The Return: How Returning Home Requires An Open Door

For years I have been challenged with the notion that ultimately, the pilgrimage calls us to return home and live forward on behalf of something other and greater than ourselves. This idea that the road out actually causes us to be beholden to something back home is a critical aspect of the becoming that this rites of passage initiates.For our lives to truly reincorporate and reflect the stories of our journeys there must be effects behind and beyond our front doors; if there isn’t, the travels and travails of the road quickly get reduced to petty ramblings and narcissistic knock abouts.

Ultimately, the greatest influence we can have on ourselves, our families, and the world around us is to live out the wizened effects of our sacred journey on behalf of the Other and the Future. 

This notion’s simplicity allows for a focus of energy around a transformed state. When Joseph Campbell talks about a “wisdom and power to serve others” on account of our wayfaring, he is getting at a fundamental aspect of the gift of pilgrimage. We go out on these personal, intimate soul-adventures to connect to the sacred in fresh, inspired ways. However, if these encounters aren’t having a greater result on the world around us, they are worthless. I believe that by applying our gained wisdom on behalf of the Other and the Future, we are re-gifting our communities and the earth with our God-given wisdom developed on the journey.

Living on behalf of the Other and the Future is a scalable metaphor; that is, it may refer to simply anyone or anything other than yourself and decisions that impact the future. In broader, and more challenging terms, “the Other and the Future” is a way of embracing all of life, especially those that are without voice and marginalized in society, and intentionally orienting lifestyle decisions that will have flourishing outcomes on our earth, the more-than-human world, and future generations. As a result, our personal sacred journey is global in both scope and impact, and we are invited to transformative micro-practices that overhaul how we view our homes and home environments.

Our return home requires us to leave the door open to the wild world beyond its threshold, maintaining the now-understood posture and practice of interrelatedness and solidarity.

Arrival: What is Your Gift?

Ultimately, we choose the way of the pilgrim’s path to get somewhere. We aren’t electing to be sojourners forever. We prefer the pilgrimage because of its archetypal stages: Longing, Arrival, and eventually, returning Home. The Arrival stage is especially poignant as this is the location and/or place toward which our heart has been bent the whole while. It is the place that strengthens our resolve when the going gets rough, or the road seems too dark and dismal. We cast our eyes upward and outward towards this place for which we have longed and to which we have attributed purpose and answered prayers.

The required posture on the Pilgrim’s Path has prepared you for your arrival; you have practiced the necessary way of seeing and listening to the surrounding greater community of things. So it is that when you arrive to your sacred destination, you are equipped to receive that which is for you.

When you arrive, do not be quick to take. Imagine you are a guest and take the time to introduce yourself before any action of harvest is taken. While this may seem silly at first, there is a profound shift in our posture when we verbally acquaint ourselves with our surrounding. Greet your place. Speak your name and your desire. Ask the deep question of your heart. Ask permission to be there and to receive. This shows respect for the personhood of a place, and slows the eager taking to a broader awareness of is there enough and what needs to be left?

Be prepared to offer something. As you approach your sacred site and your heart leaps with the proximity of answered prayers, posture yourself in such a way so to give something back to this place. A pilgrim decidedly journeys not to pick up souvenirs and trinkets along the way, but to look for circumstances to see others’ souls, and give out smiles and kindnesses for nothing in return. I challenge my retreat participants to bring along a physical item on their journey that represents their reason(s) for making the pilgrimage. The idea is that this item can be placed on the altar, or given to someone at the place of arrival as means of engaging the offering. For we know that it is only when we give that we truly receive.

Your posture is submissive and your soul is surrendered.  May what has been silenced in you for far too long, begin to sing!

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Candy Canes & clementines are treasures found within CHESTY Greenspace in December. 

For the last six years, every first Saturday in December the forest restoration group I help guide hosts a Candy Cane & Clementine Hunt in the our neighborhood woods. This sweet treasure hunt is intended for the young children in the neighborhood as a way to introduce them to the natural world and light up their imagination for the magic that is within this urban forest. We intentionally hide the candy canes and clementine oranges a bit off trail so to develop the sense of proprioception (the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself), and they are always purposely nestled within native plants and at the base of native trees for implicit learning and knowing. It is a morning filled with wonder and delight as children rush around the Hazelnut Loop discovering and taking! The forest gives us much this day, as it does every day of our lives; what is it that we can give in return? What can we offer that shows we understand a gift has been given and that one should be left in its place? 

We put up a table in the woods at the base of a century old Big Leaf Maple tree. Here, banjo music plays, submitting a song as a gift to the natural world. On the table are wild-crafting items, materials where children can create nature ornaments and natural garland that we hang in a tree in the woods. This practice is one of giving back, a posture of mutual agreement that acknowledges with gratitude the gifts given by the forest that day. The children then not only experience the delight in the taking, but also experience the joy in the giving, and the birds all love this seasonal display of appreciation and honor! 

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The Honorable Harvest is an indigenous mindset and harvesting practice that asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Robin Wall Kimmerer, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), offers this deep wisdom to our rapaciously consumptive Western culture. This ethos demands an account for how humans sow, farm, gather, and consume. And it is also an invitation to the practicing pilgrim. Through mutual exchange there is an assurance that there will always be something left for others who come after you. Kimmerer says this, "Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence" (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 190). Our local forest is a sacred site, as much as Iona or any other holy place.

We go to these places to receive much. And what is it that we can offer to ensure that our taking isn't the upending of the precious life that is there?

Kimmerer graciously shares an attempt at a written form of the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 183). I am in complete gratitude for this wise text; it has guided me in how I forage in our neighborhood forest, our own homescape, my own Monthly Mandala practice, and how we are trying to teach our children to move through the world. 

How can we learn from this wisdom, taking it into the folds of our daily lives as well                                                              as using this mindset as we journey the pilgrim's path?

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Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the now who comes asking for life.

Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

Never take the first. Never take the last.

Take only what you need.

Take only that which is given.

Never take more than half. Leave some for others.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.

Share.

Give thanks for what you have been given.

Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

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The Silence Breakers: Mother Earth Says #METOO

Cosmic Birth by Mary Southard

Humans ignore the deep inherent value of the natural world and our interconnectedness to it.  We exploit the planet for her resources without acknowledgment of the deep and lasting cost.  The payment for this extensive damage to ecosystems shows up in human lives to the extent that a peaceful enjoyment of life has been threatened and/or injury to life will be caused.  Author and theologian Shelly Rambo calls this trauma: “Trauma is described as an encounter with death…a radical event[s] that shatter all that one knows about the world and all the familiar ways of operating within it.”  Trauma to the earth moreover, vis-à-vis ecocide and environmental injustice, manifests through the bodies of women; more specifically, through the suffering exploitation of marginalized women with long-term impacts on their health and wellness. To defy systems of eco-violence is to hope for a future that recognizes the sacredness of the earth through the inclusion of women within this sacred sphere.  

She has been groped, penetrated, maimed, and raped millions of times; reduced to nothing more than a vacuous object that will provide fleeting pleasure, and meet the relentless, gaping demand for greed.  She is left sick with fouled veins; cut off appendages; diseased cultures; and empty cavities—only to be leered at again, and ceaselessly violated.  

She is Gaia.  She is God. 

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To turn humanity towards a new global outcome, we need new stories and myths of imagining God.

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Scientists like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have brought our attention to the fact that the earth is a living organism, a concept that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as noosphere or, the thinking earth.  Teilhard de Chardin’s thought would mesh well with the Gaia hypothesis.  First articulated by the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis, simply put, suggests that the earth is a self-regulating, self-sustaining entity, which continually adjusts its environment to support life.  Though a scientific theory, the Gaia hypothesis has captured the minds of philosophers and theologians demanding developing reflection and challenging long-held religious beliefs.  The personification of earth as a female has enabled us to see her in her strength and softness.  The Gaia thesis, in likening the earth to a self-regulating mammal, supports the idea that she may have organs that are especially important, such as the rain forest and wetlands, which are more vital to the global environment than are other parts of the system.  This fertile embodiment of the earth invites us to reorient our common perspectives of ecological disaster as physical trauma to Gaia; molesting, cutting, mutiliating, and oppressing her for the resources she is demanded to give. 

For Christian ecological thinkers, the biblical God and Gaia are not at odds; rightly understood, they are on terms of friendliness, if not commixing.  Eco-feminist and theologian Sallie McFague provides a critical model of God, an imaginative perspective that embodies God as Planet Earth.  While an admitted metaphor, McFague wonders how our behaviors toward the earth changes if it is imagined as self-expressive of God, if it is a “sacrament”—the outward and visible presence of body—of God, the very expression of God’s being? 

Is it possible for the human population to see the world as a body that must be carefully tended, that must be nurtured, protected, guided, loved, and befriended as valuable in itself?  For like us, it is an expression of God—and as necessary to the continuation of a vibrant and flourishing life. 

McFague strongly believes that were this metaphor for God to enter deep into our collective consciousness as thoroughly as the dominating, triumphalist has entered, it would result in a profoundly different way of being in the world.  There would be no way of seeing the earth as devoid of God, and God vacant from the earth. 

Eco-theologian Mark Wallace states, “Insofar as the Earth Spirit lives with us in and through the created world, then God as Spirit suffers loss and pain whenever the biotic order is despoiled through human arrogance.”  The human becomes both the manifesting symptom of the suffering of the earth, as well as the perpetrator.  The evil in the world occurs in and to God’s body: the pain that those parts of creation affected by evil feel God also feels and feels bodily.  All pain to all creatures (and I would include trees, mountains, streams and oceans to this category as well) is felt immediately and bodily by God. 

God experiences at God’s deepest core the toll, torment and trauma of a body under attack.  Nor is Gaia silent in her suffering but uses a different language to speak the unsayable; her deep pain manifests in the bodies of those most akin to her. 

McFague maintains that viewing the world as the body of God means seeing all bodies as the body of God; however, she calls us to look at the bodies that are neglected in our society, to look at the bodies that we render invisible; a particular body that is either objectified or intentionally made invisible: the black woman’s body.  When we look to the bodies made invisible by systematic oppression, we see a demonstration of what has been done to the planet.  

There is a broad recognition that human well-being is dependent on the well-being of the land, that the destruction of a healthy environment will necessarily affect human dignity.  There is also the realization that the problems the poor experience on a daily basis are essentially environmental problems.  Women often bear the brunt of coping with these environmental problems.  As soil deteriorates, women have to work longer hours in backbreaking toil to harvest food from barren soil.  In deforested rural communities, girls and women expend increasing energy and time to collect firewood.  Women are often forced to work in environmentally hazardous conditions for low wages.  Kwok Pui-lan, an eco-womanist theologian, breaks down these problems as a result of imperialist greed and competition; corporations monopolize basic resources such as water, which disproportionately affects women and their families. 

Indian physicist and ecologist Vandana Shiva claims that Western development is essentially maldevelopment in that it reproduces and perpetuates capitalistic patriarchy on a global scale, which relies on the structures of exploitation and degradation of nature, the exclusion and exploitation of women, and the erosion of their cultures.  She further documents women’s significant roles in the food chain and their critical contributions as slyviculturalists, agriculturists, and traditional natural scientists.  She writes: “The new insight provided by rural women in the Third World is that women and nature are associated, not in passivity but in creativity and in the maintenance of life.”  This insight requires us to move beyond  generalized notions of women, nature and culture.  While this connection is a critical start to imperative conversations within the ecofeminist movement—

There is a requisite need to evolve the understanding towards an exchange that addresses the actual bodies of women who have experienced conquest, colonization and corruption in the global market. 

Kwok Pui-lan talks about how the colored female body has been consigned to signify nature in demeaning and ambiguous ways.  She writes, “If we theorize about women and nature from the broken bodies of women of color, we can see the relationship between women and nature is much more complex, ambiguous, and multidimensional than is often assumed.”

The demand to look closely and carefully at the lives of women of color and ethics has created a theological inquiry called “womanist.”  Coined by Alice Walker, womanist theology calls forth the moral imperative to honor African and African American women’s connection with the earth (and invites specific attention to all women of color as well); specifically, Walker has investigated the similarities between structural systems of oppression that dehumanize women and dominate the planet.  “Earth itself,” admonishes Walker, “has become the nigger of the world.”  But the Earth, she goes on to say, will assuredly undo us if we don’t learn to care for it, revere it, even worship it.  Walker warns: “While the Earth is poisoned, everything it supports is poisoned.  While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free….While it is ‘treated like dirt,’ so are we.” 

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The connections between the earth-body and human-body continuum draws critical attention to the illnesses made manifest both in women’s bodies and the earth’s body.

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Narratives the world over confirm this connection.  

Katsi Cook, a Mohawk and midwife, argues that attacks on nature are also attacks on Native women’s bodies, and by extension, attacks on the bodies of Native children.  Toxins, which are released into the earth through industrial waste, pesticides, pollution, and weapons for war, are generally taken into the female body and stored in fat, and during pregnancy and lactation, women’s fat is metabolized, exposing fetuses and newborns, at their most vulnerable stages of development, to these chemicals.  Radiation poisoning, another environmental toxic byproduct of nuclear development, may be linked to the astronomical rates of lupus, an immune system disorder, among Nez Perce women living near the Columbia River in Washington State.  Wastes from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor, which began production of weapons-grade plutonium in 1943, were improperly disposed of in the river, from which the large amount of fish consumed by this community were taken.  Female tribal members have reported suffering from lupus, miscarriages, broken bones, endometriosis and life-threatening infections.  Termed “downwinders,” residents have reflected on the devastating impacts of  non-consensual radiation contamination as another form of sexual violence. 

Painful, dangerous events have created open wounds in females from the Two-Thirds-World.  Here is where Shelly Rambo’s definition of the wound as trauma is helpful.  She writes,

“For those who survive trauma, the experience of trauma can be likened to death.  But the reality is that death has not ended; instead, it persists. The experience of survival is one in which life, as it once was, cannot be retrieved.” 

This “middle” place is horrifically played out by the indigenous women of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.  After World War II, the U.S. exploded a bomb that was 1,300 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; this test was the first of 66 nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands.  The people from the island of Rongelap were directly in the radioactive fallout, which covered their beaches, homes, gardens, and skin with burning, white powder for weeks.  The women of Rongelap’s cervical cancer mortality is 60 times greater than in the mainland U.S., breast cancer rates are five times greater, miscarriage rates are tremendously high, and babies born are often without skeletal structure;  the current life-span of a Marshallese women is age 50.  “Death is not concluded,” states Rambo, “instead, it continues on in forms of life that may not be recognized as such.  Life is reconfigured as the excess of death, as what remains.”  The experience of traumatic suffering is intensified by the invisibility and unspeakable nature of violence.  The Marshallese women did not have words for the kind of reproductive abnormalities that were a result of the fallout; their trauma was silenced by a lack of ancestral understanding and cultural shame.  The violence done to the earth through wanton and deliberate warfare development was, and continues to this day, manifested in the bodies of these women with profound, devastating consequences.

As long as women’s bodies are showing trauma related to violent ecocide and anthropocentric colonization, the raping Gaia of her resources continues.  As Bessel van der Kolk has stated in his seminal work by the same title, “The body keeps score at the deepest level of the organism.”  The psychical trauma inflicted on Gaia-or more precisely the memory of trauma-acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that still at its work.  Like a splinter that causes an infection, it is the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem more than the object itself. 

The effects of ecocide on the women’s body is likened to that of the initial trauma being done to the earth, and the memory of that trauma shows up in the lives of women for generations.  To ignore and silence this critical connection between Mother Earth and the human mothers on this planet will continue to have dire effects. 

States van der Kolk, “Denial of the consequences of trauma can wear havoc with the social fabric of society….Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress.”  Our planet is showing the denial of these consequences through a myriad of ways: climate change, Fast Fashion, agri-business, and species loss to name just a few.  Rambo would see these consumptive cultural patterns as a statement of trauma.  She states, “Trauma is an encounter with death and with life. At the intersection of death and life, a cry emerges.”  There exists a global cry demanding witness to uncontainable suffering.  To see the ecocidal actions that humanity has taken against the world during the Industrial Age as trauma, and the life of humanity continuing in the face of this social and economic organization, then the body of the woman becomes the deep and desperate cry of the earth. 

Where does hope lie for a planetary population that both perpetrates and bears the trauma done to Earth?  How do we transform the shared material substances of our interrelated bodies from mutual toxicity to the brilliance of stars?  Rosemary Radford Ruether maintains that we need new psalms and meditations to make our collective kinship vivid in our communal and personal devotions.  These modern expressions need not be original however; a recognition and recovery of indigenous practices that honors the feminine may offer a way in to this much needed mutuality. 

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Women carry the wound of Gaia in their bodies, and it is from this wound that a voice demands witness: “witness death and witness the possibility of life arising from it.” 

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Many Third World and indigenous women believe that their own traditions give this voice, where the natural is not separated from the cultural and spiritual, can offer enormous contributions to saving ourselves and our planet.  The value lies not only in the long-practiced traditions of creation-honoring cultures, but in the actual ecological location  Humans are a uniquely positioned agent in the earth’s ecological matrix. 

Our particular places, our womanist lenses, allow us to see the personal saving presence of God in relationship to biotic communities, and provides a starting place for how we can contribute to reversing the global ecocrisis of Gaia, the Body of God, our Home Planet. 

The preamble to the Earth Charter echoes with hopeful possibility if we so choose to see the world as a truly holy place.  May we stand at this critical place—this place of such weighty wounds—and respond to the voice from the wound with a profound turning towards a future that honors Earth as God’s Body. 

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“We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, 
a time when humanity must choose its future…. 

To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth Community with a common destiny.”

— Earth Charter

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Bibilography

Conrade, Ernst Charity Majiza, Jim Cochrane, Welile T. Sigabi, Victor Molobi, and David Field.     “Seeing Eco-Justice in the South African Context.” In Earth Habitat: Eco-Injustice and the Church’s Response. Edited by Dieter Hessel and Larry Rasmussen, 135-157. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2001.

Grey, Mary. “Cosmic Communion: A Contemporary Reflection on the Eucharistic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin.” Ecotheology 10, no. 2 (August 2005): 165-180.

Harris, Melanie L. “Alice Walker and the Emergence of Ecowomanist Spirituality.” In Spirit and     Nature: The Study of Christian Spirituality in a Time of Ecological Urgency. Edited by Timothy Hessel-Robinson and Ray Maria McNamara, 220-236. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

McFague, Sallie . The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993.  

- - -, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987.  

Pui-lan, Kwok. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. 

Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Fransisco, CA: HarperCollinsPublishers: 1992.  

Scharper, Stephen B. “The Gaia Hypothesis: Implications for a Christian Political Theology of the Environment.” Cross Currents 44, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 207-221.

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books, 1989.  

Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Spencer, Daniel T. “The Liberation of Gaia.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 47, no. 1-2 (1993): 91-102.

United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. Earth Charter. UNESCO headquarters in Paris: March 2000.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Walker, Alice. Living by the Word. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 1988. 

Wallace, Mark I. “The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide.” Cross Currents 50, no. 3 (Fall 2000: 310-331.

Pilgrimage: It Grounds You

The theme of wandering in the Christian spiritual life is one that is underscored by the centrality of pilgrimage within Hebrew and New Testament scripture narratives.  God’s people wandered and in many respects, they seem to have been after a wandering Pilgrim-God. 

These Divine-seeking journeys led people away from home-scapes and demanded a wilderness asceticism that placed trust solely in divine provisions while wandering and faith that the promised land (a deep belonging to a place) would ultimately be found. 

God appears to prefer to be worshipped on the move rather than tied down to one place, judging by his words to Nathan the prophet when King David expressed his desire to build a permanent temple as his dwelling place, “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle” (2 Samuel 7:5-6 New International Version). Jesus himself had led a wandering and unsettled existence to which his remark speaks: “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay his head” Matthew 8:20

21st Century King James Version). Ironically, this place of promise, which was seen in the Celtic tradition as the goal of peregrinatio, ‘seeking the place of one’s resurrection,’ was only accessible through exodus and exile and in many ways, understood as martyrdom, a death to one’s self and one’s life on this earth. These early concepts of human relationship with God elevated a nomadic and dislocated sense of being.  However, despite the rhetoric of exile and exclusion from this world, ironically,

There is evidence that the practice of pilgrimage, especially through a Celtic lens, grounded one deeply in a place. 

While Irish monks’ approach to pilgrimage was based on a exilic biblical teaching, and specifically to God’s call to Abraham to leave his home and journey to a strange land, their Celtic constitution demanded that the natural world, and their place within it, mattered.  Outdoor spirituality aligned with a wandering way and didn’t relegate things of the spirit to beyond the body. The elements, the land, the water, and the accompanying wildlife all became messengers of God and therefore were critical aspects of worship and understanding of the Divine.  Even Colum Cille, or Saint Columba, while self-exiled to the Sacred Isle of Iona, practiced an engagement with the natural world that wasn’t dismissive of place as being simply a plain upon which one travels to find God.  Quite the contrary, Columba became located to the particular place of Iona in such a powerful way that the landscape became imbued with legendary stories of sacred encounters and theophanies that spanned decades. 

Through the archetypal movements of pilgrimage, one finds deep meaning and spiritual connection through both the exilic wandering and the renunciations associated with the journey; moreover, as a result, one finds themselves deeply connected within the community of creation, and profoundly rooted and at home in their pilgrimage place.   

Pilgrimage: A Profound Act of Listening

“If the journey you have chosen is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous.  Ancient wisdom suggests if you aren’t trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn’t the real thing.  The sacred, in its various guises as holy ground, art, or knowledge, evokes emotion and commotion.”

— Phil Couineau

After a season of absolute deconstruction in our lives (read more about that here) my husband started a new consultation business (Limen) that used the regenerative image of a pine cone as the logo. We were away to Whistler, B.C. with our family to discern next steps in this journey when we happened upon this new art installation along our favorite path. This is an example of how when we open ourselves up to the ARCHETYPAL circuit of the pilgrimage process, signs and symbols will begin to appear all around!

I remember sitting on the tarmac in Philadelphia awaiting our Atlantic departure to Glasgow in 2009 with a group of women from Seattle. We were on pilgrimage to Iona, so why should I have not been surprised that we were grounded for FOUR hours while the winds and rains of a Hurricane Bill whipped and roared around us, lightning lighting up the jet-black night outside our plane? What really brought the rigor close to heart was upon collecting our backpacks in Glasgow; is was evidently clear that our luggage was unable to be loaded on our flight during the storm, and also due to the extreme conditions, abandoned, not even covered against the torrential rains. My pack containing all my teaching materials for Iona was completely SOAKED, much of it rendered useless. All I could do was laugh knowing that I would cry my eyes out if I didn't. For indeed, what I was bearing witness to was the evidence of the pilgrimage stages being set in motion, this commotion being a clear marker that we were approaching the sacred!

The inevitable chaos that surrounds one’s journey to the place of their heart’s longing is set in place to distract and possibly even derail the most hope-filled plans. When one leaves on a pilgrimage, they are making an absolute commitment to a sojourn towards self-knowledge, which in Christian mystical tradition, is the understanding that knowledge of self and knowledge of God are one. And there are energies at play within and around us that are desperate to ensure that divine connection doesn't occur. This happens in the guise of uncertainties and doubts, details unwinding, or appearances that even the weather is commiserating against you!

The purpose of the pilgrimage is to ultimately make life more meaningful. It is regarded as the universal quest for the self.

Though the form of the path changes, one element remains the same: renewal of the soul. The essence of the sacred way is "tracing a sacred route of tests and trials, ordeals and obstacles, to arrive at a holy place and attempt to fathom the secrets of its power" (P.Cousineau). I absolutely believe that one might need to journey to a holy place on the other side of the planet to recover this renewal. And, sacred sites are also all around us, quietly remaining in the more wild edges of our frenetic lives, awaiting being noticed, remembered, attended. The pilgrimage process is one that can be engaged just as much at home as abroad and with just as much potential for transformation. It is the profound act of listening, which transforms the average elements of a place or even just your normal mid-week day, into a pilgrim's portal: a way of sensing and seeing that transmits the sacred to and through the greater community of things that surround us!

The way of the pilgrim is one of an inner-quiet, an inner ear attuned to the subtle sounds of the Spirit while on the sacred road.

Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

It comes down to this: Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. It is the emerging tension that results from the growing cracks of the shell of the status quo, which causes us to awaken to ourselves in the first place, that subsequently requires an exit, a departure from what we were taught within culture, society, and institutions. A threshold crossing emerges and forms with distinct clarity; here is a line we now know must be crossed, a line that reveals that there is more on the other side that will initiate a process of transformational becoming.

When we choose to respond to the Longing and the Call to leave the familiar behind in search of answers found in far-away places or even the more wilder edges of our lives, we are deploying our soul to interact and intervene with the surrounding environment-plants and people alike, the result of which is an energizing and heightened awareness of ourselves, of Others and the Spirit amidst it all. We are crossing into liminal lands, the territory of the inner-soul journey that demands an exterior embodiment of shifting sands of the inner soul-scape.

It comes down to this: Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

This kind of invited alertness requires us to depart, to leave and to walk (and walk away before we can walk back), to become intimate with the path upon which we tread, and others with whom we share it. The path that leads to the pilgrimage destination is critical for this process; for along this road, with no vehicular/insular walls to tune us out, we must tune in to the measured mode that invites contact, conversation and company. The structures we use to define who we are in ordinary life become irrelevant. Pilgrim space has no regard for class, race, or social/economic standing. There are no more random run-ins with strangers; there are no more lucky or misfortunate moments. 

In sacred travel when the pilgrim mood is awakened and engaged, every experience is potent and portends a deeper meaning; every contact attests to some greater plan. No encounter is without sacred significance. 

There are signs everywhere, if only we learn how to read them. Peculiar people turn into much-needed messengers.  The natural world speaks with candid revelation and simply profundity. This is a path transformed into grace; it is now a place where souls are nourished and renewed. With every step upon the pilgrim's path, that which has become cracked and undone begins to solvitur. Illumination and integration begin their great soul work. 

Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence

I facilitate pilgrimage journeys to Iona, Scotland and in the Pacific Northwest for individuals who respond to The Call to engage transformational travel as a means to recovering a sense of the sacred within themselves and the natural world.  Every retreat participant with whom I have worked has felt the deep uprooting that occurs when the call to go is upon them and are relieved and refreshed by this ancient practice and a profound place that demands action, questions and a quest for answers.

Iona provides all the trappings of a good pilgrimage: historical significance, a saintly presence, a continuous line of faithful heritage, and a requirement to travel there with intention.  Moreover, Iona is the historical birthplace of the Celtic Christian tradition and so by going here, I invite conversation and attentiveness to the numinous natural world that surrounds us, and of which we are fundamentally apart.  One of the key themes of this unique stream within the Christian faith is that nature is revelatory. 

The early Celtic church had a fundamental belief in the revelatory nature of the created world.  Every tree, blade of grass, and wild goose’s cry was imbued with the Spirit and spoke to the character of the Creator.  These “theophanies” –God showings—were expected and sought after as a way to understand the sacred mysteries.  The ninth century Irish teacher, John Scotus Eriugena believed that God was the ‘Life Force” within all things. 

“Therefore every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany” ”

— John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon-The Division of Nature, 749D

The entire created world upholds something of the essence of the Creator.  Eriugena also taught that there are two primary ways in which the sacred is revealed–the Bible and creation: “Through the letters of Scripture and the species of creature…” mysteries of God are revealed.

The particularities of a place subsequently became both a sacred messenger and a storied record of divine encounters.  Many important religious sites in Celtic lands are notable because of the presence of standing crosses.  These great, free-standing, three-dimensional or ‘high’ crosses often stood in replacement of even more ancient pillar stones that stood to testify and link heaven to earth.  This was a primal way of place-making.  By naming a place through the placement of stone, or more notably, through tale-saturated titles, the Celtic people affirmed how important the natural world was to their experience with the numinous.  Sacred legends associated with landscapes abound in Celtic country, and are often the narratives that bring people back to and into nature.  

The island of Iona is storied land, tilled with tales immortalizing meetings with angels, prayer practices, and marking the journeys of those who have come before.  Annie Dilland points out in “Teaching a Stone to Talk” that holy places have been disappearing rapidly since the Enlightenment, and our contemporary dislocatedness affirms this. “God used to rage at the Israelites for frequently sacred groves.  I wish I could find one…. Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy.”  However, Iona is sacred land and people make pilgrimage here to soak of these stories, hoping that something of this sacred soil will stick and have a profound impact on their personal lives.  And my hunch is that there are many more sacred sites all around us, even in our own urban neighborhoods, if only we would pay attention.  

The Celtic way of pilgrimage paid attention to place, understanding that God was revealed through the natural world and even through the hospitality of the stranger.  When we travel with a pilgrim’s pace, we embrace the perspective and values of the Divine.  Charles Foster holds that a journey will challenge you to engage critical aspects of the divine through:

“…life on the edges; indiscriminate and costly hospitality; solidarity with the marginalized (most of the nomad’s time is spent outside main centers and in the company of peripheral people); intimate relationships with humans and the environment; a new view at every step; and the loosest possible hold on possessions.”

This was a way of living, of moving, and of arriving to a place that required radical engagement.  It entreats the individual to live into communion with the seasons, the elements, the natural world and other humans.  The journey becomes the medium by which meaning is made and relationships are maintained. 

Pilgrimage demands we pay attention, sensing messages for our inner journey through the faces with whom we share the sidewalk, as well as the environment that surrounds us.  We awakening to the culture of a place when we pay attention to the potential of interactions with both the seen and unseen world.  And this is where I sense the profound gift Celtic spirituality and its propensity to journey have for our modern cities today.  This stream of spirituality both honors wandering and seeking out a new special place with the challenge to find renewal through an attachment to place.  This attachment to a place comes through knowing its stories and noticing its strangers as portals of profound meaning and connection.  However, this kind of noticing requires unplugging from our devices and engaging in our new places with our senses.  It means tapping into the collective memory of a place through our bodies.  The smells, sights and sounds of a place will reveal much about its stories—stories that induce knowledge and love of the land, the culture that co-habitates here, and the Creator who exists in and in between these places and its people.   

When one sees more of a place, (these are the bits and pieces: birds and benches, angles and alleys, weeds and woods) because of one’s experiential sense of it, it allows us to plunge into a posture of permanence because we are enabled to gauge the true significance of what we gaze upon. This kind of seeing is akin to what the early Christians meant when they spoke of theoria, that was a way of seeing into the heart of reality that sometimes revealed the very face of the divine. Or like what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he spoke of “inscape,” the luminous, utterly singular texture of a thing that emerges with blazing clarity when a person actually looks upon that thing with care and sensitivity. Pilgrimage requires all senses as it depends on our sensory selves to receive and transmit divine messages in the here and now. It is nigh impossible to have an I/Thou encounter based on particularity and receive its sacred import if podcasts and screens overwhelm our sensing selves. This capacity is often grown by practicing the pace and posture of pilgrimage so that when we return home we are able to “see into” all that is there and all that is yet missing.

Go. Deliberately.

“Since we are travelers and pilgrims in the world, let us ever ponder on the end of the road, that is our life, for the end of our roadway is our home.”

— St. Columba

There is a general unsettling that is upon people these days, an agitation that is exacerbated by the daily news of political and environmental climate change.  The traditional means and methods of creating and cultivating a spiritual practice that assuage this sense have gone stale. The weekly trek to church can be driven thoughtlessly as can the participation in the service’s rituals. It even seems, as the community that assembles for corporate worship are so compatible that carbon copies might seem a more appropriate categorization. 

Despite these long standing traditions, there is a need to go and seek wisdom beyond the pulpit and outside of the walls! Don’t vacillate as that will only result in inactivity and indecisiveness. Resolution and an intentional move to initiate the journey activates the sacred archetypes and commences the re-membering this pilgrimage is bound to produce. You do not need God’s presence when sitting on the couch undecided. 

Desperation for the divine ignites when you decide to go and commit to The Call.  This is when the enlivening veriditas energy begins to flow in and through you, and synchronicities start and happen all around you.

Each of us has a unique and particular soul, yet the Western world teaches us to feed and nurture this inner-life by the most conventional and traditional of means.  Pilgrimage, while as ancient as our bipedal designed bodies, is now seen as an unconventional expression in our culture. However, if we are going to give the soul the feeding it needs, we are going to need to go against the grain and go to where are souls are freed to search for, and re-discover the divine. This path of development and discovery ultimately is soul attunement, which integrates authentic expressions of our unique gifts and talents on behalf of a greater and common good as the result. 

The response to The Call, which requires a threshold crossing, a leaving of sorts, is an action that leads to transformation, most often fulfillment and freedom, an alignment of our individual soul with the Divine Soul and communion with all of creation. What might have started as a soft whispered call has now become a heart-throbbing desire to go and find the animus mundi--the Soul of the world! Pursue the wild place that makes your heart skip both with doubt and desire for here is where you will find your Answer covered in salty barnacles and cracked-leathered edges and God within the windswept moors and tangled trees.

Pilgrimage Awakens the Soul

“Isn’t it time that your drifting was consecrated into pilgrimage?  You have a mission.  You are needed.  The road that leads to nowhere has to be abandoned…. It is a road for joyful pilgrims intent on the recovery of passion. ”

— Alan Jones

Pilgrimage. What is it about this word that causes one’s emotions to stand on guard-both compelled and curiously cautious at the same time? Indeed, it is a loaded word, packed with ages of political and parochial themes. Even with the historical entrapping of this concept, there is a much more ancient restlessness that is deep within our collective consciousness to be on the move and to engage questions and the Answer in the rites of passage process. Movement and travel is fundamental to the human experience. A general arc from hunter/gatherer societies to today’s human populations underscores that there is an inherent desire to move. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew God is often portrayed as a traveler showing up to deliver divine guidance. The journey upon which the traveler embarks subsequently becomes sacred as well.  This holy hegira underlays the constant travels and wanderings of many ancient Celtic Christians.  Restlessness was in their blood as was the notion that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  This lens of hope presented a perspective that the road was a rite; that the path provided prescient knowledge and insight to their journey towards divine revelation. 

This is the stuff of rites and rituals. This is about growing to the edge of life as we know it and discovering that there is a world beyond that wild hedgerow that is drawing us into its feathers, fronds, and fur. Getting up and moving to the parameters of our life, to the absolute edges, is where we re-engage our senses and re-awaken our souls to our sacred meant-for-ness. 

I believe that what agitates people when they first engage the concept of pilgrimage is that it literally unsettles them. The domesticity that ties us down to the perceptions of our lives begins to untie and unravel as this seeker-path begins its work of instigating a longing and a calling to go beyond, to move through, to expand and re-discover the divine in this asperous, ancient process that involves an epic, wild exchange with the natural world. When you first hear of pilgrimage, whether it is the perspective or a place, it is as if something gets lodged within the soul like an irksome stone or that sense of evasive knowing of a lost thing that you just can’t quite remember…that sense stays with a now restless-you, and will call to you your entire life until The Longing and The Call has been courageously met and engaged with a knapsack in hand and boots on the feet, knowing that the road is a rite, the thing that will bring us to an authentic center and sense of the sacred.

Homescape Seek & Find: Discovering JOY in Our Wild Edges

“Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

Socrates infamously argued that in order to be wise, one must know oneself.   John Calvin underscored the absolute necessity of accurate self-knowledge to knowing God when he wrote: “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”  Calvin argued that one could not truly know God without knowing oneself and that one couldn’t truly know oneself without knowing God. 

This seemingly mysterious cycle appears to lack and entry point.  There appears to be a missing foundational element to this work of gaining self-understanding and Divine-knowing.  I believe that through cultivating a sacred relationship with the natural world, we cultivate an in-road into the mutually informing cycle of Self/God knowledge that dismantles its inherent anthropocentric, ego-centricity, and demands a more eco-centric approach that broadens our understanding of our selves and the Sacred to include the soil and stars. 

In seeking restorative relationship with the natural and other-than-human world, we create capacity for deeper understanding of both the self and the Sacred.  It becomes a third way into the wisdom cycle that doesn’t conflate and confuse the sought after entities, but rather informs them both in an organic and connected way.

Finding the seasonal color within the natural world begins to awaken the senses and is a fun activity for children! Here Mary’s daughter Anna finds and picks American Beauty Berry (Callicarpa Americana) for their November Monthly Mandala. 

I am in a forest phase of my life, where soul growth is related to both deep rootedness and profound interconnection. When we enter a forest phase in our lives we enter a period of rooting and a time of potential soul growth. Here it is possible to find what we have been cut off from, to remember once vital aspects of ourselves that required an interdependence with the natural world. We may uncover a wellspring of creativity and Sacred connection that has been hidden for some time underneath the trappings of a busy and overly domesticated life. In this time of recovering my more wild self, my understanding of who I am is expanding to use an ecological lens to discern meaning through interconnected relationships and a deeply presenced place. I find that what is driving my soul growth and understanding of holy mysteries are the questions: How do we be “of a place” once more?  How do we become apart of the ecology of a place and of the planet?  The answers to these questions come through a growing attunement to the rhythmic seasons of the natural world, and the phases of the wonder-filled sky, which ultimately invite me into insight and knowledge of myself and how I experience God.  

     Irish theologian and philosopher John Scotus Eriugena understood that Christ was revealed through two forms of revelation: scripture and the natural world. He believed that “Christ wears "two shoes" in the world: scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.” I want to establish rhythms and personal practices that honor and cultivate richer connections with the interrelated biological and cosmic systems that have meaningfully existed for billions of years as a way to root my sense of self and the Sacred in the very real soil of my daily existence.

I want to learn from the sacred scripture of creation.  

         I have started doing monthly nature mandalas as a spiritual practice, as a way of developing a framework for exercising my senses to awaken to the Sacred wisdom that resides within nature. Theophanies, or God-showings-are synchronistic signs that reveal significance and meaning, as well as reveal something of the character of God. By going outside to co-create a nature mandala, I have sought to develop the capacity to receive Divine symbols and experience the mysterious presence of God within the natural world. This practice, while relatively easy, has become a way that I attune to who else is residing and growing in my garden. As I slowly walk around my house and neighborhood, I begin to see anew with gratitude the vast biodiversity with whom I live. 

Naming and Knowing: Words Sharpen Sight

Searching for and discovering seasonal plants, herbs, and fruits is a true visual delight! Once the natural items have been assembled, the creative mandala practice can begin. 

This is a practice of remembering, remembering and reacquainting with the presence and names of the plant-life within one’s homescape.[1] This is a time when the seasons’ reveal who shows up and who has been there all along but whose shape has shifted as the months turn. This is an invitation to transform a stranger into a Thou by the practice of learning and saying their name. This is a process of knowing so that respect and love can emerge and transform how we live upon the land, for it has been said that one cannot love what one does not know.

Beyond the beauty and gratitude that emerges from the creation of a nature mandala, there are deep truths, profound invitations, and mythopoetic metaphor that reside within the design as well. To discover these aspects, it is well worth the time to discover the names and characteristics of those with whom we share our landscapes—you may find you reconnect with neighbors in the process! When I was collecting plants for my November mandala, I could see the orange orbs of my neighbor’s persimmons above the tall fence across from my home. Sadly, this fence has created a sense of disconnection between our families. However, my desire for one of those persimmons for my mandala was strong enough that I quickly devised a plan that would hopefully find this fruit not only in my basket but also strengthen neighborly relationships. I went to my cupboard for a quart of raspberry lavender preserves, put up this summer from our yard’s bounty. My daughter and I crossed the street, basket and jar in hand, and unlatched our neighbor’s gate. In response to our knock on the door, our Cambodian neighbor Bhun answered, accepted our jar of jam in exchange for some of his persimmon fruit! Despite our language barrier, the joy of sharing the fruit of our land as neighbors was mutual.

We cleared a circle within our Paper birch leaves (Betula papyrifera) to create the foundation for our mandala. My practice is to build the mandala around the four cardinal directions, which also correspond to the four seasons, and build into the design elements of twelve, which correspond to the twelve months of the year. 

This ritual act has reminded me that there is an inherent respect and reciprocity that is demanded with the taking as well. We all know the story of Repunzel’s father who called forth a curse when caught taking too much and without asking. As we collect our items for our monthly mandala, it is critical to do so with a spirit of grateful exchange, being careful to not take too much or take carelessly. And then there is the question of what can be given in exchange for the berry, leaf, or twig being taken? In many ways the mandala itself is a temporary gift to the natural world. And maybe this posture of mutuality invites action based commitments to more deeply care and come alongside the natural world in solidarity. 

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The accompanying practice of naming the natural elements that form the mandala exercise the sense of seeing. You will find that once your mandala is complete, you will begin seeing the selected plants all around you! This is the beginning of a vital and fun interrelationship with creation; there is so much to learn from the natural world when we allow it to be our teacher!

My November mandala was created with the following plants, trees, and fruit found within my homescape, all of whom have much to offer by way of food, medicine, or cross-cultural understanding. 

·      Nootka Rose or Wood's Rose hips (Rosa woodsii nuts):  did you know rose hips are very high in vitamin C and are delicious when made into a jelly or used with the leaves as an herbal tea. Rose hips are also lovely dried as a winter holiday garland. 

·       Japanese Painted fern (Athyrium niponicum): this is a shade-loving plant that looks as if it has been gingerly painted by a fairy's hand in silver, blue and maroon. 

·      Lady fern (Athyrium filix-femina): in the wild, Lady fern loves moist woods. Our back yard blends into a wild woodland where we have Lady Fern surrounding our fire pit.

·      Pacific western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla): a favorite native evergreen tree, we have planted hundreds of hemlocks in our neighborhood woods. Hemlock's small egg-shaped cones are a favorite with the children.

·      Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis): Ancient English lore told one to place a rosemary sprig in the pocket of an errant lover to remind them of their vows. Studies have shown that indeed rosemary increases memory and improves test scores significantly. That this herb will remind us of where we have been unfaithful to our kinship with the earth. 

·      Common Sage (Salvia): This summer I was drawn to Sage like never before, much because of my research of Hildegard of Bingen (read more here!). This entheogenic plant is used in traditional folkloric medicine to wean infants. At the time, this use was completely unknown to me...and yet, as I was in that season with my youngest, my body knew what it needed from the garden!.

·      American beauty berry (Callicarpa americana): This beauty sits near our front door, inviting birds to come dine off its edible berries. We can enjoy these berries too! Indigenous tribes used root and leaf tea in sweat baths for rheumatism, fevers, and malaria. Root tea used for dysentery, stomach aches. 

·      Purple smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria): Purple smoke bush is quite drought tolerant, which means that as our region is experiencing the effects of climate change, this species is useful in xeriscaping, which is a landscaping method developed especially for arid and semiarid climates that utilizes water-conserving techniques, such as the use of drought-tolerant plants, mulch, and efficient irrigation. Our micro-climate yard sees moist woodland habitat in our back yard, but our front yard is like a different zone entirely in the summer so we must mind what we plant so to honor our water supply. 

·      Japanese Persimmon (Diospyros kaki): While I don't know the exact cultivar, what I know is that this glowing orb lights up our winter street-scape and that ultimately the desire for this fruit brought me in contact and relationship with a neighbor who I do not know very well. There is a great wisdom in the act of sharing of our harvest; when we do, we share what sustains ourselves. 

·      Witch Hazel (Hamamelis): With blooms of honey yellow that bloom throughout the winter, Witch Hazel's bark, leaves, and twigs can be used to distill an astringent that is calming to enflamed skin. 

·      Wood sorel (Oxalis): We have planted oxalis in our back yard as the children enjoy snacking on this forgeable native plant. You can prepare wood sorrel by picking off the leaves, flowers and seed pods. Some of the whispy leaf stems are delicate enough to use but tough stems should be discarded. Wood sorrel should be used fresh. In addition to making a great seasoning and salad ingredient, it's also good as a tea. To make wood sorrel tea, pour boiling water over the leaves and flowers and let steep for half an hour or so. Wood sorrel pairs well with fish and sauteed onions. 

·      Red and Yellow twigged dogwood (Cornus alba): In winter, the bright yellow and red twigs of this shrub flame out in our yard. Twig trimmings are great for crafts and weaving.

·      Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea): Lingonberry is planted in our yard to honor my Swedish heritage. I remember my Aunt Laura making meatballs and serving them with a mouth-watering tart lingonberry jam. When I studied in Sweden for a year, a favorite snack was knickabread slathered in lingonberry jam. Before the use of refined sugar became common in Sweden, lingonberry jam was prepared with lingonberries as the only ingredient. 

Disclaimer: The brief mention about the uses of plants and other resources does not provide enough information to begin using them for those purposes. Please research further and consult with an expert before harvesting, preparing and using any of these resources for personal use. 

[1] I define homescape as the natural landscape that makes up one’s home—yard, neighborhood, even local parks and open spaces. These are critical natural areas that create habitat for a whole community of life with whom we interact. Learning about our homescapes invites us into more intentional knowledge and understanding of those with whom we share life and resources.

Rewilding & Journeying with Nature: A Conversation with Pilgrim Podcast

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with friend and fellow-guide, Lacy Clark Ellman, host of Pilgrim Podcast about our shared appreciation for seeing life through a pilgrim's lens and how the natural world avails itself to us as a sacred guide as we make our journey. In our conversation I share my thoughts around rewilding as a spiritual practice and a process of remembering our meant for interconnectedness with all of creation. If you are curious about the Rewilding Retreats I facilitate, I invite you to take a seat! Pour yourself a cup of tea and listen in for an hour. There is a sacred voice on the ancient side of remembrance that awaits you and is calling you forward toward the wild edges of your life!

>>LISTEN HERE!<<

A HOLY HIGH: How Hildegard Found Her Inspiration Grounded in the Garden

“I propose that Hildegard’s intimate relationship with the natural world was a conduit for sacred revelations and that this relationship provided the very essence from which her ecstasies were shaped and formed.”

— Mary DeJong

This essay was forged and formed in the garden. As I have read Hildegard of Bingen's writings over the last couple years, her wisdom has transformed how I understand the plant-life that surrounds me. There is an invitation to deep interrelationship through the soil that ultimately draws us closer to the Sacred Source. Thank you to the editors at The Other Journal who have worked so kindly and diligently with me to give this essay its powerful prose!

Read the full essay at The Other Journal HERE

The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence

The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place Through permanence 

I am thrilled to be preparing to deliver a paper at William & Mary College next week at their annual symposia on Pilgrimage Studies. In many aspects, this opportunity feels very much like a pilgrimage journey in and of itself. A couple years ago I received an invitation to submit a proposal for this particular academic gathering, which very much felt like the call, the requisite summons of any meaningful pilgrimage. However, life circumstances prevented the manifestation of that opportunity until now. And so I have the opportunity to seek the wisdom gained these past couple years as I have journeyed through the descent, the time of darkness and disintegration that occurs when a journey is truly leaving its indelible mark on you, and prepare for my arrival. 

In this setting my claim will be my belief that the act of pilgrimage is a practice of profound place-making. Using Uri Shulevitz's children's book, The Treasure as my primary text, I argue that pilgrimage doesn't set our longing heart in the direction of far-off sacred spaces to find resurrection within a celestial kingdom; rather, it roots us even deeper into our homescapes as the return requires creating meaningful places for the community to connect. While the journey is indeed important to return to a posture of collective provision within one's community, it is critical to note that that within this story (and very much like in our own lives), the protagonist Isaac could not have even made the journey without a deep knowledge of, and connection to, his place. Because he knows where he is, he is able to get to where he needs to go, and ultimately, to return.

We too must know our local landscapes well enough so that when it is time fulfill the call of a dream, we know how to navigate the land and engage with strangers in such a way as to not get lost. Engaging in regular practices of listening in place, where you unplug from your device and hear (really hear), and see (really see) the people and places that surround you and create the fabric of your home-land provides the most elemental conditions for co-creating places that provide for deep and meaningful community connection. For these are the very places and people who will receive the boon of your journey, the great gift that is given in exchange for the courage to respond to the call. Your community will receive the gift of your permanence.

If you do not have this book in your library, I encourage you to get yourself a copy. It is simple, delightful, and profound. And I hope your own copy of The Treasure, along with the following abstract for my paper, will inspire how your journeys will ultimately root you deeper into your neighborhoods.

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Abstract: The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence

While the practice of pilgrimage is undergoing a resurgence, church authorities haven’t always been enthusiastic.Critics, like Jerome, thought it ludicrous that prayers offered in one place could be more effective than prayers offered elsewhere: “Nothing is lacking to your faith though you have not seen Jerusalem.”However, what if in the very leaving of our houses to engage the Divine, we actually return back to it not only more connected to our Sacred Source, but also more invested in our place on this planet through a commitment to faithful permanence?

Uri Shulevitz’s Caldecott Honor awarded book, The Treasure (1978) provides the archetypal stages of pilgrimage in a condensed child-friendly, but enormously profound, way.However, what makes this story unique, and its great gift to us as readers and practicers of pilgrimage, is the invitation to see that the true treasure for which we are seeking on pilgrimage is always back at home, in both a literal and metaphorical sense.Isaac, Shulevitz’s primary character discovers that the treasure about which he has dreamt, and for which he has searched, resides in the essence of his home: underneath his hearth-place.This finding compels him to invest further in his community through sharing his treasure with others near and far. 

By looking at the ancient practice of pilgrimage through the lens of The Treasure, we can gain new insight on how this practice actually encourages one to become more rooted and connected to personal home-scapes: the neighborhood, local communities, and regional ecosystems.Patterns of narcissistic consumption of places and relationships have resulted in transitory lifestyles.Impermanence—a result of the provisional value of things accorded by the evanescence of social media—is valued over the tenacity required to remain. Isaac embodies the sort of rootedness, which is an outcome of the journey, that can effectively transform an ambiguous and meaningless space into one of deep meaning and wisdom.

The difference between a space and a place is the difference between a house and a home.Isaac leaves his house seeking; he returns to find his treasure has always been there and testifies to that wisdom by building a place of public worship; a place of deep and significant meaning that invites others in his community to be welcomed, to return, and to tell others about the wisdom encountered there.This is a true place, a home created and maintained by the initial dream to journey away-from.

In Isaac’s initial poverty, one can find themes of how impoverished the Western world is in our normative independence and isolation.Soul-less technology, especially screens and social media, further this distance from ourselves and one another.Through the journeying out to the places that call to us from our deepest dreams and psyches, connection with others is found.This connection and sharing of dreams is what can spur the return back to whence we came, rediscover meaning, and re-engage in practices that powerfully connect people to one another and their place.

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The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence

Uri Shulevitz’s Caldecott Honor awarded book, The Treasure (1978) provides the archetypal stages of pilgrimage in a condensed child-friendly, but enormously profound, way.  However, what makes this story unique, and its great gift to us as readers and practitioners of pilgrimage, is the invitation to see that the true treasure for which we are seeking on pilgrimage is always back at home, in both a literal and metaphorical sense.  Isaac, Shulevitz’s primary character discovers that the treasure about which he has dreamt, and for which he has searched, resides in the essence of his home: underneath his hearth-place.  This finding compels him to invest further in his community through sharing his treasure with others near and far through the practice of profound place-making, which requires a commitment to permanence.  I invite you into this story, which will also be looked at through the lens of Celtic Christian pilgrimage and place-making, of which I am familiar and practiced.

I believe that the pilgrimage journey, especially when engaged as a daily practice, can foster a connection to our physical places in an age when place is secondary to the modern nomadic pace.

This is the story of Isaac, a poor man who goes to bed every night lonesome and with hunger pains. However, while his belly is empty, his dream life is full. He repeatedly has a dream where a voice tells him to travel to the capital city to discover a treasure under the bridge near the Royal Palace.  The journey that commences requires a deep knowledge of his local landscape, an abiding trust in fellow humanity, and ultimately a sense of communal imagination that relies on both the dream and what is needed to deepen one’s experience of home.

place-making can be understood as a form of contemplative practice in that it can be the result of the integrative themes fastened to a pilgrimage journey: geography, stranger, and imagination. 

In an age of chronic and widespread displacement, the work of place-making—the discovery and cultivation of a sense of place—has gained new significance and meaning.  I propose that ultimately place-making can be understood as a form of contemplative practice in that it can be the result of the integrative themes fastened to a pilgrimage journey: geography, stranger, and imagination.  The deep knowledge and engagement of these three categories invites one to live more fully into their homescapes, more integrated within local communities, and ultimately, participate in providing transformative and flourishing aspects to local life.

Isaac’s journey to the city can tell us about the significance of place within the contemplative practice of pilgrimage. A journey through various topographies and encounters with others are requisite to understanding the call upon his life. It is here within the capital city gates, encountering a stranger at the site where his dreams told him to go, that everything is made clear for Isaac. This illumination and clarity was without question a profound experience of place. I would also call it an experience of homecoming, a sense of having arrived home within one’s self after a significant effort and journey searching for it. 

What is place-making and how does it shape a framework for pilgrimage and result in a sense of permanence? Anthropologist Keith Basso, who has worked on mapping the place-names of the Western Apache people near Cibeque, Arizona, for over thirty years, describes place-making as a “retrospective world-building,” a form of cultural activity that is a “ universal tool of the historical imagination.” In the Western Apache world, places and place-names are dense with meaning, holding and embodying the entire history of the people. To say the name of a place, to tell a story about a place is to waken a memory, conjure up everything that ever happened there, and make it present again to the community. This is more than mere reminiscence; remembering what happened in a given place becomes woven into the personal and collective identity of the people. “What people make of their places,” Basso suggests, “is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth…. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine.”[1]

Isaac’s experience can help us grapple with the growing concerns about the significance of place, considering in particular the widespread sense of displacement or disconnection that has come to characterize the contemporary urban experience within the Western world.

Movement and travel is fundamental to the human experience.  A general arc from hunter/gatherer societies to today’s human populations underscores that there is an inherent desire to move.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew God is often portrayed as a traveler showing up to deliver divine guidance.[2]  The journey upon which the traveler embarks subsequently becomes sacred as well.  This holy hegira underlays the constant travels and wanderings of many ancient Celtic Christians as well.  Restlessness was in their blood as was the notion that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.[3]  This lens of hope presented a perspective that the road was a rite; that the path provided prescient knowledge and insight to their journey towards divine revelation.  Isaac’s departure relied on the land as a liturgy, a sacred script that would prove his dream’s call. He is able to move through this wild landscape because it is known, much like the details of a familiar story.

The particularities of a place become both a sacred messenger and a storied record of divine encounters.  Like the sacred lands of the Western Apache, religious sites in Celtic lands are known by meaningful name and also by the presence of standing crosses, communal land-markers of ancient stories of significance.  This was a primal way of place-making.  By naming a place through the placement of stone, or more notably, through tale-saturated titles, the Celtic people affirmed how important the natural world was to their experience with the numinous.  Sacred legends associated with landscapes abound in Celtic country, and are often the narratives that bring people back to and into nature. 

The geographies of Isaac’s surrounding home-scape shaped him. From the dust of the village paths to the surrounding forests and mountains, he lived in such a way that the interweaving of these ground-scapes became spiritual directors, forming in him a sacred imagination for what was needed in his community.

Writing about the power of the imagination in an essay on the civil war, Wendell Berry emphasizes that “the particularizing force of imagination is a force of justice…Imagination, amply living in a place, brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same…If imagination is to have a real worth, to us, it needs to have a practical, economic effect. It needs to establish us in our places with a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves. I think the highest earthly result of imagination is local adaptation.”

Isaac has the imagination to create something that would practically deepen the experience of other’s living within his community because he has lived there a long time. He has listened, and responded to the silence of what wasn’t there. His deep knowledge and relationship with the surrounding forests and mountains is beyond basic map-knowledge, these are places with which he is so familiar that he can navigate known routes from his village, to the city, and back again with a felt sense, and a confidence in his greater community that the accepted rides from a stranger are welcomed gifts from the guidance that is manifesting his dream. He isn’t lost in his landscape; he is home within it and this connection is one hard to come by when one’s primary senses are attuned to technological devices that prevent one from really seeing and really hearing from the geography that surrounds one’s lodging. For it can only truly be just that, an anywhere-space where one simply resides, a shallow rootedness that can easily be transplanted since the surrounding storied geography was never tapped, never learned, never adapted and assimilated, never penetrating the person behind the screen who somehow still manages to walk upon a sidewalk.

Isaac shows us what is an “experiential place sense,” the imaginative, affective response to a place that allows it to become significant for a person or community. When one sees more of a place, (these are the bits and pieces: birds and benches, angles and alleys, weeds and woods) because of one’s experiential sense of it, it allows us to plunge into a posture of permanence because we are enabled to gauge the true significance of what we gaze upon. This kind of seeing is akin to what the early Christians meant when they spoke of theoria, that was a way of seeing into the heart of reality that sometimes revealed the very face of the divine. Or like what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he spoke of “inscape,” the luminous, utterly singular texture of a thing that emerges with blazing clarity when a person actually looks upon that thing with care and sensitivity.

Pilgrimage requires all senses as it depends on our sensory selves to receive and transmit divine messages in the here and now. It is nigh impossible to have an I/Thou encounter based on particularity and receive its sacred import if podcasts and screens overwhelm our sensing selves.

This capacity is often grown by practicing the pace and posture of pilgrimage so that when we return home we are able to “see into” all that is there and all that is yet missing.

The Celtic way of pilgrimage paid attention to place, understanding that the sacred was revealed through the natural world and even through the hospitality of the stranger.  When we travel with a pilgrim’s pace, we embrace the perspective and values of the divine.  Charles Foster holds that a journey will challenge you to engage critical aspects of the divine through:

“…life on the edges; indiscriminate and costly hospitality; solidarity with the marginalized (most of the nomad’s time is spent outside main centers and in the company of peripheral people); intimate relationships with humans and the environment; a new view at every step; and the loosest possible hold on possessions.”[4]

This was a way of living, of moving, and of arriving to a place that required radical engagement.  It entreats the individual to live into communion with the seasons, the elements, the natural world and other humans.  The journey becomes the medium by which meaning is made and relationships are maintained.  While participants of a pilgrimage often intend to go at it alone, studies have repeatedly noted the importance of social interactions along the journey. Isaac’s acceptance of offered rides by strangers while en route to the city speaks to how we co-create meaning and movement together with others. Pilgrimage demands we pay attention, sensing messages for our inner journey through the faces with whom we share the sidewalk, as well as the environment that surrounds us. 

We awaken to the culture of a place when we pay attention to the potential of interactions with both the seen and unseen world. 

This kind of noticing requires unplugging from our devices and engaging in our places with our senses.  It means tapping into the collective memory of a place through our bodies.  The smells, sights and sounds of a place will reveal much about its stories—stories that induce knowledge and love of the land, the culture that co-habitates there, and the Creator who exists in and in between these places and its people.  

Dreams are holy and contain sacred power as they project the location or echoing dimensions of a pilgrimage site—they can be portals of deeper connection to ourselves, our community, and the divine. Isaac’s dream repeatedly visited him, placing upon him a call to make a connection between his deepest desire, his geography, and the resulting imagination to create something on behalf of the common good.  What makes Isaac’s particular experience unique and profound, is that while his dream, his call, demanded an answer of going, he did not travel to a distant center of worship.

The trajectory of his transformational travel didn’t lead him to a shrine, temple, or sacred grove; rather, it led him out to the city, to a particular bridge, to be laughed at by the captain of the guards: “You poor fellow,” he said, “what a pity you wore your shoes out for a dream! Listen, if I believed a dream I once had, I would go right now to the city you came from, and I’d look for a treasure under the stone in the house of a fellow named Isaac.” Isaac turns and retraces his steps back home, accepting kind offers from strangers, walking through forests and back over mountains. Ultimately, the treasure is found within Isaac’s home, a metaphor for the divine that is deepest within each of us.

To uncover this sacred treasure has the potential to transform our neighborhoods and communities as the boon isn’t meant to fund or create more self-serving interests or even create more global thinking.

The recovered treasure co-creates places that deepen community connection to place, one another, and the opportunity to experience awe and wonder locally.

Isaac’s pilgrimage journey awakens in him an imagination for something more, a storied aspect of his community that would be on behalf of the common good, something that would create connection, and provide a place to experience awe and wonder, critical aspects of a happy and whole human life. This imagination is tinged with gratitude, an essential quality that will ensure that one’s imagination doesn’t serve the ego, but rather, the eco—the whole house, the whole ecology of a place, the inscape—the inside knowledge of the interrelated dynamics for living together.  If we are all to live together well in our places, we must create and know the stories of our interrelatedness.

With the treasure that is the result of his journey, he taps into the wisdom that has sat underneath his hearth, the heart of his home, waiting to be found, recognized, and its power used to imagine and create a place that would help to shape the identity of those who inhabited Isaac’s neighborhood.

A true pilgrimage practice becomes a way of being in the world, ultimately one that is insatiably curious for connection to the divine through others and the natural world.  This sort of pace is also slow growing, like the rootedness of a tree.  Our journey towards revelation and meaning should lead us to plant roots, roots that connect to our local ecologies and transform our neighborhood economies.  In this way, pilgrimage becomes a practice of creating a deep and abiding sense of home. 

Bringing back the boon of a pilgrimage is a requisite final stage of the journey. The Return demands a communal impact for the whole experience to be fully realized as a transformative event. Isaac’s treasure doesn’t spur him towards a rootless and fancy-free lifestyle. He invests what he has found as a result of his searching into his community, imagining and creating a culture of place and collective belonging, which produces deep roots and a sense of permanence.

With the security gained through Isaac’s found treasure, he sends a portion off to his sacred guide (the Captain of the Guards—-see the recurring theme? gratitude) and then he creates.  This act of imagination is a doubling down—a commitment to his homescape through the creation of something that didn’t before exist. He has listened deeply to his landscape and strangers and heard the silence of what is not there—an act that is not possible through impermanence and light, non-localized living.

Isaac builds a house of prayer, and presumably based on its size and amount of seating, this is not a private altar. This is a place for his neighbors to gather, to come together, to experience in community wonder, wisdomawe, gratitude, thanksgiving. This is a place that will profoundly impact the collective memory of what it means to live in this village. The wisdom gained through Isaac’s journey now marks the character of this place, and is memorialized with an inscription: “Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near.” 

Like the Celtic standing stones, this house of prayer becomes a marker, a sacred story of the wisdom found there. Like the Apache, the people’s prayers that are offered here will soak into the soil, creating memories in this place, providing a depth that demands staying, knowing, and being together.

In Isaac’s initial poverty, one can find themes of how impoverished the Western world is in our normative independence and isolation.  Through the journeying out to the places that call to us from our deepest dreams and psyches, connection with others is found.  This connection and sharing of dreams is what can spur the return back to whence we came, rediscover meaning, and re-engage in imaginative practices that powerfully connect people to one another and their place.

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Reflection

How are you practicing presence and permanence in your neighborhood?

Do you know the names of landmarks and landscapes in your community?

Test this knowledge without the use of map-skills (no Google maps either!). What names do you know? Do you know their sacred stories?

Learn the ancient, indigenous names of places in your region, and the stories that accompany these names. 

Practice your own place-naming based on the memories you have co-created in your community. 

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            [1]  Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 5, 7.  

            [2]  Genesis 12:1, 4; Exodus 34:23 for examples of Hebrew bible text where God proclaims the Hebrew people a pilgrimage people.

            [3]  Ian Bradley, The Celtic Way (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 2003), 80.

            [4]  Charles Foster, The Sacred Journey (Nashville, NT: Thomas Nelson, 2010), xiv. 

Rewilding Prayer: How Caim Invites Protection for All of Creation

Rewilding Prayer Caim

This week my youngest son started pre-school. And while his mornings will be spent within woodland walls and upon forest floors at a nature preschool, both he and and I were experiencing a deep anxiety around this fundamental shift in our daily rhythm together. I awoke early on his first day of school for a time of meditation and prayer practice on our behalf and for personal preparation.

My spiritual practices come from the Celtic tradition. The Scottish Highlands are in my blood through my maternal line and I grew up with a father who worshipped in the many steepled sanctuary of the mountains. Seeing the natural world as sacred, a fundamental feature of Celtic spirituality, is written into my DNA; it is a cellular response for me to see the numinous within nature. So on this particular threshold morning, I began with an embodied, ritualized form of prayer, the Celtic circling prayer.

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Circling prayers, also known as Caim prayers (from the Irish gaelic meaning ‘protection’), are used to create a ring of safety around one's self and their beloveds. It is a way to pray within the physical dimension as it requires the body to actively participate in the supplications of the heart. When one participates with and prays a Caim, the invocation begins with an arm extended outwards, pointer finger set towards the ground tracing the shape of a circle. This intentional act creates a sacred sphere, a space within which the pray-er invokes the protection of the divine. When I pray a Caim, I extend these boundaries beyond my personal reach to include my whole house, my neighborhood, the community in which I live, and the world at large. I encircle a space much larger than myself as a way to include the vast and diverse community of life of which we are fundamentally a part.

By extending the Caim protection beyond my person to include the plants, trees, birds, and other wild-life, I am doing something different than invoking a defense against that which is forbidden, dangerous, or out of control; instead, I am inviting that wild world in, bringing the more-than-human community of life into revered relationship and attunement. I am inviting a way of seeing the wild as wonderous, and in the most ancient of meanings, seeing myself within its ward. Encircling prayers that cast the boundaries beyond our domesticated borders initiate a way of moving through the day that is expectant of mystery and magic as the whole of creation is considered to be within the Caim circle. In this way, Caim becomes an eco-centric way of praying.

And so I prayed a Caim the morning of my son's first day of school, which would be situated on the wild edges of an urban parkland. I chose a prayer befitting the day, knowing where my son would be. This prayer of blessing is one of the earliest known Caim prayers that is attributed to St. Columba, founder of the Iona Abbey:

"Bless to me the sky that is above me, Bless to me the ground that is beneath me, Bless to me the friends--furry, feathered, or fronded--who are around me, Bless to me the love of the Three Deep within me and encircling me and the greater community of life. Amen."

(emphasis my own personal eco-centric addition)

I said these words as I circled, intentionally creating an expectation for the sacred wild to be within our midst this day.

Here is where this day's prayer practice became quite extraordinary. We are fortunate to be able to walk to this sweet outdoor school, but every step away from home towards this new experience was causing my son anxiety and tears. Our route leads us through a wondrous three city-block sidewalk that has mature chestnut and maple trees planted on either side of the path that creates a wooded passage; we have since named it the Tree Tunnel. While walking along this way, a squirrel appeared before us on the sidewalk. While that is not uncommon, we did expect the normal behavior of it scampering up a tree as we drew closer. However, this squirrel did not. Instead, it carefully and slowly approached myself and Cannon who was seated in his stroller. With a steady gaze directed at Cannon, the squirrel continued straight up to him and gently put his paw upon my son's foot. The silence that surrounded these two beings was sacred, a holy moment marked by their communion. This is interbeing, what Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks about as that recognition of the connectedness of all life, a way of being that must be reclaimed and protected now more than ever. This is Caim.

After a full minute's pause, the squirrel scampered away, and Cannon turned to me with a rapturous face, exclaiming his empowered readiness to go on to school where the squirrel would be to watch over him, protecting him until my return.

Every day thereafter this week, that squirrel has been awaiting Cannon in the Tree Tunnel and the same ritual ensues. Squirrel appears before Cannon and as we slow to a stop, it approaches him and places his paw upon his leg. Cannon quietly receives this blessing from the wild, a lesson he is too young to have yet unlearned. He inherently knows that nature is not something from which we need protection against, but a relationship in which to be cherished and engaged, a relationship that is within our sacred circle.

Rewilding Practice

Find a place outside where you can practice in the embodied form of the Caim. Back yards, front gardens, public parks, and even sidewalks will do!

Center yourself by taking several deep breaths, tuning in to the sounds of the natural world all around you. You will likely hear human-made sounds too. Don't ignore the anthrophony. Instead, receive these sounds as an invitation to include them in your Caim too.

When you feel ready, position your body facing north. Breath deeply and feel the air within and around you. Stretch out your arm in front of you with your pointer finger extended and pointed to draw a metaphorical, expansive circle that includes the natural world. Slowly turn your body in a clock-wise rotation--going from the cardinal direction north, to east, to south, to west and back again to facing north while saying this simple encircling prayer, adapted to include the greater community of things with whom we live:

• North, “Circle us Spirit, Keep protection near, And danger afar.”
• East, “Circle us Spirit, Keep light near, And darkness afar.”
• South, “Circle us Spirit, Keep peace within, Keep evil out.”
• West, “Circle us Spirit, Keep hope within, Keep doubt without.”
• Back at the North can finish your prayers with: May you be a bright flame before us, May you be a guiding star above us, May you be a smooth path below us, And a loving Guide behind us, Today, tonight, and forever.

Amen.

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Trials and Trails that Wound: How We Learn from the Dragon

We are coming into the season of Michaelmas, the ancient festival time of St. Michael who is connected to myths and lore around harvest abundance and more prominently, dragons. St. Michael is an archetypal representation of our inner light and courage that is called forth when scarcity is nigh. This scarcity and its corresponding fear is our dragon, one that we all must meet.

Since the birth of my fourth child, Cannon, and the years in his wake I have found I'm asking how I befriend the dragon--the one that lives in the dark woods of our innermost journey, the one that can claw and snatch. It feels that within the realm of the feminine, there is an invitation that goes beyond conquering to that of kinship. I spoke about this idea at my graduation ceremony, very much having this archetypal myth in mind.

Yes, dragons and the dark woods within which they live, can scar us. But instead of killing the beast in return, can we learn to ride the dragon, and see our scars as sacred?

Learning from the Dragon’s Fiery Fury

We each accepted the call to come here, and with this acceptance in many ways we disappeared from the world, descending into the mysterious, archetypal dark wood. This is the stage of the journey where the epic work of self-reflection takes place with the purpose of renewal and discovery.

This is the time of tests and trials, which serve as fortifiers as we learn to rely upon companions as well as our own developing abilities to move to and through suffering. This requisite stage brings one into the darkest chamber of the heart, a place filled with trauma and treasure, a place through which one must trod to manifest the deeply held desire for transformation.

This is the stumbling along the hard, dark path-time. The descent is disorienting, destabilizing, and in a word: deconstructing. This isn’t just the stuff of legends. This is life well-lived, and it is a quest of meaning-making and discovery. And like any good transformative adventure, there are dragons.

Joseph Campbell would say that this is the part of the journey when dragons emerge from the shadowy wood and must be slain…but this isn’t the way at The Seattle School. Here we have gained knowledge and tools to encounter the dragon. How will we engage its various forms, listen to its terrifying tales, and learn from its fiery fury? For only when we begin to reconstruct together new ways of being through the recovery and discovery of lost pieces of ourselves will we find that the dragon actually becomes a vehicle towards our well-being: here we learn how to train, and ride, dragons.

But first we must find the unknown path, an endeavor that requires much.   This is the way of walking through the woods—an arduous journey winding through unfamiliar territory, trying to find the way through, all of which requires endurance, stamina…and inevitably, brokenness. Our brokenness becomes the path back into being.

Here in the dark woods, we trip and fall—scraping, breaking, bruising our way through the requisite phase of finding.

This is the sacred Holy Saturday time where the woods keep silence and watch.

I thought that I met my dragon when I began the work of confronting my story four years ago in the first year foundational course Faith, Hope and Love…the thing that I would primarily fight and wrest…and while that did indeed occur, it proved itself to be more of an entrance to an even darker wood, a longer labyrinth, and one that demanded that I find out who I truly am when the demands of the journey turn treacherous. This is what I now know: the forest forms you.

In the dark of my winter term of my first year at The Seattle School, I became pregnant with our fourth child. This pregnancy proved near fatal for both me and my then-baby who, born too early, was dangerously close to death. As I lay in my own liminal life-shadow, he needed resuscitation, and was placed in NICU for weeks.

We lose much of ourselves during our passage through the dark—in many ways this must occur for the gifts of the transformation to have space to become. 80% of my blood was lost during the emergency birth and replaced with other people’s blood during my reconstructive surgery, creating a much longer and more wearisome journey back to health.

Shortly after I was learning to live with my new wounds, my husband got mono and could barely get out of bed for a month. Then he lost his job and the security of our family’s primary income. By now I remember wondering when this wandering would end—every hard and painful path seemed to be dropping out from underneath us to reveal yet another rocky road.

One dark summer night, with only the street lamp assisting with light, I was harvesting my lavender, hustling it to help put food on the table. While wielding a brand new scythe—and not fully present to its power—I cut a significant portion of my finger off and ended up back in the ER only to begin another long, slow and painful journey to healing. This pain, this part of the dark woods, taught me deep truths about regenerativity—especially as I witnessed my finger literally grow back. Hope indeed is forged in the forest.

I have had to ask the question and face the answer of who would I become after facing such fierce dragons who seemed to cut and jeer in the face of my becoming. How could I befriend the foe and their fire?

It has been said that the wise one limps. You will know wisdom not by one who walks upright, whole, and strong, but one who walks humped and slumped, scarred by the trials and trails that wound.

We gather today, robed with honor, distinction, and wisdom. These robes would say to the world that we are now wisdom-bearers. Ones who have risked much for priceless gain. These robes become your story to steward, not to hoard. May these hoods continue to call forth courage, for this dress required a fight with dragons that will forever remind us of what we have been through, the deep woods through which we have come.

Keep alive the memory of the woods for they have proven to be the greatest of teachers. For deep roots are reached through the forest. And don’t forget the dragon’s fire, fashioned now into foresight. Don’t let it slip from your heart, for that which wounded us has also healed us.

Lest this become a tale forgotten, finger your scars as a reminder of your journey in the case the limp you now bear does not.

May you learn to love your limp and see your scars as sacred as you leave this place, wise from your time in the woods.

Watch the video of Mary DeJong delivering this script at the 2017 Seattle School of Theology & Psychology Commencement ceremony here.

Guidance & Wisdom from the Sacred Wild

GuidanceSacredWild

I feel like I've been walking towards today for years. It was four years ago that my work with Waymarkers was put in the vault as I left to pursue my Masters in Theology & Culture with a focus in eco-theology from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

This journey took me through some of the most wildest of woods where I was taught again and again of the revelatory quality of the natural world, and that the woods are indeed the wisest of teachers. I reflect on themes experienced in these last years during the commencement speech I was asked to give during my graduation ceremony.  You can listen to that here.

Today feels like an emergence from the woods. In many ways I feel like there are open vistas of hope and opportunity before me, inner-landscapes that demanded the requisite journey through the woods. Today I offer my work of Waymarkers anew, infused with the theory, theology, and practice gained in the last four year. Waymarkers is a sacred guidance venture that provides support and frameworks for cultivating connection and communion to and through the natural world.

Waymarkers' hope is to guide others toward a holistic and harmonious inter-connected life with the more-than-human world through restorative rewilding rituals and pilgrimage practices that recover a way of seeing the sacred in the soil, the stars, and, even in our neighborhood streets.

With Celtic spirituality and sacred ecology providing the framework, Waymarkers offers guidance and support for those who are ready to respond to the call to wander into the sacred wild, seeking wisdom from our interrelated web of life. Without this kind of spiritual formation, there can be no authentic ecological consciousness, because there can be no true sense of the interdependence of all things. We must see the natural world as a sacred Thou, no longer an objectified It. Cultural historian Thomas Berry eloquently insists that "the world is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." To participate in this communion is sacramental, and the elements are all around us, awaiting our participation in our backyards, neighborhoods, our cities and parks, and the hinterlands beyond.

We are placed with a purpose. To not know this is to be without waymarkers, to be displaced.  Waymarkers will journey with you to a way of belonging, to a renewed sense of solid, sacred rooting in the land where you live.

Let's journey together and discover the wisdom that is rooted in the woods, and wind our way to a place of belonging!

Iona: Getting There Well

The journey itself to Iona makes this place unique; it is long, quite complicated and even relatively uncomfortable for the urbanite who is accustomed to quick and easy travel. This distance provides the perfect pilgrimage process, for it truly requires a removal of oneself from all that is familiar and supplies a lengthy trek-full of obstacles, no doubt! Once there, one finds a sparsely populated island, with almost no cars and a large abbey, whose structure appears to have dropped from the heavens onto this topographically small and relatively insignificant place.

Sheep outnumber the residents and the sunlight plays on the hillsides in the most magical ways. One senses almost immediately Iona is indeed a "thin space" – that brushing up against the Divine is inevitable.

It takes time to get to Iona. To start your pilgrimage preparations, think about the itinerary in two parts: TRAVEL TO OBAN and OBAN TO IONA

By Train

Trains travel regularly from Edinburgh (Waverley Station) and Glasgow (Queen Street Station) to Oban. This spectacular journey (one of the top rail rides in the world!) takes approximately four hours and the train terminal in Oban is next to the ferry terminal for the Isle of Mull.

Rail Enquiries: Tel: 08457 484950. Scotrail (Trains)www.scotrail.co.uk

By Bus

Buses depart from Edinburgh (St. Andrew Square) and Glasgow (Buchanan Street Station) and go directly to the Station Road stop in Oban. The route takes approximately four hours-make sure to pack a snack!

Bus Enquiries: Tel: 08705 505050 or visit www.travelinescotland.comScottish Citylink (Coaches)www.citylink.co.uk

By Car

From Edinburgh take the M9 to Stirling, then the A84/A85 to Oban. From Glasgow take the A82 up the side of Loch Lomond to Crianlarich, then the A85 to Oban. If you are travelling from the north of Scotland the A82 will take you from Inverness to Fort William, then take the A828 to Oban.

Disabled Passengers

For assistance on the railway ring Scotrail (Tel: 0845 605 7021).

Recommended accommodations for your overnight in this seaside town

Oban Youth Hostel

www.syha.org.uk/hostels/highlands/oban.aspx

Harbour View Guest House

A lovely and affordable B&B in Oban within walking distance from the train and ferry.

Dilys McDougall at dilysmcdougall@aol.com

Tel: 011-44-1631-563-462 Harbour View Shore Street Oban, Argyll PA34 4LQ

Ferry Service to Mull

The ferry from Oban to Craignure on Mull takes forty minutes. Walk on passengers should arrive within an hours time of departure, and make sure to give yourself time to pick up a fresh seafood sandwich at a local fish monger booth near the ferry-delicious! Cars need to check in at least thirty minutes before departure and advanced tickets is strongly recommended during the summer season and public holidays.

Ferry enquiries: contact the ferry operators Caledonian MacBrayne (Tel: 08705 650000) or visit their website www.calmac.co.uk

Across Mull

Tour buses will pick up passengers in a lot just off of the ferry departure area and bring them to the ferry terminal at Fionnphort; these bus times generally coincide with the Mull and Iona ferries. There is a sweet little gift shop and restroom facilities to visit-if there is time before the bus departs!

It takes approximately one hour to drive across the Ross of Mull from Craignure to Fionnphort, where the ferry leaves for Iona. Visitors cars are NOT allowed on Iona, but there is free car parking at the Columba Centre in Fionnphort, minutes from the ferry terminal.

For bus enquiries: Tel: 01631 566809 or visit www.bowmanstours.co.uk orwww.travelinescotland.com or Tel: 01546 604695 or Email: public.transport@argyll-bute.gov.uk

Ferry to Iona

The bus will drop you off at Fionnphort. There is a ten minute passenger (walk-on only) ferry that crosses the Sound of Mull landing at the pier in the village of Iona. In the Winter some ferries need to be reserved the day before travel.

Telephone the CalMac Craignure office on: 01680 612343 or visit www.calmac.co.uk/destinations/iona.htm

Disabled Passengers

For assistance on the ferry ring your departure terminal: CalMac Oban (Tel: 01631 566688) or Craignure (Tel: 01680 612343).

You have arrived to Iona, the place that has called to you! Savor your arrival.

Emergence

This is merely a note to awaken you to what is emerging here at Waymarkers. I graduated with my Masters in Theology & Culture from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology and a specialization in Thomas Berry's Universe Story from Yale University this past June. In these past years, my studies, research, and writing have all reached towards Waymarkers in some way, shape, or fashion, wondering about how my learnings would integrate into my work that shows up in the world wide web through Waymarkers.  These summer months have seen this wonderings become more clarified, and these emergences will begin to show themselves through a new website and offerings, expanded writing themes beyond that of pilgrimage, and engagement with theories around ecotheology, sacred ecology, and a reverence for creation as the dwelling place for the divine. I hope this is enough to pique your interest and that you will feel invited to journey along with me upon paths that will take us deeper into the wilds where Creator can be heard speaking through all created things.

Seminary Musings: Connected to the Other through the Stars and Soil

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On this Day of Epiphany, and before my next term at school holds my time hostage once again, I wanted to take a moment to share some of the emerging thoughts that have been personally prominent these past few months.  As we take time today to reflect on the legendary Three Wise Men, kingly magis who had deep knowledge of the links between the Divine and the cosmos, may we too ponder how we invite our celestial neighbors to inform our sense of awe of the Grand Story in which we continue to participate. 

I returned to seminary with an understanding that I needed a framework of academy and community to speak into inklings and intuitions that I have based my vocational experiences upon.  My work of the last 10 years has been based on ideas that promote living on behalf of the Other and the Future as a way of delving into a meaningful life that furthers the peace of heaven on earth.  These reflections have led me to actively engage our urban neighborhood in a call to see our local urban forest as both "other" and the future in that there has been a traditional treatment of this land that is akin to oppression, misalignment, marginalization and fear.  My hunch over the last many years has drawn connections with how we treat our native landscapes and how we treat one another.  It is no longer a surprise that this particular Southeast Seattle forest is also one that is stymied by outdated models of conservation and policies that have prevented and prohibited access by the City's most diverse and traditionally underserved community.

This is all to say, the intersection of urban place, the environment, and how this all informs our spiritual identity has been driving my academic pursuits, and will continue to be the lens from which I look at my learnings and studies.  I would like to share with you all my "Theological Anthropology" paper that was assigned for one of my courses last term.  Yes, this is a vulnerable display of my academic blunderings, but my desire is to stay transparent with my Waymarkers community in what I'm learning, and where, I (and this on-line community) is heading in the future.  I would love to hear your thoughts and reflections on this paper!  With that, please do read on with great grace for my professional attempts.  Perhaps a bringing along cup of tea would assist in the softening of the reading!  And may this be an invitation for us all to be like the Three Wise Men, and continue to look up to the stars as guidance for our journey on the soil of this good earth below.

A Theological Anthropology: Loving Your Neighbor Well Through the Land

Different faith traditions from all over the world uphold the basic tenants of The Golden Rule or the ethic of reciprocity.  Echoes of this wise code, from Hinduism (“Treat others as you would yourself be treated.”) to Native American spirituality (“Live in harmony, for we are all related.”), carry a similar semblance of the demand that people treat others in a manner in which they themselves would like to be treated (Princeton University, Ethic of reciprocity, n.d.). The intrinsic morality that is bound in this maxim, as delivered by YHWY in Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD,” contains essential attributes of the way humanity is called to live in connection with the Creator through kinship with others on this planet.  The triune nature of the Trinity makes God’s self known through diversity in relationships with the other and revelation through Nature, and subsequently models and informs how one lives wholly and well in intentional relationship with other people and things.  It is through the mutual respectful engagement of all living things—be it neighbor or nature—that a justice-oriented response to living occurs; one that discovers and responds to the goodness of God through the integrated presence, and subsequent love, of the other and the natural world. 

The Western Judeo/Christian ethical standard to love one’s neighbor as one’s self demands that one exists fully and well when in relationship with human beings and other living things for it is in the exposure and experience with others that God is encountered.  With the call to love one’s neighbor as much as one’s self, there is an inherent challenge to enter into a degree of relationship that removes the other from a place of isolated alienation to a place in the community, even to the extent of being the one who literally lives next door.  By use of the glaring call within Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29, Guitiérrez (2000) courageously claims that love for God is activated by loving the neighbor, particularly the wounded or needy (p. 149).  Guitiérrez dares people of faith to see the neighbor as someone other than the like-minded person with whom one shares similar dreams and passions, and adjacent real estate in a suburban cul-de-sac.  He states, “The neighbor is not the one whom I find in my path, but rather the one in whose path I place myself, the one whom I approach and actively seek” (Guitiérrez, 2000, p. 153).  Based on an intentional relocating of the other, or relocating to become neighbors to the other, one can shift objectifying macro-perceptions to the personal, integrated stuff of one’s very own lives, and lean into the dynamic lifestyle of transforming Other to Neighbor to Self where the self-preservation with which one is born is willfully desired for all who live and exist.  

This justice-oriented approach of integrating the other into one’s daily life finds theological grounding in Jürgen Moltmann’s (1993) ecological doctrine of creation.  The monotheistic standpoint of God resulted in a historical perception of a God that was disconnected from the created world, but maintained a powerful presence as ruler and owner of all therein.  Moltmann (1985) states, “As a result, the human being—since he was God’s image on earth—…was bound to confront his world as its ruler” (pg. 1).  As dominator, the human being could be excused from a relationship with all of creation and move into roles of objectifier and oppressor.  This role as ruler, which again allowed the human to relate to a monotheistic God, justified actions against anyone other-than-himself and an exploitative use of the earth and its resources.  This way of understanding God clearly has ill effects on the globe and its community; therefore Moltmann (1985) offers a Trinitarian perspective of God that binds all of humanity and creation in a relationship created for the common good:

If we cease to understand God monotheistically as the one, absolute subject, but instead see him in a Trinitarian sense as the unity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, we can then no longer, either, conceive his relationship to the world he created as a one-sided relationship of domination. We are bound to understand it as an intricate relationship of community.

(p. 2) 

The Trinitarian nature of God provides a relational model that mandates a knowledge and understanding of the other, and a relationship that results in a bond from stranger to that of neighbor.  

This transformational process is made available because of the incarnational nature of God and the Christian’s call to embody Christ.  The nature of God is relational as seen in the Trinity; therefore we are bound to understand God in relationship with community.  Barsness (2006) understands this relational encounter as hallowed when he states “Our relationships must be held sacred, for it is the nature of God to reveal himself incarnationally” (p. 45). It is in relationship with others, where Christ is embodied, and where humanity becomes the Imago Christi.  So, when care is extended for others, it is Christ caring; when forgiveness is offered, it is Christ forgiving; when reconciliation is engaged, it is Christ healing and reconciling through the embodiment of the human experience.  To dispense God’s healing and wholeness through encounters with others, to be present to their pain and needs requires a physical presence to those wounded places and people.  Martin Buber (1970) would say, “God is present when I confront you. But if I look away from You, I ignore him. As long as I merely experience or use you, I deny God. But when I encounter You I encounter him (p. 28).  It is in this call to the genuine encounter with another human being or life with nature (Buber, 1970, p. 57) that Moltmann’s (1985) doctrine of creation and Guitiérrez’s (2000) liberation theology weave together into a critical challenge for humanity in the 21st century; the future of fecund life on this planet will be determined by the ability to extend justice and love for neighbor to include the rights of the earth and the greater community of things with whom life is shared on this planet.  Indeed, to be an image-bearer of the Imago Christi involves loving respect for all of God’s creatures.

Moltmann (1985) states, “The dignity of human beings is unforfeitable, irrelingquishable and indestructible” (p. 33).  To see the human in a state of inherent goodness transforms how one views the other and has vast implications for how relational engagement ensues.  To stand with an understanding of created dignity invites one to seek out the Divine in one another; we are challenged with the beauty of truly encountering the Imago Dei in others in our neighborhood.  Furthermore, this posture of dignity has implications for the planet and beyond.  Aquinas says: “God wills that humans exist for the sake of the perfection of the universe” (as sited in Fox, 2011, p. 28).  This same inherent goodness can be applied to the natural world, which also participates in worship and adoration of the Creator God.  Aquinas also stated:

Because the Divine goodness could not be adequately expressed by one creature alone, God has produced many and diverse creatures so what is wanting in one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another.  Thus the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness.  (p. 28)

This is a celebration of the diverse order of created things and underscores the importance of a relational view of the diversity of the Trinity.  This perspective also recovers a sense of the sacred in local neighborhoods and the greater landscapes beyond by acknowledging the inherent goodness and revelatory means of Creation.  However, implicit in the genuine encounters available with the other on a sidewalk or forested trail, is the need to rediscover the vastness of God’s immanence beyond our world.  There is a need to recover a sense of this grand divine cosmos, a whole in which all of humanity participates as image bearers of God.

The Imago Christi participates in this elaborate perspective as well.  Cultural historian and spiritual ecologist Thomas Berry (1987) is explicit in placing his vision in the lineage of the Cosmic Christ, which is written of in John’s Gospel (Christ as the ‘light in all things’).  He writes:

If Saint John and Saint Paul could think of the Christ form of the universe, if Aquinas could say that the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature whatever, and if Teilard could insist that the human gives to the entire cosmos its most sublime mode of being, then it should not be difficult to accept the universe itself as the primordial sacred community. (p. 38)

This is a clear and grand picture beyond the anthropocentrism from which the Christian consciousness needs to depart; a move in this direction not only affirms the dignity of humanity, but that of the other, which includes the vast and great cosmic community of which our planet is a part.  This is a bold movement from seeing God as the absolute subject, which increasingly stripped God of his connection with the world (Moltmann, 1970, p. 1).       

The effects of a monotheological thought regime has wreaked havoc on the marginalized and on our planet.  In fact, it could be argued that geoengineering (the intentional large-scale modification of the earth and weather patterns by dominating humans) schemes have become uniformly disastrous as we see the heart-wrenching effects of damming and deforestation on our planet and within our communities (Jenson, 2013, p. 11).  McFague (2002) provides a helpful theological framework of traditional models of the God-world relationship and why these models result in thought patterns and behaviors that are detrimental to the earth, the greater community of things, and ultimately, even personally.  She suggests a critical shift to the agential model by asserting that the world is God’s body (p. 40).  To understand this in light of Buber’s (1970) life-with-nature relational sphere allows one to fully accept and engage the natural world as revelatory (p. 58).  While Buber would have understood this relation to be with individual animals, rocks, or elements, this intentional awareness of the potential of a genuine encounter with the natural world is evidenced when he writes, “something lights up and approaches us from the course of [its] (the tree) being” (Kramer, 2003, p. 52-53).  During an I/Thou encounter with a natural thing, there is the unique particularity of the thing that “speaks;” this is relational evidence that the created world emanates from the Creator.  The resulting effect of Buber’s (1970) relational sphere with the natural world and McFauge’s (2002) agential model offers freedom to live fully and transformational into local neighborhoods, thus affecting global trends. 

            To divorce God’s presence from the created world has had profound effects on the human and community experience.  The resulting disconnect from nature can be seen the world over; while it is evidenced in the power-over posture that has resulted in geoengineering sciences, it is also evident on local levels in how traditional cities have been designed with little access to Nature in mind.  “People with less access to nature show relatively poor attention or cognitive function, poor management of major life issues, poor impulse control,” says Frances Kuo, a professor at the University of Illinois, adding that humans living in a neighborhood stripped of nature undergo patterns of social, psychological, and physical breakdown similar to those observed in animals deprived of their natural habitat. “In animals, what you see is increased aggression, disrupted parenting patterns, and disrupted social hierarchies” (Louv, 2013, n.p.).  One cannot live the designed life of wholeness and health without engaging the natural world.  There is a profound link between how one engages creation and subsequently treats the other, and their neighbor.

The resulting negative psychological implications of removing access to nature in urban communities has been noted and strong voices are now coming to the table to encourage urban leaders and designers to re-imagine how to integrate natural and wild landscapes into cities and neighborhoods.  Richard Louv (2013), the author of the renowned book Last Child in the Woods, also contests that genuine encounters with the natural world will have profound effects on our communities on neighborhoods.  Note his list of the seven comprehensive effects of access to nature on communities: improves psychological health, may help reduce domestic violence, natural playgrounds may decrease bullying, encountering other species help children develop empathy, greater biodiversity in cities can increase social and family bonding, and more nature in one’s life can offset the dangerous psychological impact of climate change (Louv, 2013, n.p).  There is something physiological that occurs within the human when exposed to the unpredictable environment; the body, mind, and spirit positively reacts when experiencing the earth beneath their feet and the euphoric effects impacts not only the individual, but also the community for good.  Creation is designed to be revelatory and provides not only the environment for a genuine encounter with God, but also is the context for where people engage others in a sacred space of dialogue.  Jones (1985) speaks to this socio-wilderness dynamic when he says:

Without the occasional abrasive brush with the unexpected, human life soon becomes a mere matter of routine; and, before we know where we are, a casual indifference and even brutality takes over and we begin to die inside. The shock breaks open the deadly ‘everydayness’ that ensnares us and brings something awesome and terrifying to our reluctant attention: the believer’s name for that ‘something’ is God. (p. 84)   

Clearly, there is something of the essential goodness of God that is bestowed on God’s creation for the effects of natural environments to have such profound effects on a person.  To not have exposure and experience with nature can lead to the brutal posture that objectifies and exploits the other.   To see the inherent goodness in nature and its intended presence in the lives of humanity leads to a therapeutic stance that acknowledges how the surrounding landscapes can participate in the healing and wholeness of individuals and communities.  The mysteries of God will be better accommodated when we recalibrate God’s creative landscape to include planet earth and every creature that lives here.

Our neighborhoods are never singular communities, but are actually a mesh of myriad overlapping networks. We all belong to many different communities, from the diffuse (i.e. a professional association, or an online message board), to the intimate (i.e. a family, or a group of friends).  In consideration of the paramount impact of how a landscape informs an individual and how they connect to the other in their community, there is an emerging theory called “Placemaking” that aims to create a balance of uses in public spaces that serve the many communities at once; in this way a landscape can serve as a therapeutic response to the needs of a neighborhood.  A single place can’t do everything at once, so “Placemaking” prompts us to look for convenient and clever ways to make limited space serve multiple functions.   De Botton and Armstrong (2013) have suggested that by balancing ones need with those of the people by which one lives, one finds their place, literally and figuratively, within a community of neighbors.  By inviting the presence of a place to participate in the lives of communities for a common good, there is an acknowledgment of something profound and beyond human-limitations that is unleashed: God moves back into the neighborhood!

 The challenge of loving and caring for one another well in the 21st century requires one to recover a primordial sense of the vast mystery of God and apply that energy to paying attention to the earth.  Our love of neighbor needs to be extended to the greater community of things on this planet and our neighborhood needs to considerably broaden to include our universe as well.  Historically anthropocentric views have concerned Christians with the redemption of this world alone, and have disconnected the very nature of a connected, covenantal God with the diversity of his inherently good creation.  Nobel Peace Prize two-time nominee Ervin Lazlo (2011) attests that “seeing ourselves as separate from the world fuels selfish and irresponsible tendencies: we are only responsible for ourselves, and not for ‘foreigners,’ ‘competitors,’ and ‘others’” (p. 117).  In bringing the care of the earth into the folds of reconciliation, there is acknowledgement that human-centric modern history has caused great harm to marginal people groups, and environmental injustice to a host of living beings on this planet, as well as a severe disconnect from the goodness with which the earth was designed, and how that endowed goodness was created to participate in the whole person and health of a community.

In returning to a grand sense of awe before the God of the Universe, God’s relationship is placed with humanity into the context of billions and billions of galaxies.  This profound placement of the Great Mystery has immediate effects on how we engage and encounter the other and all living things.  “The experience of our connection with each other and the universe would inspire solidarity among people and empathy with all life on earth” (Lazlo, 2011, p. 124).  While God is intimately present as one’s neighbor on the front porch, to allow God’s cosmic vastness and presence in creation will inspire a critical mass that espouses values of sustainability, peace, and personal and social responsibility.  In this way, the embodied life of God is seen on earth.  The wisdom of the ethic of reciprocity, or The Golden Rule, unleashes love and empathy for the other and transforms all life on earth into one’s very neighbor. 

References

Barsness, R. (2006). Surrender and transcendence in the therapeutic encounter. Journal of

       Psychology and Christianity, 25(1), pg. 45-54.

Berry, T. (1987). The earth: A new context for religious unity. InA. Lonergan and C. Richards(Eds.),

       Thomas Berry and the new cosmology. Msytic, CN: Third Publications.

Buber, M. (1970). I and thou. New York, NY: Touchstone.

Chaney, A.J.B. (n.d.). Ethic of reciprocity. Princeton University. Retrieved December 4, 2013, from

www.princeton.edu/~achaney.

De Botton, A. & Armstrong, J. (2013). Art as therapy. London: Phaidon Press Limited.

Fox, M. (2011). Some thoughts on Thomas berry’s contributions to the western spiritual tradition.                                                                       In E. Laszlo & A. Combs (Eds.), Thomas berry dreamer of the earth: The spiritual ecology of

 the father of environmentalism (pp. 16-31). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Gutierrez,G. & Nickoloff, J.B. (2000). Gustavo Gutierrez: Essential writings. New York, NY: Orbis.

Jensen, D. (2013, September/October). Dead end: on killing the planet in order to save it. Orion

       Magazine. 32(2), 11-12. 

Jones, A. (1985). Soul-Making: Desert way of spirituality. San Fransisco, CA: Harper and Row.

Laszlo, E. (2011). Berry and the shift from the anthropocentric to the ecological age. In E. Laszlo & A.

Combs (Eds.), Thomas berry dreamer of the earth: The spiritual ecology of the father of environmentalism (pp. 16-31). Rochester, VT:            Inner Traditions.

Louv, R. (2013, November). A momentous week for the children and nature movement: Big pediatric

       and public health news and a boost from the interior. The New Nature Movement. Retrieved from http://blog.childrenandnature.org/.

Love, R. (2013, August 22). Restoring Peace. Psychology Today. Retrieved from

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/people-in-nature/201308/restoring-peace.

McFague, S. (2002, March 13-20). Intimate Creation. The Christian Century, 36-45.

Moltmann, J. (1985). God in creation. Norwich: SCM Press Ltd. 

Connected Colors-A Gift from the Garden

Connected Colors-A Gift from the Garden

This week has provided space for some much needed self-care. Seven weeks into my first term at The Seattle School and we have a week "off" to read, write, reflect and rest.

With most of my reading already caught up, I was all too eager to get my fingernails dirty and be outside! My spirit rejuvenates in the soil of my garden. It is where I get connected and find connectedness. It is where I engage awe and wonder in ways that only the natural world can provide. As I wrestled overgrown perennials and dug deep into the damp earth to plant promises of spring, I was struck with the diversity of color that still surrounded me, even as Autumn begins to shed her vibrant hues.

My youngest and I collected a rainbow today. And the colors gave me hope, that even whilst Winter is soon upon us (and my studies will require my attendance once again), there is sheer, inherent beauty in what we are created to be! There is connection and cohesiveness in creation, and we are a part of this great created community of things!