YEAR ONE: R/evolutionary Open Blueprints for Devotional Being(s)

Faith in Practice Field Notes: Part Three

The editors at The Commons are happy to have Elæ Moss offer a new installment of “Faith in Practice.” The ongoing series will be collectively available here.

 

By Elæ Moss

 

What now? A faith in practice YEAR ONE practicum

We’re moving from the groundwork of this series into a practicum of sorts, which can be practiced individually or in communities. It is a “faith based” offering that at the same time asks what it means for anything to be “faith based,” as well as what it means for people to have “faith,” to be devotional, or practice being faithful as an orientation that allows us access to concrete tools for embodied imagination and the reification of belief in our bodies, relationships, systems, and world.

The baseline project for this offering is YEAR ONE, which is a speculative public project that invites us to move from a space of reactivity and triage response to that of creating and imagining our future world and its possibilities—and to seeing that world as already existing and embodied, currently and historically, through legacies of radical action and imagination.

Today, and in the next few months, I’ll use the YEAR ONE framework to introduce ways you and/or your community can identify and address your individual and collective needs as we experience rapidly shifting ecological, cultural, and sociopolitical realities. These strategies approach this work as, always, inextricably “spiritual” and “systemic” in nature. In fact, the hypothesis here is that the ways we’ve been taught to separate these words is part of the problem our new co-creative efforts look to solve.

Each month, we’ll consider a topic area, supported by real-life case study examples from my own work on the ground at Judson Memorial Church, and in coalition justice, faith, and arts-based practice from my network. For that month, you’ll also find a tailored set of materials to support the concrete, somatic, and spiritual challenges each topic raises: strategic resources, secular and sacred texts, devotional prompts, and a range of facilitation tools to support workshops, community dialogue, and other programming which you can adopt (and/or adapt to your own needs).

This month, you’ll also find a bit more about YEAR ONE and some additional materials below, to support the initiation of this project as part of your journey.

Topic Calendar for 2025:

Health and Safety I – Resourcing Bodies for Change

Health and Safety II – Abolitionist Security, Preparedness and Sanctuary

Sacred Economics and Solidarity Economies
Earth Month – Sacred Ecological Shifts for Faith Infrastructures

Re/Tooling, Resource Development and Blueprint Building

Starting the clock anew: a possibility-powered timeline reset

In my last entry for this series, I laid out the notion of faith as a practice that lays this groundwork for imagination both in mind and body. I also laid out the possibility that we might identify this moment in our lives as our own sort of collective Anno Domini, or Anno Ipsi, which is to say: YEAR ONE.

The YEAR ONE concept is simple. It is based on the theory that in every major shift in human history, whether we call this “Revolution” or something else, there was not one concrete date on which these massive changes happened, but an accumulation of not only public opinion but also orientation. In other words, at a certain point the tide turned in the number of people who moved from cognitive to embodied change, ready to co-create and bring about something new.

If we decide we have the power to create as opposed to react (a great illustration of the power of the same materials to produce seemingly opposite results), we can re-orient ourselves to a position in which we experience ourselves as powerful co-creators, capable of immense transformation. With that, we can decide that any tipping point happens not as an inevitable consequence of whenever the tide happens to turn but as something within our grasp.

 

 

YEAR ONE invites you to decide, claim, and name, publicly if you so desire: “I am not part of that other story anymore. I am—we are—starting a new story, today.” And, if you believe in ritual, like I do, you are welcome to use the signatory document I created a few years ago to “make it official,” even with a witness if you so choose!

So, how does your world shift once you name and claim for yourself the internal, spiritual refusal of any legal or political body’s right to hold authority over our shared existence? When you let that refusal settle in you—truly own it—what changes in how you move through your day, engage with others, or envision the collective work we’re all part of? And in practical terms, do you notice a recalibration of your own inner compass, a different sense of possibility, or a new way of standing in your own power? When you begin to reclaim sovereignty over our imaginative and bodily freedom?

Topic dive: health and safety, part 1: resourcing bodies for change

Many years ago, and many years into my system change work, I started noticing a trend both in individuals and communities I was teaching and collaborating with: that while there was a deep cognitive and emotional desire for certain change, there seemed to be massive blocks preventing the actual operationalizing of strategies being developed and learned.

At this time, I was also on my own journey of coming online with my body, after a lifetime of dissociative performance of gender, undiagnosed neurodivergence, childhood trauma, and so on. These two parts of myself converged in an awakening where I essentially realized that none of us could actually do this change work without somatic healing and becoming more familiar with the mechanisms of our own human, embodied experience.

I began developing a series of tools for system change work that was based in somatics—recognizing that any work for the collective body couldn’t skip work on our own individual ones. These “disruptor mechanism protocols” and other methods were ones I set to implementing daily myself as much as I was now offering them publicly through workshops, videos, and other media. I continue to stress that my own disruption and reprogramming work is a constant effort; in Ministry and in life, my goal is not to position myself as somehow expert but rather facilitator, practicing and modeling modes of being that might be healing to both individuals and our communities at large.

 

Just as faith infrastructures begin not with the brick and mortar of our churches or mosques or synagogues but with the materials and methods we build in our hearts and bodies and collectives when we pray and sing and believe together, the first step to building Health and Safety mechanisms for all of us is establishing safety and identifying risk in our bodies.

However, some of what we experience as “risk” is in fact a lack of familiarity, combined with cognitive overload and decision fatigue—adults are now estimated to make a staggering 35K decisions daily, which increases in times of change, unrest, or acute emergency. Part of what our practicum includes this month, therefore, is an exploration of how “Health and Safety” starts with recognizing where and how our personal and collective well being is impacted by overload as we struggle toward clear solutions or good data, feeling impotent against encroaching social and ecological dangers, etc.

At Judson church, and in coalition, there is rich evidence that concretely equipping ourselves and our communities with a baseline of material and practical tools and skills, and a bit of a roadmap that makes the next steps feel within our reach, goes a long way. So: building on months of coalition liberation clinics, we moved in earnest into abolition / restorative justice facing Community First Aid trainings in collaboration with a facilitator from New York City Action Medical, free to anyone within our network—as well as self-defense skills, NARCAN trainings and distro, and specific tools for Trans and Queer legal and medical protection moving into the coming administration.

 

What does it mean to train our individual and collective bodies to care for and protect ourselves and others, in particular the endangered populations so many of our faith spaces seek to serve?

And what does it mean to (re)imagine what our faith spaces can (and must?) do, be, and offer, now and in the future?

 

Next time, we’ll dive more deeply into different forms of community medic preparation, safety marshal and other community security considerations for physical plant and human operations, and specific disaster health and safety readiness protocols like go bags and call trees—and you’ll get an orientation to using (and/or replicating!) the Judson Resource Hub that we’re building out both online and off, for anyone who needs it.

We got this, beloveds! Check out this first packet of materials for ways you can engage with these offerings in any way that feels supportive to you—in your meditations and prayers, your mutual aid and justice work, your relationships, or any combination that helps your YEAR ONE kick off with a powerful, possible pop!

 

 

All work at The Commons is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, culture worker, and system doula dedicated to radical modes of relational and spiritual engagement. Elæ currently serves as a Community Minister at Judson Memorial Church, focused on sustainable human infrastructure building at the intersection of community education, collective care, faith, arts, and social justice. They teach and work as an Interfaith Advisor at Pratt Institute, are a Civic Leadership Fellow at the Interfaith Center of New York, and are also a member of the 2024-25 Solidarity Circles cohort at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Elæ is currently preparing for Interspiritual ordination through the Seminary program at OneSpirit, following two years as an MFA Public Action Fellow at Bennington, both the culmination of over twenty years approaching ministry as equally art and sacred service: creating sanctuary tools and spaces for seekers, rooted in commons-driven social justice organizing. A practitioner of Buddhist and Q’ero medicine traditions, Elæ is also a certified Quantum Touch healer, mindfulness facilitator, and officiant of radically reimagined human rituals. In addition to their Public Action MFA, Elæ holds a Masters in Urban Design from CCNY, and did Doctoral Research in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Find them at: https://onlywhatican.net, on substack, or on instagram at @thetroublewithbartleby.