Lawler: How does a mystic become an activist? It seems an oxymoron.

Harvey: The mystics as we know them will be praying as the last tree is cut down. They are junkies of ecstasy and bliss, and they’re hooked into the iv of their own self-created mystical experiences. There are too many bliss bunnies running around, presenting the divine as a kind of cabaret singer in hot pants, available for any kind of fantasy you may have. Then there are the activists, who are noble and righteous and give their lives to their cause, but they are divided in consciousness. They demonize others and often burn out. Neither mystic nor activist balances transcendence and immanence, heart and mind, soul and body, presence and action.

Lawler: But don’t many traditions — from Christianity to twelve-step programs — consider service a spiritual necessity?

Harvey: Yes, it’s essential to all the major traditions, from Buddhism to Judaism. In Hinduism it’s what the self does when it recognizes itself in all reality. In shamanism, being in tune with nature leads to serving all living beings. Service is the central message of Christianity, though it’s been lost for the most part.

Sacred activism isn’t anything new, but we need to bring an urgency and intensity to this message at this moment, because there is a worldwide addiction to money and power and a worldwide depression that affects even people who claim to be religious but have secretly given up on the human race.

Service, as it’s usually understood, is not going to be enough. Working at soup kitchens, helping stray animals, looking after old women, sitting by the deathbeds of young men who are dying of aids — all these are honorable actions, but we have to go farther. What’s required now is inspired, radical action on every level.

Lawler: Can a mayor, a congressperson, a ceo of a major corporation be a sacred activist?

Harvey: If that person is prepared to do some dangerous and disruptive things, yes. I don’t think a ceo could be a sacred activist if his or her company was strip-mining or spreading toxic waste. A sacred activist would risk everything to transform those policies.

Lawler: If we want to move beyond the idea of individual service, it will require organization. But can you organize mystics?

Harvey: Absolutely you can. The great revolution that has to happen for the world to be saved will be organized through networks of grace. Look at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a court in which victims of apartheid could give testimony and perpetrators of violence could request immunity. Look at how the people of Rwanda have come together. I am working with a child soldier from Sierra Leone who was tortured and raped. He wants to go back to his country and bring together all the people who went through the same experience, so that they can mourn together and help each other and use their tragic experiences to remake their country.

For people to come together, they must first be broken by what is happening. When people allow the horror and pain and sorrow of this time to go through their heart like a spear, the thought of hiding away in their private devotions becomes repulsive. They need to turn their love into action.

Lawler: So this will not be a hierarchical approach?

Harvey: No, the Divine Mother doesn’t like top-down organization, because it is often authoritarian and patriarchal and driven by an agenda. The kind of organization I’m describing is compassionate, egalitarian, and driven by the heart. When people devoted to a cause come together and pour out their creativity, “mother power” is born. Grace comes down, creativity flourishes, and amazing things happen.

Lawler: Creative, passionate people don’t always agree. How can sacred activists work out their differences?

Harvey: If sacred activism becomes a normal way of functioning, there will be more sensitivity, clarity, and wisdom, and less divisiveness. If people differ, they will be willing to go through a process of consensus, and once a decision is reached, their hearts will be united. We have seen glimpses of this. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to turn large numbers of civil-rights activists away from violence and toward reconciliation and peace. Many African Americans thought he was crazy at first, but he convinced them by personal example and indefatigable commitment. The same is true of Gandhi. Many Indians thought he wasn’t standing up to the British. And some Tibetans believed the Dalai Lama was soft on the Chinese, but they’ve been convinced by his example.

Lawler: Yet there are compassionate environmentalists at odds over whether to support nuclear power. We’re human, and we get attached to our particular solutions. How do you mediate that?

Harvey: Painfully and slowly, as it has always been done. All divine visions are hard to embody. They require hard work. You have to keep looking at your own shadow — and sacred activists have two shadows: they have the shadow of the mystic, longing to escape into the light and leave the world behind; and they have the shadow of the activist, which is full of denunciation and divisiveness and anger. But if you examine those two shadows long enough, something amazing happens: the mystic’s shadow gets purified by the activist’s, and vice versa.

Lawler: How do these shadows manifest in you?

Harvey: I wouldn’t be so disturbed by the mystic’s addiction to transcendence if I didn’t know something about it. I have felt that shadow in myself that says, Only God is real. The rest is illusion. It comes from a psychological desire to escape the complexities of my past. On the activist side, I understand how easy it is to project my own failings onto others, to demonize the ceos and George W. Bush and not recognize that every time I catch a plane to go and talk about saving the environment, I am polluting. Every time I think of President Bush as a psychopath who doesn’t deserve to live, I’m committing a kind of murder.

Lawler: Author Anne Lamott writes about the necessity of loving George Bush.

Harvey: She puts an image of him on her altar. I’ve been trying to love him myself. I understand the temptation of anger. I am a passionate person, and passion’s shadow is anger — ferocious and lacerating. Though I feel sacred activism needs the power of anger to fuel its work, we also need to purify and transmute that anger.

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