vision of how we can act for the healing of our world, identifying practical steps that move us forward in our vision.”

One of the reasons Macy uses the spiral is to make it clear it is not a circle. It doesn't end. The practice of moving through this spiral is something we can do again and again and each time we might discover something different, something deeper. This is a tool we can use whenever we are facing something that breaks our hearts in the world. We can always take a moment to move first into gratitude, filling ourselves with that feeling of connection and wonder - that power and light that buoys us. From this place of connection and strength, then make space to honor the news, the event, whatever it is that is heartbreaking or disturbing. And in that alchemy of holding these two together and remembering how they both remind us of our fundamental compassion and belonging, move to seeing with new eyes a vision for how you want to move forward.

Many people are trained in this “Work that Reconnects” and help lead groups where you move through this spiral together. If you are interested in learning more, there are resources online by searching Active Hope.

I did not mean for this to be exactly an advertisement. Yet, I have found this spiral to be incredibly helpful in finding a way to honor the pain and fear I have for the future, without getting undone by it. It helps us stay connected to what is happening and engage in ways of trying to make change.

The next couple Sundays, we will continue to explore this theme of hope. At the end of the month, we'll return to Joanna Macy's work again. For if we want to be seeds of change, or if we want to plant seeds of change, we need tools to help us develop active hope - a form of hope that leads us toward hopeful action.