Sketches

Encounters with Salmon-Christ: Sketches from a Cascadian Christianity

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

Opening the creaking door of the large pickup truck that had driven us down the hatchery road, I was overwhelmed by the smell of death and decay. I let out a groan and my host, a board member of the Oyster River Salmon Enhancement Society, laughed and said, “That’s why I don’t eat fish most of the year!”

I had come for a scheduled tour of the Society’s hatchery. Our first stop was a fish trap that was filled with pink and a few early coho salmon. The trap was a large rectangular metal container submerged in a small side channel of the Oyster River. As we approached, we could hear loud banging coming from inside as the salmon jumped. When we opened the lid, a large pink salmon sprung out of the water with gusto and landed with a splash. The Society has been working for decades to restore salmon to historic numbers in the Oyster River which has been severely impacted by logging, mining, and development.

I felt a rush of childlike wonder at the sight of these living breathing aqua-bodies, swirling, and lusting for the gravel beds where they would spawn. They were born here, lived their lives in the oceans and then came back to these places to mate and die. The Society collected them, harvested their eggs and milt and then released them back into the river to live out the rest of their short lives. This might sound romantic, but salmon who have spawned start to look like zombies, their flesh decomposing and falling from their torsional bodies. Bears make frequent appearances along the banks, fishing with ease for the spent salmon, though we didn’t see any the day I went. Ravens and crows pick at the fishy bodies. Animals will sometimes carry the salmon deeper into the forest, and their bones nourish the roots of trees. The dying salmon give their bodies to the river and the forest, and in a way to the world.

A few days later, I came across a reference to New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan’s book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. Crossan is known for his vivid and controversial portrayal of the “historical” Jesus. This moniker is to distinguish him from the Jesus of faith, belief, and miracles that is so familiar to the Christian story. In the passage, Crossan speculated that any convicted traitor crucified by the Romans was likely either left on the cross to terrorize the public, eventually devoured by carrion eaters; or, tossed into a shallow mass grave, and then, likely scavenged by dogs. Crossan believes that in all likelihood, Jesus of Nazareth met this fate, and stories of the tomb, the bodily resurrection and ascension emerged from the disciples’ grief, realistic visions of Jesus alive, enduring faith in his message and teachings, and the living breathing developments of oral traditions.

At first, the idea and image of the body of Jesus being picked at by vultures or eaten by dogs felt scandalous, blasphemous. Certainly, it is not an unprecedented claim. Denial of the resurrection is often part of larger polemics against Christianity from Greco-Roman Pagans or later materialists. All the same, I felt a flash of defensive anger at the implied disrespect to the central story of my Christian (even if unconventional) faith.

The Paschal Mystery is a deep and cherished cosmic myth and reality for me. God is not some distant First Cause, but implicates Themself into the world. Each day is a death and resurrection. Each phase of my life is death and rebirth. The Christian liturgical wheel of the year cycles through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the landscapes of the Northern hemisphere and the Christ. The universe proceeds on the principle of star death and resurrection. The story feels deeply woven into the world, and into the land. And that is why I believe it. It has been less about whether it was historically true, but more about whether it felt real.

Visually, I am used to seeing the Jesus of stained-glass windows and icons. Stern, serene, floating in the air. Even if some of our more gruesome crosses vividly portray his suffering and death, we all know how the story ends. Jesus was resurrected and ascended bodily into heaven.

As I allowed Crossan’s image to sink a little deeper into my heart, my anger transformed into peace. Jesus, the God-Man, eaten by buzzards and dogs began to touch the soft edges of my faith. It was not at all that with Crossan’s scholarly boldness, the story finally made sense, appealing to my reason, intellect, and now I could just get on with taking the resurrection metaphorically or symbolically.

The image of a God who descended into our deepest pain and suffering through death on the cross, being further humiliated and devoured only enhanced the image of a God whose weakness is Their power. A God who enters fully into the world “saves” it by becoming one with it. The body of Jesus going the way of all flesh, cycling into the body of animals and the soil is an earthier resurrection. But it also adds a step to the Paschal Mystery. The world is in a constant cycle of Birth, Life, Death, Decomposition, and Resurrection. My God Decomposed before the resurrecting into the bodies of the animals, plants and fungi.

This may seem absurd to the orthodox ear, but Jesus himself invokes this kind of horticultural mysticism in the Gospel of John. The author writes Jesus saying, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). The seed does not grow in space. It does not ascend in the air. It sinks into the dark moist humus of the earth. This is the fabric of cosmic, biological and spiritual evolution. Jesus entered into this mystery, but we turned it into a fairytale about how good always wins and the wicked are always punished. The cross became a ransom, a universal sacrifice rather than a grand archetype of the way suffering must be metabolized and transformed for new life to emerge.

Most theological claims about the resurrection are primarily spiritual anyway. It isn’t that the resurrection is imagined to be a post-mortem resuscitation. Theologians claim that Jesus really died, and that the resurrected body was a post-mortal eschatological reality. It represented the Humanity 2.0 of the coming Age. Paul understood this as a spiritual body, and later Gnostics would assume that it was only spiritual, the physicality being illusory.

To be honest, despite my love for the Paschal Mystery, I have always struggled with the doctrine of resurrection as a historical event. The way it comes across in the New Testament is fragmentary, somewhat contradictory, and dream-like. The Ascension too has always troubled me, especially because it seems to be a clear homage to the power and legacy of the Hebrew Prophet Elijah, and a taunt to claims that some Roman Emperors were taken into heaven.

The idea of the resurrected body as an ecological body endears me to Jesus’s carnality, but still retains the Divinity he points to in himself, humanity, and the earth community. In addition, I like to imagine the life of Jesus after the resurrection as an insension rather than an Ascension. God went deeper into our world by becoming it. After all, Jesus didn’t come down to earth, he emerged from the fleshy humanity of Mary. He was born just like the rest of us.[1]

Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr writes of the difference between Jesus and Christ: “The Christ Mystery anoints all physical matter with eternal purpose from the very beginning.”[2] Rohr sees creation, Jesus, and the Christian community as instances of the Universal Christ spoken of in Colossians chapter 1. In Christ the world was created; the Son is a visible image of the invisible God, etc. With this scriptural Cosmic Christ, Rohr wants Christianity to expand not contract our view of God in the world and at the beginning of his book The Universal Christ he asks us directly:

“What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe? What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love? What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too? What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?”[3]

The mystical body of the world includes the earth community evolving toward greater complexity. The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw Christ as the horizon of evolution, the Omega Point of all creation and Jesus as the living Heart of the Cosmos, which is love.

To be clear, I don’t want you to take my sketches here as anything like a truth claim. I am not trying to convince you that the resurrection is false. That Crossan’s is the real story. I don’t believe I have now discovered the true history of Christianity. My faith in the Paschal Mystery is not literal, it is literary. I am not seeking authentic orthodoxy but realistic mythodoxy.

There are times when I will resonate with the bodily resurrection after three days and the Ascension into Heaven after forty. But watching salmon give themselves to the world, and hearing Crossan’s scandalous claims about Jesus in the same week felt significant. I remember feeling like the salmon were a kind of Forest-Eucharist, and that to talk of Jesus’s body leaving the earth was a strange tale that abstracted his fleshliness from the earth that made him.

This fleshly eucharist was illustrated beautifully in Cormac McCarthy’s last dual-novel The Passenger and Stella Maris. A brother and sister are entangled in a forbidden love that is never consummated. Alicia Western is driven to suicide by vivid visions of mutated vaudevillian creatures and Bobby Western lives with the regret and guilt of her death. At the end of Stella Maris, which is a series of transcripts from interviews between Alicia and her therapist, Alicia longs to give herself back to the earth and end her deep existential loneliness. She says,  

“I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.” (my emphasis)

Alicia wants to become a eucharist for the world. She intuits that for there to be life there must be death. Alicia’s self-emptying (the Greek is kenosis) impulse is much like that of the salmon, and much like that of Jesus. My encounter with the Salmon-Christ taught me that to get from life to death and back to life again, there must also be decomposition.

[1] I heard Richard Rohr say this in one of his daily emails somewhere.

[2] Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ (p. 19). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[3] Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ (p. 5). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Sketches: Surprised by Grace in Cormac McCarthy

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

In the same week that Pope Francis went to hospital, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former Prime Minister, Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber, and famed American writer Cormac McCarthy died.

What a strange collage of legacies. I don’t know much about Berlusconi, but when I was on an 8th grade field trip to Washington DC I got the news that my uncle, who was a timber industry lobbyist in northern California, had been killed by a bomb addressed to his boss. Ted Kaczynski, an anarchist/primitivist living in a remote cabin was terrorizing the forces of ecological evil. He was arrested in 1996 and spent the rest of his live in prison.

I remember hearing about Cormac McCarthy in university. He had just published The Road (2006). He was beginning to be known as one of the greatest living American writers.

I didn’t get around to reading McCarthy until a few years ago, when I finally picked up The Road I couldn’t put it down. His stainless steel prose and the exploration of human purpose stripped to its most elemental struck a deep chord. The book is heartbreaking and horrific. But it somehow still touched something like the holy in me. Perhaps that is a predictable response from a privileged first worlder to post-apocalyptic simplicity, but still.

Last year, while teaching a course on death, disease and disaster in the humanities, McCarthy’s novel seemed an obvious choice for exploring the possible ruin of earth the coming age of the so-called Anthropocene may bring. At the end of the novel he writes:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” (Pg. 287).

The Road makes clear that we have a lot to lose, and that enduring that loss may cost more than some of us can muster.

I have read most of McCarthy’s major works. I can’t say I love it all, but something that keeps coming up in my experience of McCarthy is an abiding encounter with the holy, or to put it another way, grace. By grace in this instance I mean an unspoken wholeness that seems to be shot through it all, or as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Now don’t get me wrong, McCarthy’s stories, characters and plots don’t directly speak to this. McCarthy’s world is a world of fallen, wounded, and downright evil human beings. McCarthy liked to show humanity at its worst. But each story is set in a richly alive world bursting with fecundity. In his first novel, the Orchard Keeper (1965), a hermit figure lives deep in the Tennessee woods. He is a kind of Appalachian Adam, before the fall that surely comes.

“Curled in a low peach limb the old man watched the midmorning sun blinding on the squat metal tank that topped the mountain. He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne branches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms.” (pg. 51).

Lush prose for a lush landscape.

In Blood Meridian (1985), where the huge, pale, erudite and depraved “Judge” seems to be a personification of a simultaneously civilizing and terrorizing Manifest Destiny, the pools of blood and monstrosity are somehow poulticed by the beauty of McCarthy’s language and vast western landscapes.

“He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescoes. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel.” (pg. 27-28).

“Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.” (pg. 57).

“It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain and soon all the wild menagerie of that country grew mute. A horse put its long wet face in at the door and Glanton looked up and spoke to it and it lifted its head and curled its lip and withdrew into the rain and the night.” (pg. 124).

McCarthy’s landscape is not moral, enchanted or invested in his characters’ lives. But somehow the spaciousness of the land allows for the possibility that another path might have been chosen. And that for all the terror, small moments of peace are never to be squandered.

I am not a literary critic, so maybe some has already said all this, but in my experience, there is something holy about a beauty that includes darkness. McCarthy doesn’t try to persuade the reader to see the beauty in bad things, he simply zooms out far enough so that even humanity’s most sinister acts are humbled by a grandeur not of our own making.

The Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor has been credited with writing to a similar effect—invoking a sense of grace through stories of violence. Her two novels and many short stories contain characters blinded by their own selfishness, greed and hatred. There is supposed to be a kind of path not chosen in O’Connor that points toward grace.

I have read many of O’Connor’s stories and her novels with this in mind. But personally, I just don’t experience it. I find O’Connor’s characters’ evil deeds so sticky and unflinchingly proximate that I never get to see another path or a bigger world. I leave the reading feeling closed in on and the wider world cut off. There doesn’t seem to be any cosmos, just dark, eccentric human foibles on colorful display like wax models in a museum. The trouble being that no matter how lifelike the museum pieces, their backdrops are only a hasty two dimensional painting under dim lighting.

O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood (1952) in particular felt this way. Hazel Motes, an ex-army man, starts to preach the Church of Christ without Christ. The philosophical premise is promising but the delivery is a string of nasty interactions that left me feeling sad and existentially disappointed. Displaced even.

Again, McCarthy’s characters are not better people, they don’t come around. But somehow when I read McCarthy, a dull melancholy throb transfigures into grace, not disappointment.

So the Catholic writer (O’Connor) feels more like a nihilist than whatever McCarthy might be called in his raw portrayals of human evil and the yawning void of an apathetic cosmos. Personally, over and over as I have read and reread McCarthy, I was surprised by grace. Thank you, rest in peace.

Cultivating Placefulness

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

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

Sketches: An Emerging Christian Mythodoxy

/ Jason M. Brown / 2 Comments

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.