Everywhere I have been in Israel, Palestine and Jordan is more than one place. These ‘wheres’ are layered with ‘whens’. The hillsides have been grazed for millennia. Caves have been inhabited by thousands of generations. Even Neanderthals have been found in the Carmel mountain range.
Each church or basilica is often a collage, a composite assemblage of past shrines. Byzantine establishment, Islamic conquest, Crusader rebuilding, reconquest, 19th or 20th century restoration. Ottoman and then British colonial rule. Most recently, the state of Israel.
Israeli nationalism imagined a unified Jewish homeland. After WWII this aspiration gained traction. When Israel declared itself a state with British permission in what was then Mandatory Palestine, some 400 Arab villages were “depopulated.” Either razed or reinhabited by Israeli re-settlers. A massive global diaspora felt it was coming home. Arabs who had lived in these places for hundreds of years felt like they were being driven from their traditional territories so to speak.
Nationalisms of all stripes tend to purify and reify places and construct them as if there were an original people and place. Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms both make claims to autochthony, which literally means self-earth. Of the place. And all these peoples have strong claims to this land. Throughout the long list of empires that have trampled and exploited the region, some measure of plurality has been navigated. From Pagan to Christian to Muslim empires.
We are now living in a time of either/or, left/right, oppressors/oppressed. Israel and Palestine’s aspirations will continue to play into this winner/looser political rhetoric.
In this way, Nationalism is a kind of sacralized mono-culture. One that tries to control stories and identity by imposing a single reading of place. Regardless of the future arrangement, plurality is going to have to be recognized by all sides.
From May 15-31 I will be in Israel/Palestine on pilgrimage. Going to post some jottings. But I’m writing them on my phone so forgive the brevity and choppiness.
The first ten days will be on a tour led by a Franciscan friar named Father Ben. He is originally from Ghana. Getting here was a long journey but very smooth. On my over night plane from JFK to Tel Aviv, there were many different kinds of Jewish folk. The man next to me wore a black woven Kippah on a bald head and it kept falling off when his head dipped in sleep.
I would wake up and look around with groggy eyes and see men dressed in full Jewish prayer regalia bobbing in place with prayer books in hand or sitting quietly adjusting their phylacteries on forehead and left arm.
The airline steward asked if I wanted my mid flight meal kosher, or “just regular.” I looked at my Jewish seat companion and said, “um, non-kosher please.” I said that so as not to imply that eating Kosher was all that odd.
At the hotel, there were mezuzahs on every door. A surcharge for spa services on Shabbat. And there was an elevator that was designated for use on Shabbat, saving observant Jews from having to press the elevator buttons. There was a small synagogue in the hotel basement.
In the front of the hotel, just below their welcome sign, there was a small pipal tree growing, the holy tree of enlightenment for Buddhists. I think they are quite common here.
When I rented a car on the first day before the tour started so I could see Haifa, I saw a man pulled over to the side of the busy freeway praying on his mat in the dust. In the most mundane of places he was making that dust holy with his prayer.
As I drove on the busy Israeli freeway, I passed a Caesarea freeway exit and the Roman aqueduct that fed water to the city from Mount Carmel built by Herod to honor the Roman Emperor in 22 BCE. It felt surreal to see Biblical place names on street signage. But of course, how else would it be? These places did not freeze in time.
In Nazareth, we visited holy basilicas and shrines and then ate shawarma in an equally ancient grotto turned pilgrim cantina. I joked that perhaps it was the place Jesus himself had his first shawarma!
Eating fish at our hotel on the Lake of Galilee, where Jesus and his disciples fished. Walking the shoreline and seeing privatized beaches with kayak and sea doo rentals.
All the religious sites have been breathtaking, if crowded. But at the margins off all these places and spaces there has been a kind of dialect of the holy also spoken by the mundane. If holy places are so often sacred because of what we believe exists there objectively, holiness can also be a powerful practice of making-sacred-with our places.
I recently joined the board the Brandt Oyster River Hermitage Society. We are getting ready to launch our website, and I was tasked with writing a short bio on Father Charles Brandt, a Hermit-Priest who lived in a small cabin and supported himself as a bookbinder on Vancouver Island. I met Charles in 2016, when I was completing my dissertation at UBC.
Photo by the author, 2016
Charles Brandt was the fifth child of the six and was born on February 19, 1923, in Kansas City, Missouri. He is of Danish-English heritage, the child of Alvin Rudolph Brandt-Yde and Anna Chester Bridges. His father was an auto mechanic at a Buick dealership and later served as a pilot in the Airforce during World War II. After the war, he worked as a Park Superintendent at Swope Park. Charles had two brothers and two sisters.
At the age of three, the family moved to a small farm where he had some of his first encounters of wonder in the natural world. The family raised chickens and had a milking cow. A small spring emptied into a creek on the property and there Charles would fish for perch and crawdads. In primary school, an observant teacher encouraged Charles to paint, and he enjoyed painting apple blossoms with watercolors. His Aunt, Helen F. Bridges, was on the board of the Kansas City Art Gallery and encouraged all the Brandt children to pursue artistic talents. Charles continued studying art at the Kansas City Arts Institute on Saturdays for several years.
As a Boy Scout, he earned the rank of Eagle and was drawn toward craft and book binding. Eldon Newcomb, a scientist who was also the head of the nature staff at Osceola Boy Scout Camp, became a major mentor and influence on Charles. For several summers, he served as a counselor at the Osceola Boy Scout Camp, where he taught bird watching and natural history. As a Scout he was elected to the Mic-O-Say tribe, which is an honor society that exists within the Boy Scouts of America. (In recent years the organization has been criticized by Indigenous people over concern that it engages in cultural appropriation. But in Charles day, it was a different time.) Charles was very early on fascinated by birds. Charles writes,
“During the spring of my 2nd year of high school, having become quite interested in bird study, I had an experience on weekend out along the Blu River. It was beside a small stream with the spring foliage when I began to see a stream of warblers moving along the stream and in the bushes, feeding and calling. The amazing thing was there were about nine different species in all their mating plumages, migrating through their nesting grounds. It was an overwhelming experience of beauty and wonder and wild. I wanted to preserve it forever” (Brandt 2006, 2).
This fascination with birds, birding and wildlife was a key dimension of Charles’ contemplative approach to ecology, and ecological approach to contemplation.
Father Brandt attended high school in Raytown, Missouri. Active in debate, band, swimming, oratory, sports, drama. He also worked as a life saver and lifesaving instructor. When Charles was thirteen, he read Henry David Thoreau’s famous book Walden Pond, and immediately felt the desire to “go to the woods”, a desire that eventually would call him to the hermit vocation. On Thoreau Charles said,
“I got interested then in Henry David Thoreau. He went to the woods to find out what life was all about, and that was really quite exciting, and a real challenge for me; and I wanted to do something like that. That was probably my first inroad into the hermit life” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 42).
Land, place, ecology and silence were for Charles a single whole from a very young age.
But at university, he decided to study conservation at the University of Missouri where he majored in wildlife conservation. Reflecting on this later, Charles realized that he had roomed with Starker Leopold who was studying wild turkeys in the Ozarks. Starker was the son of the famed conservationist Aldo Leopold (1987-1948).
In 1943 Charles entered Active Service with the US Army Air Corps. It was around this time, while Charles was studying in Colorado for the army, that Charles began attending a Baptist Church. And until 1946, when Charles was discharged, he travelled and studied for his service positions with the US Army, including bombardier training in Victoriaville, California. Charles was appointed a Flight Officer but never saw active combat before the war ended. When he entered military service, he didn’t really reflect on whether or not it was the right thing to do, since it seemed to be a patriotic duty. But by the end of his service, he felt that he had become something of a pacifist and winced at the thought of being an actual bombardier.
In 1947, Charles headed to Cornell University to study ornithology. Charles studied birdsong recording under Dr. Peter Kellogg and studied nesting birds at the Edwin S. George Reserve in Michigan. He was also elected to Phi Kappa Phi, a student scientific society for his high academic achievement. Charles would go on to graduate first in his class with a Bachelor of Science in biology. Charles’ first scientific article was published in the Wilson Bulletin, based in Anne Arbor, Michigan. The essay was entitled “The Parasitism of the Acadian Flycatcher.”
Taking serious stock of his spiritual life, Charles began attending Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Ithaca, New York. Soon, Charles met the Reverent Francis Voelcker, the priest in residence there, who saw in Charles a great contemplative potential. He began mentoring Charles and encouraged him to explore a vocation to the Anglican priesthood. Charles spent that summer living with an Anglican religious order, the Brothers of Saint Barnabas, who were devoted to the care of men and boys with developmental disabilities and incurable illnesses.
Though as a Hermit-Priest Charles never married, and he doesn’t mention many romantic partners, it seems that during this time he was quite fond of a woman he refers to as C.C. They attended services together at Saint John’s and Charles simply writes, “we spent considerable time together” (Brandt 2006, 4).
After graduating from Cornell in 1948, Charles decided to pursue Holy Orders. He returned to Colorado where he lived during his military training and was accepted as candidate for Anglican priesthood by Bishop Bowen of the Colorado Diocese. He entered Nashotah House Seminary in Wisconsin, living there for three years where Charles enjoyed the routine of the community which included Mass and the daily office.
However, during seminary Charles continued to wrestle with finding a meaningful spirituality and began to read more widely from books by writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Father Benson of the Cowley Fathers of England, another Anglican religious order. He seemed to be seeking a deeper spirituality of silence and contemplation. Then, Charles stumbled upon Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Story Mountain and found a deep resonance with Merton’s rich contemplative spirituality. Of Merton’s writing he said simply, “it blew me away.” So much so that he and several seminarians had arranged to spend easter at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton lived, to experience Trappist life firsthand and meet Merton in person, but the trip was cancelled at the last minute, and they didn’t end up going. On reading Thomas Merton for the first time, Charles reflects,
“So when I read The Seven Story Mountain, that was what I was looking for; that really answered my question. I wanted to know if it was possible to really experience God in this lifetime, can you talk to him, as a person? That was really a revelation, The Seven Story Mountain, and it changed my whole thinking. From then on, I was thinking in terms of monastic the life” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 48).
That year, however, Charles ended up visiting another Trappist monastery. He made arrangements to meet with Father Bede O’Leary the Abbot and theologian of Our Lady of Guadeloupe Trappist Abbey which at the time was located in New Mexico (in 1954 the community relocated to Carlton, Oregon). Charles wanted to talk with O’Leary about contemplative, or mental prayer and Father Bede became a great voice of council for Charles.
In 1950 Charles spent the summer at the Community of Augustine and Anglican Contemplative House in Orange City, Florida and on December 7th Charles was ordained a Deacon at Saint Andrew’s Church in Denver, Colorado by Bishop Bowen.
In 1951, accompanied by Reverend Voelcker, Charles went to England to explore the varieties of the Church of England’s contemplative life. They visited Chevetogne, Belgium where he met with Dom Lambert Beauduin (OSB) who was interested in the Anglican re-unification with Rome. This meeting brought Charles to question the validity of Anglican Holy Orders, because he learned that they had been declared invalid by the Vatican.
From here, Charles began to try his hand at the monastic life in earnest and in 1951 he became a Postulant at Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican monastery in Mirfield, Yorkshire. Despite his doubts, in 1952 he was ordained an Anglican Priest by Bishop of Wakefield, UK.
In 1953 Charles left the Community of the Resurrection and spent some time in continental Europe making various stops in France and Rome. He spent ten days in Assisi, a few weeks in Rome, and met with a Benedictine monks named Father Dennis Stratham OSB. Father Stratham was from Saint Gregory’s monastery in Shawnee, Oklahoma. This meeting would prove providential, as Charles was received into the Roman Catholic Church there in 1956.
In the meantime, Charles continued his quest for a place to express his contemplative vocation within the existing religious communities of the Anglican/Episcopal traditions. When he returned from Europe in the latter half of 1953, he travelled to a property in Gaylordville, New York where Father Paul Weed had a property that he wanted to transform into a contemplative community. Father Charles built a small hermitage on the property out of old railroad ties and started working as a Chaplain at Kent School in Connecticut where he also helped with the garden.
Soon however, Charles discerned that this was not his place and he decided to move to Three Rivers Michigan, a small Anglican Benedictine community in 1954 and entered as a postulant. While he was there, he learned to chant the divine office in Latin, and continued his voracious reading of the mystics and contemplatives. Charles was deeply moved by the writings of Camaldoli monk Father Bede Griffiths whose autobiography The Golden String deeply impacted Charles. Griffiths was a monk in England for many years, but eventually found himself in India dialoguing with Hindu Sanyasis and fusing East and West. Father Charles also began reading John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Newman had spearheaded the Anglo-Catholic revival in the Church of England in the late 19th century, but eventually converted to Catholicism and was made a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. This period sealed Father Charles movement to the Roman Catholic Church, so he left for Louisiana to meet with the only catholic priest he knew, Father Bede O’Leary who was on leave and serving a parish there. O’Leary sent Charles to St Benedict’s Monastery, and he met with the Prior there. Despite meeting daily for a month, Charles was not quite ready to make the move from Anglican to Roman Catholic. So, Charles decided to travel to Mexico City on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our lady of Guadeloupe, accompanied by Father Bede.
Upon returning, he decided to head to Saint Gregory’s Abbey in Shawnee, Oklahoma where he continued his discernment, studied Latin, and met with a resident theology professor regularly. It was during this time that Father Charles fell in love with book binding, a skill that would become his own contemplative bread and butter throughout his years as a hermit in British Columbia.
On January 26, 1956, Charles Brandt was received into the Roman Catholic Church and in April he was confirmed in the Cathedral at Oklahoma City. Charles continued his stay at Saint Gregory’s, taking theology classes and deepening his bookbinding skills. That Easter Charles decided to travel to Gethsemani Trappist Abbey where he met with Thomas Merton who was the novice master at the time. Merton was warm and received Charles with kindness.
On his first meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Brandt recounts, “So at Easter I went to Gethsemani. I knew Merton was the novice master. I didn’t realize I was going to meet him. I was in the guest house for about a week. So [knocking] I hear this knock on the door, and in enters Thomas Merton. You know, he sat down there, just the most ordinary person in the world. Immediately, I liked him, really liked him as a person, and we talked. My intent was to enter the novitiate there, but he said, “Don’t come here. We could make a good monk of you, but not a good contemplative”” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 52).
After several chats with Merton and later his Bishop, Charles decided to forgo a trip to Rome to pursue a quicker pathway to priesthood and decided to first solidify his vocation as a monk. Charles decided to enter New Melleray Abbey, Dubuque, Iowa, another Trappist Abbey. This decision seemed fruitful and in 1958 Charles made Simple Profession (temporary vows) and was put in charge of a small book bindery. Charles continued his studies in philosophy and theology.
In 1964, during the upheavals and experimentation of Vatican II, Charles became uncertain about making final profession (vows). All over the world, monastic orders were studying their roots, which went back to the hermits and recluses of Syria, Judea and Egypt. Charles remembered that Thomas Merton told him about the Camaldolese Order which had a monastery in Ohio. So, Charles and his Abbot drove to visit them. However, the Camaldolese stood for the duration of the divine office. Having a back problem, Charles knew within ten minutes that he wouldn’t make it.
Back to the drawing board, Charles wrote a letter to Thomas Merton. Merton’s reply was published in a collection of letters, and Merton encouraged Charles to continue his search for a more contemplative place to live out his vocation. Charles soon found two eremitic experiments: A Benedictine hermit named Peter Minard in North Carolina and Dom Winandy, greatly admired by Merton, who was leading a small group of hermits on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
After visiting Peter Minard, Charles was impressed. Minard lived a simple life on old plantation. But soon it became clear that Father Minard was mostly looking for someone to run the farm. So, the Abbot of New Melleray wrote to Dom Winandy, who gave Charles permission to come for a visit.
In March of 1965 Charles arrived at Winandy’s group, The Hermits of Saint John the Baptist, located on the Tsolum River in Merville, BC one hundred acres of forested land. Charles moved into a small trailer and then began to build a hermitage there with some local help which was completed in September. To earn a living Charles decided he would try his hand at being a professional book binder, and the Trappists of Carlton, Oregon, Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey (who Charles had previously visited in New Mexico), donated some book binding equipment. With this Charles began to search for clients in the local area.
Despite Dom Winandy’s misgivings about hermits becoming priests, Winandy gave Charles permission to meet with Bishop Remi De Roo, who eventually accepted him as candidate for priesthood. In August he received minor orders and was incardinated in the Diocese of Victoria which essentially ended his temporary vows at New Melleray. On November 21, 1966, Charles was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest by Bishop De Roo at the Canadian Martyrs Church. According to Charles, he was the first full time hermit ordained in Catholic Church in several hundred years.
While living on the Tsolum River, Charles began working as a fisheries technician, and assisted in some parish work on Cumberland on Sundays. Eventually the hermitage site became a bit too crowded, and Winandy and several hermits including Charles dispersed to other properties. In the Spring of 1970, Charles moved his hermitage structure to its current location on the Oyster River.
In the mid-1970s Charles travelled extensively to improve his bookbinding skills. He spent several months in San Francisco learning book restoration and then travelled to the New England Document Centre in Andover, Massachusetts to learn more about flatwork conservation of maps, parchments and prints. Charles was even appointed Chief of the Bindery, which kept him very busy teaching workshops and conducting surveys. In 1975-76, Charles travelled extensively in Europe where he both worked and studied additional conservation techniques.
Returning to Canada, from 1976-1981 Charles was employed by various Canadian book conversation programs. First, he worked for the Canadian Conservation Institute in Moncton, NB as Professional Book and Paper Conservator. Charles said a daily noon Mass in an English-speaking Church in Moncton. When this office closed, he moved to a centre based in Ottawa where he restored bound volumes, maps and art works on paper. Charles was also hired by the Manitoba government to design and oversee the building of a state-of-the-art restoration laboratory in Winnipeg from 1981-1984. The purpose was to survey and restore the Hudson’s Bay archives. Charles also travelled throughout Canada doing conservation work in Yukon, Manitoba, and Alberta during this time. On his love for bookbinding and conservation Charles wrote:
“Probably the best contemplative part of bookbinding is sewing the book. It’s a very relaxing, I think a very meditative, contemplative aspect of binding. Literature is disappearing at a great rate from our libraries all over the world, and it’s our written record of humanity. So if you’re preserving that, as I am, you’re preserving humanity, the culture, and I think that’s really quite worthwhile. It’s like preserving the earth. It’s not just a job, it’s something that’s conducive to the prolongation of civilization” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 55).
Charles was a craftsman and appreciated work well done. The embodied nature of the work, the quiet and the sense of purpose facilitated a contemplative atmosphere that was conducive of prayer.
In 1984, Charles finally returned to his beloved hermitage where he began making additions to the structure and installing a conservation lab and library. Charles began teaching conservation and restoration techniques at University of Victoria, UBC, Simon Fraser, University of Alberta, Washington State University and in many communities across Vancouver Island.
Even before he left for his travels related to book binding and document conservation, Charles was a passionate lover of place. He would write letters to local officials protesting proposed developments on the Oyster and Tsolum Rivers. When he returned to full time residency at the hermitage in 1984, he began lobbying campaign which mushroomed into a large number of environmental projects throughout the Campbell River and Comox Valley. Throughout the years, Charles was involved in many environmental groups and causes: The Steelhead Society of BC, Haig Brown Kingfisher Creek Society, the Campbell River Environmental Council, the Tsolum River Enhancement Committee, the Oyster River enhancement Society, the Oyster River Watershed Management Committee and the Tsolum River Restoration Committee. In the 1990s the local media began to take notice, and he even received several environmental awards for his work on river restoration and conservation.
It was at this same time that he began holding meditation retreats with the local community, despite some Catholic leaders warning against “Eastern” forms of prayer and meditation. His work of ecology and contemplation were quite a natural fit: Action and Contemplation were connected. In 1990, the meditation group became a regular event, which continued to the end of Charles’ life.
In 2001, Charles was the keynote Speaker at the Western Conference on Christian Meditation in Edmonton, Alberta which solidified his leadership in the global contemplative movement. On prayer, Charles reflected, “I think that anybody who prays benefits the whole body of Christ. Prayer touches everybody. The person next to me is affected by whatever I do. If I pray, that helps them, and it also helps the natural world” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 39).
Charles life was a series of questions lived out in many different places and among many different communities. But his love for craft, ecology, and prayer shine through all of this. Charles is an exemplar of contemplative ecology lived well. Toward the end of his life, Charles reflected on the contemplative life and on the hermitage property that the Hermitage Society lovingly maintains. He said,
“In a way, I’m looking towards eternity now. I’ll be 93 on February 19th, [2016], so I’m not going anywhere. I love this spot. I’m permanent. I feel steady, in a sense, with life, and with my calling. And this is my place. I walk out and I know the trees, and I know the birds and the animals. They’re my friends. As I said, the human community and the rest of the natural world has to go into the future as a single sacred community. I feel that I’m part of this community where the natural world and people come and go; and if we don’t, as Thomas Berry says, we’ll perish” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 57).
Father Charles Brandt died at the age of 97 on October 25, 2020, after a short stay at a local hospital in the Comox Valley. Upon his death, close friend and co-founder of the Brandt Oyster River Hermitage Society Bruce Witzel reflected, “His stature as a spiritual teacher as well as his whole legendary reputation as someone who integrated spirituality with ecology will live on after him in the lives and efforts of the many people he directly inspired” (Closter 2020).
Charles’ Publications
Charles Brandt. Meditations from the Wilderness: A Collection of Profound Writing on Nature as the Source of Inspiration (Harper Collins, 1997). 150 quotations about ecology, place and contemplation.
Self and Environment: On Retreat with Charles Brandt. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2000). An outline of Charles thinking on contemplative and ecology.
Bibliographical Sources
Charles Brandt, “Autobiographical Timeline” Email from Charles Brandt to Judy Hager (Dec. 14, 2006).
Rev. Don Grayston (1939-2017) and David Chang “A Single Sacred Community:
Over the next few weeks, I will post a series of sketches of some ideas I have kicking around in my head. With luck, they might become longer essays or full length books! Apologies in advance for grammar and spelling errors…
Living in Vancouver I have always felt a bit lonely in my Christianity. I love the catholic tradition, but I have serious hesitations about a full-throated enthusiasm for being part of the Roman Catholic Church. Recently, I learned that two men I admire converted (or in one case reverted) to Christianity. This has made me feel a bit less lonely and pointed to something I see happening among some spiritual but not religious ecological types. Paul Kingsnorth and then Martin Shaw, both British, and both frequent speakers on podcast and YouTube circuits, converted to Christianity in 2021. Paul converted directly into Eastern Orthodoxy, and Martin, after being baptized by an Anglican priest, has entered catechesis with a local Orthodox church in Exeter.
Shaw grew up in the Baptist tradition, with a preacher as a father, but in his teens became a musician and eventually left the church (very familiar to my own story). He was raised not just with theology but the telling of fairytales and myths. Now in his late 40s, at the end of a 101-night vigil in the forest, Shaw saw a multicolored star-like aura of light moving toward him which pierced the ground like an arrow. He heard a voice that said “Inhabit the time in Genesis of your original home.” He says he felt the presence of “the mossy face of Christ.” Thereafter, entering the lockdowns of COVID-19, he had series of dreams in which a clear message was conveyed. Podcasters Mark Vernon and then Justin Brierley have observed that many in the West are seeking for deeper meaning beyond the fuzzy post-Christian spiritual but not religious landscape of the liberal and progressive West. They have cautiously suggested that Christianity is entering a new phase.
Paul is a talented novelist, who for many years, was a front lines environmental activist. He always had a spiritual side and spent time in Buddhism and Wicca as an unapologetic Deep Ecologist and critique of industrial civilization. His book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist was a public break with his career in the mainstream environmental movement and a manifesto of slowing down, staying put and giving up on the “carbon game.” His response to environmentalism, and his lavish praise for writers like Wendell Berry always sounded to me quasi-monastic. His decision to move to a small farm in Ireland sealed that impression. Kingsnorth continues to rail against “the machine” but he is now doing so within a consciously English, even Celtic, Christianity that shares very little of the New Age trappings of the Neo-Celtic visions of folks like Matthew Fox or John Phillip Newell.
In both of their Substack threads Kingsnorth and Shaw have been thinking out loud about their newfound Christian practice. One thread of Shaw’s is entitled “A Liturgy of the Wild” and in it Shaw curates several wonder stories and archetypal hero journeys that are accompanying him as he learns the rhythms of the Christian liturgical calendar. I have always admired both men, and I feel a deeper kinship with their stories. I don’t always agree with Kingsnorth’s politics, but I certainly have taken heart in my own lonely journey with the catholic contemplative tradition.
My pilgrimage into catholic Christianity began when I stumbled onto the writings of Thomas Merton, the Trappist writer-monk who spent much of life writing about contemplative spirituality from his monastery in Kentucky. When I attended my first Easter Vigil (Saturday evening service before Easter Sunday), I felt the power of the liturgy through the candle-lit depth of anticipated resurrection. It was a powerful, aesthetic, and affective experience. As the warmth of the liturgy sank in over the days and weeks thereafter, I realized that for me the power of the Christian tradition lay not just in creeds and atonement for sin, but in an ability to invite us into a participation with the cruciform nature of the cosmos. By this I mean that through a liturgy that aligns with the seasons of the Norther Hemisphere’s waxing and waning and the earth’s own resurrection, we bring our own bodies to the pascal mystery: birth, death, and resurrection. Coming to believe in the resurrection of Christ was made possible for me by experiencing first a real attention to the resurrection of the earth. Thereafter, the resurrection of Jesus was not an exercise in intellectual ascent to the proposed truthfulness of an enchanted version of History, but to the reality of resurrection that spoke out of every flower and tree and my own circadian pilgrimage through the year. Jesus distilled and recapitulated that rhythm with his life.
I recount this here because what I am observing and learning from Kingsnorth and Shaw is that to a large extent they too were drawn to the archetypal, storied mysterious depth of the tradition. Their hearts were caught in the fisher’s net, and they have lived to tell the tale. Like the mystics, who classically emphasize direct experience, they are speaking from their own bewildered walk with a wild Christ. Not the buddy Christ of contemporary mainstream Christians, but a dark figure who broods in the wildlands and rails against convention.
Shaw for example specifically states that he was drawn back to Christianity because of the strangeness and wildness of Christ and the story. He calls Christianity “the last great mystery”. And now he is a on a mission to reclaim the contemplative, wild, ecologically rich texture of the faith. Whereas many converts to Orthodoxy I have read about tend to emphasize coming to some ascent to its authenticity in relation to some imagined original or continuous Christianity, what I hear Kingsnorth and Shaw doing, is, walking in the tracks of the mystics, drawing close to the warm glow of the power of Christianity’s stories and liturgies.
They are in short espousing what I want to call a Christian Mythodoxy. Mythos: from a root that comes from mouth, myths are not untruths to be busted, but the stories and deep human truths in which we see ourselves participating; not just moral lesson or entertainment. Doxy: meaning praise is our orientation toward the Divine, how do we soak up the rays of the Divine? It constitutes our spiritual practices, our liturgy and worship.
In the wider orbit of ecological spirituality, there are a lot of wonderful conversations that are trying to reconnect with the earth’s rhythms, place, archetypes, myths and even astrology. Adaya’s ecological spirituality courses, the School of Mythopoetics, the now defunct Seminary of the Wild, and many more. Yet while many of these courses can feel quite hostile to Christianity (speaking from personal experience), several renegade threads have been seeking to rewild the Christian lifeway.
For example, Franciscan Ilia Delio has showed that Catholic, from the Greek Kata-holon, according to the whole, must catch up with the facts of evolution and the implications of the discoveries of quantum physics regarding matter-energy as a continuous reality. Others like philosopher John D. Caputo have talked about post-modern Christianity as an exercise not in theology as science, but as a kind of Theo-poetics. As I often tell my students, religion done well is poetry about a mystery, meaning that theology for the most part is not meant to be an exercise certainty, proofs and evidence, but one of awe, wonder, praise and sometimes lament. Others such as writers Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand are doing fascinating things with the possibilities of a wilder, earthier, porous Christianity. These two seem to be more on the outside margins of the tradition, but they speak eloquently about the wild origins of Jesus’s teachings, parables, and connections to the natural world in first century Palestine. Brie Stoner’s podcast Unknowing has also been the grounds for some interesting conversations about what comes after a rigid, denominational Christian identity at the dawn of the Anthropocene.
What I see happening more and more in these discoveries or reimaginings of Christianity does not fit into any denominational category. It is rather a kind of diffuse gesture, posture or dare I say (leaderless) movement. A Christian Mythodoxy seems to be one possible green shoot germinating out of the compost pile of a religion in decline (at least in the West). Stoner’s series on composting Christianity, and Sophie Strand have used that wonderful metaphor to talk about living on the edge of something that feels like both a death rattle and a birth pang (Romans 8). The so-called Anthropocene is bringing about great harm but is also opening space for something new.
What I am experiencing and observing is the idea that to be a Christian is not just to ascent to a platform of beliefs and then check one’s life against it. Rather, beyond theology (not in opposition to it), there lies a move toward a mythic praise, a mytho-doxy, grounded in the body and grounded in the cycles of the earth, that is the tangled fabric of our messy faith, which is always, already embedded in the liturgy of the cosmos, the good earth, and the breathtaking beauty of the pascal mystery.
“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.
–The Apostles Creed
“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.”[1]
–Thomas Merton
A Communion of the Saintly
Toward the end of the Nicaean and Apostle’s Creeds, Christians from many denominations affirm the belief in the Communion of the Saints. In practice, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Oriental, and Easter Orthodox traditions commonly integrate saints into our liturgies, calendars and even patronal names at baptism. My own patron saint is Saint Kevin of Ireland. Not only is he the patron saint of very ordinary names like mine, but as a hermit, he embodied the deep love of Creation at the heart of Irish Paganism and Christianity.
The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church defines a saint as someone who is closer or more united with Christ in heaven. Intercessory prayer, which seems to pick up where Pagan polytheism leaves off, sees this proximity to heaven as a legitimate and effective way of amplifying one’s prayers. It emphasizes the idea that the church is a communal structure that is not confined to the living.
Saints are also culture-heroes that elevate our eyes toward heavenly virtues through the prism of their unique gifts. Saints are the celebrities and athletes of the spiritual life. They are role models and icons of holiness and character. For example, sounding a bit like a Catholic Bodhisattva, 19th century French Saint Therese of Lisieux wrote, “I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth.”[2] Saints are heroic in virtue, and yet they are often keenly aware of their own woundedness. Contemporary Catholic commentator and YouTube evangelist Bishop Robert Barron uses the analogy of a pane of glass to describe the saintly heart. As it becomes more directly illuminated by light, even the slightest smudges and blemishes become readily apparent. As Barron puts it, saints are simply people who know they are sinners. Saints don’t earn this merit, they simply orient their lives toward the light already there.
In a broader sense, all Christians, or even all people, are saints. In his letters, the Apostle Paul refers to the ordinary members of his churches as Saints—as contemporary Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, continue to do. For Paul, the Saints (Gk: hagiois, holy ones) were those who had chosen to bask in the Grace of the risen Christ.
This notion of ordinary folks being Saints shouldn’t surprise us. Think of Paul’s stark transformation from a persecutor of the church to a Christic visionary; or of Peter’s penchant for cowardly self-preservation at the time of the crucifixion, to a miracle working evangelist-martyr who tradition holds was crucified upside down. From the earliest moments of Christianity there is a notion that each of us are saints in embryo, holy not just through extraordinary feats of virtue, but through our createdness, our belovedness, and our utter dependence on God, who brings us into being and sustains us in each moment.
Making Room for Creation in the Communion of the Saints
For most of Christian history, Sainthood has been seen as a human affair. However, it seems like the time has come to decenter the human person as the only creature in Creation worthy of the title. I don’t want to devalue us, I want to decenter us, there is a difference. I want to think about this with the help of 20th century spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the patron saint of ecology Saint Francis of Assisi, and a few other geologians.
It isn’t actually that much of a leap to go from the notion of a primordial sainthood at the heart of our human createdness, which emerges from no merit of our own, to the saintliness of the rest of Creation with whom we share our evolutionary morphology and instincts. As a monk explained to me on retreat regarding his belief in animal souls: “Do we have the same Father? Ok, then we are siblings!”
In his poem Canticle to Creation, Saint Francis of Assisi affirmed this close kinship with creation in the 12th century. In writing with the reconciliation of two rival cities in mind, Francis declared with the Psalms that all of creation rightly gives God praise. However, he also went a step further by referring to Sun, Moon, Water, Plants, Earth, and Fire as our siblings. He wrote: “Praise be to you Lord God through Brother Sun…”[3] This kinship language is striking for a pre-ecological age that affirms the interrelatedness of all creation. And yet, there is no confusing Creation and Creator, only a more directly aligned prism that is able to see God’s loving presence in Creation.
In his foundational book New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton meditates on the depth of contemplative spirituality in the Catholic tradition. Merton’s writing had a great deal to do with bringing mysticism and contemplative spirituality to an entirely new generation of Catholics, and his influence has reached into the generations of the 21st century through the efforts of the International Thomas Merton Society. One of the most startling and beautiful passages in New Seeds beautifully amplifies saintliness beyond the more than human Creation in a way that would have turned Henry David Thoreau’s scruffy head. Merton writes:
“A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him. It “consents,” so to speak, to His creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.”[4]
A tree’s substance, its tree-ness, is its praise, and because that substance owes its very being to God, it is fundamentally united with God, or, in other words, a Saint. Merton continues:
“The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate beings, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God. Their inscape is their sanctity.”
Here, Merton alludes to a word coined by Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Inscape for Hopkins is a creature’s most intimate uniqueness, which bears the very finger print of God. As Dan Horan has written, this is a deeply Franciscan idea, which echoes the heady theology of 14th century theologian John Duns Scotus. Merton, say on!
“The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom and it declares the glory of God. The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God. This leaf has its own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength.”[5]
Swoon. This is one of my very favorite passages from Merton, and when I first read it as a seasonal forester in Utah in 2012, it changed the way I saw the woods. It is recalling this passage that I affirm the idea that the Communion of Saints is ready for an update.
Extinction is Martyrdom
Death is a fact of evolution. Most species have an ecological life span of about a million or so years. Human beings may be no different if we don’t shape up. Extinction, the death of a species, happens naturally. Admittedly difficult to calculate, the background rate of natural extinctions is about one species per million species per year. The industrial machine is speeding up that rate so by estimates of between 100 to 1000 times the background rate. There have been five major extinctions of life on this planet, reducing species diversity by 75-90 per cent. Human expansion out of Africa, but especially the activities of industrial humanity initiated what some are calling the Sixth Extinction event.
For those of us who see the world as more than a God-given grocery store, extinction caused by human beings is a travesty. Extinction has been likened to the silencing of an instrument in the symphony of Creation. Said another way, if each creature is a word of God, unique and singular in its particularity and bespokeness, a species, is an epic cosmic poem. Extinction at the hands of human expansion impoverishes the vocabulary of this cosmic epic that makes up an earthly Communion of Saints. Just as murder is not just death, extinction by our hands is a kind of martyrdom.
Escha-ecology
In his Letter to the Romans chapter 8:22, Paul writes that “all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.” There is a sense that Christ is a cosmic event, and salvation an earthly affair. In the famous John 3:16, “God so loved the world”, after all. Eschatology is the study of last things, final words, and end times. For many Christians, only humans will accompany God into post-moral eternities. But in an era of ecological conscience, eschatology needs an earthy reassessment. As ecological theologian Sallie McFague has written, “Salvation is the direction of all of creation, and creation is the very place of salvation.”[6] Salvation was not just a single event, but an ongoing trajectory of Creation as the Body of God.
Theologians like the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and his contemporary interpreter Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio, see Big Bang cosmology as affirming the idea that Creation is moving toward its fulfillment in God. For Teilhard the Omega point was synonymous with the Logos of John Ch. 1, where the author states that the Word (Logos) was with God from the beginning and is God.
Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet, and Teilhard used this as an image of the entirety of Creation being drawn into God through the humanity of Christ (Logos). Of course for Teilhard, the Omega point insinuated that the Noosphere, or mental realm, would become independent of the physical world, but Delio’s writings make a stronger claim that all of creation is involved in this ongoing cosmic soteriology. She writes, “Rather, reality is a single, organic, evolutionary flowing.”[7] The lives of Saints are powerful because they give us a taste of heaven on earth. To expand the Communion of Saints is acknowledge that like the Our Father prayer, salvation is the ongoing process of earth merging with heaven.
Finally, if a human can be a saint, perhaps we should consider whether or not her gut flora, eye mites, viruses, lice, skin and mouth bacteria, fungi, and parasites might be as well. Perhaps as well, we should wonder whether the species that have been domesticated with us are Saints: Heather, corn, wheat, barley, millet, cows, chickens, dogs, pigs. Perhaps as well those that have accompanied us as we made our cities: Cats, rats, mice, cockroaches, pigeons, squirrels, starlings, coyotes, dandelions, and crows. And perhaps those species and ecologies that provided the materials, medicines, and wild foods that nourished us. And all those that populated our symbols, languages and stories. Perhaps the Communion of Saints is nothing less than an ongoing Being-One-With the Holy-Ones-of-Creation.
A Litany of Ten Salish Sea Rainforest Trees
Saint Western Red Cedar pray for us…
Saint Douglas fir pray for us…
Saint Western Hemlock pray for us…
Saint Grant Fir pray for us…
Saint Sitka Spruce pray for us…
Saint Amabilis Fir pray for us…
Saint Big Leaf Maple pray for us…
Saint Red Alder pray for us…
Saint Paper Birch pray for us…
Saint Yew pray for us…
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions. Kindle Edition, 1961/2007), 27.
[2] St. Therese of Lisieux, The Final Conversations, (Washington: ICS, 1977), 102.
I have participated in my share of circles where Western folks like me are seeking deeper spiritual connection outside of their Christian or Abrahamic roots. Many of us have come from more rigid religious backgrounds that felt moralistic and spiritually anemic. In addition, the unfortunate legacy of violence, toxic patriarchy, intentional genocide and overt structural racism within the cultures that cluster under the umbrella of Western civilization has led to an understandable longing for the “Not-West”. As a result many of us have mixed, dabbled, converted, or fawned over traditions generally labelled as Eastern, Indigenous, Pre-modern or non-Western.
We say things like “Christianity is dualistic” or “Western civilization is patriarchal”, “colonialism is violence”, “this land was stolen”. We feel ashamed of our history and seek to extract ourselves from tainted, offending identities by talking about the need to move toward anything but the “West.” The general belief seems to be that unlike our civilizations, Indigenous cultures and Eastern philosophies are animistic, more spiritual, and egalitarian.
This disillusion with the entirety of one’s own culture/civilization can be quite distressing. One may, as many of us have, descend into an internalized self-loathing rooted in a self-imposed cultural exile. We feel lost, uncertain, despairing. The centering of our sin as Westerners compels us to seek atonement through our lifestyles as post-Western, post-Christian, or what have you.
However, sometimes it feels like there is an unhealthy polarity in this longing for the not-West. By this I mean that our longing seems to reflect an instinct implanted in us by the very cultures we critique. This is a logic expressed by either/or thinking, by dichotomies. Because we have come to reject the framework of the West, we seek alternatives in culture perceived to be outside of the West. For example, disillusioned Christians will sympathize with a vague sort of Buddhism, which is imagined to be less moralistic, focused on individual spirituality and closer to nature. This view conveniently ignores the fact that Western Buddhisms have mostly found a social niche within counter-cultural individualism. Rarely is it acknowledged that historical and global Buddhisms are quite capable of their own versions of patriarchal sexism, violent Nationalisms or a strict, even suffocating, socially constricted moralizing.
In light of a flood of individuals embracing non-Western spirituality and identities, some social justice advocates have rightfully raised the question of inappropriate cultural appropriation. This is generally defined as: “the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression and doesn’t respect their original meaning or give credit to their source.”[1] This critical gaze is generally cast toward those in the Neo-Shamanic, Neo-Pagan, New Animist, Entheogenic, or the ever evolving New Age traditions. It is sometimes levelled against Western Yogis who teach Yoga that has been stripped of its Tantrism/Hinduism, or Mindfulness meditation stripped of its Buddhism.
I sometimes find that the critics of cultural appropriation are too rigid in their boundary policing and fail to discern between spiritual eclecticism and harmful exploitation. It can be difficult to tell the difference. The practices associated with cultural appropriation that I find most harmful or offensive are not the ones that adopt practices into one’s own spiritual path, but those which twist the practices into something entirely contrary to their original intent.
For example, non-Western cultures which carry a kind of cache or alluring exoticism are easily appropriated as yet another marketing icon in the religion of consumerist self-worship. Late capitalism’s fetishism of brands and consumer goods is unequivocally religious in nature and believe it or not, most of us are members of the Church of the Consumer.
A contrast: Perhaps the use of Yoga primarily as a means to physical fitness with some positive mental and spiritual side effects would be a slight misuse of the practice’s original intent, but certainly not necessarily the kind of repugnant cultural appropriation that is worth denouncing. Rather, appropriation is the intentional distortion and exploitation of the allure of Yoga’s exotic imagery for profit or in service of the exalted, self-realized, human being. Once a yearning for a particular type of life, value, or habit gains any semblance of social cohesion, focus-group-high-priests are there to sell it back to us as a means to self-fulfillment. Your spirituality, your zero waste lifestyle, your veganism, your social justice activism are already being sold back to you in a thousand different ways.
In my view, this twisting is worthy of public denunciation and avoidance by those who care enough to think about it. However, another danger that lurks behind the adoption of non-Western forms of spirituality is that it can enable what has been termed spiritual bypassing: avoiding the necessary healing of one’s own cultural traditions or the reclaiming of one’s own culture’s symbols and archetypes. The term spiritual bypassing was coined by psychiatrist John Welwood who defines it as a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”[2] So, for example, rather than working through our issues with the Divine Masculine, we opt to focus on the Divine Feminine. Harnessing the momentum from legitimate grievances against our own cultures, we ping to the mirror image of a polemical spiritual binary, rather than seeking to re-integrate a broken and abused dimension of the whole. Again, I am not against authentic conversion, or responsible syncretisms, but I think this caution is not often heeded before starting on the journey out of the traditions of own upbringing (if we in fact have had them).
My Own Situation
All of the world’s spiritual and religious traditions formed from some level of improvisational spiritual jazz. I was raised in the Mormon tradition which borrows from Judaism, Masonic rites, folk magic, and Puritan capitalism. Gradually however, I found myself drawn toward the contemplative Catholic tradition with a strong emphasis on the natural world as a means of communing with the Divine. I identify very much with the pluralist impulses at the heart of the Perennial Tradition, Western mysticism and esotericism. So, I converted. Catholicism is an open-invitation tradition, all are invited to join and participate in the forms of Catholicism. It is also within the same religious family as Mormonism, Christianity.
In my personal spirituality I practice Centering Prayer as a method of meditation. This is a silent meditation practice developed by Catholic monks in the Christian contemplative tradition. It is not borrowed from Buddhism or Hinduism, but shares certain qualities and characteristics. However, even if I chose to participate in a Zen community for example, the spiritual goals, though very different, are in some ways compatible. So, even though I would feel justified borrowing and mixing from Buddhist practices, I don’t really need to, as the resources are available within my own tradition. Rather, I am able to admire the Chan/Zen/Dao traditions of China and Japan and cross reference the theologies of the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads to be very resonant with my own Catholic pan-en-theistic pluralism. I do this inter-spiritual work rooted in my contemplative Catholicism.
However, Western contemplative practice is notoriously Neo-Platonist, meaning it often elevates the mental/spiritual over the bodily/earthly. In my own practice I have really struggled with ways to engage in a more embodied contemplative prayer practice. Christianity, as far as I know, has not developed a rich tradition of ‘body prayer’ except for perhaps pilgrimage, which I have embraced. Yet, I have still felt drawn to experimenting with other forms of embodied contemplative spirituality. For example, I have begun to learn more about the basics of spiritual Qigong and Hatha Yoga. I am fascinated by the cosmological depth of Chinese spirituality, and it’s reflection in the human body. Certainly Western forms of astrology attempt this, but do not have any forms of actionable body prayer practices that I am aware of. So, I have experimented with a few rudimentary forms of these practices. I have incorporated them into my own spiritual goals, goals that certainly resonate with the various religious traditions they come from, but not exactly. Unlike the forms of economic cultural appropriation discussed above I would characterize this use as within the bounds of an ethical appreciation and adoption (spiritual jazz).
However, I am curious to hear your thoughts on the difference between appropriation and appreciation. I wonder if those of us who were raised with a particular tradition should spend more time seeking out and understanding the jewels in our own traditions before we begin to bridge and bricolage with others. This not only honors our ancestors, but builds up a strong point of reference when seeking alternative expressions for specific spiritual goals. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when thinking through the question of cultural appropriation versus cultural creativity:
How would you feel about charging money to teach a specific and known practice from a tradition that has a history of suppression from your own lineage/group?
Was the practice you are engaging with looked down on with skepticism or seen as superstition by previous generations? What historical injustices took place as a result of this?
Were you trained in your practice by a member of your own culture or the practice’s originating culture(s)? Does that bother you? Did your teachers have a reverence for their lineage?
Did they have the blessing of someone in that lineage to use the practice as a source of livelihood?
Have you listened to traditional practitioners of this practice? How do they feel about you practicing it? Promoting it?
Have traditional practitioners made repeated and public efforts to discourage the use of a certain or set of practices?
Are you participating in a practice that has become athleticized yet retains certain vocabulary and concepts that have been repurposed toward general wellness or individualism, the dominant religion of capitalist humanism?
Are sacred symbols or statuary that are often associated with sacred rites being used as aesthetical objects or décor?
Does your practice feel like it is being used as a weapon in your own rejection of the dominant culture?
To the post-Christians out there, if broadly speaking, Buddhism and Christianity are equally capable of being awful, why is the Eastern foil so consistently sympathized with and apologized for? Why not spend that energy re-claiming, healing and transforming Christianity?
As an introvert at first I found online dating to be a relief. We go to an agreed upon forum to seek out romance. No unwanted public advances, no embarrassing moments of chatting up a lovely person at the grocery store when the partner walks up. We upload our most attractive photos and write a pithy caption of ourselves, and what we are looking for. We then scroll and swipe through people who seem more or less compatible with those desires. It’s quick, it’s efficient. Despite the many pay walls and cheap tricks the apps use to upsell users, one can scroll through age and distance screened members. Some accounts may be stale or even fake, but for the most part you get a tour of your local dating scene at the touch of a screen. Matching and then chatting is a low stakes way to get to know someone a little bit before investing the time and energy in an in-person meet up. So far so good.
Some profiles emphasize the user’s adventurousness, others their sex appeal. Some write precious few or even no words, others write a treatise on the qualities they expect in a partner, and their low tolerance for hook ups, games or pen pals. There are dog people, a few religious folks, lots of love for good food, travel, and plenty of spiritually minded folks who want to know your sign.
Once you hit your daily quota of free swipes, the waiting begins. Out of swipes all one can do is hope that one of the people you liked, likes you back. But even then, once I have matched with someone, there is no guarantee that they will respond. Women tend to get surges of interest, their inboxes quickly fill with messages from fishing-rod-toting, or shirtless dudes who initiate conversations with ‘Sup?’, or simply ‘Hi’. I typically go with a sincere compliment or question. But this is no guarantee that I will get a response. Once a message has been reciprocated, there are those who simply let them sit, or ghost. I have been ghosted so many times, I should start an exorcism practice.
Don’t get me wrong, I have had some lovely encounters through dating apps. Some that ended up being short term flings, others that blossomed into meaningful relationships, and still others that have become intimate friendships. Overall I am grateful for them, despite the strange, insecurity and exhaustion inducing nature of online dating. After a recent breakup, I couldn’t resist. I rebooted my profile and began swiping. But a sinking feeling quickly set in and I hastily deleted my profile. There is a darker side to dating apps that I am just now beginning to understand. It doesn’t mean I won’t be back! But I have some thinking to do first.
On display in every profile are windows and mirrors. Windows into the lives of people of all shapes, sizes and motivations. There are also mirrors reflecting our desires: beauty, success, sex, intelligent conversation, fun, adventure, security, progeny. Scrolling and swiping have become a kind of anti-sacrament. They represent the promise of something we long for at the tips of our fingers. Each profile, match and chat is an allurement into the hope of communion with another person. But these desires are not an end in themselves, each points to some biological or psychological need (or trauma), they are not fulfilling in themselves.
Like all social media which tries to keep our eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible, online dating keeps us hooked on the possibility of that perfect someone who fulfills our deepest longing. And yet the glut of choices available means that even if we do match with someone wonderful, we perhaps wonder if we could do better if we just kept swiping.
At a summer course on the poetry of desire I took several years ago, poet, musician and Anglican Priest Malcolm Guite suggested that our current social media and marketing landscape is as if we were on our way to a sumptuous feast, but we are constantly waylaid by junk food stops along the road, so we never actually get to the feast. We are stuck in a kind of spiritual hamster wheel. We scratch out a bleary-eyed sign of the cross with our thumbs to a false God that will never fully satisfy. In his lectures, Guite masterfully quoted scripture, medieval poetry, and contemporary literature; but he also peppered his talks with amusing pop culture references: The Spice Girls: “I’ll tell you what I want what I really really want.” Mick Jagger: “I can’t get no satisfaction” and U2: “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” What is apparent in the theology of desire is that at their best, our desires and longings point not just to biological urges, but to the deep desire behind all our desires, the yearning beyond yearning, the desire for union with the Ground of Being.
Guite lamented that Christianity, the religion of the Incarnation, has been so skeptical of our desires for so long. As a result, marketing and social media were more easily able to convince us that what they offer could fulfil our surficial desires, and that wasn’t so bad after all. The excellent documentary ‘The Century of the Self’ (2002), shows how marketing in North America went from being about communicating information about a product’s usefulness (This is a very effective shovel, you are going to love how this shovel digs), to suggesting that a product would fulfill our desires, or even help us to become a better version of ourselves (This shovel will make you cool, it will make you sexy, it will complete you).
What has evolved is a kind binary between pushing down our desires and superficially fulfilling them, the way of God and the way of the world. The Church has ceded all of desire to the world, and taken on the position that the way to God is to rid ourselves of our desires. This does not create saints, it creates guilt, and a kind of binge/purge pattern of neurosis that traps us in narrative cycle of awful sinner in need of redemption. The church has been seen as being all about saying NO to our desires. But as Guite suggests, Jesus always framed his message in the positive: Love. All of the church’s no’s should clear the way for a greater ‘yes!’ Saying yes to the reality of our fundamental unity with a loving God.
Even within the faithful practice of religion, our desire to walk the way of God can often devolve into the worship of a vending machine God. The so-called Prosperity Gospel is a merger of Protestant Work Ethic, Capitalist consumerism and obedience=blessings theology. I was taught to pray by thanking God first and then moving into a litany of ‘please blesses’ which was inevitably a much longer list.
As Guite suggested, rather than extinguish or suppress our desires, we must learn to redeem them. As Guite said, “Pushing them down darkens them.” Rather we need to desire through our desires, past them, beyond them. We should engage them as signs of a greater desire beyond desire. In sacramental theology, we should recognize that there is a divine purpose in all our desires. Plato explored that purpose beyond the world, and Aristotle saw it within the world. Christianity should have no problem seeing that our desires are a kind of beyond within; a transcendent immanent.
If I scroll through dating apps in the hopes of filling a void in my life, I will probably never stop scrolling and I might be more likely to treat people as means to filling the end of my superficial desires. If I realize (still working on it) that I and the people on the other side of the screen are all Words of God expressing the beauty and diversity of creation, I might just be able to see beyond my desires and put my phone away long enough to experience the One truly worth swiping right for.
Looking out on the cemetery at Gethsemani Trappist Monastery
During All Souls/All Saints Days this year, I was lucky enough to travel to Kentucky for the annual Society of American Foresters conference. I was attending in order to deliver a short talk on the short history of monastic forestry, a topic that was included in parts of my dissertation. On the first day, I attended a field trip with the History and Philosophy Working Group. We visited Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, and then went to Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, the place where contemplative writer Thomas Merton lived from 1941 to his death in 1968.
One interesting fact that we learned was that during his very productive writing career, Merton was also the Abbey forester. As Forester, Merton would take the Trappist novices out to prune trees, clear dead branches, and plant trees. In the late 1950s, the monastery had been gifted hundreds of loblolly pine seedlings from the state forestry agency. Unfortunately, this particular variety was not very cold tolerant, and the first winter killed most, if not all of them.
The county also worried about fire in the area, and suggested the Abbey build a fire lookout. Merton, who was seeking a deeper vocation of silence, seriously considered manning the lookout as a quasi-hermit. However, the lookout was rather far from the Abbey, and when a monk-mechanic tried to teach him to drive, he wrecked the jeep within a few minutes behind the wheel. Merton was eventually allowed to live as a hermit on the property, but not as a fire lookout.
Despite Merton’s short lived career as a forester, and failed tree planter, he nevertheless gleaned deep meaning from the Abbey’s landscape. His nature writing is filled with references to the flora and fauna of the Kentucky hardwood forests, pastures and knobs. Though I have been to Gethsemani before, it was a great honor to return to a favorite Holyscape, where the life of a writer I deeply admire lived out his ideas and crafted his bold poetry and prose.
We have all heard the story. Christianity, with its embrace of Greek metaphysics and its longing for the Kingdom of God, drove a wedge between humanity and the earth, between Creator and creation. A wedge that became a full-fledged dualism under Enlightenment and Protestant iterations that emphasized rationality and nature’s objectivity. What had once been an enchanted cosmos, was now a vast and mostly empty universe.
Yet, despite this ambiguous lineage, Christianity is having something of an ecological renaissance, with theologians, ministries and parishes responding to the call to ‘re-enchant’ the earth, and to lend our weight to reversing course. The ecological crisis is thus necessarily being framed as a moral crisis, and it is generally agreed that a perception of the world as sacred, a perception that was intentionally dismantled under modernism and capitalism, should be reclaimed. The favored model of God as transcendent, distant, removed and patriarchal, is giving way to an experience of God as immanent, sacramental, and feminine.
In my own life, I have boomeranged between these models; from Christianity to a sort of pantheistic nature spirituality and back again over the last several years. However, it was something Pope Francis wrote in his recent encyclical letter Laudato Si, and an experience I recently had in a cherished forest that got me thinking about the value of the transcendent in our approach to the sacred in the age that is increasingly being christened the ‘Anthropocene,’ the age of human domination.
It was partly because of Christianity’s complicity in the ecological crisis, and a host of other reasons, that I had broken with the faith of my upbringing. While I was in graduate school, an inner tumult developed into a full scale crisis of faith. I became depressed and nihilistic. Perhaps, I thought, the world and our existence were meaningless, that there was no value, beauty or purpose outside of our tiny little human minds. It seems part of the human vocation to grapple with questions of meaning and purpose at some level, and I didn’t necessarily expect a resolution. But as I tried to put the pieces of a broken faith back together, I somehow knew that God would still be among them or between them.
Bit by bit, my experience of God began to change, and I became more and more convicted of God’s immanence to the world. In theology and philosophy, immanence, from the Latin for ‘remaining with,’ specifically refers to God’s presence or expression within the created order. For example, in Greek philosophy the Logos was thought to be the logic, or rational pattern behind the stuff of the world. Philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, and later Gilles Deleuze, postulated a metaphysical monism in which all things were one substance in various states or forms within the vast event of the cosmos. Rather than speak of essences, the cosmos was an unfolding event. Specifically for Spinoza, God and Nature were the same, Pan– all, –theism, God.
However, beginning with the monotheistic writers of second temple Judaism, and later affirmed by Christianity, it was argued that if God is all powerful and the creator, God cannot be encapsulated by the world, contained by it or synonymous with it. God is imagined to be the source and ground of being, within which the universe and being itself comes to be. Theologians such as Dominican Friar Thomas Aquinas postulated that God’s radical transcendence from creation could only be met with analogy, metaphor and iconography.
Growing up, I had been taught about God’s otherness or beyondness, a creator in stark contrast to creature. However, throughout my life, and particularly as I emerged from my short-lived faith crisis, it was encounters with silence, wild and urban nature, and the poor that drew me deeper into an experience of the sacredness of the world, especially through trees and forests, and the underlying divinity that shines through when I remember to look up from my philosophical musings and pay attention long enough to listen, watch, feel, wait. God ceased to exist as a being in a heavenly realm, or as a nebulous force acting on the world from a distance. I began to perceive, in a flitting crow, a soft breeze, a dangle of moss, a dapple of light, a configuration of bodies in a crosswalk, that God was the very fabric from which the world was made and that the sciences took on their own sacred dimension as a tool both for understanding as well as communing with an utterly pantheistic God-world. The world came alive in a way that it had never been before, and began to reclaim something of the magic of an enchanted world that was as Thomas Berry famously wrote, a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
After I completed an eclectic mix of Master’s degrees in forestry and theology, I landed two adjunct teaching jobs back in Salt Lake City, and a seasonal summer position as a forester. I began to read more about pantheism, to meditate, and to consciously explore the city and mountain forests of my Utah home, the home of at least some of my ancestors. I began to regain hope in a this-worldly ecological spirituality that sought the divine in nature, and my purpose in the present moment, and for the most part, it was working. However, it was an experience I had while attending a Midnight Easter Vigil at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City that unexpectedly set me back onto the Christian path, and an encounter with the value of transcendence in my experience of God.
One of the courses I was teaching in Salt Lake was ‘World Religions’, and I had decided to attend Holy Week services at the Cathedral as a way of experiencing other branches of Christianity. I had heard they had beautiful music, and that the space was breathtaking. I arrived a few minutes late, and quietly pushed through the heavy wooden doors at the front of the towering sandstone gothic edifice. An usher immediately greeted me with a smile, and handed me a candle. I thanked him and found a spot to stand at the back of the nave.
The voluminous space was mostly dark, but the bodies of the reverent devotees were glowing in silhouette with the collective illumination of hundreds of tiny candles. Someone offered me a light, and I looked around in awe as the Gregorian chant of the choir filled the frescoed forest of stone columns and vaulted canopy arches. As I took in the beauty, I thought to myself, that it sort of felt like a funeral. Just as quickly it seemed, I realized, it was a funeral. On Good Friday, Jesus had been crucified and laid in the tomb, and throughout Holy Saturday, Christians waited in suspended, silent animation for the moment when life would once again triumph over death. As the readings proceeded, spanning the width of salvation history, we came closer to the moment of Christ’s resurrection, until finally, the Lenten poverty was broken by a string of cacophonous ALLELUIAS! Suddenly the lights of the cathedral came on in a sudden flash. Christ was risen, and something beyond me stirred my soul.
Going to Mass for Easter will sound familiar, even mundane to many, but for me on that evening, having grown up in a different tradition, for the first time, a familiar story took on a deeply cosmic dimension, and that I was participating in it with others. That my life was somehow embedded within that story, and that I was wedded in one way or another to its outcome. We were ritually celebrating, not just sermonizing the hope that suffering and pain are not meaningless, that death is not the end; that creation, birth, life and death are the archetypal structures that pervade the universe. That somehow, we will come out the other side. Standing at the back of the cathedral with a tiny candle, the hope and power of the Christian story hit me all at once like an unexpected wave. The world really was filled with mystery, beauty and holiness. While it would seem that the universe is headed for a cold extinction, Christianity insists on celebrating life through death. Our gaze is fixed with unflinching hope on life, but squarely in the middle of that gaze is a tortured corpse hanging on a tree. Christianity’s hope is not a naïve or vapid one, but one rooted in the realities of pain and suffering both personal and evolutionary which are not threats, but the very seeds of continued hope and life. That inner landscape I had been trying to access and cultivate began to germinate with tiny fragile seedlings that I continue to clumsily nurture as I write these words. God’s presence in the world, which I had just learned to experience as a pantheist, began to once again trickle back into the sacraments especially the Eucharist, icons, choral music and sacred space.
In a Dark Wood
It was getting harder for me to discern the contours of the last few meters of a familiar forest trail. I was on my way home to Vancouver, British Columbia from Lacey, Washington after a short retreat with the Benedictine monks of Saint Martin’s Abbey. I stopped in Bellingham for food, and a quick hike through a favorite grove of trees to stretch my legs before I pressed northward. In my haste, I had slightly miscalculated the amount of remaining daylight, and how long it would take me to walk the 4.5 km trail before the closed canopy forest became thick with darkness.
I was already in a dark mood, and the cold, dead vegetation of muddled greens and plentiful browns, chilled me to the bone as I stumbled over the squish of decomposing leaves speckled along the path. The deciduous trees were naked, and the conifer branches loafed in their winter dormancy. As I reached a critical fork in the trail, I started in the wrong direction, and had to double back to find the trail again. As my feet finally touched down on the familiar gravel of the parking lot, I felt a small pang of relief and embarrassment for almost getting lost in such a familiar place.
Yet, despite my love for being in the forest, as I got into my truck, I finally acknowledged a sense of foreboding, sadness and longing that I had felt as I walked in the waning light of that winter day. As someone who loved to preach about God’s presence in the world, it was actually hard for me to admit that I didn’t feel anything but awe, wonder, amazement and gratitude in the forest. The place is as familiar and sacred to me as any church, or my prayer space, and I have spent many hours on the trail, staring with slacked jaw up into the canopy; or on hands and knees smiling into the stoic face of a rough skinned newt. But that night, I could not shake a feeling of deep unease.
As I sat tending to the wound in my heart, a wound with no particular source, I remembered something Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 Encyclical Letter Laudato Si. In an authoritative Encyclical Letter, Pope Francis had officially acknowledged the seriousness of climate change, the importance of caring for the earth not just as a gift to humans from God, but as a web of living creatures endowed with intrinsic value independent of their usefulness or beauty to human beings. Yet, he also affirms the traditional Christian understanding of God as not being coterminous with the world (I.e. not pantheistic) and Pope Francis warns against what he calls pantheism’s “stifling immanence.” When I first read this statement, the part of me that is still a pantheist took exception. Even as a new-ish revert to Christianity, God’s immanence in the world is crucial to my faith, and the foundation upon which I have built the bridge between my faith and my understanding of ecology. But as I turned the keys and began to back out of the small roadside parking lot, the meaning of this simple phrase began to come into focus.
Toward a Spiritual Ecology of the Transcendent
As is well known, in response to the excesses of early industrialism nurtured by the transcendent model of God, the Romantics and poets and later the Transcendentalists of the 19th century, took issue with the plunder of the natural world for profit, and the notion that God was a distant fatherly being. Writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that nature pointed to spiritual truths, and conservationists began to find God in Nature, a domain of reality held as opposition to Culture. Wilderness took on a new vibrancy and holiness and God became wholly immanent to creation. Preservationism then, became about protecting a sacred Nature from a ravenous Culture. For example, early American conservationist John Muir, in a letter to a friend written in 1868 proclaimed that Yosemite Valley was “by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.” And for Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau and many others of his generation, the wild places became the sacred sanctuaries held in opposition to the establishment Protestant Christianity with its emphasis on scripture, doctrine and getting to Heaven. Thoreau wrote in his essay ‘Walking’: “I enter a swamp as a sacred place –a sanctum sanctorum.”
Unfortunately, this dualistic approach to the natural world has led to an impoverished ethic with respect to our relationship to those areas that fall outside of the more charismatic protected areas. As William Cronon controversially wrote in his 1996 essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, the so-called wilderness ethic that the preservationist movement has promoted not only failed to prevent our most serious ecological crises, it has tended to de-valued places closer to home that do not fit a narrow aesthetic of wilderness. Certainly there is value in places of transcendent beauty; but there is also an immanent sacredness to places more familiar, rich with memory and closer to home.
My experience in the Cathedral had been of God’s unexpected presence; and my experience in a grove revered as sacred had been one of God’s unexpected absence. It would seem that God is something of a Trickster; not always present to the world in the ways we expect. We cannot just go to church, pray, meditate or go even to our favorite spot in the forest and expect a holy moment to be waiting. As theologian Belden Lane reminds us in his book Landscapes of the Sacred, the sacred (God) often choses before is chosen. God’s immanence to the world may be real, but it is not a vending machine to which we can keep coming back for the same encounter, experience or fix.
An encounter with the sacred (God), can, paradoxically be experienced as absence. Religious life is not a kind of spiritual aerobics that makes us feel warm and fuzzy all the time, and the natural world is a place of both beauty and pain. The spiritual life is also about facing our failures, suffering and that of the world. To frame immanence as ‘stifling’ as Pope Francis does in Laudato Si, is not to argue that God is absent from the world, but, to say that unless we are sometimes faced with the feeling of God’s absence, we will never move, grow or seek change. This is what Saint Augustine meant when he wrote that “our hearts are restless Lord, until they rest in you.” God’s transcendence, or beyondness can teach us that we are not self-sufficient on our own. If everything is God, rather than everything being in God (pan-en-theism), the mystery of the other has nothing whatsoever to teach us about the Other that is God.
There is of course many more theological reasons to balance God’s immanence and transcendence. However, for those of us invested in the project of reenchanting the world as a moral response to the ecological crisis, the way we frame the sacred in relation to the world has consequences within the increasingly fragmented environmentalist landscape that we have inherited from the preservationists and conservationists which are being increasingly critiqued as ineffective or overly romantic.
We seem to be on the verge of something new. Though much contested, some have proposed that we are entering the ‘Anthropocene’, a term coined by climate chemist Paul Crutzen in 2003 to describe the increasingly pervasive impact human beings have on the planet. Currently being debated by geologists as to whether or not it makes up an actual new geologic epoch, there is no agreement about when it might have started. Do we date it to the advent of intensive farming? The peak of the so-called First Axial Age roughly 2,000 years ago? The dawn of the industrial revolution in the 1800s? Or, with the first nuclear explosion in the mid-20th century? What is clear, is that human beings are the culprit for much of the ecological changes being tracked by scientists across the board. What is not clear is how to respond.
What I have noticed in these ongoing debates about how to proceed, is that models of the immanent and transcendent aspects of the sacred have not been properly addressed by both sides of a hotly contested debate within the environmental movement between so-called Ecomodernists on the one hand, and Ecocentrists on the other. It would seem that a way forward will require a better balance between notions of immanence and transcendence, not necessarily of God per se but of the implications of to what extent we acknowledge the sacredness and transcendent value of the world in our strategies for lessening the destructiveness of the human presence on the planet.
With the recent publication of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, the authors align themselves with a growing number of environmentalists who think traditional conservation strategies have failed. These “new” environmentalists are confident that the Anthropocene will be a step forward not backward:
“As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.”
Human genius will save us, and we can expect, with the proper adjustments to institutions, economies and technologies, a Tony the Tiger-styled “grrrrreat!” Anthropocene.
Ecopragmatists, New Conservationists or Ecomodernists as they variously self-identify, have more confidence in human genius than human heart, and for many of them, solving the ecological crisis is not a moral imperative but a practical necessity. Thus for many, the language of the sacred is a human construct at best, and a romantic diversion at worst. For the writers of the Ecomodernist Manifest, environmentalism’s sacred cow, Nature has got to go, and we need to embrace technology, State-centered decision making, an emphasis on Ecosystem Services, and a human-values centered approach to ecological sustainability. This is because Ecomodernists, like classical Modernists, are confident in human rationality and genius as an effective tool for managing the planet as a whole wherein both social justice, biodiversity and ecological integrity can be achieved.
This approach has often dodged the possibility that anything is inherently sacred, or that biodiversity and ecosystem have transcendent value outside of human valuation. It is what we make it, what we value, what we desire. If we want wilderness we need to justify it through human values and priorities. As futurist Yuval Harari writes in Homo Deus, we are now gods, on the brink of immortality, and capable as ever to manage the planet for the good of all life (as seen through human eyes). Traditional conservationism, founded on a theology of beauty and the transcendent is deluded and impractical in its romantic attempts at preserving, as Ecomodernist Peter Kareiva suggested, “islands of the Holocene” in the midst of a rapidly evolving and advancing human race.
Opposed to Ecomodernism, and continuing the legacy of the great Romantics, are a growing number of environmentalists who claim to be either Ecocentrists, or Spiritual Ecologists. Rooted in the intuitions of the Deep Ecology movement of the 1970s and 80s, these folks insist that the totality of the earth-system, biotic and abiotic, carry intrinsic worth beyond human usefulness (even spiritual usefulness), and are therefore of primary ethical concern and imperative. Advocates of Ecocentrism, the idea that individuals should be subservient to the greater ecological whole, suggest that we need a new religious sensibility that will enshrine this ethic in its worldview. They insist that the earth has value apart from human perceptions. That biodiversity and intact ecosystem regardless of their value to human economies or aesthetics should be preserved as close to intact as possible, and that the only viable option for humanity is to radically downsize our population and footprint.
Ecocentrists often join forces with other strands of environmentalists, poets, nature writers and ecotheologians who have been calling for a “reenchantment” of the world; a world that is wholly sacred; a sacredness that is immanent to the world, and does not appeal to a distant Creator. Rather, its sacredness comes from its very existence, complexity and fecundity. In his edited volume Spiritual Ecology, the editor, Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, writes that “The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong.” Lee’s book features voices from the world’s major religious and spiritual traditions, each singing in a different octave the song that the earth is sacred and that we must return to a meaningful commitment to this reality if we are going to overcome the daunting troubles we now face as a species. This intuition, that our bodies, and our very existence is part and parcel to the wider world, but not another world, is a core intuition of a pantheistic theology where the world’s sacredness is wholly immanent. In describing his connection to an island off Haida Gwaii, anthropologist Richard Nelson captures his own embeddedness to the earth and her processes:
“There is nothing in me that is not of earth, no split instant of separateness, no particle that disunites me from the surroundings. I am no less than the earth itself. The rivers run through my veins, the winds blow in and out with my breath, the soil makes my flesh, the sun’s heat smolders inside me. A sickness or injury that befalls the earth befalls me. A fouled molecule that runs through the earth runs through me. Where the earth is cleansed and nourished, its purity infuses me. The life of the earth is my life. My eyes are the earth gazing at itself…I am the island and the island is me.”
Human beings are the earth gazing back at itself, and to find ourselves embedded in her webs of life is to come face to face with the sacred. We must therefore protect life, protect ecosystems, and protect the earth from the savage assault of Homo industrialis by developing an entirely new approach to our relationship with the earth. We need a new approach. But the approach advocated by Ecocentrists seems to be simply an inversion of traditional binaries: Rather than the sacred space of church, we want the sacred space of the forest. Rather than a Transcendent God, a wholly Immanent Divine. Rather than a world filled with objects we wish to return to a world of interconnected subjects.
We seem to be endlessly caught pinging between opposites put in place by the Enlightenment and the Protestant reformation. It seems we are pressured to choose between either nature as god, or the human being as divine. And while I agree that we need a return to an immanent framing of the sacred, and a stronger sense of reverence for the world, we should not lose hold of the beautiful and productive aspects of the transcendent. Rather than swinging between the sentimentalism of Spiritual Ecology and the cold calculated pragmatism of the Ecomodernists, might there be a third way?
While journalist Emma Marris is often accused of being an Ecomodernist, in her book Rambunctious Garden, while she does take aim at traditional conservation strategies such as wilderness areas and invasive species, her approach in the final chapter of the book seems to strike a balance between values as being both transcendent and immanent, and the possibility that sacredness is as well. For example, while critical of ironclad definitions of nature and wilderness, she is not opposed to recognizing and managing landscapes for their sacred value to human beings, or the intrinsic value of ecosystems and species. However, what she insists is that it is human beings who will inevitably make decisions with respect to these values. If we are too focused on enhancing ecosystem services, which many Ecomodernists are, we may lose sight of the importance of protecting the intrinsic value of endangered species. If we are so focused on saving a species from extinction by preserving it in labs (such as is the case with some frog species in Central America being wiped out by an invasive fungus), then we may forget to protect the ecosystem it evolved to thrive in. If we affirm the rights of every species to thrive and flourish, we may tie our hands when a particularly aggressive species threatens an endangered species such as is the case with certain invasive trees, plants or mammals on island ecosystems. Marris, though she does not say so in these terms, seems to be suggesting a more balanced approach to the transcendence and immanence of the sacred with respect to the life of the world. There are values beyond human values; but we shouldn’t be afraid to participate in the world for fear of violating the sacred precincts of the domain of Nature we have shored up to alleviate our guilt for the desecrated places under the plow of human Culture.
Of course, these debates are complex and the stakes are high. In advocating a middle ground, one that balances transcendence and immanence in relation to value and the sacred, I am not claiming that the way forward is simple, straightforward or free of pain. But from where I stand, along with the movement to make the world sacred once more, we should not discard the sense of absence, longing, and transcendence at the heart of the world from which we emerged and to which we are wedded. As conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “To be a good tinkerer you need to keep all the pieces.” As we enter the Anthropocene, we will need the language of the sacred and the profane, the language of presence and absence, the language of death and life. As we march into an unknown future, a future that often looks bleak and without hope, it is essential to celebrate big victories, to be present to small beauties, but also to mourn the losses great and small. Even in the midst of darkness, despair, of loneliness, pain and loss, life, the earth, and God have a way of turning shit into compost.
Antonio Paucar, Altar. Exhibit at the Museum of Latin American Art.
Introduction
I increasingly come into contact with folks who have a difficult time understanding why anyone in their right mind would self-identify as religious—while I walked the Camino de Santiago this summer, when I meet people in activist circles, or even on dates—I hear a very similar line of argument: Religion and religious people are rigid, outdated, dogmatic, violent, and judgmental; whereas spiritual people are open, accepting, non-dogmatic, fluid, expansive and personally fulfilled.
While listening to a Podcast from Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, I came up with a pithy paraphrase for one of his common arguments for the necessity and beauty of religious life. I posted it on my Facebook page to generate some discussion, knowing that it is an increasingly unpopular position these days. I wrote: “Saying that one is spiritual but not religious is like saying that one is athletic but doesn’t play sports.”
For those of you who know me this might seem an unexpected analogy. As a child I was literally the worst member of every sports team I was part of from soccer, to T-ball, to junior high volleyball. I am not very athletic at all really, I like walking, and birding, but that’s about it. I don’t even like riding bikes!
But the more I thought about it the more this analogy seemed to express a frustration I have been feeling with the dominant secular and anti-religious zeitgeist. Spirituality has come to mean a state of being comfortable, fit, relaxed, and centered; while religion is a cultural hold out for pre-scientific, dogmatic zealots. Religion is a dinosaur going extinct, spirituality is an iphone app that keeps you connected, fit and hip.
The word religion has morphed into a dust bin for things we don’t like about the way religious institutions and religious individuals behave. It becomes part of a binary straw-person argument that pits spirituality against religion, with spirituality getting all the positive aspects and religion the negative ones. So, what is gained by insisting that religion and spirituality are inextricably connected as I often do?
It is a defensive stance against those who look down on anyone who would consider self-identifying as religious. This is not a calling out of those who have been hurt by religious institutions and religions people to rejoin their native folds. It is an explanation of what religiosity means in a rapidly changing world. It is an insistence that both religion and spirituality continue to mean something in our complex and messy lives.
A Few Conventional Definitions
The human phenomenon of religion is notoriously difficult to comprehensively define, but that doesn’t mean the term is useless. The European colonial roots of the concept initially measured religiosity through a Christian lens; but again, that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about other cultural practices as religious in a broader sense.
As often happens in abbreviated forums like Facebook, several of the commenters simply dismissed the efficacy of words to grasp reality. ‘Religion can mean whatever we want!’ Or, ‘it depends on how you define it.’ What do you mean by religion? Spirituality?
To make my argument that religion and spirituality are inextricable, I am not going to gerrymander a super-inclusive and only positive definition of religion. Religion accounts for plenty of human good and evil. To begin, here is a narrow and clearly Euro-centric definition by Oxford English Dictionary: “The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” The emphasis is on belief, and that belief is centered on a Supernatural being. Many of the world’s religions then do not qualify as religion under this narrow definition because it take as its cues Christianity’s central focus on Creed and God as a being. A definition that should rightly be abandoned.
However, to swing to the other pole is equally undesirable. I am not trying to trick you into thinking you are in fact religious; that even atheists can be religious (though I have said this). I think being religious includes certain criteria, and that spirituality are the means of seeking that criteria. Max Lynn Stackhouse defines religion as “A comprehensive worldview or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted.” Under this definition, all human meaning making is religious. He is essentially equating religion with ontology, the bedrock assumptions of ‘what is’ to a give society. For my purposes here, I do not take this more expansive view, though I certainly sympathize with its intuition.
I think Emile Durkheim’s classical sociological definition gets closer to a universally relevant but still meaningful definition of religion: “A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them.” There is an emphasis on the sacred, which doesn’t necessarily mean God; and there is an emphasis on praxis carried out in community. Merriam-Webster’s approach simplifies Durkheim’s as “A personal set or institutionalized system of attitudes, beliefs and practices.” And, I would add, in relation to the sacred or transcendent dimension of existence, which as Paul Tillich writes, are our “ultimate concerns.”
Oxford University Dictionary’s definition of spirituality is surprisingly dualistic: “The quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.” This seems strange in a time when spirituality is earthier than ever, with Yoga, nature and energy work being popular spiritual activities. Conventionally defined as an interest in self-understanding, growth, connection to the world or cosmos, spirituality is often conceived as something that gives one a deep sense of meaning, satisfaction or physical wellbeing.
Now, when I compare religion and spirituality to sports and athleticism, here is what I mean. Oxford defines sports as: “An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” So, yes there are competitive sports, but there are also lots of non-competitive sports that simply involve physical activity that requires some measure of skill. We engage in sports for a sense of wellbeing, but also to improve. Oxford defines athletic as someone who is “physically strong, fit, and active.”
Athletic is related to the word ascetic which comes from the Latinized form of Greek asketikos which means “rigorously self-disciplined, laborious, or skilled worker, one who practices an art or trade, especially “athlete, one in training for the arena, to exercise, train, especially to train for athletic competition, practice gymnastics, exercise.” An athlete is someone who practices a disciplined activity in order to improve upon it, often giving up certain pleasures and comforts, even suffering pain, in order to achieve a greater level of skill.
In other words, religion is an interest and a seeking for God and the Transcendent, and spirituality is the way we do that. Spirituality is not just feeling good, or connected, or happy; spirituality is a discipline that promises a payoff. To claim to be spiritual without having a spirituality seems meaningless if we keep with the analogy.
Objection 1
The first and most obvious objection to my analogy that religion is to spirituality as athleticism is to sports, is that one can be generally athletic without playing competitive sports. I concede this point, but would respond that in the above conventional definition of sports, competitive and non-competitive sports are included. Rock climbing is a sport that can be contemplative or competitive; running can be part of a race, or a personal practice. In fact a focus on winning in sports seems a great analogy for how religion goes wrong. My point being, that when I say sports I am talking about lineages of physical activities that have taken a particular form. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone that gets exercise by periodically flailing around. Usually it takes a form: Weight training, aerobics, Zumba, running, walking, golf, tennis, football, rowing, kayaking, etc. Even Crossfit, which is a medley of physical activities has become itself a particular lineage of physical fitness with its own set of rules, techniques, gyms and culture. I am not however saying, using the sports analogy, that there is One True Sport; Christianity’s claim to Truth leaves the analogy, and is fodder for a different discussion.
The religions developed rules, practices, sacred spaces, organizations around a particular end: Union with God. By reclaiming the word religion, I am saying that to engage in a spiritual practice it is inevitable that it take a certain form, usually embedded in a certain tradition of practitioners who know something about how to ‘play.’ To take spiritual practice seriously is to behave religiously. To take the spiritual life seriously, you should probably listen to people who have done it before you. You wouldn’t show up to a football game with bat, or try to tackle a fellow marathon runner.
Objection 2
Another objection is that some religious people really aren’t that spiritual. I would whole heartedly agree with this criticism of religion. Sometimes we become so obsessed with the rules of the sport that we forget to have fun. In light of this, many have left formal religious affiliation opting instead for a generalized spirituality. I sympathize with those who have been bored by religion, and especially those who have been hurt by it. I am not making excuses for religious abuse. One friend who I deeply respect wrote: “Because I’m not religious, I’ve been trying to assert for years that I’m not spiritual, because I had this same dualistic conception. But now I’m just being honest with myself, that for better or worse, as ridiculous as it is, I am spiritual, even without a religion.”
I have no quarrel with this statement, or this very common journey. I understand that when one no longer identifies with a particular religious institution, we might therefore assume that we are no longer religious. Sure, I feel safe in Christian religion and spirituality, but what about those who do not have a tradition, or who have needed to leave one? This is an important and difficult question. I would simply ask, what do we mean by spiritual as a state of being? As I have defined it above, spirituality is a thing we do, not something we are or feel. To BE spiritual is like saying that I AM baseball. I would be interested to know what folks mean when they say that they ARE spiritual outside of what they DO that makes them feel that way. I am arguing analogically that religion is the sport of seeking union with God and that spirituality is suit of rules, spaces and techniques we engage in to achieve that state. I am calling religion to a deeper engagement with its spiritual practices, and spirituality to a deeper honoring of its own religiosity.
Done right, religion, as a universal human phenomenon, leads us into a deeper spirituality that transcends but does not render obsolete religious traditions and structures. Our most beloved spiritual leaders, poets, mystics, etc. have each been rooted, tethered, loyal to particular religious traditions. Rumi is a classic example, of a poet who has found an international and interfaith audience, but whose actual life was deeply rooted in his Muslim faith. The Sufi orders are Muslims first.
From where I stand, the danger of an untethered spiritual identity is twofold: First, it is easily assimilated into a capitalist framework of identity marketing, and second, it then reinforces rather than breaks down our obsession with self, body image, ego and pleasure. Spirituality is not a sensibility, a lifestyle or an identity; it is a practice in which one engages to deepen one’s awareness of God and the Transcendent dimension of existence. Like practicing sports, it can sometimes be difficult, painful and fraught with challenges.
For those of you who identify as spiritual but not religious I would simply say that I love you. I have so much to learn from you. If my analogy still doesn’t convince you then let’s keep talking. I think words like religion and spirituality should mean something, and I want to know what they mean to you. I continue to identify as both spiritual and religious, but this does not mean I am any better at playing the game than the rest of you. I am often very discouraged by just how bad I am at it! But I love this game, I want to know God. These days, the field is getting more and more sparse; please, come and play.
holyscapes 