Holding a Positive Vision for the Future

We are in what Richard Rohr calls "The Wisdom Pattern." It hurts.

“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness. To reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.” —Wangari Maathai, Nobel lecture, 2014"

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, “Quadrangular Strokes Evoking Group of Figures,” Tate Modern. Prints start at £30.

This is the epigraph to Loretta Ross’s Calling In: How to Start Making Change With Those You Want To Cancel, which can’t arrive on our shelves soon enough (it’s out on February 4, pre-order now). Loretta will be back on Pulling the Thread to talk about this beautiful book, but if you missed our first conversation (“Calling In the Call-Out Culture,” it very, very much holds for this moment in time as well (she was my second guest, after poet laureate Joy Harjo).

For many of us, it has felt like an ominous start to 2025—Los Angeles burning bilaterally, a slurry of cruel executive orders that feel far from a mandate to tend to the price of eggs, and now, much of the country held in a vice of extreme cold.

Though it sounds treacly to say it, we can’t lose hope.

I just tore through Richard Rohr’s new book The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (out March 4, and YES(!!!), he will be on Pulling the Thread), where he returns again to the idea of the Wisdom Pattern, that throughout time, our evolution follows a predictable (and yet holy unpredictable) spiraling and unfolding of order, to disorder, to re-order. (The Wisdom Pattern is also the name of my favorite Rohr book—I wrote about the pattern in “A Politics of Expulsion” and “The Cosmic Egg.”)

Here is a tidy summary from Rohr of the three states:

Order, by itself, normally wants to eliminate any disorder and diversity, creating a narrow and cognitive rigidity in both people and systems.

Disorder, by itself, closes us off from any primal union, meaning, and eventually even sanity in both people and systems.

Reorder, or transformation of people and systems, happens when both are seen to work together.

We are in a period of DISORDER, and we have been for awhile, much as we try to cling to our old systems, and the idea that a rational world is one in which we can engineer certainty. As Rohr writes, “Modern people believe that things will only get better and better. This worldview has taken many surrogate forms and shaped all of us deeply, especially in the West. It told us that education, reason, and science would make the world a better place. But then the Holocaust happened—in the very country that was perhaps the most educated, logical, and reason-loving in the world. For Europeans, the collapse into postmodern thinking began at that point: ‘If we can be this wrong, maybe nothing is right. All our major institutions failed us.’”

This is where ORDER tumbles into DISORDER, where we start to understandably question not only our systems of government but our own minds. Rohr continues, “The spread of violence through society is frightening. We’re seeing that the postmodern mind forms a deconstructed worldview. It does not know what it is for, as much as it knows what it is against and what it fears. To have a positive vision of life is almost considered naïve in most intellectual circles. Such folks are not taken seriously. They are considered fools. If we cannot trust in what we thought was logic and reason, if science is not able to create a totally predictable universe, then maybe there are no patterns. Suddenly we live in a very scary and even dis-enchanted universe—where no intelligence appears to be in charge, where there is no beginning, middle, or end.”

Rohr believes, and I ardently stand behind him in his faith, that there is a pattern, it’s just very difficult to identify what’s unfolding when you’re in the middle of the process. It doesn’t mean that we have to love or embrace this pattern, or want to be living in DISORDER, but it does mean that the free-fall in the tumble cycle of the dryer does begin its steady ascent again.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the L.A. fires, a horrendous and devastating event that seems to have knocked out two poles of the city in almost stunning symmetry. There’s a confluence of reasons why these fires destroyed entire communities (and we will play the blame game ad nauseam in its aftermath), but what the fires are calling for in response is clear. A complete re-ordering: We need to build fire resilient structures. We need to re-organize our community functions and neighborhoods to ensure that we can knit a net of immediate and sustained support focused on collective care. And we need reconstituted and upgraded government systems to safeguard and protect us. I’m not sure what will emerge, but I’m hoping with all my heart that we can hold a positive vision for a future city, a promise of what’s possible when it’s all been razed to the ground.

I believe that Trump is an unconscious martyr of DISORDER, ironically empowered by those who insist on ORDER. I’m certain that he does not hold the vision for REORDER: We’re not yet ready for the re-visioning and the rebuilding and he will not be the shepherd to renewal. But I do wonder if Trump is the forest fire, intent on burning it all down to force us to build something new. This will be painful. It will be chaotic. For many, it will be a slow-rolling nightmare.

After the election in a newsletter called “Managing Our Collective Anxiety,” Carissa Schumacher talked about the collective void that was ending at the close of 2024, writing: “This Void's purpose, as the first of the collective and systems/institutions voids, is to reveal more deeply how collective needs and wants are changing and evolving.” Politics completely aside, we can all recognize that our systems are struggling to keep up with our values—that we need sweeping change and have for a long time.

I was thinking about this in the context of the fire, not only in its immediate unfolding and what did and did not happen, but also in the short-term aftermath. As one example, so many of us who are lucky enough to still have homes do not want to put in insurance claims for the cost of being evacuated for two weeks, or for smoke remediation, because we are scared we’ll lose our already scarce, very expensive, woefully inadequate home insurance in retribution.

Or, in L.A. at least, even if you pay for PPO health insurance, chances are that you can no longer find any doctors who will take it. As I was writing this newsletter I received an email from my OBGYN, who I see for about four minutes a year for my requisite physical and mammogram prescription. She informed us that while she’ll still take insurance, we’ll need to pay a baseline of $300 a year to stay in her practice…up to $1500 if you want additional perks like same-day appointments, focused mainly on those who are pregnant. After I broke my neck a few years ago, when I went to see the doctors from my hospital stay (covered) for my requisite follow-ups, I had to pay fully out-of-pocket, with no insurance reimbursement. My neurosurgeon was $750 and my neurologist was $900. It’s hard to blame them as I don’t think they’re motivated by greed just a need to pay their overhead. As my neurologist quipped in apology, “Hey, I drive a Honda and my kids go to public school, I can’t afford to take insurance.” Our systems are broken.

Whether we like it or not, we are living through some sort of great unwinding. Everything feels deeply uncertain and apocalyptic, which also gives us another clue. While the word apocalypse cues zombie movies, the etymology is apo (un-) + kaluptein (to cover)—it means “to uncover” or “to reveal.”

As Rohr writes, “There’s bad news and good news here. Living in a transitional age is scary: It’s falling apart, it’s unknowable, it doesn’t cohere, it doesn’t make sense, it’s all mystery again, and we can’t put order in it. This is the postmodern panic. It lies beneath most of our cynicism, our anxiety, and our pandemic violence.”

But we can’t lose hope. Or our access to joy. Or the ability to hold a positive vision. And we can’t run either. Or project our fear onto each other. Instead, we must learn to turn and embrace the shadow in ourselves and in each other. We must, to quote Jung, hold the “tension of opposites” together with as much capacity as we can muster: There is bad, or evil, in all good, and good in all bad or evil. Light and shadow are co-dependent functions, just as birth requires death. It will feel dangerous, unsavory, and worse, but it’s the only path through…a path that will lead us to build something more inclusive and more thoughtful and more sturdy in its wake.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Rohr, which holds regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a religious POV: “Normally, the way God pushes us is by disillusioning us with the present mode. Until the present falls apart, we will never look for something more. We will never discover what it is that really sustains us. That dreaded falling-apart experience is always suffering in some form. All of us hate suffering, yet all religions talk about it as necessary. It seems to be the price we pay for the death of the small self and the emergence of the True Self, when we finally come to terms with our true identity in God. Many Jungians describe this in psychological terms as the ‘necessary souls suffering’ that comes from the death of the ego. Jesus would say, ‘Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat’ (John 12:24). By avoiding this legitimate pain of being human, we sadly bring on ourselves much longer lasting and, often, fruitless pain.”

Take care, friends.

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