Deborah Johnson: Activism Powered by the Sacred

Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism

Dear Friends, blessings to you as we observe Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and Pride month… and in the midst of both the ongoing horrors and beauty of the world. This month, I am pleased to introduce the Rev. Deborah L. Johnson, who stands at the intersection of many social justice issues, bringing a spirit of oneness in service to personal and social transformation. I hope she will inspire you.

Reverend Deborah L. Johnson has been an activist all her life. She’s an organizer, strategist, consultant, public speaker, pastor, and spoken word artist known for her ability to bring clarity to complex and emotionally charged issues. Her passion is facilitating the healing of cultural and sociopolitical divides in order to bring forth the Beloved Community.

Rev D, as she is known, is the founder of Inner Light Ministries, an independent spiritual community that’s part of a broader New Thought Movement based on universal spiritual principles. She is also the visionary behind a new venture, Unleashing Our Future, fostering the capacities, compassion, and connection for personal and global transformation. Rev. Deborah has received numerous awards, appeared in several films, and is the author of two books, The Sacred Yes and Your Deepest Intent.

I met Deborah 30 years ago at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual Creating Change Conference, during her tenure as NGLTF’s board co-chair. We have been walking together in one way or another since. When I conceived this blog series of conversations with activists whose work embraces healing, I knew I wanted to include her. Pride Month seemed like the perfect time.

As we settle into our zoom call, I ask Deborah how she would define activism. She replies, “I'd say activism is where your vision gets put into motion. When you’re engaged in bringing forth the ideals that you have been espousing, there comes a point in time when it's necessary to go into the implementation mode. Activism, to me, is at that point when you're not just talking about it, but you're walking the walk and doing the work that's necessary to bring forth your vision.”

When I invite her to talk about the primary areas of her own activism, the forms it’s taken over the years, she is thoughtful. “If I were to reduce it down to its primary threads,” she begins, “I would say it's about possibility and empowerment. I have a belief that everybody has value and that there is room enough for us all. So whether it's in community-based activism, whether it's been in the corporate world, political systems, the judicial system, educational systems, on and on, that fundamentally, my activism has been about removing the impediments that are restricting us from being able to be the fully actualized people that we can be.”

She smiles, “That's heavy lifting sometimes. Sometimes that's a lot of conflict resolution work, a lot of growing in the heart space, as well as things like public policy. You have to take it from a lot of different angles. It's not just a one-strategy remedy, because once the impediments have become institutionalized, they're reinforced in so many different ways. You’ve got to do it with a broad swath.”

As a young adult in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Deborah served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center (now the LA LGBT Center). She was a successful co-litigant in two landmark civil rights cases in California. The first, in 1984, resulted in the inclusion of sexual orientation in the state’s Civil Rights Bill, setting a national precedent. The second, in 2005, defeated a challenge to the state’s Domestic Partnership law.

As we reflect on those formative days in what is now the LGBTQIA2S+ movement, Deborah chuckles, “We didn't have the alphabet then. It was just the G, and it took a hell of a lot to get the L in there. Let alone anything else.” I remember that struggle, too.

Deborah grew up in the Holiness Pentecostal Church, at a time when homosexuality was not only considered a sin, but was classified as a mental illness, and a felony. She describes her early activism as a matter of survival. “I'm at the end of the baby boom and everything was up at once,” she tells me. “The feminist movement, the Black Power movement, the Stonewall riots that kicked off the modern gay liberation movement. And all of those and more were really near and dear to my heart. I began to see very early that it seemed like it was essentially the same issue, just dressed up in like different clothing, but the same fundamental issues of othering, of oppression, marginalization, supremacy, et cetera.”

Seeing the common dynamics across different forms of oppression, and working to transform those underlying patterns has become a cornerstone of her lifework.

I ask if she can talk about a time when she experienced healing in the context of her activism. There are many, of course, but the one shares also harks back to that earlier period. “Actually, I was just talking about this a couple of days ago with someone who was near my age—about healing that happened between the men and the women in the gay community as a result of the AIDS crisis. In the '70s, early '80s, there was a lot of separation between the men and the women. And it was really hard. It was really hard, and it was really, really divisive.

“When the men started coming down with—actually, at the time, they were calling it GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. They weren't really quite sure what it was. But there was an overwhelming compassion that came over us as we were watching them get sick. It's very debilitating—everything that would happen—watching them die, watching society turn away. And us really not being sure how you catch it or what you do, but this sense of solidarity that said, we'll go down with you; we're not going to leave you alone.”

Lesbians held blood drives, cared for the sick and dying, advocated for treatment, and took on the jobs that the men had been doing in movement spaces as so many of them became ill and died.

“It was a real pivot point in the healing heart-space of if you're just always fighting, then that's what you're doing. You're just always fighting. If you walk around like a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Activism can get a little cannibalistic that way, when you have so many wounded people. It was a turning point in my life, in my activism, and in really deciding who or what I was fighting for.

“Dr. King used to always talk about the fact that he wasn't just fighting for Black folk. He was fighting for the soul of America. He was fighting for everybody up against the same forces—including the poor white people. It was at that point, during the AIDS crisis, that I got it. That the systems that are keeping any of us down, are keeping all of us down. And I stopped fighting for just my own survival, but rather for the liberation for all of us, including the so-called oppressors.”

As so often happens in these conversations, Deborah has already begun answering my next question, but I invite her to share more about what she learned from that experience that we might bring forward in our work, both individually and collectively.  

“I learned that it's important to be consistent in your values. I believed that we were all equal in the eyes of God, that we all had equal value, that we all mattered, but I wasn't acting that way. I had my own hierarchies. I had my own judgment. I had my own marginalizations, and who I thought deserved and didn't deserve. What I learned was that if I don't live it, then I'm going to be part of the problem, and that I could easily be perpetuating the very things that I say that I'm against. And if I really want to see the change, I have to be it. I have to give the graciousness I want to receive. I have to be as non-judgmental as I don't want to be judged.”

“Easier said than done,” I offer.

“Yeah,” she says, “but whenever I found myself saying that, when I really think about the alternatives, being angry is hard work. Being self-righteous takes a whole lot of energy. And in the final analysis, I don't know that it's harder. It's the reverse, in the sense that it's like exercising. Once you get started, there's something that kicks in, and it's an easier momentum. When inertia sets in, it's harder to get the object to move. But once it's in motion, it can move. So the intransigence of the, ‘this is my position, and I'm not going to move, and I'm going to... GGGRRRRRRR!’ That takes a lot of energy. But once you start moving, and once you start to flow, there's a grace and there's an ease, so to speak, where everything's not so hard anymore. I want to invite people into that—that you can do the activism, but it doesn't have to wear you out. It doesn't have to drain you. The draining comes not so much from what's going on the outside as what's going on with us in the inside. When people get worn out in the movements, it's often because they've worn each other out!”

Since Rev. D has been in this work for more than 50 years, I’m curious what has sustained her. She responds without hesitation, “Love. It's love that sustains me. My love of life. My love of the Divine. My love of people. My love of music and art and beauty and nature. Love is that energetic force that unifies everything. The only thing that ever needs to be healed is the sense of separation. When we feel separate from our good, separate from each other, separate from the Divine, that's when we get depressed. That's when our energy goes down. And inevitably, if I'm feeling out of sorts, it's because I'm feeling separate. So I have to go back and I have to consciously reconnect.” That connection with the larger Life of Spirit—and healing any sense of separation—is at the heart of both her activism and her ministry.

I ask Deborah to describe how her spirituality informs her work as an activist. “I don't think it's possible to separate the two,” she replies. “Everything always starts with a paradigm. It starts with a worldview. About who we are, what's the natural order of things, how do things change, who or what's in control. All of those are profoundly spiritual questions. They are at the root of what frames how we see things. So if you think people are equal, if you think some people were made to rule over others, if you think one sex is superior to the other—these aren't just political things. These are worldviews that you have about life. So how mine is informed, is that I believe in a theology where there is no dualism, that there's no warring gods fighting against each other, that there's just one power, there's just one force, there's just one creative energy. Everything comes out of it. It's a question of how much we identify with it, feel connected with it, and how do we use that power.

“It informs my activism because I don't come from othering,” she explains. “I see everybody and everything as an extension of myself. I'm not trying to kill them over there, because there's no them over there. If I'm doing harm to anyone, I'm doing harm to us all, including myself. I come at my activism from the standpoint of we sink or we sail together. And that includes the ones that I don't like. It takes you to a different place of compassion and empathy. And requires a ton of forgiveness.”

We don't usually think of forgiveness as an activist practice, but Deborah believes it’s essential.

“Because the forgiveness isn't for the other person, the forgiveness is for you,” she points out. “The forgiveness shifts YOUR relationship to the situation. If you don't know how to forgive, if you don't know how to make sure that your future and your energy is not tied up in the karma of somebody else's actions, then you're controlled by what they've done. And this is what happens when we're not willing to see ourselves and everyone else as greater than what's happened to us.

“What calls me,” Deborah affirms, “is a profound belief in our potentiality, in the possibilities of us as a human species. I think we are imbued with so many powers, so much possibility, so much strength and wisdom. If we could just get over ourselves and get over the impediments that we put up against each other.”

Her statement offers a nice segue to what has become one of my favorite questions to ask in these times. Really, it’s a question for all of us to ask ourselves and one another regularly as a way to stay encouraged: what is it that inspires you to do the work that you do, and what gives you hope?

Deborah thinks a moment before answering, “I get inspired by possibility. When I can feel into and sense that there are greater things that are waiting, that there's something that's trying to birth, that there's something that's trying to happen, that inspires me. I also get inspired by the legacies of the foremothers, the forefathers, the shamans, and the mystics, the poets, and the prophets, and the priestesses, and the people who've gone before who faced so many kinds of adversities and atrocities, and who've come out on the other side. I love ancient wisdom. When there are truths that are spoken that have stood the test of time, I find those very inspiring.

“And the hope—there's an acronym that came to me a few years ago, which says it all for me. The H-O-P-E stands for Heart Open, Possibility, and Engagement. It's those three things. I think those are the three things that we need to get hope, to keep hope. And whenever I'm losing hope, it's because I have separated from at least one of those. It becomes a litmus test for me. Is my heart open? Am I staying in possibility consciousness? And am I staying engaged?

“I have an adventurous soul. What gets me excited is, what doors have we not even opened yet? What territory can we go into? How can we be better at this? More alive, more joy-filled, more creative, more compassionate. I’m like: bring it.”

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To learn more about Rev. Deborah’s work visit:

Rev D’s website: https://revdnow.com

Inner Light Ministries: https://www.innerlightministries.org

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/revdeborahjohnson

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RevDNow

Science and Nonduality Conference Presentation (2017)