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Apocalypse? NOT!!! - Grand Archdruid John Michael Greer, Part 2

John Michael Greer is author of 27 books on topics like peak oil, nature-based economics, and druidry - because he is Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. One of his latest books is Apocalypse NOT: Everything You Know About 2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture is Wrong.

Broadcast on:
04 Mar 2012
Audio Format:
other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them In their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you To sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone Today, for Spirit in Action, we continue our visit with John Michael Greer Last week, we introduced you to John Michael Learned a bit about his role as grand arch druid of the ancient order of druids in America And we talked a little bit about transitioning to a post-peak world And about the economics and wealth of nature To tell you the truth, with the 27 books He's written John Michael could keep us busy with a profound influx of knowledge For many more weeks But what we'll tackle today is some more on our post-peak-oil world As we learn to cope with the tremendous changes this will imply for us And also, I'll look at that threatening or perhaps promising date When something mind-blowing is supposed to happen December 21st, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar But I want to start you out for today's program with a little music I believe it was Pete Seger, who took the original religious song, "Old Time Religion" Added some new lyrics which take us to some really old time religions Including druids, like John Michael himself But also, folks, you'll surely learn about during the interview Sarah Thustra, "New Agers" and the like While our show today is about serious stuff, this is tongue firmly buried in cheek This version is by a past guest of mine, Tom Rosson We'll resume our talk with John Michael Greer after Tom Rosson's performance of "Old Time Religion" "Old Time Religion" We will pray just like the druids They drink fermented fluids, go dancing naked through the woods It's good enough for me, can be that old time religion, can be that old time religion Give me that old time religion, it's good enough for me We will pray to Sarah Thustra, we'll pray just like we used to I'm Sarah Thustra, boost up, it's good enough for me, can be that old time religion Give me that old time religion, give me that old time religion, 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the gods of polytheism do not claim to completely transform human life and replace it with something that we really really want better You know infinite bliss or something like that People invoke polytheist gods for help Within the realities of existence And the frost giants there being representations of the destructive inhuman powers of nature Well to come back to the idea of apocalypse The end of the world the great change is going to happen The great change, yeah Have you John Michael in all your readings research on this? Have you come up with a number of times where a Christian sect has predicted this at the date and said Like what happened last year? It's almost beyond calculation Pretty much every year somebody is proclaiming the end of the world And it's been going on since Roman times There was I'm thinking the Montanists who were in what the third century Who have proclaimed that the new Jerusalem had actually been cited descending from heaven Over some some God for sitting corner of Asia minor Every few years certainly At least one of these one of these outfits becomes widely enough known to breaking to the media of the time Whatever those whatever the media happens to be And it's a constant drum beat And nobody ever draws the logical conclusion Which is that maybe there's something wrong with the basic assumptions When when Jesus for example as cited you know at least three of the four gospels said You know some of those listening will still be alive when these things happened Clearly he wasn't talking about the end of the world Because you know that was a long time ago Either that or it was a very bad prediction Well that's possible I actually think that particular prediction was a prediction of the The Roman Jewish war that broke out in 66 AD There's many of the things that you know if you actually look at what he said And compare it to what actually happened during that time It's a tolerably good set And so it's quite possible that you know people were when the gospel got around Being written down people were saying wow you know he predicted that this kind of stuff But then later on he got misunderstood People lost track of the fact that they were talking about this historical event Which would have been perfectly reasonable for you know somebody to spiritually advance to warn Other people about you know you're gonna be around when this happens guys Be ready to head for the hills Well it certainly happened a lot across the centuries and including in the USA Care to talk about a couple of more notable ones like the Great Disappointment Oh yeah the Millerites Yeah William Miller was a hard scrabble New England farmer and student of the Bible Who became convinced that he'd worked out the actual big So he's spent rather a number of years going up and down the back roads In New England preaching and beating houses that it was gonna happen in 1843 or maybe 1844 You know based on this complicated set of calculations that's the book of books of Daniel That by around 1840 there were enough people in you know America at that time Who really wanted to hear it was very much a situation like this one There had been in the very big liberal political movement immediately after the war of 1812 With anti-flavery the first strings of modern American feminism And so on a variety of liberal causes And people have gone out trying to change the world make the world a better place Very much like the 60s and it didn't really work I mean they got some very important changes to happen But it became increasingly clear that the big cause which was anti-flavery in those days Was not going to go anywhere without one heck of a fight And we're not talking about moral conflict but actual war And so people were looking for other answers That you had the transcendentalist movement you had various The equivalent of the New Age movement nowadays and of the alternative spirituality People turning aside from the the unsolved political kind of from sort of spiritual answer And then that didn't work either than just as our New Ageers have not managed to make You know to create their own reality the way they expected to And so finally the idea that there was going to be some There would be a grand transformation of everything And they'd get everything they wanted was very appealing to people And so you had hundreds of thousands, possibly a couple of million people They went into the whole MRI business convinced that Jesus was going to come in glory in the clouds In 1843, 1844 and fixed the world It finally narrowed down to a specific date That was October 22nd, 1844 And hundreds of thousands of people gathered on hilltops across the country Hilltops because you want to see Jesus appear in the clouds, you want a good view And there they were preying their heads off and nothing happened That actually put paid to to large scale apocalyptic in the United States for some years Because the embarrassment of what came to be called the greatest appointment Was kept in mind by a lot of people You had a lot of little apocalyptic sex after that, but they were little They never got the kind of media exposure that Miller writes to But eventually the lesson was lost Now you also mentioned a number of apocalyptic movements which are secular Which don't have a specific name of a god in their communism Or Marxism amongst them Marxism Marxism is the perfect It's really the furthest extension of what I suppose you'd have to call back What would be called back then in Christian heresy In the direction, in a particular kind of social-liberal direction That ever was, it takes over all the basic ideas of mainstream Christian orthodoxy And simply puts them into a secular mode So in place of Eden you have primitive communism In place of the fall of man, you've got the dimension of private property In the place of the veil of tears, various dispensations and so on That's come between then and the birth of Christ You have the various stages of feudalism and early capitals and so on In place of Christ's apostles, you have Marx and his disciples You have the acts of the first international as they act of the apostles You have the conflict between the few true believers in the gospel Of Marx and an evil, gigantic society dominated by the evil power of light capitalism Finally you have becoming of a millennium, the second coming of Marx In the form of the revolution of the proletariat You have the millennium of socialism and then finally The new Jerusalem of the communist utopia descends from the heavens And everyone's happy forever and ever It's literally the same theology with a few of the words changed and some serial numbers filed off And it worked out perfectly, didn't it? And we saw how well that one worked, yeah That's the problem with the apocalyptic theory You can get a revolution with one You can lead people to do the most preposterous things You can lead people to do the most brutal and cruel things But you can't get utopia No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you believe The new Jerusalem of communism did not descend from the heavens The socialist utopia turned out to be great, bureaucratic And rather heavily laden with prison camps In every case that it was tried Well, one of the other ones that you mentioned And you talk about some of the secular type movements, apocalyptic movements Going back as far as 14th century One of the times that particularly interested me was this explosive movement that started in England Or in the mid 1600s It's four months that led to the replacement of the king Full mess of turmoil And I'm particularly interested in that period Because that's when Quakers happened to originate And you mentioned all other kinds of groups so too The 5th monarchy men, the Lovelers, the diggers And the muggletonians The muggletonians, yes Waterwick Muggleton And I forget the name of his cousin Became convinced that they were the witnesses described in the book of relations Who would go around witnessing the imminent the second coming And the muggletonians were significant presence In Britain for some years until It became very clear that the second coming was not showing up on time The Quakers actually have a very interesting relationship to that Because they came out of that movement Of apocalyptic thing My mind seems to be a sensible thing And paid attention to their own experience Instead of pushing toward this idea That the world is going to be totally changed next Thursday So they're one of the rare groups that said, okay, I guess this isn't Maybe we don't just have to change the date? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that does happen. You get that every so often that people pop out of the apocalyptic thing And say, oh, okay. So obviously, this is the world that we've got And how do we lead us of life within the world that God or whoever Have made for us. That tends to be a much more useful question to ask And it leads to various productive places And I would point out also the Quakers are still around You will not find a lot of diggers, renters, fifth monarchy men, muggletonians, or what have you these days But on the other hand, there's many Successions of whether it's yellow turban and over in China Or you'll find the evangelical Christian of the apocalyptic left behind mode They're still around and they do seem to propagate though, don't they? That's the thing about a meme it propagates And it doesn't have to be helpful, it just has to be appealing Would you explain what a meme is for those who haven't read "Apocalypse Not?" The idea, as Richard Dawkins pointed out back before he became primarily a promoter of atheism And was actually doing the whole thing A meme is a set of ideas that spread through a human community The way that a gene spreads through a gene pool Because it has some kind of selective advantage that propagates it in place of others It's a dominant gene rather than a recessive one, typically And so it's a set of ideas that communicate itself It encourages its own communication In the case of the apocalypse meme If you believe the world is going to end with the first thing you do, you tell other friends and neighbors Because that's part of the meme This is news, you don't keep it to yourself, you can't The world's about to end, everyone must know that's part of these ideas And they spread to shift metaphors a little bit, but it's like a cold virus It's very catchy It survives to the extent that it can keep on finding new hosts Well, an apocalyptic meme is obviously very good at that So does Drury not have the genetic susceptibility to it? Is there no way that you can have a Drurytic apocalypse? I suppose it's possible, but it's never happened I don't know of any druid group anywhere that has embraced an apocalyptic theology Or even gotten close to one I suppose, you know, if you are focused on nature as it is, it's kind of... It may be a little harder to get caught up in this idea that it's about to be replaced by, in effect, some set of daydreams I've seen some pagan writings that I guess kind of get connected to New Age They're talking about 2012 as the coming of the new world, that kind of thing So how far is it from... I mean, I think, Geordry is perhaps one variety of paganism or something But how related are they or is their connection? That's actually a complicated issue Because, well, we all know that the pagan traditions, the pagan traditions, we have no date back to the dawn of time But the dawn of time, in this case, is about 1947 Most of modern paganism is either directly descended from Gerald Gardner's invention of Wicca Or even, in some ways, inspired by it And so it comes out of that particular mix And it drew very heavily in America, especially from the same sources of the New Age drew from The druid revival is older, but the existing druid groups these days trace their heritage back to the 18th and 19th centuries And so, while there's been a tendency for druid groups to be sort of lumped together with the broader pagan scene There's an extent to which they don't really have that much in common There are things that you will find in the modern pagan scene, the modern neo-pagan scene But you will rarely find in the older and more traditional druid groups And, of course, there's, again, there are overlaps, there are fusion groups, there are groups that borrow from some of the older druid traditions Some of the new or neo-pagan traditions and this kind of stuff But it's definitely a blend, it's not a case where there's an identity Well, we've already mentioned this, but I want to make clear what your take on it is, John Michael The 2012 end of the Mayan calendar, is it or is it not accurate to look forward to December 22nd, 2012, as the end times Or the beginning times or whatever, dawning of the age of Aquarius, whatever Is that not accurate? Yeah, the age of Aquarius started in 1879, it was just widely proclaimed at the time No, the thing, if the Mayans didn't predict anything, for December 21st, 2012 For a how-three-time king, thirteen-zero-zero-zero-zero in that calendar They did not predict anything the whole thing was invented, essentially out of whole cloth, by the late-hosts and wellers I take it, you're not worried I'm not, I've already given a name to that day, which I'll be talking about in late December And that day is nothing happened today This is, we're going to see the exact same thing that happened with the Millerites There'll be all these people waiting at Tikal and other Mayan ruins Or standing on hilltops at various other places waiting for the space brothers to land Or the comet to hit, or the great wave of cloud, just in the world that they think they deserve And nothing's going to happen And people will be saying for something, oh yes, we felt the great change of consciousness And then, you know, we'll be dealing with the aftermath of an election and all the usual stuff And it will be even the most frantic true believers, which we'll think in, and guess what? Nothing happened And then, they'll pick another day Actually, the other dates are already starting to come, a really striver who did a lot to promote 2012 A few years ago, have a book out now arguing for 2020 as the Omega Point date So he's sensible, he's getting his ducks in a row in advance So, if the world does end on December 22nd, would you be willing to come back on my show on the 23rd and apologize for your skepticism? Certainly, if the world ends, schedule me in Actually, if the world doesn't end, I'd love to come back on the show also And then, we can talk about nothing happened and do a sort of post-mortem on what? What to do now when the world's still around? No, wait, that's the wrong terminology of post-mortem because it didn't end? I don't know, or if I'll say a post-feed them, I'm not sure what the right phrase would be Well, perhaps I'd better remind our listeners, this is Spirit in Action And I'm Mark Helpsmeet, host for Northern Spirit Radio Productions website northernspiritradio.org Home for just shy of seven years of archives of Spirit in Action And our other weekly program, Song of the Soul There's links to our guests, a place to help ensure we continue the future by donating online Or you can mail us a donation There's a place to comment about this, or other programs, or in general Please talk back to us and help us get to know you, your thoughts, feedback, and possibilities for future programs Now, back to our guest, John Michael Greer, Grand Arch Druid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and author of 27 books Before I return to some questions about our adaptation to a post-peak oil world and general environmentalism I've got one more about Apocalypse, John Michael That is that environmentalism There certainly have been environmental apocalypse concepts and such You've written pretty extensively about peak oil, post-peak oil, the world then Is it not apocalyptic writing because there's no big miracle that happens at that point? Is the miracle part of it, the thing that makes apocalyptic so powerful generally for folks? It's partly the miracle, it's partly the idea that something's going to happen really soon And it's partly the projection of daydreams on the future Because usually what an apocalyptic vision amounts to is that there's going to be this big change And then whatever I really want to happen is going to happen All that I'm saying in my books on peak oil It's not that the world is going to end It's that history is going to follow its usual course And one of the things that usually happens in history is that when a civilization overshoots its resource space It goes into decline Now, the word decline is when you could hardly say no, it is people won't hear it They think, you know, the future has got to be either continued progress or total catastrophe Nothing in between, that's one of our great blind spots as a culture But in fact, industrial civilization is already in decline by most measures We can expect that decline to continue and accelerate our mismanagement of our relationship with the natural world If we were to revision that relationship If we were to start paying attention to the fact that our prosperity, our lives, our economies Every part of what makes a human society is completely dependent on having an intact biosphere And take that seriously and take action We could level out that decline at a certain point We probably haven't, we've made enough mistakes, there's going to be a lot of damage to undo But we could level that out, re-stabilize, and create what I called in the book of that title The Econecting Futures, a future society in which we can maintain a fair amount of technology In harmony with the natural world and in a situation that's sustainable over the very long term If we don't do that, we're going to go through history as usual Which means, you know, the long flow declined if one to three centuries into a dark age It's not a big deal, all of our ancestors went through it Our descendants will probably have to slog through it again Unless we get a clue, that's not apocalyptic, it's simply saying, okay, we're not special We're not destinies, darlings, we don't get to dodge the usual fate of civilizations Unless we're smart enough to take action And hopefully, by listening to you and a number of other people who are looking at the facts We will get smart enough, we will make the intelligent decision It would be nice, it would be very welcome Well, in terms of that ecological future And I think this maybe also relates to what people might choose in their year of initiation as druids But what kind of things? Just give us a range of things that one might do to take that step of connecting with the earth Which might prepare us for this eco-technic future I mean, what kind of things are we talking about? Okay, well, again, they rank from a very simple to the relatively complex It's not necessarily good idea to pile into the big ones all at once, it depends on your circumstances One of the simple ones is to take an inventory of the cleaning products you use at your house and get rid of the chemical ones You can clean most households cleaning things with soap and baking soda Those do not destroy the environment, many of the chemicals in modern cleaning products They're lasting toxins, you flush them down the drain, they're going to be poisoning fish for a very long time We have this delusion, if I may interject something here, but there's this place called away And when you get rid of something, could you pour something down the drain or put it in the garbage or what have you It goes to this non-existent place called away, okay, there is no such place Whatever you put down the drain, it's going to come out of your tap eventually Whatever you leave, you put it in the garbage, it goes to the landfill, it's going to get into the water supply, it's going to get in the air What goes around comes around, it's one of those basic laws And taking the time to sort through what you're using just to clean the house That's a very basic choice I should say there's a lot of very highly marketed green products, usually about three times the price of their chemical equivalents You can get it at upscale stores these days And unless you really want to put in the extra money supporting the profits of often some very large corporations That are selling you that stuff Again, soap and baking soda will do you just as good That's one example Another example is one that I can guarantee you, I will say it and there will be this immediate, horrified gasp Across the entire range of your listeners, they will probably hear it on the moon And that is very simply get rid of your car In America, we fetishize automobiles Cars are, the cars symbolize the freedom that we don't have anymore what we like to pretend we have Some of them fetishize more than that The whole fad for SUVs remember back in the day people were not that long ago people were insisting Oh, I've got to have SUVs to protect my children Well, you know, the SUV lifestyle is the major thing that's threatening your children Oh, we don't need cars Most of us, great, even in America Many, many people can get by without a car Or at most need to keep it parked in the driveway, say, six days a week It requires a willingness to take a little more time Except a few more limits Maybe change the relationship of where you live, where you shop and where you work So that they're not separated by vast distances Like, be reasonable about that But many, many people in America can simply do without their cars And suddenly discover they have many hundreds more dollars a month That they used to be throwing down the gas tanks and everything else These are two extremes, one very simple, one very complex Both of them require that we actually pay attention to our lives and say, okay This is a change that I need to make Here is something that I need to do in order to relate in a more constructive way to the living earth And I don't imagine that many of our listeners will be inspired by this To suddenly up and get rid of their cars, although, you know, I can hope But I hope, you know, the idea will at least percolate in that All these things that we take for granted The use, preposterous amounts of energy That put out all this pollution, that use all these resources That demand, say, all the additional resources for roads and freeways We think they're normal, they're not We read lives that have become structured around these things But we don't have to read those lives, we can actually change our lives And that's where the rubber meets the road, so to speak That's, or if you will, where the shoe leather meets the road I was wondering about which metaphor you were going to use there I assume that, because this is included in druidic practice, that attention to the seasons Not necessarily just, you know, the solstices, equinoxes, the cross-quarter days, all those But just attention to the seasons in a way we don't Since we're in this cocoon of our houses, or our air conditioning, or our heat, or whatever That this would be a fundamental step If we were paying attention to that, it moves you a bit closer to, I think, reality It moves to a lot closer to reality People in America basically have this idea of progress I mentioned the idea that progress is, you know, growth is this basic law of existence And it's totally unnatural, and it's totally unseasonal If you pay attention to nature, to the book of nature, the scripture of the druids, if you will That's where you start realizing there's a cyclical pattern of things Spring leaves on the summer Summer leaves on fall, and fall may be the harvest, but it's also when the weather's starting to cool And the days are getting shorter We act as though we live in a world where summer is followed by uber-summer And uber-summer by uber-uber-summer and so on, off into eternity And the harvest just keeps on coming in bigger and bigger and bigger every year We think we live in that kind of world, we don't In a very real sense, the preposterous abundance and extravagance that we've all grown up with We've been gathering in the harvest for half a billion years of fossil sunlight And we've been wasting We're our great-grandparents knew perfectly well that the whole harvest was the time you put stuff up You stored things you knew when the harvest comes winters out far away We've lost track of that, and so we've been burning through the harvest like nobody's business Pouring it down the indoor SUVs and flying around the world And all this kind of stuff, flying strawberries into supermarkets in January And losing track of the fact that when harvest comes winter is not far There is fall, there is winter, and eventually a spring in the broader cycles of time Many civilizations have passed through this cycle of seasons many times in the past Were not exempt from what we just think we are If you get to learn the rhythm of the seasons, if you get used to the fact that things rise and fall They expand, and they contract, time moves in that kind of cycle Then it becomes much easier to incorporate that into your vision of the world It becomes much easier to incorporate that into your vision of life Each of us will go through a spring, a summer, an autumn, and a winter And imagining that life only matters if we can pretend to be 17 years old forever Looks remarkably stupid Once you grasp that and once you grasp that every season has its beauty, every season has its gifts And you know in an economic sense, I think that in the US, I mean this idea of increasing abundance We have to have continual growth, all of that That one way that it's been living out, not only in the sense that our kids have to be better off Than we are, have more things than we have But it shows up in our decreasing savings That we've decreased our economic savings each generation Such that people 100 years ago, we're saving half of their income Our incomes are much larger now, and we save a pittance The only saving that we have now is a mathematical artifact Because more people are paying down their debts than are running up new debts And that's largely because the banks are loaning Yeah, exactly And it's complex thing because of course, there's also the fact that Although inflation is under control, but gosh prices keep on going up How does that work? Yeah, well, there was a guy many years ago, a Bertram Gross wrote a book called "Friendly Fascism" Which I highly recommend to our readers One of the things he predicted, this was back in the early 70s, that economic indicators would become economic vindicators That statistics, economic statistics, would be systematically massaged by governments around the world Ours and everyone else's To make things look good And that's become a growth industry That's one of the biggest growth industries we've got these days Is remanufacturing our own statistics So that for example, when people run out of unemployment benefits, they no longer count as unemployed That's been the case in the United States for many years now So the figures come out, you know, unemployment rolls have shrunk More people are working no, more people have hit their 99 But you can't say that, generally, certainly in the mainstream, maybe you're not going to hear that There's a lot of that kind of nonsense And there's also the simple fact that nobody wants to deal with the fact that it takes two incomes now To afford the kind of lifestyle the one income could afford when I was a child And that's not just because you're eating more than you use That's not because we're eating The whole, don't even get me started on that, the whole "obesity epidemic" Which was generated, by the way, by lowering the definition of obesity Marilyn Monroe, at the peak of the sex kitten phase of her career, wore a size 12 dress If you want people to spend a lot of money on diets and diet products and surgery and things like that Convince them that they're too bad, it's a good approach But that's another point entirely, and that gets us into all of the very corrupt ways That, you know, very script-centered society and manipulate the general public for their own profit I want to mention, we've been speaking with John Michael Greer Author of a plethora of books, 26, 27, probably 29 by next week when you hear this [laughter] One of them we've talked about is the Druidry Handbook, Apocalypse Not Everything you know about 2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture is wrong Those are just a couple examples You can follow his blog on the archedrudereport.blogspot.com You can find him everywhere without much print that he's putting out And it's all fascinating, engaging, and worthwhile stuff for our world There's a reason I chose to have him here on Spirit and Action And I'm so happy, John Michael, that you could join us I very much enjoyed the conversation, thank you Thanks much, and to all you listeners, here's a little music to send you out with For this version of Spirit and Action Coming up on four years ago, I had a wonderful musician on my Song of the Soul Program A man who captures some of the same magic of encounter with our natural world in his songs His name is Chris Pfeiffer, this song is Magic in the Moon See you next week for Spirit in Action The seeds in the apple, apples in the seed The curious cat, the child in me Notes on the page, ear in the tomb Rocketships and fuel, magic in the moon With or without, without or within A brief case and grass, water and wind Down to the second, somewhere around the moon The eagle is landing, magic in the moon Oh, how do we know? Do we really, really want to know All the secrets of the show Cables and wires, feathers and wings, mirrors and smoke, evergreen Explanations, buds and blooms, small step for men, magic in the moon Oh, how do we know? Do we really, really think we know How does it all go away? Oh, how do we know? Oh, how do we know? Oh, how do we know? Matters and facts, sand and glass, just do is it The ranger's mask, terribly late Or the wise cocoon, one giant leap Or magic in the moon Oh, how do we know? Do we really, really have to know If it is all so Oh, is it so? Oh, how do we know? Do we really, really have to know? Oh, how do we know? The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.