Waymarkers: Categories of Inspiration
As I have more opportunities to teach and accompany others on their soul-formation path, I am often asked what are the areas that have most influenced my work and Waymarkers’ offerings. As I was clearing out my office recently, I came upon a writing project and drawing that aimed to get at three primary categories of inspiration and influence. I created this in October 2015 and it is amazing to see how these categories continue to shape and form my thinking and my work!
As I have more opportunities to teach and accompany others on their soul-formation path, I am often asked what are the areas that have most influenced my work and Waymarkers’ offerings. As I was clearing out my office recently, I came upon a writing project and drawing that aimed to get at three primary categories of inspiration and influence. I created this in October 2015 and it is amazing to see how these categories continue to shape and form my thinking and my work! I am also incredibly happy to see that my thinking, theologies, and theories (in short, my praxis) continue to emerge and evolve!
I am using the concept of a Venn Diagram as represented by a Celtic Trinity Knot to describe my three primary passions (and ways of seeing the Divine at work in the world), their intersections, and ultimately, what they reveal about myself in relationship to the Sacred. Following are my core thoughts related to each trisection.
Placemaking/Theology of Land
Theologian Walter Brueggeman states that “…land be handled always as a gift not to be presumed upon and land be managed as an arena for justice and freedom.” And, it is true that those historically denied justice and freedom, power, place and voice, could see the arena of a wooded landscape as an absolute threat. Walter Brueggeman’s hermeneutic of Israel, provides understanding that, “Israel experienced the bitterness of landlessness, being totally exposed and helpless, victimized by anything that happened to be threatening. However, also as Israel, we take up a new identity vis-a-vis the land. It is important to be very clear about what the land is, how it addresses us, what it expects of us, and how we shall shape our faith and admit our identity in relation to it.
How do communities work on creating meaningful places that invert political and capitalistic powers on behalf of the other and the future?
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 is revealed as intimately involved and present within the neighborhood and neighborwood!
Celtic Christianity
The great Celtic teacher John Scotus Eriugena taught that God speaks to us through two sacred texts, two books if you will. One is the book of scripture…the other is the book of creation, vast as the cosmos. Just as the Sacred speaks to us through the written words of scripture, so to does Spirit speak to us through the wild elements of creation. The natural world—the creatures within it and the elements that form it—then are a living sacred text we can learn to read and interpret.
Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice and as other traditions study their sacred texts, and even as we engage our sacred imagination in the practice of Midrash, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God. This way of "reading" requires seeing the soil as a sacred story, and realizing that many of the narratives that have been told within the reverential spheres are ones that separate us from the reality of the biosphere.
Influenced by the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and the mysticsm of John’s Gospel, Celtic spirituality sees creation not simply as a gift, but as a self-giving of God whose image is to be found deep within all living things. Sin may obscure God’s living presence, but never erases it. The divine voice can be heard speaking through all created things.
EcoPsych/EcoTheology
Author and psychologist Bill Plotkin believes that the way towards a collective societal shift towards wholeness and sustainability will be to progress from our current “egocentric societies (materialistic, anthropocentric, competition based, class stratified, violence prone, and unsustainable) to soulcentric ones (imaginative, ecocentric, cooperation based, just, compassionate and sustainable).” Plotkin draws from the collective academy of cultural thought provocateurs ranging from Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to imagine how to cultivate more mature human individuals to inform an evolution into a more mature human society. He believes that nature has always provided and still provides the best template for human maturation. Plotkin unpacks this further:
“…every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood. In contemporary society, we think of maturity simply in terms of hard work and practical responsibilities. I believe, in contrast, that true adulthood is rooted in transpersonal experience—in a mystic affiliation with nature, experienced as sacred calling—that is then embodied in soul-infused work and mature responsibilities. This mystical affiliation is the very core of maturity, and it is precisely what mainstream Western society has overlooked—or actively suppressed and expelled.”
Western civilization has buried most traces of the mystical roots of maturity, yet this knowledge has been at the heart of every indigenous tradition known. In this light, we see that our self-imposed exile from an honoring relationship with creation has stunted God’s design for human development, and even a proper revelation of God. Creation is imbued with the wisdom and presence of the Sacred, and to stifle and ignore the inherent value of the created order, stifles the very voice of Wisdom in our lives. Our way into the future requires new cultural forms of the old ways of being in relationship with the earth. As urban-dense living becomes the increasing norm for countries around the world, re-imagining how urban greenspaces provides the opportunity for a relationship with the wild world becomes critical. The health of our psyche, and the planet, depends on it.
Center
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. By engaging in restorative acts of reconciliation with the planet, there is an openness to the endowed goodness of creation and the intention that it 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). Leonardo Boff would call this the “socio-cosmic,” where mountains, plants, rivers, animals, and the atmosphere become the new citizens who share in the human banquet, while humans share in the cosmic banquet. Only then will there be ecological justice and peace on planet earth. In embracing the world. we shall be embracing God.
The Lost Names of God: A Solstice Reflection
What do you do when you lose something? You ponder its whereabouts, and then go out to look for it, and sometimes you end up recovering that which was lost in places that surprise you. We have lost the knowing that the earth is sacred, that we are surrounded by hallowed presences who bear witness to our lives, as well as express their own inherent divine qualities. Seek through the practice of ceremony. Find a recovered and reconnected way of understanding that the holy is Here. And hope beyond hope, may your ceremonial search yield the surprise of the divine ground of being that is within your particular place.
I come to this pinnacle of the solar year, this hot and heightened sun, with a posture of vigilance, a stance that might not be all too surprising given our times, but one that is consternating all the same. Already in our Pacific Northwest part of the world, the fires are burning. Smoke cloaks the sun's intensifying rays, amplifying the heat. Seattle's urban streets are buckling under the sweltering strain. Gun violence is already intensifying (the corollary between inescapable urban heat and social tensions is a studied reality). While children may be enacting the summer rituals of swimming and sandal-wearing, there is a sense that the adults are diligently looking over their shoulder, or even up at the smoke-filled sky, discerning when to return to the relative refuge of home.
Not the picture that you might have expected to kick off this quarterly newsletter offering, I'm sure. And not one that I necessarily want to write about either, and yet.... And yet, it speaks to the grief that I know I am not alone in experiencing as each consecutive season brings with it more suffering change, so markedly different than the perception of the assured rhythmic seasonal changes in which I grew up. And yet, even that which I knew was its own iteration of shifting environmental degradation that had become its own version of an accepted and normative existence. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today’s global environmental issues. When one forgets over the course of a couple years, decades, or generation what once was, or who once was, it becomes near impossible to advocate for those places, people, or other remarkable forms of existence. Do you remember the Passenger Pigeon? Probably not, and if you know about its one time form of life, its likely you don't stand around missing it.
We are a forgetful and fickle species, us humans, and if we continue to not remember, we will end up forgetting what has been lost. But even in our forgetfulness, there is something deeper still that remains, a cellular memory that longs for what once was; a longing for a home that no longer exists.
While working at the University of Newcastle in Australia, ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that seeks to describe this feeling. 'Solastalgia’ – a gladstone of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers looking into the effects of wildfires in California. It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, and speaks to growing unease around what this loss portends for the future of all life on our planet.
The magnitude, rate, and extent of the changes that humans have made to the Earth’s more-than-human world are hard to grasp. What is easier to grasp is the idea that it has always been this way. And yet, we find that we are awaiting the fist summer sight of the Monarch butterfly flitting through the wasting away Sword ferns, but the waiting is endless; or we realize that the ache in our eyes is do to the relentless searching for the nesting pair of Red tail hawk that have been in the Big leaf maple down the hill for twenty years...but they are no longer there. The solace found within the dynamic constancies of one's environment is waning as the "lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change to one's 'sense of place' and existential well-being is increasing" (Glenn Albrecht Murdoch, 2010).
The human caused degradation to our home planet is causing massive species extinction. Indeed, we are within the Anthropocene Extinction, or the sixth mass extinction, which is one of the most significant events in the history of the Earth. Every day there are unique and particular life forms that are closing their eyes to the hope of a future. And with each eye lid shuttering, I would maintain that we are losing embodiments of the sacred. Every species that becomes extinct is a lost name, and form, of God.
Ecotheologian Sallie MacFague's seminal work has been around our metaphoric language and symbols used to describe and define the divine. In our era of global heating and climate catastrophe, she urges us away from metaphors that describe God as separate from the world and creation--words and resulting paradigms related to monarchy, kingdoms, hierarchies, dominions, etc. Instead, she advocates for the mindset shifting metaphor of seeing the Earth as the Body of God. Sit with that for a moment. The Earth: The Body of God. How does this land with you? If we lived within this worldview, how would it change how we are presenced upon this planet? This understands the world, and its host of wild and wonder-filled life, as sacred, every aspect and being a numinous element. So when the Passenger Pigeon, Monarch, and Red tailed hawk no longer exist in the air, or when the Salish Sea resident Orca population rings the death knoll at the brink of their extinction, we are literally witnessing a diocide, the killing of God.
What do you do when you lose something? You ponder its whereabouts, and then go out to look for it, and sometimes you end up recovering that which was lost in places that surprise you. We have lost the knowing that the earth is sacred, that we are surrounded by hallowed presences who bear witness to our lives, as well as express their own inherent divine qualities. Grief is a handmaiden to loss. Studies show that within the realm of environmental grief and anxiety, practicing nature-based rituals and ceremony can help one be resilient in these grief-filled seasons, and be a way to respond to feelings like solestagia.
Seek through the practice of ceremony. Find a recovered and reconnected way of understanding that the holy is Here. And hope beyond hope, may your ceremonial search yield the surprise of the divine ground of being that is within your particular place.
May something within this Summer season whisper to you, beseech and beguile you, rooting you deeper into the places you call home. Or perhaps you haven't yet found your way home, and this is why you are here. May you be invited into a ceremonious way of living that seeks to recover the sacred within the wild.
Waymarkers' mission is to bear witness and act as a guide to your journey, to your rooting and to your rising, and to your pilgrimage journey of belonging to this wonder-filled and wild world. May the wisdom-seeds that were planted this past Spring be about the critical work of differentiation and particularity. May that they become the wild and precious fruit that only you can bear and bring to the world. May something in the potent summer heat and long, light days ripen in you your purpose and your belonging. May that the sun, present and demanding, remind you that it is time to become; for it is now time to allow Summer's heat to transform the seed into an offering. And in this work, may you observe and be guided by waymarkers~ones from the wild who will accompany and apprentice you, reminding you of the way back to the belonging we have within the sacred reality that we live within an ensouled world.
Tour of Extinction
The world has been captivated by the display of grief as an orca whale mother (Tahlequah also known as J35) has carried the remains of her baby on her nose through the waters of the Salish Sea for days. She is calling out to us to no longer see ourselves as separate and apart from the great assembly of creation: will we hear and respond?
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.”
"See Me" by Lori Christopher
The world has been captivated by the display of grief as an orca whale mother (Tahlequah also known as J35) has carried the remains of her baby on her nose through the waters of the Salish Sea for days. A member of the critically endangered sorter resident clan of orca whales, Tahlequah gave birth to her calf on July 24. For reasons unknown at this time, the calf lived for only half an hour. Since the death of her newborn, Tahlequah has been carrying the lifeless body on her nose or in her mouth in an unprecedented display of grief as she and her pod have moved northward through the San Juan Islands.
There are many excellent articles and reports about what Ken Balcomb, the founder of the Center for Whale Research, is calling a “tragic tour of grief.” You can read the timeline of this maritime mourning through The Seattle Times as well as through many other press and publications. This sorrow that we are witnessing is hitting our hearts hard. People are reporting feeling an empathetic response to J35’s loss as they reflect on their own profound suffering and heartache. Within this mutuality, there is also an overwhelming sense that we are beholding an anguish beyond the edge of even our own human comprehension. We may mourn with Tahlequah, but will it be enough to bring about the requisite change to ensure the future of this magnificent form of life?
This grief tour is the death knell of extinction. How does one put down the body that contained the very kernel of hope for survival? How does one let go of the embodiment of faith that ensures that there will be a tomorrow?
The beloved and decomposing body Tahlequah carries is a clarion call to awaken the world to the collective bones of mass extinction; it is beyond a strident warning. It is a SEE ME and WAKE UP demand to confront what our human presence is doing to the biodiversity of the more than human world. This is her flag, her desperation, her plea. We can no longer just bear witness without bearing the arms of action. We can no longer simply stand beside as another species ceases to exist on account of our human-centered ways. To think this orca pod will remain without changing anything is insanity for we cannot expect different outcomes while repeating the same behaviors over and over again. Furthermore, to not change our ways, to simply allow this precious form of Life to starve away is a form of evil for which I do not know how we can account.
This week I have been daily present to the very waters that this pod calls home, a sea where I have seen the black triangular fins slicing through waters, orcas breaching and swimming my whole life. This week the waters have been still and silent, eerily echoing the steady loss of biodiversity and life of this orca calf. I have stood by the sea, salty tears streaming down my face, asking this great body of Living Earth what needs to be done; desperate for a hope that would emerge through the very lapping waves that also carry Tahlequah and the bones of her babe. It is not a mystery why these beings are being brought to the brink of extinction. She is informing us of what needs to be done.
Tahlequah as Mother, as the archetypal portal of future generations, as the very seat of Creation is stoically carrying her calf as a clear and stirring command to abandon our still-birth ways that lack the life-force to listen deeply to animals, birds, Earth, and those that live within the sea. She is calling out to us as a great prophetess of the sea, echoing Job's wisdom that the more-than-human world offers us insight and understanding to the Sacred and our True Selves. She is informing us in the most poignant and powerful of ways to no longer see ourselves as separate and apart from the great assembly of creation: will we hear and respond?
Respond with Hope. Respond with Action.
It has been 3 years since there has been a successful birth for the Southern Resident Orca. These whales have a 19 month gestational period and because they are starving to death they are losing these babies in the late term of pregnancy. There are very few breeding pair possibles left and if something doesn’t change NOW extinction is inevitable. This pod has lost nine of them in a one year period due to starvation. Now there 75 whales left....the lowest number in almost 50 years after the population of these families were decimated by a rush on Orca captivity for aquarium entertainment.
Scientists agree that the only thing that will save this beloved species from certain starvation is the breaching of the Lower 4 dams on the Snake River allowing the salmon a habitat up river in which to spawn in cold clean water. Salmon is a key staple food source for this orca population and it is because of a lack of this food source that the orcas are starving.
To find out more about this process please visit www.damsense.org
Contact Washington and Oregon Senators & Governors as often as you can in response to what Tahlequah is requesting. Below are then numbers that need to be called and a script to help you if you aren’t sure what to say. If you are asked for a Zip code and don’t live in Washington use 98101. And if you live in Washington and need a Oregon Zip code 97212.
Please call Washington Legislators:
Senator Patty Murray
(202) 224-2621
Senator Maria Cantwell
(202) 224-3441
Governor Inslee
(360) 902-4111
Please Call Oregon Legislators:
Senator Jeff Merkley
(202) 224-3753
Contact: www.merkley.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Ron Wyden
(202) 224-5244
Contact: www.wyden.senate.gov/contact/
Governor Kate Brown
Phone: (503) 378-4582
Call Gov. Inslee (WA) (360-902-4111) & Gov. Brown (OR) (503-378-4582) and tell them to breach the lower 4 dams on the Snake River!
Call Script:
Phone or Email
"Hello Governor or Senator _____________ My name is _________ and I am calling to insist you implement the plan to breach the lower 4 dams on the Snake River with no further EIS (environmental impact studies) We have completed these studies for 25 years costing tax payers millions and the answer s always the same the only way to save our salmon is by increasing there spawning habitat. These constant studies are just a stall tactic. Meanwhile the Salmon of the Pacific Northwest and the Southern Resident Killer Whales are going extinct. The time is NOW.... Ken Balcom from the Center for Whale Research says if we are lucky we have another have until the end of 2018 to get started breaching. In addition these dams aren’t adding even adding power to the grid and are costing Tax payers millions. DON’T let this happen on your clock do the right thing....let it be your legacy Breach the lower 4 dams on the Snake River NOW to save millions of tax dollars annually, bring wealth & jobs to a region and restore salmon runs which will save the southern resident Orcas from going extinct."
Thank you to Michelle Seidelman for this wisdom and guidance for how to act in response to our empathetic grief.
God’s Grandeur within the World House: A Liberated Vision for Our Common Home
Ecological conversations place us in political arenas, fundamentally because power resides in land. An environmental ethic began to take shape in the consciousness-raising 1960's as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work began to expand the focus of his civil rights movement to extend to economic human rights throughout the world. The laws of economics and ecology are one and the same, each derived from a fundamental principal of sustainable habitat, or household for all life. The intersection of King’s economic human rights intersected the environment (ecology) in the understanding that our planetary household requires space and the means for a flourishing life for all living things. Dr. King understood the work that was required of us all to live together in peace in our “inherited large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ecological conversations place us in political arenas, fundamentally because power resides in land. An environmental ethic began to take shape in the consciousness-raising 1960's as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work began to expand the focus of his civil rights movement to extend to economic human rights throughout the world. The laws of economics and ecology are one and the same, each derived from a fundamental principal of sustainable habitat, or household for all life. The intersection of King’s economic human rights intersected the environment (ecology) in the understanding that our planetary household requires space and the means for a flourishing life for all living things. Environmental ethicist and theologian Larry Rasmussen argues that, “Without adequate hospitable habitat, nothing lives.”
Dr. King understood the work that was required of us all to live together in peace in our “inherited large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together."
This beloved community, this “world house” must be integrally and harmoniously connected with the earth community, for the earth is every creature’s home.
This sense of an interrelated home planet (oikoumene) invited new interpretations of Christian stewardship and dominion, and countered theologies that would see humanity as perpetually disconnected sojourners finding solace and home in heaven alone. Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ On Care for Our Common Home, famously represents the movement the Church’s social and moral teachings are taking in response to the human causes of the ecological crisis. With a deep lean towards the consensus of sciences, the liberal Christian environmental movement was born, which created political agency and demand for regulations and policies that would protect the whole of life.
Whereas an ecologically focused interpretation of biblical scripture landed liberal streams of the Christian faith at home on Earth, faith in the Apocalypse has been another powerful driving force in American politics, especially for Christian-right views. This belief underscores Capitalism and empowers climate deniers, because ultimately for Christian fundamentalists, a future on our planet is irrelevant because within an apocalyptic lens, the Earth has no future. Environmental destruction is not only disregarded, but welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. This particular hermeneutic finds anchoring in the author of Hebrews words, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” Couple a theology of being heavenly bound with a world that is going to be destroyed by hellish brimstone, then what is there to save? Indeed, conservation becomes a moot point especially when subduing the earth is translated as resource consumption for capitalistic and colonizing culture, and is more in line with the End of Times. To be fair, the theological lens of stewardship was used by evangelicals to address environmental problems.
Problematic to a theology of stewardship is that what it lacks in mutuality, it makes up in capitalism and colonization without limits.
It was also co-opted by the conservative evangelicals, including many leaders of the Religious Right. In 1999 the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty gathered clergy, theologians, economists, environmental scientists and policy experts in Cornwall, CT to develop a “Judeo-Christian” understanding of stewardship to be applied to environmental policy. The Cornwall Declaration of Environmental Stewardship, which came out of this gathering, promotes a “strong anthropocentrism, a commitment to libertarian, free market economics, and a deep mistrust for mainstream science…and that the human person is the most valuable resource on earth.”
The Cornwall Alliance calls the environmental movement “radical” and claims “this so-called green dragon is seducing your children in our classrooms,” while “millions [are] falling prey to its spiritual deception.” Peter Heltzel argues, “It is clear that the Cornwall Declaration is more than a call to environmental stewardship; it was a vigorous apologia for free market capitalism.” The agenda behind the straw-man, or shall we say, straw-dragon, of environmentalism was deeply embedded in the consumption-driven spirit of capitalism. Emphasizing the close relationship between evangelical and capitalism, William Connolly writes, “The right leg of the evangelical movement is joined at the hip to the left leg of the capitalist juggernaut.” Because of these deep connections between nationalistic evangelical monotheism and capitalistic consumerism and colonzation, attempts at evangelical environmentalism often perpetuate a theology of capitalistic conquest and white dominion even amidst its best attempts to respond as stewards and care for creation.
photo by Jason Drury
The connections to land subjugation, people oppression, capital gain, and a monotheistic god have far deeper roots than modern conflations. According to Hebrew Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, the ancient Israelites produced the first enduring monotheism—the belief in a single god. The difference between Israelite monotheism and the pagan religions of that era was not simply a “matter of arithmetic: one God rather than many…. Pagan religion personified [nature’s] forces, ascribed a will to them, and called them gods.” In contrast, ancient Israel, for the first time in the history of human symbolic consciousness, conceived of a god above and beyond the now-desacralized forces of nature. This shift left land and its inhabitants vulnerable. Joshua 17:14-15, which is set in the context of two chapters of land distribution to the house of Joseph, has Joshua instructing his followers to bará (cut) down the trees in the forested high country to make more room for their expansive colonization. The Revised Standard Version translates bará as “clear”: “And Joshua said to them, ‘If you are a numerous people, go up to the forest, and there clear ground for yourselves in the land of the Perizzites and Rephaim, since the hill country of Ephraim is too narrow for you.” Commentaries on this passage are in agreement that there was an ancient stand of extensive forest in this region, and that Joshua was encouraging the House of Joshua to turn their complaints into action and enlarge their borders by taking matters into their own hands by dispossessing the original inhabitants of the country by cutting down the trees for their own advantage; partly for the building of more cities and towns, and partly for preparing the land for the use of pasture. Land was a resource to be used to both grow a nation state as well as to conquer people; it was no longer home to the imminent divine.
This separation had great significance in the forming of the Western Christian mind. Biblical writers imagined that humans occupied a more exalted position in the natural order than the nature-based pagan religions conceived. Humans, sinful though they are accord to this world-view, occupy “a position on earth comparable to that of God in the universe.” Church father Paul of Tarsus perpetuated this Hebrew concept of human primacy over the natural world into the early Christian church. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he wrote that God had abandoned pagans because they “worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). This reinforced a theology of complete transcendence from the created world, and to venerate nature in any way would lead to a pantheistic Christian culture in which, theologian Paul Tillich noted, “the term pantheist is a ‘heresy’ label of the worst kind.” Herein laid the normative foundation for most of American Protestantism and Catholicism until the 1960s, one that was a human-centric and desacralized valuation of the natural world. An environmental movement that would see the other-than-natural world as having independent and inherent value apart from the human would be suspect and against the evangelical will of a deistic God.
The contemptuous mundi tradition delivers important moral consequences. Mark Wallace states, “If nature is not a sacred place, but a potential site for idolatry, then it is properly regarded as the domain of human beings, who because of their superior reason, have been designated by God to be God’s vicegerents over the entire created order.” Much of the evangelical critique in response to this seemingly scripturally sanctioned theme is that it lands itself squarely in the framework of pantheism or panentheism (i.e. God is the tree vs. God is in the tree).
A biblical, eco-centric model that supports Divine imminence and insistence that humans are not the center of the universe is a radical departure from our most fixed notions.
The life and work of the French mystic and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin is an example of this sort of radical voice, who in Hopkin’s phrase, understood the “world as charged with the grandeur of God.” Teilhard had a profound understanding of the sacramentality of the cosmos, as both the signifier of the Divine and a location of divine action and energy.
Sacramentality is a way of seeing the cosmos as a holy arena in which the things of the earth are not only signifiers of divine love but in some sense are active participants in the Divine; the material world is the instrument through which God comes.
To this end, Teilhard delighted in progressive science and wrote prolifically around his scientific specialties of paleontology, geology, philosophy, and theology. His great contribution, amongst others, was as a Christian thinker in the field of evolutionary science, which altered the scope in which the Western world traditionally viewed the human. His study of humanity’s place within Deep Time allowed him to critique the predominant use of redemption oriented theology and return to a more functional creation theology where the sacramental subjectivity of the universe is embraced. Every single living being was sacred—all en-souled bodies, the soil and the stars!
Teilhard’s contribution to sacred evolutionary cosmology was profound, and in many ways provides the inroad to how the Church can move collectively beyond our historical divisions towards a posture that sees and serves the wounds of our planet through the lens of sacred personhood and poverty. The existence of poverty is a social cause the universal Church embraces. Key to the Latin American liberation theology movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that the agency of the poor gained a voice and it was they that demanded the structural analysis and change to restore their rights. Ecoliberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who was heavily influenced by Teilhard and Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed that the not only was the earth sacred, but it was now to be counted amongst the poor as it too has been systematically under assault from the plundering of development as practiced by capitalistic societies. This move towards environmental justice challenges both liberal and evangelical Christians to actively respond to the physical suffering and ecological vulnerabilities of poor communities.
Can the Church unify around this paradigm shift of not only seeing how the planet’s poor people are impacted by climate change, but that this environmental crisis is occurring because of an irrupted and impoverished planet?
Perhaps, but this positions the protagonist agent as the dominant culture in a hierarchical manner that doesn’t fully restore rights or dignity to the planet itself. Is it possible for the Earth herself to give expression of her sufferings and her hopes, and demand the systems that allowed for environmental destruction to be addressed?
Whanganui River
In early 2017, the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India were granted the same status as a person, much like the protective status given to humans and corporations. These bodies of land and water now have their own legal, living identity, “with all the corresponding right, duties and liabilities of a legal person.” To pollute or damage these rivers will be legally equivalent to harming a person. No longer constrained as a resource humanity could exploit, re-source, or manage, this move recognized the sacred design of mutuality between planetary systems and people. In this revolutionary judicial law, these bodies of water have been given personhood. They are no longer simply a resource to be subdued, used, and dominated for the sake of humanity. They have inherent value simply for their being. This idea of the personhood of planetary features isn’t entirely new.
In 1972 legal scholar Christopher D. Stone argued in his famous essay, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, that rivers and trees and other “objects” of nature do have rights, and these should be protected by granting legal standing to guardians of these voiceless entities of nature, much as the rights of children are protected by legal guardians designated for this purpose. Stone’s argument struck a chord with U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. That same year, Justice Douglas wrote a dissent in the case of Sierra Club v. Morton, in which he argued for the conferral of standing upon natural entities so that legitimate legal claims could be made for their preservation. The river, Douglas wrote, “is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—the fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”
Fifty years on the Christmas Eve preceding his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and told the congregation that in order to achieve peace on earth, “we must develop a world perspective,” a vision for the entire planet. “Yes,” he said, “as nations and individuals, we are interdependent.” He continued on with a statement that could easily have been proclaimed Wangari Maathai or today’s #NODPL water protectors, Dr. King stated,
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.”
The earth is beginning to have a voice through this acknowledged personhood that will demand its inherent right to liberated life. This is the voice of the poor, the voice of the oppressed, the voice of the absent. The earth’s voice can now be included in the critical formula in how to serve the poor that has been advocated for by liberation theologians: “the preferential treatment of the poor.” This does not mean that we have the option to be committed to the poor; rather, this expressed primacy of the poor in Scripture is rooted in the unmerited love of God. This is the kind of renewed theology of creation that Tielhard imagined, and one that responds adequately to the anthropocentric supremacy in Christianity, together with biblically rooted commitment to justice for the poor and vulnerable ones. To an extent, the ecological crisis, and in particular, the climate change crisis within it, have given rise to this earth-centered spirituality that sees all created things-rivers, forests, oceans, and all the creatures therein-charged with the grandeur of God. “This is our faith,” Dr. King told his church on that December morning. “As we continue to hope for peace on earth,” he went on, “let us know that in the process we have cosmic companionship.”
This is our hope: a sacred world house, a collective planetary home in which together we advocate for the rights to life and a flourishing future for all.
Bibliography
Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.
Brueggemann, Walter. The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002).
Brunner, Daniel L., Jennifer L. Butler, and A.J. Swoboda. Introducing Evangelical Ecotheology: Foundations in Scripture, Theology, History, and Praxis. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014.
Cappel, Jerry. “Deeper Green Churches.” Sewanee Theological Review 58, no. 1 (2014), 139-161.
Connolly, William. “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine.” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 869-886.
Cornwall Alliance. “Resisting the Green Dragon.” YouTube video, October 15, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGEOFipx70U.
Douglas, William O. Nature’s Justice. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000.
Fischer, Kathleen. “Christian Spirituality in a Time of Ecological Awareness.” Theology Today 67 no. 2 (July 2010), 169-181.
Glacken, CJ. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from AncientTimes to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1967.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988.
Heltzel, Peter. “The World House: Prophetic Protestantism and the Struggle for Environmental Justice.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 63, no. 1-2 (2010), 26-41. http:// usqr.utsnyc.edu/article/the-world-house-prophetic-protestantism-and-the-struggle-for-environmental-justice/.
Kerber, Guillermo. “Caring for Creation and Striving for Climate Justice: Implications for Mission and Spirituality.” International Review of Mission 99, no. 391 (November 2010), 219-229. doi: 10.1111/j.1758-6631.2010.00045.x.
King, Martin Luther Jr. Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community. Boston: Beacon, 1968.
Knights, Philip. “The Whole Earth My Alter: A Sacramental Trajectory for Ecological Mission.” Mission Studies 25 no. 1 (2008), 56-72. doi: 10.1163/157338308X293918.
Rasmussen, Larry. Earth Community Earth Ethics. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998.
Scherer, Glenn. “Christian-Right Views are Swaying Politicians and Threatening the Environment.” Grist, October 28, 2004. http://grist.org/article/scherer-christian/.
Stone, Christoper D. Should Trees Have Standing: Law, Morality, and the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. “The Mass of the World,” in The Hymn of the Universe. London: Collins, 1965.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Volume I. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Victor, Philip J. “This River Has the Same Legal Status as a Person.” CNN, March 16, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/asia/river-personhood-trnd/.
Wallace, Mark I. “The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering the Spirit in Nature.” Theology Today 50, no. 1 (April 1993), 13-28.
Zeleha, Bernard Daley and Andrew Szasz. “Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change.” Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences 71 no. 5 (September 2015), 19-30. doi: 10.1177/0096340215599789.
The Silence Breakers: Mother Earth Says #METOO
Time Magazine rightly recognized the countless women behind breaking the silence of patterned sexual assault as the 2018 Person of the Year. It is not a surprise that our cultural consciousness is cracking as it experiences a reckoning in response to the #metoo movement during this season of stretched out night. Advent comes during utter darkness, and yet there is yet hope in the coming light. There is another female whose voice we must elevate alongside all the other voices who have spoken: Mother Earth otherwise known as Gaia.
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.
To turn humanity towards a new global outcome, we need new stories and myths of imagining God.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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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.
Rewilding & Journeying with Nature: A Conversation with Pilgrim Podcast
Are you curious about how I understand rewilding as a spiritual practice and nature as a sacred guide? Are you wondering if a Rewilding Retreat is right for you? Listen in to this illuminating conversation I had with Lacy Clark Ellman, host of the Pilgrim Podcast and pilgrimage guide with A Sacred Journey. I think you will come away with a desire to be rewilded!
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!
