The world needs revolutionaries of the heart and soul: visionaries, healers, mentors, and leaders who can illuminate the darkness by lighting new lamps.
The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.
–Ursula Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight.
--Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy
The fire approached the school but did not scorch it. The mudslide afterward separated the campuses, closed them, and killed more than twenty residents of a nearby community.
Graduate students of psychology who had stayed on campus moved to a hotel. One evening they found themselves sharing a hot tub with firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders who had just been digging bodies out of the mud. Some of these brave personnel were in shock.
On the fly, the students combined their counseling skills with their knowledge of story, depth psychology, and imagination to offer informal support to the grateful first responders.
At the time I was an executive-level administrator at the school, and when I heard about this, I was inspired. Here was an example of taking deep learnings normally reserved for individuals out into the community.
I had recently coined “enchantivism” to denote the actions of creative people at every level of society who give us glimpses of how things could be, making collective change through inspiration. My interest in this came from observing over the years how many activists—some of the real heroes of our time—got injured or burned out. What could they do in their post-heroic phase to go on making change? What could non-activists do?
Although enchantivism is explicitly “utopian” (we need a better word) in portraying better possible futures to work toward, our students had responded to a kindred but different need: to offer counseling and support that, bypassing the psychotherapy focus on pathology or disorders, focused on strengthening the heart, spirit, and soul. We need not define these religiously.
Since then, I’ve also pondered Abraham Maslow’s throwaway thought about the need for “meta-counselors” who address sicknesses of the soul. That, of course, is what clergy are supposed to do, but too many are more intent on making converts, conforming to their religious party line, or defending the indefensible. I know Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist clergy who are exceptions, but they are vastly in the minority.
What about the Nones, the “spiritual but not religious” who are now the largest religious group in the United States? What about their counterparts elsewhere? And what about all the visionaries, creatives, performers, healers, ritualists, and teachers of various sorts who want to work for lasting change? And the aging, disabled, quirky, uneloquent, eccentric, introverted, mystical, or just plain different standing by?
All these people hold the hidden power of a new cultural therapeutics, a renewal of bonds and restoration of realistic hope beyond diagnostic categories, ad hoc activism, or affiliations of religion or political party. Perhaps these people hold the key to a new worldview waiting in the wings.
The Need for a New Kind of Change Agent
It’s hard to make lasting change in a highly resistant world.
Record levels of confusion and emotional exhaustion assail activists, leaders, climate scientists, educators, psychotherapists, and others who wonder what good their work actually does. It is not just the burnout studied among activists by Dr. Paul Gorsky, Laurence Cox, or Lucas Mazur; resources of various kinds are available for that (see also the Audre Lorde Project).
Part of this has to do with our dependence on the heroic-patriarchal model of change: the lone good guy, sage, or savior who rides into town, stirs things up, and leaves again. In truth, this was never a good model for change, and certainly not effective for any lasting impact. It was said that when Genghis Khan was in charge, a virgin with a bag of gold could ride across Mongolia without fear of being troubled; but when the Khan died and the empire split, armed escorts were needed once again.
An underlying affliction surfaced in a 2022 study by Abramof and Peixoto: “People [in the West] have lost their ancestors, their territories, their gods, and assume a private life where they find themselves helplessly entangled in their problems.” Our culture of hyper-individualistic materialism has unmoored us from the inner, social, and natural worlds. This is not a new problem, but it is a growing one with serious consequences at many levels.
As Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and others have observed, we have no overarching Big Story or “mythology” left: no frame of orientation, ideal, and aspiration. Patriarchal religion is outworn, and materialism offers no meaning. We live in an existential vaccum (Frankl) in need of a new mythos (PJ Manney). How are leaders, educators, and healers supposed to serve without such internal resources?
Furthermore, how might the special skills of cultural edge-walkers be of use? Of the self-developers, spiritual mentors, artists, performers, caretakers, intuitives, dreamers, ritualists, healers, writers, filmmakers, nature people, and introverts? What about the aging, disabled, quirky, uneloquent, eccentric, mystical, and just plain different? What can they do?
Lighting the Lamps
I call them lamplighters: reflective creators, healers, and mentors who bring deep reimagining and restorying that rally the human spirit to remind us of who we are at our best. We need change agents who explore new visions, hunt possibilities, surface liberatory counter-narratives, instigate play and joy, support activists, accompany the troubled, and probe old tales for relevant insights for today.
Lamplighters are revolutionaries of the heart, mentors of the mind, strengtheners of the spirit, and nurturers of the soul. These quiet visionaries, deep restoryers, depth and wisdom mentors, and heralds of hope might also serve as worldview therapists and philosophical counselors to address our inner diminishment. They might also choose to be mythietai: tale-tellers of the past who used fiction and folklore to resist injustice.
However they choose to work, lamplighters start with the lore that guides us, expanding or replacing constricting keystone fictions (guiding stories) by welcoming in exiled aspects of who we really are. They tend the redemptive unminded: the deeper and larger story, the hidden spark, the values of Being, overlooked possibilities, our nature relations, the hopeful stone rejected by the builders, wisdom for the streets, the germ of meaning in the soil of our troubles.
I like to think about lamplighters as mages who bring magic, as possibility detectives, as wonder workers, or as Kourettes, the guardians of newly born gods in Greek mythology. Their work stands on five pillars: imagination, vision, restorying, care, and possibility. The overall goal is to to find inspiring visions (some from fictions), dreams, ideals for assembling expanded stories: a new cycle of guiding lore with larger possibilities from the edges of culture and consciousness.
Lamplighters conjure beyond the actual by lighting up the possible. They weave and storytell and celebrate not to create belief, which is overrated, but with visions to believe into. In doing so they foster enlarged guiding stories, new dreams to follow, meanings to live by, direction, reenchantment, creative resilience, noetic faith, hope, and perhaps even inspirituality: higher inspirations that also inspire others.
Examples of Lamplighting
Although legislation, activism, and other forms of tangible change are necessary, the deepest and most last changes arrive through maturation, widening and deepening of consciousness, finding one’s place in the world, inspiration, and welcoming in what has been cast out.
Here are some examples of people unveiling their light:
During the civil war in El Salvador, women setting up refugee camps also created for each a committee of joy (Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics, p. 231).
Yo-Yo Ma often shows up with his cello outside the concert hall. In six Denver neighborhoods, for example, where people have trouble making ends meet, he participated in local events drawing on immigrant and indigenous traditions to celebrate the motif of “home.” This project expanded to 36 communities on 6 continents. “The Bach Project was my response to anxiety and division in the world unlike any I had felt before. Bach’s music — with its extraordinary empathy and soaring imagination — is one way that I can invite people to sit together, listen, and share an experience. So in each community, I played these suites as an offering and I asked a simple question: how else is culture helping us imagine and build a better world?”
Culture Connects Us is a documentary showing how Americans from different cultural backgrounds draw on their arts and traditions to connect and uplift community in many examples of unity through difference.
Chloé Valdary opposes intolerance by drawing on pop culture, including hip hop, Disney, Moanna, and Beyonce, which offer lessons in how to love. Her project of enchantment offers three guideposts: 1. Treat people like human beings, not like political abstractions (stereotypes etc.). 2. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down. 3. Root what you do in love and compassion. If you remove the heart, love, and nurture, we become rageful, Moanna’s angry goddess.
Theater director Lear deBessonet discusses transformational celebrations that involve and include everyone. These build relationships, promote community, and strengthen wellness and mental health.
Ramzi Aburedwan assembled Al Kamandjati (The Violinist) musical groups to bring music – and hope – to Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The musicians play despite checkpoints, tanks, and guns. Even the soldiers stop to listen to the concerts.
Edward Bellamy’s utopian science fiction novel Looking Backward exerted enormous impact despite its flaws. It triggered a mass movement and political discussions throughout the United States, some in clubs organized to spread the word. Tolstoy and John Dewey commented on it. The book caught the popular imagination by offering glimpses of how things could be.
Namina Forms, author of The Gilded Ones, loved Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but she found no one in Middle-earth who looked like her. She drew upon the folklore of Sierra Leone, her troubled homeland, to write fantasy epics featuring Black and brown women.
Ari Honavar notes that even before the COVID-19 pandemic videos of Iranian doctors dancing in hospitals and Italian residents singing from balconies, Persians chanted Rumi – “I am the sultan of love!” – during the Iran-Iraq War. “Those of us who lived through the fundamentalist power grab in Iran experienced a revolution of joylessness. Perhaps the most radical act of resistance in the face of adversity is to live joyfully.”
In 2008, Ultimate Peace was founded by Frisbee players. Members set up a week-long overnight summer camp in Israel to bring young Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians together to build cultural bridges between these groups.
The Gaza Surf Club was founded in 2008 by Explore Corps to serve as an educational and community development resource for Palestinian surfers in the Gaza Strip. The club supports the sport's development in Gaza and promotes the film Gaza Surf Club.
As early as 1905, nearly 50 years before the first photovoltaic cell was put to use, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote Sultana’s Dream, in which the women of “Ladyland” lived on solar energy. How might science fiction solve climate change?
The character Ahsoka Tano (played by Rosario Dawson) is the first BIPOC woman to lead a Star Wars series. As such, she inspired Alexis Tai to leave an oppressive evangelical Christian milieu, just as Ahsoka left her own male-dominated religion behind. “I didn’t denounce Christ — just as Ahsoka did not reject the Force — but it did mean I needed to question the institution and belief system to decide my perspectives... I got the chance to validate my choice to maintain certain parts of my faith... I no longer wanted to be part of organizations that perpetuated judgment, homophobia, hypocrisy and discouragement of critical thought."
In Zimbabwe, where psychiatrists are few, grandmothers have been trained in talk therapy. They offer it for free through the Friendship Bench program in more than 70 communities. The program has expanded into the US and other nations where depression has been on the rise for some time. The goal: to create a network of grandmothers in every city in the world.
John Carroll launched social media account @MakeBlackoutPoetry to showcase his and other poets’ work. Unexpectedly, the account grew so much that it has engendered two books: Hidden Messages of Hope, and the workbook Make Blackout Poetry: Turn These Pages into Poems. Followers of the account not only wrote their own poetry (#MakeBlackoutPoetry), they created an online community of hope.
Artists Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen collaborate with local elders — fishermen, farmers, biologists, ecologists, and others — to turn participants into sculptures: an outcropping of rock, a pine tree, and various Nordic nature spirits. Folklore and art underline our deep, transrational relations with the natural world.
Groups of musicians have been making joyful music in the midst of tragedy and death. Jon Batiste composed the album We Are as a love letter to his heritage and to Black diasporic music and culture: “I put hope in my music because having authentic hope is a radical stance right now.” He did this during the pandemic and the first Trump administration. Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast composed Jubilee to celebrate the fight for joy. MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger asks: "If not hope, then what? That is the essential question of being for me now. What is the alternative? …As the father of two children, ages eight and 12, who continually bear witness to the injustices of our world, I believe that part of my obligation to them is to offer a picture of the world that, while based in reality, interprets any small cracks in the forces that work against them – against us – as seeds of potential for a better world, one that is fairer and more just.” Other musical beacons of hope and joy include Amy Lee of Evanescence, Fred Again, Pharrell Williams, Chuck Johnson, Sofia Kourtesis, and Porter Robinson.
Musician and composer Ramzi Aburedwan opened a music academy to bring music education to children in refugee camps. Two documentaries highlight his work: Just Play and It’s Not a Gun.
Sarah Corbett uses cross-stitch to fight activist burnout and start transformative conversations. On a train ride from London to Glasgow she was asked about her craftwork. “I immediately thought to myself, ‘Oh, if I was cross-stitching a Gandhi quote, we could have a conversation about that.’ But the fact that a stranger was asking me what I was doing, it made me think how powerful it was that I wasn’t giving eye contact, I wasn’t shouting at them with megaphones, and they were asking me.”
Can imagination save us? Writer and speaker Susan Griffin notes that social movements are driven by imagination. “Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges.”
In my Lamplighter Trilogy, a planetwide celebration called The Colors of Liberty challenges authoritarian groups everywhere.
The blog “Let’s Repair the Liberty Bell” calls for a new American mythology.
In 2017, I coined “enchantivism” to describe storytelling activism that shows us a better world: the Beloved Community, the 24th Century, the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, etc.
These are very public examples, but lamplighting can be done at four levels, starting with the Personal. The next wider level is Public, then Professional (as loreology), then Profound, on the level of mystery school teachings, “a gnosis of imagination” as my second dissertation expresses it, or even a movement.
Whatever levels are involved (they can overlap), the work of lamplighting must remain nonpartisan—which is not the same as neutral. Neutrality favors the unjust, the criminal, and the oppressor. When used for social justice, Lamplighting should always take the side of the exiled, silenced, and vulnerable, but not the side of a particular political party, religion, or corporation. Then it would degenerate into propaganda.
One creative who understood this was Hermann Hesse, who often went privately into action on behalf of the oppressed. In Gunnar Decker’s biography of Hesse, he makes an apt observation:
It wasn’t political solutions that he was searching for, but rather that spirit which would be able, for the first time, to impart a meaning, a wholly new meaning, to any future political endeavor. He wanted islands of humanity and love, spirit and soul…
Hesse favored an alliance of creatives working for “the dawning of a new ‘Kingdom of the Spirit’ in opposition to the concept of the Third Reich.” Perhaps the lamplight examples mentioned trace the outlines of such an alliance.
“All these are beautiful examples,” one might argue, “but the powerful and unscrupulous now hold the levers of power over billions.” They do not. You and I do. Collectively, evil of the type exemplified by authoritarianism, greed, or corruption—or all three—only stands so long as people don’t know their own organized power. A relative handful of rulers seize and hold power by injecting fear into the spellbound many.
Lamplighting breaks the spell by fighting sorcery with magic, reminding ordinary folks that, together, we are unstoppable when seized by the power of dreams about how good things could be. People with a vision depose tyrants, tear down empires, make world-changing discoveries, fashion new democracies. “Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world,” Tolkien wrote: “small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
Resources for Lamplighting
Free resources, including the Lamplighting Handbook: https://www.chalquist.com/post/carrying-light-in-dark-times-resources-for-lamplighters There are also links to where I am on social media.
My Assembling Terrania stories and novels of hopeful near-future fiction, including how revolutions of hope can work: http://www.chalquist.com/fiction .
The Lorecast (my podcast): “Toward a Planetary Mythology,” Part 1. Part 2.
I’m building an online school/certificate program for this kind of depth work. It will be a nonprofit based outside of higher ed. More on that soon.
In addition to free talks via Zoom on how to engage in lamplighting, I have started offering paid 4-week trainings as well.
In Mighty Networks I’ve designed but not yet launched Pronoikos, a network for lamplighters. More on that soon as well.
This network will also feature a reading list, a music playlist, and poetry like that of “Invisible Work” by Alison Luterman.
Comments