Rector’s Note:Remembering Joanna Macy-7.31.25

Joanna Macy, whose work and writing has had a profound impact on me, passed quietly from our lives a few weeks ago on July 19 at the age of 96. I didn’t know it until a few days later when I read a tribute on the social media platform Bluesky. Macy was a scholar of Buddhism, an eco-philosopher and the creator of “The Work that Reconnects,” a set of practices for staying spiritually and emotionally connected and whole in the often painful work of justice. She was a scholar of systems theory, a global collaborator on peace and justice, especially environmental justice, and a wise student of the kinds of connections and collaborations that are essential to creating just and resilient systems. I first knew of her as a translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours, after listening to a 2010 interview with her on an episode of On Being with Krista Tippett titled A Wild Love for the Earth. The Book of Hours was one of four of Rilke’s works that Macy translated, an exquisite introduction of his poetry for me. One of my favorites graces the cover of Macy’s webpage:

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? - (R.M. Rilke, Book of Hours – I, 2)

And this is how Macy lived her life – in widening circles that reached out across the world, and that continue to give so many of us active hope in work that often feels hopeless – especially now.

In 2016, I attended a multi-day seminar led by Macy, learning the practices that make up the Work that Reconnects. They are set in a spiral that maps important stages that the work of justice – all justice – requires. Beginning with gratitude, it moves to honoring our pain for the world, then seeing with new eyes, and finally going forth into the action that the world and that God calls us to do next. And therein one finds gratitude, and pain, and new insights, and the work continues.

In this simple structure, Joanna and her many collaborators packed an immense toolkit of practices for individuals and groups that helped us to name our gratitude, ritualize our heartbreak, connect in new ways to ancestors, future beings and those we meet along the way, and to reenter work that always threatened to burn us out. It is profoundly wise, humble and connected work. In the days that I spent with Joanna and other teachers and students of this work, I was able to sink deeply into my love for the earth and for her gifts and her great wounds and needs. I wrote a song called “The Earth Asked” while I was there and sang it for the group on our final day. In the book we used as our text Coming Back to Life, Joanna wrote this note to me: “Oh Barbara! How fine that you are making songs to heal the world.”

And that was my tiny brush with a great, great soul, a universal saint. That her actual handwriting is in my book is an immense treasure. But more important is the work between the covers – practices and insights that speak to the intersections of all the pain, hope and collective systemic work that we are all caught up in.

As a child, Macy attended liberal Protestant churches; three generations of her grandfathers were Congregational ministers. She ultimately adopted Buddhism as her spiritual life practice after she worked with Tibetan refugees in India as a member of the Peace Corps. The healing and connective practices that she created over the course of her adult life resonate with the insights of all the great spiritual traditions, including our best Christian wisdom.“

Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?” Rilke asks. From what I’ve known of Joanna Macy and her work, I am confident that she is all three. And that is a great consolation for me in this ongoing work that connects us all.