Sacred Space

Sketch 2: Cultivating Placefulness

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

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 any grammatical errors or sloppy syntax!

Prelude

Toward the end of writing the manuscript for my book about the monastic sense of place, a simple turn of phrase occurred me: Placefulness. This seemed to sum up in a simple word how monks in the Benedictine/Cistercian monastic tradition related to the landscapes of their respective monastic communities. The were present not just to abstract theological notions, or the love of God, but to the intricacies of their surrounding environments, which were often extensive rural properties.

I googled the phrase. A workshop called Into the Mountain mentioned it, seeking an embodied encounter with the land. A travel writer named Vanessa Walker named her website after the word, and it appears to be a new site dedicated to travel writing. There were a few other hits, but nothing that explored the word as an academic concept or spiritual practice.

The word felt useful. So, in December 2022, when I was invited by the Multifaith Network for Climate Justice in Bellingham to give a talk on contemplative ecology, I thought I would think through the idea out loud. The talk was well attended, and I gave a follow up in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University’s Institute for the Humanities. This Sketch is an outline of that talk.

We seem to me living in the -fulness of times. You are probably familiar with the term Mindfulness: Meditation practice rooted in Buddhism; moment by moment awareness of sensations, thoughts and feelings without judgement. But there is also an emerging alternative called Bodyfulness, articulating the somatic therapist Christine Caldwell’s paradigm for a more embodied contemplative practice. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud has recently written a book called Timefulness which argues that as temporal creatures we are embedded in earth’s deep time cycles. Placefulness then would be something along the lines of the contemplative practice of attending to what is and what arises in our places, especially during troubled times. So, like any spirituality worth its salt, that means integrating the good, the bad and the ugly in the places we live, especially as climate change takes a deeper hold on the world.   

To Be in Place

The Greek philosopher Archytas (4th century BCE) is reputed to have said that “To be is to be in place.”[1] This positioned place as a central ontological notion in Greek thinking that was all but obliterated with the advent of geometric space during the Enlightenment and the seeming social construction of everything with the semiotic turn of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s sense of place began to reclaim space (so to speak) in the theoretical circles of geography and the social sciences. For example, an early re-examination of place is found in Yi Fu Tuan, a geographer, who used the term Topophilia to explore the “feeling-link” between people and places (1974). This can be compared with EO Wilson’s Biophilia: The idea that we are biologically rooted to feelings of affinity with life. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) examines the importance of em-place-ment, and the malaise of place-less-ness that set in during the late modern period. One of my favorite explorations of place and perception is by anthropologist Tim Ingold, who developed a “Dwelling Perspective” on environmental perception that drew from the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who were overtly opposed to the Cartesian project that had favored space over place. Echoing this ontological turn, anthropologists began to see that as Christian Norberg-Schulz writes, “To dwell means to belong to a given place.”[2]

A few examples:

Aboriginal Song Lines

Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines (1987) explores settler and aboriginal understandings of place in Australia. In the publicly available sources, Aboriginal sense of place can be described as relating to the Dreaming. During the Dream Time (Every-when), the Ancestors of all life sang the world into being along tracks, called Songlines. during the Dreamtime. A Dreaming is one’s first Ancestor whether it be Kangaroo, Lizard, Bandicoot, Honey Ant, or Badger. Most Dreamings are animals, a few are plants or trees. An initiated person receives a portion of a Songline that traverses the first track of their Dreaming. The tempo and melody of the Songline express the topography of the place. So, forms of the land are a remnant of the first ancestors first movements, and each place is stacked with stories from that sacred canon.

Moral Place-scapes Among Western Apache

Indigenous placenames in the American West are often made up by afforded features of the landscape: Trees, mountains, valleys. Or they speak of activities that take place there like harvesting, council, or hunting. For example, in Western Apache place names, Tséé Chiizh Dah Sidilé means Coarse-Textured Rocks Lie Above in a Compact Cluster. This is a descriptive name for the features of that place.

In short, places teach Western Apache how to live. The collective history of the Apache has accumulated in these places, and they speak their lessons to the people. For example, at one such place a man attempted to commit incest with his stepdaughter. In Keith Basso’s account of these places in his amazing book Wisdom Sits in Places, his informant Ruth gets visibly uncomfortable as they pass this place in their car, and says, “I know that place, it stalks me every day.” In Ruth’s case the place reminded her of an assault she suffered by someone close to her. Not a romantic notion, but the wrongness of the act is written in the landscape which gave her strength. To put a person in their place so the speak, one need only recite a particular place name and its lessons will shoot like an arrow into the mind of one’s interlocutor.

Well Known Coast Salish Transformer Sites

In my part of the world, Cascadia, where Coast Salish peoples have lived and flourished for thousands of years, Transformer Spirits such as Xáays among the Squamish are responsible for certain prominent features of the landscape. A few publicly available examples: The Lions Peaks / Twin Sisters (Ch’ich’iyúy Elxwíkn) on the North Shore Mountain range were transformed for negotiating a peace treaty. The Stawamus Chief (Siám’ Smánit) in Squamish was a Long House where people and animals met for ceremony. Skalsh Rock in Stanley Park was an ancient chief turned into stone for insisting on purifying himself before his child’s birth. Additionally, obsidian deposits were understood as places where Thunderbird shot lighting out of his eyes. These sites were not only moral lesson, but monuments to their deep ties to place.

To be Rooted

Place is a richly textured part of Indigenous spirituality and lifeways. However, despite a reputation for Platonic otherworldliness, the Christian contemplative tradition has deep roots in a biblical sense of place. Simone Weil once wrote that “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”[3] Rootedness was a central idea for Weil, whose life was cut short by her own radical asceticism.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann (2002) wrote that “In the [Bible] there is no timeless space, but there also is no spaceless time. There is rather storied place, that is, a place that has meaning because of the history lodged there.”[4] The Peoples of the Levant were covenanted to the Divine through places: Jacob/Israel wrestled with an angelic person, and the placename Penuel means Face of/facing Adonai. Many passages in the Hebrew Bible either begin or end with a reference to the name of a place, or the origin of that place’s name. Stone altars, groves, and mountain peaks were places of contact with the Divine or the history of the Patriarchal period. This is not a reverent nature spirituality, but a sacred geography where a peoples’ claim to the land was rooted in encounters with the Divine. Layered over this history, is the motif of the tension between the Paradise-Garden and Desert-Wilderness, starting with the very first chapters in Genesis where Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden. The entire arc of the story of Israel is God alluring them back to the garden through covenant, obedience and justice.

The story of Jesus of Nazareth is told through particular places. The arc of his vocation as Messiah recapitulated the places of Hebrew tradition: Bethlehem, Egypt, Jerusalem, Mount Tabor, and finally the Tree of Life (cross) and the Garden (tomb). Jesus consistently leaves the towns and cities to pray in the desert. Early Christians recognized certain places as sacred based on their association with Hebrew prophets, Christian martyrs, monks and ascetics and the life of Jesus. The early hermits and monks fled to the desert as means of radical asceticism, but also because the desert is an ideal place to practice a spirituality of silence.

The Christian relation to place becomes more ambivalent as it weds Greek metaphysics. As Saint Augustine wrote, “Our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Christian writers often portray humanity as a wandering pilgrim on earth, much as Plato saw the Forms as the really real. Belden Lane (2001) and John Inge (2003) show that despite a rich sense of place throughout Hebrew and Christian sacred writings, there is a tension with the mystic placelessness of Christian eschatology: Lane writes, “…one finds a continuing tension between place and placelessness, between the local and the universal. God is here—in this place at Bethlehem, Lourdes, Iona, even Boston and Salt Lake City.”[5]

The Monastic Sense of Place

My book Dwelling in the Wilderness: A Liturgy of Place for the Anthropocene (2023) will explore how contemporary monastic communities are invited into a rich sense of place. Rather than being born from the place as Indigenous peoples are, monks take a vow of stability that encourages them to become ‘lovers of the place;’ to root their whole spiritual life of seeking God in a place and a community of imperfect monks. That life is punctuated by daily and seasonal liturgies that can attune the monks to the cycles and seasons of their places. Manual work balances a life of prayer by engaging the body and can enrich spiritual development by linking tasks to places and teaching vital lessons about the spiritual life. A monk’s time spent in formation, work and leisure means that over many years memories and lessons accumulate in place, giving shape to a personal spiritual ecology that connects place, spirituality and theology. And while some monks may return to certain places over and over, it was often the ‘Charged Moments’, as one monk put it, that ended up being most significant. By Charged Moments the monk was referring to times when a feeling of communion, or a spiritual insight comes out of nowhere. Those unexpected places are then integrated into a monks’ spiritual ecology, or moral landscape: places of rich memory, lesson or insight that then continue to teach monks how to be monks. As one monk said, “You become part of the land. Our vow of stability grounds us, and an image that was really helpful for me was the idea of these trees [points] taking root; you know we’ve got thirty feet of topsoil, and the roots go deep… So that was the image of stability that I had. The longer I stay here, the more I can see myself growing in ways I never thought possible. It’s of course not always easy, staying in one place, but the [longer] you stay the [the higher you can] reach.”

Placefulness as Contemplative Ecology

European descended peoples in North America live with a devalued sense of place. It has been re-placed by mobility, commodity and sentimentality. We see uprootedness, placelessness, dis-placement. The troubling loss of place can been seen through the post-modern attempt to respond to a deep yearning for rootedness in the culture. As philosopher Vince Vycinas wrote, “[W]e are homeless even if we have a place to live”[6] Often, new architecture seeks to emplace us by building homey Town Centres that mimic public or even domestic spaces, flashing a sense of place to our meaning-hungry hearts. Consumerism is as much driven by manufactured needs as it is a sense of belonging or self that has been expertly packaged and sold back to us. The Anthropocene, the so-called geological epoch of human domination, is as much a crisis of meaning as it is a crisis of ecology and extinction.

As parties gather in international conferences to discuss emissions reductions targets, many activists have also been looking for ways to heal a wounded sense of meaning, purpose and sacredness in a world on the brink. In the scholarly world, tracking this movement is often called Religion and Ecology or Religion and Nature. But activists tend to use terms like Spiritual Ecology or as Pope Francis does in his encyclical letter Laudato Si, Integral Ecology. These broad movements represent the spiritual wing of environmentalism that sees ecological issues as moral issues, the earth as sacred. As Sufi teacher Llewelyn Vaughn Lee expresses, “The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.”[7] Separateness and displacement from earth are roots of our ecological crisis.

This sense of oneness is echoed in the non-religious but deeply spiritual ethnographic memoir of anthropologist Richard Nelson, which takes places on the island of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia. He writes,

“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.”[8]

Without reference to God, religion or even spirituality, Nelson describes a realization that is perhaps obvious to Indigenous peoples, and those who are rooted in place, whose ancestors nourish the land they harvest their food from. For Nelson, it was an ecological Apokalypsis, a great revealing of a truth hidden before his very eyes.

My own writing at Holyscapes has been oriented toward a contemplative spiritual ecology that reflects on the relationship between inscape and landscape. Really what I am interested in is to learn the liturgy of my place. My walks attend to the cycles of the stars, sun and moon; I am even learning the rudiments of the astrological archetypes and Greek stories that accompany the constellations. I want to attune to the cycles and patterns of season and weather, the features of topography and surficial geology. The Latin, common and/or Indigenous names of plants, animals and fungi. The lifeways of food, medicinal plants and fungi. The soundscape and seasonality of local and migratory birds. And a growing awareness of the memories, lessons, experiences, symbols and rituals that embed themselves in the places I visit.

In addition to learning the liturgy of place, I think it is essential that we engage and support ecological restoration projects. While ecological restoration has its critics, one of its potential benefits is not just to local biodiversity or ecosystem function, but to our sense of place. As ecologist Stephanie Mills (1996) writes,

“[The act of restoration] gives [people] a basis for commitment to the ecosystem. It is very real. People often say, we have to change the way everybody thinks. Well, my God, that’s hard work! How do you do that? A very powerful way to do that is by engaging people in experiences. It’s ritual we’re talking about. Restoration is an excellent occasion for the evolution of a new ritual tradition.”[9]

Ecological restorations’ biggest potential might be in its ability to restore people to a deeper relationship with our places.

Caution I: Beware Spiritual Extractivism

One of the core moral lessons of the conservation movement, was that industrial civilization’s hunger for converting the earth into cash or calories has devastated ecosystems and caused a culture-induced mass extinction. Many of those who are interested in shifting the conversation toward a more sacred sense of the world have started many wonderful projects such as retreat centres, Wild Churches, or Forest Bathing circles. As I shift my mind set of seeing the world as a background to one of home, I want to say that caution is in order. In some ecological spirituality circles, workshops or liturgies I have attended, there is often a circle sharing exercise in which we are encouraged to go out into the forest and find a natural object that speaks to us, or to have a conversation with a tree, etc. We are charged, dismissed and given 45 minutes to soak up the forest’s spiritual lessons and the pressure is on! As I talk about Placefulness, my first caution would be to beware of a taking our extractivist cultural instinct and simply shifting it toward what I am calling a spiritual extractivism. Theologian Belden Lane’s words are a much better caution:

“The challenge is to honor the thing itself, as well as the thing as metaphor. When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson declared in 1836 that ‘every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact,’ he sent people racing to the woods, anticipating the voice of God in the call of every thrush. But too often they paid scant attention to the songbird in their anxiousness to hear some transcendent message. They returned home full of nothing but themselves, their pockets stuffed with metaphors. As the imagination reaches relentlessly for a timeless, interior soulscape, it is easy to sail over the specificity of particular landscapes” –Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (1998, 17)

Caution II: Beware Dissociative Jargon

This one’s for me. In academia, we are coming up with some important terms to describe what is happening to our world, words like Solastalgia, coined by Glenn Albrecht has gotten a lot of traction because it speaks to a feeling that is becoming more common, and just as potent as nostalgia was thought to be during the 1700s, where it was diagnosed as serious illness due to longing for one’s homeland. Solastalgia is the feeling of loss and longing for one’s home place as it changes before our eyes. This kind of language, though abstract and new, is powerful for describing our feelings. What I mean by dissociative jargon is more in line with words like environment, ecosystems and even ecology. Ecosystem is a word for places coined by a culture without a home. I learned this caution from a hero of mine, agrarian writer Wendell Berry. I have a lot to learn from this caution. As Berry writes:

“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.” –Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (1993, 35)

Troubles: Therapizing Place and NIMBY-ism

In addition to these cautions, I am also interested in the troubles on the horizon, troubles for which I don’t have direct prescriptions to solve. These are troubles that I want to think out loud about in future writing and if possible, public gatherings.

First, there is a strong tendency to assume that developing a place is space is a kind of wellness technique. For example, forest-based therapists often see places through a therapeutic lens (this is often good). We develop a practice of deep attention to place as a means of de-stressing, unwinding, or spiritually tuning in to the happenings of a forest. However, I must insist that just as mindfulness is not just to be practiced when we are happy, a practice of Placefulness is not just practiced when our places are lush, or when we are comfortable and happy, or simply in need of cheering up. Forests are places of predation, decay, rot, parasitism, suffering and pain. If we go to the forest and only see vibrant life, interconnection and cooperation we are missing half of the experience.

Sense of place can also become something of a classist project of protecting a strict view of land that elevates places that are primarily in wild states, lined with walking trails and recreational areas. Working landscapes are often excluded, which tends to bias our notions of places worthy of our attention toward those that fit the narrow aesthetics of urban and wealthy recreators, retirees, or second homeowners. NIMBY-ism (Not In My Backyard) can even kill renewable energy projects that threaten a cherished viewshed. Some communities value places primarily for wellness, aesthetics, spirituality and leisure and these are important values. But Placefulness needs to wrap its arms around the reality that many people have to make their livings from the land, as foresters, miners, loggers, truckers, farmers, ranchers and many other professions and many of them are trying their best to do a good job, usually small scale, independent operators. This is tricky, because we need to radically transform our economy, but the answer isn’t simply building a wall around some places while others go to shit.

With Trebbe Johnson’s Radical Joy for Hard Times, we need to be prepared to love damaged places. We need to witness and resist cultures of destruction but also as Donna Haraway encourages us, to “stay with the trouble”. This means resisting either/or narratives that trade in either apocalyptic or techno-optimistic storylines. It means attuning to our neighborhoods as well as our local wild forest parks. It means supporting and celebrating a stream restoration project and grieving an oil spill in the bay. Our places are wounded, so are we. Attention, holy grief and acts of beauty in wounded places are integral to Placefulness.

Troubles: Weaponizing Place

Another important trouble is that deep reverence to places are caught up in human conflicts all over the world. Control over (sacred) places is often enlisted by ethno-nationalist agendas. For example, Hindu nationalists (VHP) demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 because they claimed it was built by Muslim invaders on a sacred Hindu site. Sacred Groves in India, which are often pointed to as examples of ancient conservation projects, are often caste-restrictive, gender restrictive and include taboos that look nothing like the egalitarian access Westerners expect from protected areas. Sense of place is often accompanied by knowing one’s place in a social hierarchy. In addition, Israel/Palestine continues to be a conflict between those who are deeply invested in their identities and home places. Zionism is a place-based movement. Placefulness needs to grapple with this toxic dimension of sense of place.

Troubles: Reconciling Place

Last, sense of place is not communing with Nature with a capital N. In the pacific West where I live, he beloved forests where I walk, the parks and neighborhoods are all the traditional territory of the Musqueam people. To go into the forest and see only nature is to negate that these are cultural landscapes whose ancient stewards have been stripped of their claims by force. There is a political ecology to Placefulness.

There are some very encouraging large-scale trends: The BC Treaty Commission, Indigenous protected and conserved areas; the advancement of Rights and Title settlements; co-management, profit sharing agreements. The Land Back, Land Guardians, Indigenous land trusts, revitalization movements, Voluntary Land Tax projects like the Reciprocity Funds program. These are all gesturing in the right direction, but reconciliation and decolonization are not the same thing, and Placefulness needs to grapple with what that means for settler and immigrant peoples who love where they live. A post-colonial “Cascadia” should be able to include settler and immigrant peoples, but Indigenous peoples need to be treated with the historical justice that making right deserves. How far does that go? I don’t know. Perhaps I should start look into immigrating back to England after 7 or so generations of ancestry in North America? Or, perhaps my practice of Placefulness needs to be able to sit with discomfort, ambivalence, and the historical wrongs that I had no part in carry out, but whose privileged fruits I unquestionably benefit from. As Nigerian Post-Christian Yoruba writer Bayo Akomolafe says:

“I like to say that, sometimes the best answer to a pressing question is bewilderment. It’s not the answer itself, it’s not the correct answer, it’s the gift of bewilderment, it’s a gift of straying away from the algorithms of easy arrival. And my Elders always taught me that…the answers are not always going to be available…thank you for holding the space for queer questions, and uneasy arrivals for tending to the tense fields where new kinds of beings and becomings can thrive and grow…”[10]

Placefulness is about making space for the unknown, cultivating holy grief for a rapidly changing world, and loving our places even when it might be uncomfortable.

[1] Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place, 1993, 14.

[2] Christian Norbert Shultz, The Concept of Dwelling, 1993, 109.

[3] Simon Weil, The Need for Roots, 1949, 41.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, The Land, 2002, Pos. 3051, Kindle edition.

[5] Belden Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred. 1996, 242.

[6] Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods, 1969, 268.

[7] Llewelln Vaugan Lee, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, 2013, 7.

[8] Richard Nelson, The Island Within, 1989, 249.

[9] Cited IN: Gretel Van Wieren “Ecological Restoration as Public Spiritual Practice” Worldviews 12 (2008) 237-254.

[10] For the Wild Podcast: https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/dr-bayo-akomolafe-on-slowing-down-in-urgent-times-encore-285

The Annunciation of Spring

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

Santa Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi by Sandro Botticelli completed in 1489.

Above the altar of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of Saint James Anglican Church, where I serve, is a painting of Bottichelli’s Santa Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi. When I lead morning and evening prayer on Wednesdays and Sundays the painting speaks of the ‘Yes’ that Mary gave to God and the Holy Spirit during that encounter. The posture of deference that the angel holds, is always striking to me, as well as the European rather than Semitic setting.

This year, the Feast of the Annunciation was held on April 9th, because Palm Sunday fell on March 25th. I have nothing profound to report about this day, which is seldom celebrated amongst the fanfare of the Easter Season. But on that day, as I walked lazily toward my destination at the neighbourhood park, I noticed a hand full of tree swallows swooping and diving above me for the first time this year.

Just as the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mother Mary to announce the coming of a saviour, each year these tiny birds, little angels the size of a child’s palm, announce the arrival of spring. I smiled and continued my walk, grateful for the connection between a feast day of the church, and an ancient marker of the wheel of the year.

What’s in a Name? Decolonizing Personal Spiritual Ecologies

/ Jason M. Brown / 1 Comment

Standing on the creaky porch of Park Butte fire lookout, it felt like I was face to face with the southern slope of Mount Baker. Thirty miles east of Bellingham, Washington, on this 4th of July, the trail had been practically empty. I stayed the night in the lookout, and watched the colorful flicker of fireworks on the coast below mirror the twinkle of the stars above. As I began my hike down the next morning, I wanted somehow to reverence the commanding presence of the mountain in whose close proximity I had slept. I asked myself a simple question: Does it matter if I think of the mountain by its Settler name? Or, should I refer to it by its Lummi name: Kulshan?

I didn’t really know anything Mr. Baker, except that he was English; or much about the word Kulshan, except that it was one of the hip new breweries in town. So, I mustered a hasty sign of the cross, brought my hands close to my heart, and said ‘thank you.’

After my trip, I began to do a little research. Mount Baker is a 10,700 foot, relatively young at 100,000 years, active strato-volcano. Which means it is made up by layers of igneous rock, lava and pumice. It is glaciated, and snow-covered year round and has one of the highest snowfalls in the world.

Coast Salish peoples have dwelt in the area for at least 14,000 years. The Lummi word for the peak is as I already knew Kulshan, but it doesn’t mean White Sentinel, or The Shining One as I had heard. The word means something closer to ‘puncture wound.’ For the nearby Nooksack people, Kulshan actually refers to the area around the peak, used for hunting and gathering. Kweq’ Smánit, which simply means ‘white mountain’, is the name for the summit.

There are at least two stories associated with Kulshan. A 1919 ethnography recorded a retelling of the story of the Thunderbird, a supernatural being who dwells in the tops of mountains. A Lummi man related

“Thunder is caused by a great bird…the thunderbird is many hundreds of times larger than a fish hawk. It is so large that it can carry a large whale in its talons from the ocean to its nest….This huge bird has its home yonder on Mt. Baker, where you see the clouds piling up now. Whenever this bird comes from its nest and flies about the mountain top it thunders and lightnings, and even when it is disturbed in its nest it makes the thunder noise by its moving about even there…. The lightning is caused by the quick opening and shutting of its powerfully bright, snappy eyes and the thunder noise by the rapid flapping of its monstrous wings” (Reagan, 1919, 435).

The Thunderbird is a being in most if not all Coast Salish cosmologies, and it is often both a respected and feared presence in the land that demands respect and sometimes placation through the burning of ceremonial fires. For the Squamish peoples, the rich deposits of obsidian are places where lighting that shoots from thunderbirds eyes hit the earth.

The ethnographer Charles Buchanan in 1916, recorded another story of a man named Kulshan who had two wives; one beautiful, and one kind. Kulshan loved the kinder wife more, and the beautiful wife grew jealous and decided to leave him, hoping he would realize what he lost and come after her. As she walked south, she turned back many times to see if Kulshan was looking, and as she got farther away she had to stretch higher and higher to see Kulshan. Eventually she made camp on a high outcropping and stared back at Kulshan, waiting for him to come. Eventually she turned into the peak we today call Mount Rainier, and he into Mount Kulshan.

During the age of conquest, the mountain was sketched by Gonzalo Lopez de Haro on a Spanish voyage in 1790. He named it ‘La Gran Montaña de Carmelo,’ in reference to both Mount Carmel, but also the Carmelite Order, home of Saint John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. In 1792, it donned the now familiar name of Englishman Joseph Baker, who was Captain George Vancouver’s Lieutenant.

Over the years, Anglo mountain climbers, ethnographers and history buffs have been in favor of renaming the peak Kulshan. Proof of this are the dozens of local businesses, mountaineering clubs, or botany societies who have taken it on as a namesake. But in doing so are we paying deference to an authentic place-name tradition? Or feeding our own ideas about indigeneity? Perhaps both.

Personal Spiritual Ecology

Acknowledging indigenous place-names certainly look toward a reconciliatory stance, provided it is accompanied by respect for sacred sites, more resource management autonomy, and Treaty and Title rights if possible. However, phenomenologically, a place-name does not automatically give us admittance to the world the name upholds. For example, Coast Salish place-names are fairly simple descriptives: ‘white mountain’, ‘place for herring fish’, etc. It is rather, the activities of dwelling that accumulate around those place-names that give rise to an experience of the world. This is beautifully illustrated of course by Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places but unlike Basso’s semiotic approach, Tim Ingold’s insights show us that landscape is not just a cultural layer we project onto the physical world, but the world itself. While I might be able to understand or recall certain Coast Salish place-names or stories, I must admit that I do not dwell in that world, and an attempt to do so for my own academic or spiritual curiosity carries with it the weight and suspicion of the colonialism of the last 200 years. In addition, in retelling these stories, there is the danger not only of losing details in translation, but importing my own world into the telling. And yet, are there any ontologies, especially today, that are not plural? Hybrid?

Learning about the history of the mountain, I confess that Mount Carmel resonated most with me. I am of course aware that to stick with ‘Carmel’, is to return to where we started, to run the risk of perpetuating imperial Christianity; but it is also to connect the place to the rich contemplative spiritual tradition of which I am a practitioner. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel, features the mountain as a symbol for our longing for union with God.

Lastly, regardless of one’s spiritual orientation, the land can speak to us in ways that we cannot always predict. I recall sitting in a discussion group at a Salish Sea conference. I made some point about place names. A Nooksack woman responded patiently that it was not we who named places, but the places themselves that gave people their names as gifts when they are ready. Translated into contemplative spirituality, this is the practice of attention, or, Prosoche (pro-soh-KHAY) in Greek. Being present a person, place, or organism, we listen to what they might say about the world, about ourselves, or about God. Perhaps it is with this practice that new names and thus, new worlds might arise.

This paper was presented at the recent Mountains and Sacred Landscapes Conference at the New School for Social Research in New York City. 

References

The Tower of Silence

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

The Prophet Zoroaster

The Prophet Zoroaster. Source: Wikipedia

I recently did an interview with three Zoroastrians who live here in Vancouver. As I was preparing for the interview, I learned the fascinating history of the death rituals practiced by ancient and some modern Zoroastrian communities.

Briefly, Zoroastrians are followers of the teachings of the prophet Zarathustra, or Zoroaster in Greek, who is thought to have lived some time between 1,500 and 650 BCE. They are probably the first monotheistic religions with a great reverence for the elements, especially fire, which is a kind of incarnation of wisdom.

However, because of a dualistic cosmology, with the forces of good and evil forever at odds, dead bodies are believed to be quickly tainted by evil spirits. Because the elements are holy, death must be dealt with in such a way that the elements are not tainted by the corpse. This means no burial, no cremation, or setting out to sea. Traditionally then, Zoroastrians have conducted what is often referred to as ‘sky burial.’ The corpse is taken to a place called a Tower of Silence, where carrion eaters such as vultures devour the corpse. The technical term for this is excarnation, and it is also practiced by certain sects of Tibetan Buddhism, and in Mongolia, Bhutan, and Nepal.

Mumbai Tower of Silence Entrance Source: Wikipedia

Mumbai Tower of Silence Entrance
Source: Wikipedia

One particular case that drew my attention, was the Zoroastrian community in Mumbai, whose Tower of Silence called the Doongerwadi, is surrounded by 54 acres of unmanaged forest, creating a small oasis. The Tower was built in the late 1600s, but is located in what is now an upper middle class neighborhood.

However, in the 1990s, the vulture population, which traditionally devoured the corpses in short order, collapsed due to the use of a drug administered to cattle, which was then ingested by the birds who had eaten the remains of treated cows. In some places, the vulture population was decreased by 99%.

This decrease in the vulture population, has meant that there are not enough birds to properly decompose the corpses of Mumbai’s Zoroastrian community, and there are worries about the public health implications of half decomposed corpses sitting around, even with the forest buffer.

In response, Zoroastrian activists have begun experimenting. There is a vulture breeding program in the works that is having some success, but others have began experimenting with solar concentrators which direct the suns heat onto the decomposing corpses which dries them out and speeds up decomposition time.

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/26/death-city-lack-vultures-threatens-mumbai-towers-of-silence

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1443789.stm

Homily: Living Symbols

/ Jason M. Brown / 2 Comments

[Homily delivered Feb. 26, 2017 to Saint Margaret Cedar-Cottage Anglican Church.]

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At 4:13 AM I stumbled in the pale darkness to my choir stall. When I finally looked up through the west facing window of the chapel at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in northwestern Oregon, a glowing full moon was setting through a light haze. The monks began to chant the early morning Divine Office of Vigils, a ritual that unfolds day after day, month after month, and year after year in monasteries all over the world.

This month-long immersive retreat in 2014, inspired the questions that would become my PhD dissertation research, which I completed over a six month period in 2015 and 2016. I am now in writing the dissertation, and should be done in the next 2, 3, 4 or 5 months. I wanted to better understand the relationship between the 1,500 year old monastic tradition, contemporary environmental discourses and the land. And I wanted to better describe for the emerging Spiritual Ecology literature the ways that theological ideas and spiritual symbols populate monastic spirituality of place and creation.

Exodus 24:12-18

In the readings this morning, we are gifted several land-based symbols. God says to Moses in Exodus: “Come up to me on the mountain.” Liberated from Egypt, God is now eager to build a relationship with his people and Moses’s ascent of Mount Sinai to receive the Law mirrors our own spiritual journeys. A thick cloud covered the mountain for six days before Moses was finally called into God’s presence, like so much of my own spiritual life, lived in darkness, with small rays of light.

Matthew 17:1-19

In the Gospel reading, Jesus too ascends a “high mountain.” There, his disciples witness one of the most perplexing scenes in the New Testament: The Transfiguration. Jesus’s face and garments shone like the sun. And then, certainly conscious of the Hebrew text, the writer says that a bright cloud overshadowed them and they heard a voice say: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” Christ, who was fully human and fully God, was revealing in his very person to Peter, James and John his fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. And presence of the symbols of mountain and cloud were bound up in the authenticity of Jesus’s claims to messianic authority.

2 Peter 1:16-21

Even though it’s not clear that the Apostle Peter is the author of our second reading, the message is clear: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.” Reading Exodus and Matthew, it might feel simple to slip into an easy allegorical hermeneutic, to see everything as a symbol; but the writer of 2 Peter is clear: Stop trying to turn everything into a myth! This reminds me of the quote from Catholic writer Flannery O’Conner who said of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.”

img_6579With these texts in mind, especially questions of religious symbols and religious realities, I want to talk a little bit about my research with monastic communities, and then return to these texts at the end. Monasticism, like Christianity as a whole is steeped in symbols. For example, the Abbas and Ammas of the early monastic tradition experienced the desert as a symbol of purification and sanctification. Saint Anthony fled to the desert to live a life of solitude, spiritual warfare and strict asceticism. The silence and nakedness of the desert landscape was as it were a habitat for the silence and simplicity that led the Desert Fathers and Mothers through the wilderness of their own sin to the simplicity of God’s presence. As Saint Jerome wrote, “The desert loves to strip bare.”

The motifs of the Desert-wilderness and the Paradise-garden are like two poles in Biblical land-based motifs. Pulling the people of Israel between them. Adam and Eve were created in a garden, but driven to the wilderness. The people of Israel were enslaved in the lush Nile Delta, but liberated into a harsh desert. The prophets promised the return of the garden if Israel would flee the wilderness of their idolatry. Christ suffered and resurrected in a garden after spending 40 days in the wilderness. The cloister garden at the center of the medieval monastery embodied also this eschatological liminality between earth and heaven, wilderness and garden.

Mountains too were and continue to be powerful symbols of the spiritual life. From Mount Sinai to Mount Tabor, John of the Cross and the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing, each drawing on the metaphors of ascent and obscurity.

But do you need a desert to practice desert spirituality?

Do you need the fecundity of a spring time garden to understand the resurrection?

I would argue that we do.

For my PhD research, I conducted 50 interviews, some seated and some walking, with monks at four monasteries in the American West. My first stop was to New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. The community was established in 1958 by monks from Italy. The Hermitage is located on 880 acres in the Ventana Wilderness of the Santa Lucia Mountains. Coastal Live Oak dominate the erosive, fire adapted chaparral ecology, and the narrow steep canyons shelter the southernmost reaches of Coastal Redwood. The monks make their living by hosting retreatants and run a small fruitcake and granola business.

The second monastery I visited was New Clairvaux Trappist Abbey, which is located on 600 acres of prime farmland in California’s Central Valley and was founded in 1955. It is located in orchard country, and they grow walnuts and prunes, and recently started a vineyard. They are flanked on one side by Deer Creek, and enjoy a lush tree covered cloister that is shared with flocks of turkey vultures and wild turkeys that are more abundant than the monks themselves. They recently restored a 12th century Cistercian Chapter house as part of an attempt to draw more pilgrims to the site.

Thirdly, I stayed at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey, which was also founded in 1955, in the foothills of the Coastal Range in Western Oregon. When they arrived, they found that the previous owner had clear cut the property and run. They replanted, and today the 1,300 acre property is covered by Douglas fir forests, mostly planted by the monks. Though they began as grain and sheep farmers, today the monastery makes its living through a wine storage warehouse, a bookbindery, a fruitcake business, and a sustainable forestry operation.

For my last stop, I headed to the high pinyon-juniper deserts of New Mexico. At the end of a 13 mile muddy dirt road, surrounded by the Chama River Wilderness, an adobe chapel stands in humble relief against steep painted cliffs. Founded in 1964, Christ in the Desert Abbey is the fastest growing in the Order, with over 40 monks in various stages of formation. The monks primarily live from their bookstore and hospitality, but also grow commercial hops which they sell to homebrewers.

In my interviews, the monastic values of Silence, Solitude and Beauty were consistently described as being upheld and populated by the land. The land was not just a setting for a way of life, but elements which participated in the spiritual practices of contemplative life. To use a monastic term, the land incarnates, gives flesh, to their prayer life.

Thus, the monks live in a world that is steeped in religious symbols through their daily practice of lectio divina, and the chanting of the Psalms. As one monk of Christ in the Desert put it:

“Any monk who has spent his life chanting the Divine Office cannot have any experience and not have it reflect, or give utterance in the Psalmody. The psalmody is a great template to place on the world for understanding it, and its language becomes your own.”

In this mode, the land becomes rich with symbol: a tree growing out of a rock teaches perseverance, a distant train whistle reminds one to pray, a little flower recalls Saint Therese of Lisieux, a swaying Douglas fir tree points to the wood of the cross, a gash in a tree symbolizes Christ’s wounds. In each case, the elements of the land act as symbol within a system of religious symbology. One monk of Christ in the Desert, who wore a cowboy hat most of the time related:

“When the moon rises over that mesa and you see this glowing light halo. It echoes what I read in the Psalms. In the Jewish tradition the Passover takes place at the full moon, their agricultural feasts are linked to the lunar calendar. When they sing their praises, ‘like the sunlight on the top of the temple,’ ‘like the moon at the Passover Feast.’ ‘Like the rising of incense at evening prayer.’ They’re all describing unbelievable beauty. I look up and I’m like that’s what they were talking about.”

The land populates familiar Psalms, scriptures and stories with its elements and thus enriches the monastic experience of both text and land.

Theologically speaking, God’s presence in the land is a kind of real presence that does not just point to, but participates in God. This gives an embodied or in their words, incarnational, quality to their experience of the land. As another example, one monk went for a long walk on a spring day, but a sudden snow storm picked up and he almost lost his way. He related that from then on Psalm 111 that states “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” took on a whole new meaning.

In addition, the monks often spoke of their experiences on the land in terms of flashes of insight, or moments of clarity that transcended any specific location or symbolic meaning. One monk called these experiences “charged moments” where a tree or vista one sees frequently, suddenly awakens to God’s presence.

The monks at each community, in their own ways, have sunken deep roots into the lands they live on and care for. Each, in the Benedictine tradition, strive to be “Lovers of the place” as the Trappist adage goes. When I asked one monk if this meant that the landscape was sacred, he paused and said, “I would only say that it is loved.”

I am arguing in my dissertation that monastic perception of landscape can be characterized as what an embodied semiotics. By this I simply mean that symbols and embodied experience reinforce each other in the landscape, and without embodied experience symbols are in danger of losing their meaning.

The motifs of desert and wilderness, the symbols of water, cloud, mountain, doves, bread and wine, the agricultural allegories of Jesus, and the garden, are in this reading, reinforced by consistent contact with these elements and activities in real life.

On the last Sunday before Lent, as we move into the pinnacle of the Christian calendar, it is no coincidence that the resurrection of the body of Jesus is celebrated during the resurrection of the body of the earth. But does this mean that Jesus’s resurrection can be read as just a symbol, an archetype, a metaphor for the undefeated message of Jesus? Certainly Peter and the other Apostles would say no. They did not give up their own lives as martyrs for a metaphor.

For a long time I struggled with believing in the resurrection as a historical reality. But when I began to realize the connection between the land and the paschal mystery, it was the symbols in the land itself that drew me to the possibility of Christ’s resurrection. And that in turn reinforced my ability to see Christ in the entire cosmic reality of death and rebirth active and continual in every part of the universe.

As Peter warns his readers: “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” For how can we truly believe in the return of the Beloved Son, if we have never been up early enough to see the return of the star we call sun?

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My First Visit to Gethsemani Abbey

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Statue greeting visitors to Gethsemani Abbey.

Statue greeting visitors to Gethsemani Abbey.

I arrived at Gethsemani in the first mega bus of three. The spire of the Abbey church rose suddenly behind a slight grassy hill. Several monks greeted us and led eager groups of about 20 through the cloister, Thomas Merton’s humble grave, and then up the short road to the hermitage where Merton started living full time in August of 1965. The pilgrim crowd, reverently snapping photos in silence, we converged in waves on the cinder block hermitage. It felt something like a flash mob-monastery—all of us interested to some degree in Merton’s spiritual writings, some of us scholars on Merton’s theology, but none willing to take the lead into the actual life of a monk or nun. We were a momentary cloister, a temporary community. Meanwhile the monastery’s average age climbs, and the monks announced this week that they would discontinue producing the cheese they have produced for many decades. Gethsemani Abbey remains a sacred site to many of us, but it is changing, and its long term future is uncertain.

I stood with the others outside the hermitage, drinking coke, listening to a monk tell us stories about Merton’s life here as fire ants, sent forth from their clay monasteries, silently tried to rip my toenails off my sandal-shod feet. We nodded, asked questions, paced through the small rooms, and then wandered outside toward the edges of the clearing to imagine what solitude would be like here. As we made our way back, another group eagerly approached.

At the end of our tour there was still about an hour before the monks were going to chant the mid-day hour, so I decided to head back out to the hermitage to see if I could steal a few moments alone. I passed chatting stragglers, and when I arrived, I went inside, snapped a few photos of the empty rooms, prayed in the small chapel, turned off the lights, picked up a few discarded refreshment cups from the floor, and then sat myself down on the now silent cement porch which had only a few minutes earlier been bustling with pacing pilgrims. A fat lizard scurried across the front of the cool cement porch into a small strip of sun near the edge. She stopped to eye me up and down, putting in a few push-ups before scurrying on. The breeze was cool and it lifted the green leaves of the tulip poplar, maple and oak trees that now surround the monastery. (At the time it was built, judging from some early photos, the area around the hermitage was much more open.)

Monks chanting the noon hour.

Monks chanting the noon hour.

I didn’t have any profound flashes of insight, or visions of Merton banging out drafts of his immortal prose, but I felt a glimmer of the wholeness of solitude, if only for a few precious minutes. I could hear my breath and the wind rising and falling together. I felt peace. I felt God. Then, a hunched figure appear on the meandering path up to the hermitage. My brief solitude at Merton’s hermitage was ended. As he approached I could see large cuffs in his pants, and a few patches. I could somehow tell he was a monk from Gethsemani, no doubt on his way to stay at the hermitage for a few days, as it is still in regular use. I greeted him, and in with a slightly annoyed but honest tone he said, “You must be a straggler?” I said, “Yes, I will get out of your hair” (he didn’t have very much of it). He introduced himself, and told me he had timed his annual week-long stay with the full moon, so as to be able to attend lauds and mass in the mornings without the use of a flash light. I wished him luck, hopped over a few anthills and was on my way down the road back to the cloister, the road that Merton and many other monks and retreatants have taken over the years. The bell rang, and I made it to the monastery chapel in time to hear the soft chant of the monks of Gethsemani. Later I gave a presentation at the Conference on Merton the hermit and the idea of wilderness. It was a beautiful day.

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Merton’s hermitage from the path.

This year I have been lucky enough to visit a couple of sites with sacred significance to me: Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker house in Manhattan and Aldo Leopold’s shack in Baraboo, Wisconsin. In past years I have also visited the site of the saw mill where John Muir worked in Yosemite Valley, the Sacred Grove where Mormon founder Joseph Smith had his visions, and Walden Pond. Each of these sites brings into full color the significance of place in our encounters with the Divine, with life. Each of us famous or not, inhabits a place. Our bodies know that place better than our minds. So, to inhabit the places where my mentors worked and wrote is like meeting them in person, or more awkwardly, meeting them in place. I think this desire is universal in humanity, based on the number of sacred sites, shrines, national historic sites, etc. that exist throughout the world. But just because we hold a particular cinder block hermitage in New Haven, Kentucky to be sacred, should not meant that everything outside that space is unsacred. As Wendell Berry has written, there are not sacred places and unsacred places in the world, there are only sacred places and desecrated places. May we continue to visit and protect the places that inspire us, and inspire the places we are at home in.

Holy Ground

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

ShackThere is something about being in a place that our spiritual, historical or literary ancestors have once tread. Ones that walked, worked, wrote or traveled through a place or landscape. The practice of retracing their steps is an ancient human practice, we call pilgrimage. I didn’t go on foot, but between a lovely wedding in Chicago among family and an amazing Religion and Ecology conference in New Haven among friends, I was lucky enough through the grace of some old friends to visit several of these places over the last week. While in Madison, Wisconsin we travelled by car just north of Baraboo to a small shack on the western shore of the Wisconsin River. It was here that Aldo Leopold, Yale Alumnus and ecology saint wrote his famous A Sand County Almanac. The locale is no pristine wilderness, a sandy soiled pine forest that gives way to riparian grasses and shrubs at the river’s edge. But walking the numbered stations of the Leopold Foundation’s pamphlet, like an ecological stations of the cross, those typical trees took on the spirit of the Leopold family, who planted the trees in an act of ecological restoration. The shack as temple in a sacred grove. A temple, not of worship or divinity, but a tangible shrine to one of the early voices to suggest that humanity was not conqueror of Nature, but citizen. As we stood on the sandy river shore in silence, water lapping against the sandy ground, a flock of 15 sand hill cranes passed overhead on their way to their nightly roost. The water was deep blue and the air was chilly when the sun passed behind clouds. There was nothing otherworldly about the experience, but it certainly enriched my love for Leopold and his contribution to the ecology movement.

CWOn foot, I seek an inconspicuous corner of 1st Street in East Village, Manhattan. The St. Joseph Catholic Worker House of Hospitality has been in continuous operation since Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day founded them in 1936. When I arrived, a small crew of volunteers that included two Mormon missionaries, were serving a simple soup, and a smiling woman made the rounds topping off coffee mugs. The guests sat mostly in silence, some in quiet conversation. I struck up a short conversation with a volunteer and he immediately offered to let me serve some coffee. We chatted about the project, the place, and Dorothy Day, the movement’s founder, who is currently being reviewed by the Vatican for Canonization. The Catholic Worker Movement is a lot like other homeless shelters, but more than that it was an early socialist attempt to live the Gospel by fulfilling Jesus’s command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the sick. They espouse a simple philosophy of Christian pacifism, agrarianism and personalism. They serve daily meals and give free clothing away and house several dozen people on a temporary basis. A drop in the bucket in a city of 8 million, but just looking around I could feel of Dorothy’s spirit, silently fulfilling the most basic of Christian practices.

A young parish priest opened the Rectory door of Corpus Christi Church in Morningside Heights and asked “How can I help you?” I told him I was a reader of Thomas Merton, and asked if I could see the chapel. Without hesitation, he slipped into tour guide mode, opened the door and showed me to the room where Merton first met with Father George Barry Ford. A small hand painted portrait of Merton hung on the north wall. The Priest showed me into the church and guided me toward the back of the chapel to a small baptistery where Merton was baptized. The church was beautiful, built in 1936 in a Baroque Revival style. A little too ornate for my taste, and nothing like the Cathedrals I had visited throughout the day in Manhattan. But the place help a special presence as the place where Thomas Merton worked out his conversation and eventual decision to join the Trappists in Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky. Merton went on to become one of the most influential Catholics of the 20th century, and his writing is widely read.

I am no expert on these writers, but they have all, Leopold, Day and Merton influenced by thinking, the way I live my life and the subject of my research. Being in the places where these wonderful human beings worked out their own questions, ideas and lives gave me a kind of strength and assurance that I was at least moving in the right direction.

 

Convergence Reflections

/ Jason M. Brown / 1 Comment

A year ago, I decided I wanted to put on a conference. I had just started my PhD program at UBC and finished a course on the history of environmental thought. It became clear that there was so much to learn about our religious and spiritual relationship to the world. Being new in the Pacific Northwest I wanted to bring people together, to see what was out there, what was being done, and how we might form a stronger community of ‘spiritual ecologists’ in the region. I wanted to discuss religion, spirituality, ecology and cosmology in the same space, and I wanted to gather strength for the fight for our future that our generation is in the midst of. What started as an idea became a reality from September 22-24 and the 29th. With fifteen artists and at least twenty four presenters, speakers or narrators this truly was a Convergence of talent, ideas, passion and beauty. I chose the title Spiritual Ecologies and New Cosmologies, because I wanted to span the diverse terrain of scholarship, activism and advocacy for a new way of seeing ourselves in relationship to the earth and the Universe herself. I chose the plural because I knew there would not be just one vision of a sacred earth or a sacred cosmos, but many. I chose Convergence, because I wanted it to be about more than just presenting papers. As the core organizer I made plenty of mistakes: perhaps too many speakers, too few breaks, too much time in our heads. But overall we had an amazing spectrum of lectures, presentations, storytelling, performance, walking meditation, art and most importantly discussion and sharing. While the Convergence is over, the art will be exhibited at the Liu Institute until November 6, so if you missed the Convergence stop by!

Day 1: Beginnings

Storytellers

Storytellers

The picture of Monday’s speakers brings me great joy. For all the strife and religious violence in the world it was amazing to have people speaking from 10 different traditions, and sharing those perspectives with an audience of 80 other perspectives. We had some technical difficulties and the speakers went a little long, but to be in the First Nations Long House among the amazing totems and pillars was a wonderful place to tell stories of origin and beginnings. We were welcomed to the Musqueam territory by Elder Larry Grant, who told us about the origin of the name Musqueam, and the problematic nature of colonial English words like ‘creation’ and ‘Creator’ and the Musqueam concept of all things possessing a life force. As we learned, not all of our spiritual traditions tell stories of beginnings –our Buddhist and Hindu storytellers spoke of unimaginably long cosmic cycles within which human beings strive for liberation from suffering. While the Judeo-Christian creation stories (Gen. 1 and 2) offer poetic details about the emergence of the universe and a cast of characters, our Sikh storyteller declared that only God knows how the universe was brought into being. For us it will always be a mystery. In Islam, everything in creation points back to Allah, from beginning to end, and our Mormon storyteller spoke of our eternal co-existence with God and the universe. If we had had more time, I would have asked 10 more scientists to speak from their traditions. But our cosmology story teller, Ben Pfeiffer a Langara College science professor, did an amazing job, by telling of the Big Bang and the origin of the earth in a story that included a mythical spider who challenged the dominant telling of the scientific story of the universe by mostly white men. After the welcome dinner, we heard from those in the audience who brought up many interesting points and spoke from experience. They all had stories to tell, and I wish we would have had time to hear them all.

Day 2: Cosmologies

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Cosmic Meditation Walk

On our second day, via skype, we heard from the producers of ‘Journey of the Universe’, a film about reconnecting the human purpose to cosmic evolution. During the response to the film by Bruce Sanguine, a local self-professed evolutionary Christian, a young woman entered the room and began speaking loudly, asking if she could speak, asking what we thought we were doing. I tried to ignore her and move on with the evening, but she persisted despite efforts by some of the participants to calm her down and invite her outside. At one point she insulted our speaker by saying what he was saying made no sense. As Bruce continued, I lost my temper and stormed up to her demanding that she leave the premises. She refused and my anger only escalated her outbursts. The room was tense and we tried to move forward, while someone called UBC security. While I stormed around, one of the participants quietly gained her trust, and took her outside, calming the woman down, and teaching her how to reconnect to herself through the ground and the trees that surround the Liu Institute. The woman admitted that perhaps she should not have made such a scene and apologized. The evening proceeded with some very insightful reflections, but as I reflected, my boldness melted into shame. Yes, I had worked so hard to build something, and she had tried to ruin it…How dare she insult my speaker! But I realized what a perfect metaphor it all was. All of our preconceived notions of comfort, order, harmony, normality, and mental health can be shattered in an instant. How could I change my relationship to the earth if I could not even love one person suffering from a momentary lapse in mental health? If that woman, who refused to tell us her name, is reading this, I want to say I am sorry. Please forgive my lack of compassion for you. I will do better.

After our discussion we turned to the Sisters at Earth Literacies Program for a walking meditation that spanned the entire history of the universe as told by contemporary Cosmology, each milestone marked with a candle. I was impressed by the amount of silence between the beginning of the universe and the emergence of galaxies, and the tiny spaces between the creation of earth and the evolution of consciousness. After the Sisters outlined the journey, we all walked the spiral from the center to the outer edge in silence. It was profound to see the milestones that led to Jason M. Brown walking in a small room of peers in British Columbia under my feet; to grasp that I was but star stuff reflecting back on the process of becoming Mind stuff.

Day 3: Ecologies

Speakers and Participant from the afternoon session

Speakers and Participant from the afternoon session

On the third day we had an amazing and full lineup of speakers. We had some great discussion as well. I felt so privileged to be around people who care so deeply about the earth and making our civilization more sustainable. We also had the perspectives of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Pagans, Unitarians, Survivalists, Atheists and more! I was struck by Meg Robert’s and Mike Bell’s points about the importance of spiritual practice for keeping our activism vital. I was struck by the need to ground our consciousness raising in the landscape, in a context, or as Matthew Humphrey argued, in a bioregion, or life-place. As Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr has put it in his writing “We don’t think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” This is exactly what Suresh Fernando is attempting to do with his spiritual community at Ruby Lake on the Sunshine Coast. Yes we can seek personal spirituality, but it must be grounded in place, in tradition, in community.

With respect to system change we had a few different minds. For example, Winnie Chu is starting an air pollution monitoring company guided by Buddhist principles. Others were adamant that what is needed is to create semi-autonomous zones that can push back the system which is hopelessly corrupt, to birth a new way of living on earth. These autonomous zones would not just be political, but could demand freedom from noise pollution, light pollution, techno-addiction, and the alienation from life itself. In the end it seems that authentic Transition will require an all hands on deck strategy: system change from within and pressure from without.

Spiritual practice is what will keep us grounded and keep us from burning out. We must be connected to the wild and to each other. And yet, it is essential that in seeking the wild, we do not romanticize it as some far off wilderness park. As Nikki Van Schyndel reminded us, our hearts are wild, and there are wild things all around us. And yes, sometimes it is scary, but fear can be the birth pang of joy. Yes, we must push back industrial civilization to some measure of sustainable limits, and yes we must protect and restore intact ecosystems; but we must also remember to dwell in the wilderness of the present moment, with what and who are all around us while we work toward these goals.

We were blessed to have several First Nation’s folks among us for our discussions, and they reminded us of the dangers of appropriating Indigenous lifeways. We must stand in solidarity with First Nations peoples and against continued racism; but we must also decolonize our own traditions and retrieve and reclaim the good and beautiful in them. As a Christian practicing Zen Buddhism, this was a particularly potent lesson for me. The Celtic and Franciscan traditions of Christianity have been neglected for the colonial, guilt ridden, and capitalist Christianity of the West.

Nikki teaching us how to make fire with a bow drill.

Nikki teaching us how to make fire with a bow drill.

Day 4: Convergence

On Monday September 29, we decided to continue the community that was forged during these few days. The Spiritual Ecologies and New Cosmologies Community, a tentative title, has been born. Starting with online networking and resource sharing we want to continue to build bridges and understanding between faiths, to offer resources to communities of faith in the Pacific Northwest that want to do more to connect their faith with the earth. The community wants to plan more events, a 2015 Convergence perhaps, but definitely smaller workshops on Sacred Activism. Ari Lazer, one of artists is also hosting a workshop on Sacred Geometry, so check that out. If you did not get the email I sent out and would like to stay connected please let me know.

 

Thank you to all who attended this convergence! To my co-coordinator Elaine Hsiao, to Andrea Reynolds at the Liu Inistitue, to Blake Smith and Miriam Matejova from the Liu Lobby Gallery and to Maya Graves-Bacchus for her help and to many others for your love and support.

Please share your responses and reflections with me at

Jason [dot] minton [dot] brown [at] gmail [dot] com

The Highway to Heaven is in Richmond, BC

/ Jason M. Brown / 1 Comment

Today we visited Richmond’s famous ‘Highway to Heaven.’ Developing along Highway No. 5, there are some  26 religious centers, temples, synagogues, churches and gurdwaras. These centers have been eager to cooperate and recently put on an art exhibit at the Richmond Museum. We didn’t get to visit all of them, and the Shia Mosque was closed. A wonderful Chinese woman gave us a tour of the Pure Land temple and we were offered a lovely vegetarian dinner with the nuns and lay people preparing floats for Canada Day. We sat in for the last few minutes of the Tibetan Buddhist Temple’s daily chant and marvelled at the massive Shakyamuni statuary. It got me thinking; I focus on spiritual ecology, mostly on forests; so is spiritual ecology just something that occurs outside? Or is it anywhere we create a spiritual oikos, a spiritual home. Sacred spaces like temples can sometimes be used to delineate sacred from profane, inside from outside; but they can also point us toward the holy in everything. Sacred spaces are microcosms of the macrocosm (the hole is in the parts). They orient us, instruct us, allow us to practice being human for when we step outside into the messy complex world. If we learn to see the holy in the particular, it can more easily be seen/felt in the universal. Thoughts?

Thrangu Tibetan Buddhist Temple
Shia Mosque