"None of us has all the answers
and yet none of us is apart from divinity." - Matthew Fox
For many people, spirituality and ecology may be separate disciplines, spirituality being the realm of clergy and ecology the realm of scientists. But we are living in a time of both ecological and spiritual crisis, one in which we are loosing species at unprecedented rates and in which masses of people are desperately seeking some spiritual direction in life. It is possible that the only way to restore wholeness may be to rediscover the vital connection between the two crises: a spirituality centered in Creation.
Spirituality is a part of human existence which people have recognized as far back as we are able to discern, and yet it is a concept not easily defined in words. One way to define it may be to describe spirituality as the relationship between life and the spirit. The spirit is that part of ourselves which is at the core of our existence and of who we are as beings, that which extends beyond ourselves and gives life meaning beyond physical survival. Religion then is organized spirituality: the uplifting and nurturing of spirit by people uniting to go about the business of living. Throughout existence as we know it, religion has taken many forms, but as is the case with spirituality, it appears to be as ancient as human life itself.
History of Spirituality in connection with Earth
I will begin by discussing some of the history of spirituality as connected
with Earth. So-called "primitive" religion, in what we are able
to gather from cave drawings, fossils, and artifacts, centered around the
interconnectedness of the human and non-human worlds, and also for many
thousands of years, had a distinctly feminine or androgynous focus in its
imagery. Integral to this spirituality were ritual and ceremony, seeming
to imply the necessity of effort required in maintaining this union with
the rest of creation.
Spirituality centered in creation is a tradition which is far from new. But it is something we have to rediscover in this society which has become anthropocentric, mechanized, and nonmystical. It is the spiritual heritage of most indigenous peoples for whom cosmology was, and in cases still is, the basis of worship, prayer, economics, politics, and morality. Their world view is one in which the divine is expected to be manifested anywhere and at any time. The oldest tradition in the Bible is creation-centered as well, particularly revealed by the Yahwist author in the Hebrew Bible, in most of the books of the prophets, and in the wisdom literature (Fox, 1991). It is the tradition into which Jesus was born and therefore also that of early Christianity. And there have been other brief high points in history for a more earth or cosmos-based spirituality. The Renaissance of the 12th century was one of these with its mystic prophets Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. Mechtild of Magdeburg and Meister Eckhart were among the mystics of the 13th and 15th centuries. But Eckhart’s condemnation in 1329, marks the beginnings of rejection of the cosmology of the ages before, of our spiritual connections to all that exists (Fox, 1991).
For at least the first 200,000 years of human life, the wonder of the female capacity to produce and sustain life was central to religion. The religion of ancient times was much more female oriented that historians have allowed us to believe. Cave drawings from the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon periods are rife with images of what appear to be female deities giving birth to the universe. From the Upper Paleolithic period, a bas-relief (circa 19,000 B.C.) from a cave in the Dordogne Valley in France depicts the Great Mother with a bison horn in hand and painted in red ochre, the color of blood and life. The male role in producing life was not realized or acknowledged. Rather the female and the spirit communed to give birth and create. Preserved footprints speak of circle dances which may have celebrated life and cycles, communion and community.
Seasonal cycles and birth and death were also central to ancient religion. It was believed that the dead returned to Earth for rebirth so they were buried in the fetal position, ready to be born again. A female Earth was the source of life and the central religious symbol. In the very oldest creation myths, a female god creates the world from her own body, and belief is in a Goddess responsible for both the good and the pain in life. So the first God for humans was Mother Earth. In fact, the later Biblical idea of a male God forming humans from clay was taken from earlier Sumerian and Babylonian creation stories of a potter Goddess.
This early female religion was organic: a union of body and spirit, of "daily tasks and cosmic meaning" (Sjoo and Mor, 1987). Its body symbolism expressed a poetic and non-dualistic mentality in which the cosmos was a body and the body a cosmos. Early women knew no dualisms and it is suspected had no hierarchies of leaders and followers because they recognized the shared nature of existence and made no superiority distinctions between daily tasks and sacred rituals (Sjoo and Mor, 1987).
Though this tradition has been lost in Western culture, it has not been forgotten among many indigenous peoples. Among the Navajo, whose women are directly inspired by the Great Spider Woman, the original weaver of the universe, both the feminine and the earthly have been upheld in life and spirituality.
For the Igorot people of the Philippines, the universe is a living being and each part of Earth is endowed with spirit (Tauli-Corpuz, 1996). Unity, interdependence, sharing, and consensus are integral to spirituality and the land is largely what provides the people with their identity. Ritual is an important part of life, the purpose of which is to strengthen unity and to appease and thank the spirits in nature which are connected to agriculture and the cycles of life. Productive activities like harvesting, become rituals in themselves when the work is shared and done in groups. Spirituality for these people is in the rhythm of the day-to-day and they relate well to each other and the earth, not so that they will "go to heaven", but because that is what makes community work.
Today, introduction into the cash economy is breaking down the Igorot spiritual links to nature and at the same time causing serious environmental problems. Other by-products include the loss of community, as people become dependent upon machines, money, and the international marketplace. The people are pitted against each other in the struggle to make money, loosing their interdependency with each other and the earth. This in turn has lead to increased alcoholism, violence against women, and teen pregnancy (Tauli-Corpuz, 1996). When spirituality is torn away from its Earth base, many problems are created for all of us in all areas of life. A mentality of equal partnership which provides us with the means to survive well and to bring about restoration and reconciliation is replaced by a dominator model of society allowed by the separations and boundaries we create.
Although Christianity has moved away from earth-centered spirituality, the Bible itself is a book revealing the history of a culture in which environment, spirituality and justice are one. The Judeo-Christian God is one who loves all of Creation. John 3:16, "For God so loved the world…", may be better translated from the original text, "For God so loved the cosmos…"(Dick Hodgson, personal communication). God is concerned with all that exists and not merely with humans. In Job 38:4,8,and 12, God challenges Job with the wonders of the universe and Job, realizing his smallness in it, admits that he knows little (Job 4:4). Relationship to God and relationship to the land were integral to the first Jewish people. The God of the Bible is one who directs people to give the land and themselves a Sabbath (Leviticus 25:3-4). The people and the land have a reciprocal relationship in which both must care for each other.
One place where the Bible seems to have fallen short, however, is in its ability to help people to realize the motivations behind the way of life it describes. Somehow, many people have come to see God as a maker of rules to be followed, the purpose of which is to gain access to a life after death. In turn, a life of good relation with other people and Earth is no longer an end in and of itself but a means to get beyond to some other-worldly reward. Because of this, people are not able to maintain that spirit-filled way of life which much of the Bible and Jesus have attempted to convey.
Patriarchal and Modern Industrial Religion
As ancient people would probably have described it if they had such a word,
and as some people today still do, "sin is a turning away from creation
and its author, the divine one who dwells in all things" (Fox, 1991).
With the break-up of cosmology at end of the Middle Ages, we begin to move
into a new patriarchal and modern industrial religion that characterizes
the West today and also, I would venture to say, into a stifling and diminished
spirituality. There occurs in Western culture around this time, a split
between science and religion, as well as the loss or suppression of female
and nature images for deity. M.C. Richards comments of this split: "There
is a palpable disunion. This split obstructs the poetic consciousness; it
is a characteristic malady of our society…the inner soul withdraws,
goes underground, splits off from the part that keeps walking around. Vitality
ebbs. Psychic disturbance is acute. Suicide may be attempted" (Fox,
1991).
We see a drastic shift away from animism toward anthropocentrism in which humans only are seen as having relationship with the divine and as being important above all else which exists. We also see the almost complete elimination of female imagery for the divine occurring approximately 3,000 to 4,000 years ago (Sjoo and Mor, 1987); a shift to "God the Father" and the death of "Mother Earth", the "Great Spirit Mother" and the androgynous Creator. Along with this, we can deduce, came also changes in gender roles and views of both women and the earth.
Father God has many implications. The father cannot have the same relationship as the mother in giving life since he cannot give birth or feed offspring from his own body as she can. Child and father do not evolve from the same body as do mother and child. Therefore, there is a loss of direct connection between the human and divine, or the human and all of life for that matter. A separation of self from all "others" is produced, and God becomes abstract, distant, and moralistic. Even by the beginning of the Bronze Age, the Creator is beginning to be seen as apart from Creation and Creation viewed as fallen and inherently faulty (Sjoo and Mor, 1987). The idea of original sin develops and our primary relationship becomes a sharing in some innate sin rather than the common "God-within". The class system develops and guilt and punishment become central themes in religion. An unjust system can work because people are made to believe that they deserve it.
Other problems arise when God becomes for people purely spirit and has nothing to do with the material. How can we then explain death and suffering? The blame must fall on the corruption of Earth and its people. The Hindu, Buddhist and Christian religions all offer liberation from physical existence and the natural world. But in denying and fighting ties to nature, people destroy it and thereby destroy themselves.
This patriarchal religion is wrought with dualisms. Since the Father God was all good, Christians and Hebrews had to invent the devil. Originally the Hebrew word "Satan" simply meant "enemy", but it came to be used to signify the source of and embodiment of all evil (Sjoo and Mor, 1987). The Jewish Essenes were also developing this good/evil dichotomy even before Christ, and Islam has inherited and elaborated on the same dualism. In many cultures then, half of life, pain and death, is now seen as enemy and not part of the life process.
The symbolism used in much of religion, and that of Western cultures in particular, is anti-earth and has the effect of promoting dualisms between earth and people, God and earth, men and women, people and God. The language is now one of hierachy, of dominance and submission. There is an abstract worldview "in which the ‘manmade’ symbols are not comprehended as part of a larger reality; they are comprehended as the reality" (Sjoo and Mor, 1987). This dualism most likely first arose with men who felt themselves on the outs in creating life. They needed a way to control and manipulate it, to feel powerful. But the God which has been created and now worshipped out of this is anti-sexual, anti-body, anti-earth and yet is supposed to be the creator of life. This simply does not make sense. As Sjoo and Mor say, "to erase the earth side of the spiritual equation is to de-energize the equation" (1987).
With the onslaught of the industrial revolution, we see the rise of science in a sense as the patriarchal religion. There is a great deal of irony here in that materialism becomes the dominant ideology while spirituality becomes other-worldly, irrelevant, and more feminine in nature. Matter, however, is still viewed as being inert and only valued in human ability to exploit it. Though materialism is now a god, it is a far cry from the spirit-filled matter of the Goddess religions.
Others claim that monotheism is a primary culprit in the separation between the material and the spiritual and is responsible for our present treatment of the earth. Historian Arnold Toynbee says, "The recklessly extravagant consumption of nature’s irreplaceable treasures - and the pollution of those of them that man has not already devoured - can be traced back in the last analysis to a religious cause, and…this cause is the rise of monotheism" (1974). He says that human greed and the impulse to exploit now run rampant where they were formerly controlled by the worship of Creation. This has been an outcome of monotheistic Western culture, but its original intent was probably not so. And the worship of one female deity which encompassed and was in all things as in many ancient religions, did not preclude the abuse of Creation. Therefore, though Toynbee suggests the need to return to pantheism and religions such as Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto which see divinity as being within nature and in which the goal is harmony with it, the same attitudes and way of life may be found within a monotheistic worldview.
Sadly, Christianity has had a long history of destructive relation. Out of this tradition have come travesties such as the treatment of the first peoples of the United States by the European settlers. Whites in the U.S. believed that God had given them a land to subdue and that this was their right even if it meant killing huge numbers of animals and people.
According to Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, the charge against Christianity can be summed up in four central themes: (1) it views nature as nothing but a resource valuable only for exploitation, (2) it has embraced modern science and technology in the conquest of nature resulting in excessive human power over nature and major economic problems, (3) it has upheld a dualism between the spiritual and material, viewing nature and the physical as full of sin and creating a hierarchy which has subjugated both women and nature, and (4) the belief in the second coming has tended to give people the attitude that what happens to the world in the present does not really matter (1984).
The result of this general shift in the West to a dualistic, patriarchal, hierarchical spirituality and religion is that the separations it promotes have become terribly ingrained in most people regardless of whether or not we claim to adhere to these beliefs. So much of the way we now orient ourselves in the world is by means of separations rather than commonalities and unity. This is made obvious by Susan Griffin as she describes some of those boundaries we have created to separate: "The errant from the city. The ghetto. The ghetto of Jews. The ghetto of Moors. The quarter of prostitutes. The ghetto of blacks. The neighborhood of lesbians. The prison, The witch house. The underground…The border. The nation. The promised land. The chosen ones…" (1978).
Bringing Ecology and Religion Back Together
So what do we do now? Are we stuck in an unhealthy and broken relationship
with God, our world, and each other that can only lead us in a downward
spiral of ecological and spiritual decay? Matthew Fox writes that "Whether
the future presents itself as still more beauty or as still more pain depends
on our choices as we respond to our role as co-creators in an ever-unfolding
creation" (1991). Sadly, it often seems that the only way people will
begin to care for the Earth and to restore right relation with it is when
we see that by not doing so we are coming to obvious physical or material
harm. People are extremely slow to recognize the spiritual harm done them
through lack of meaningful relationship with the rest of Creation. But beginning
to develop our spirituality in a new direction may provide us with a way
to both insure physical survival for ourselves and the planet as well as
provide us with a more meaningful existence.
We can begin by relearning the sacredness of Creation in our lives, we can develop new rituals to reconnect ourselves, and we can become part of a movement toward a way of life which is justice and wholeness. As psychologist Howard Clinebell says, we need "inreach, upreach, and outreach" (1996). Inreach opens us to awareness and allowing of nurture by nature. Upreach is the new spiritual connection that gives us energy and empowers us to do outreach, the action to save the planet and ourselves.
German theologian Dorothee Soelle writes on sacredness and the ritual which can sustain that for us: "The old myth is a story about life as sacred. This sacredness has to be dramatized again and again so that we do not forget it or think of it as superfluous. In mythical language we give thanks for the sun, bless bread, wish each other a good trip home, and thus recall that life is a gift, not a possession" (1990). We must come to see all relationships and interdependencies as sacred and that without them we cannot live. As Eckhart says, "relation is the essence of everything that exists" and that "isness is God"(Fox, 1991).
Matthew Fox describes a Creation spirituality which is a life-filled path, an abundant way of living that is full of spirit, deeply personal and also communal. It is about solidarity and the sharing of beauty, pain, and struggle. This spirituality sees Creation as an original gift of unconditional love. It is when we cut ourselves off from this sense of grace and blessing, Fox says, that boredom and depression occur.
Fox describes four paths of Creation spirituality as a journey which can help to guide us in our experience of God and to find a way of living abundant life (1991). The first path is that of awe and delight. We can learn to see each being as a "mirror of God that glistens and glitters", as Hildegard of Bingen has said (Fox, 1991). We will fall in love with life when we take in the miracle of existence.
The second path is one of darkness, silence, emptiness, letting go, and pain. God is in the darkness as well and we cannot go beyond the superficial without also facing this part of life. We must confront rather than cover evil in ourselves and society. It is in covering up that despair and apathy result. But when we let go and learn to simply be in the pain, compassion can begin to flow.
The third path is that of creativity and imagination: expressing or naming what is deep inside us, a co-creating with God. Psychologist Otto Rank claims that "pessimism comes from the repression of creativity" (Fox, 1991). Creation inspires awe, as I fully realize when I hear the beautiful language of a poet or listen to a Mozart symphony. Finally, the fourth path is the path of work against injustice. It is the struggle for balance along with the coming together to celebrate and give thanks for the gift of being and being together. We must be compassionate as the Creator is compassionate. The Bible is full of this message, with Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Luke 6:36 being one example. But it is often misinterpreted because the call to building justice is not burden or righteousness but rather a way for humans to join in "the dance of all creation in the quest for balance" (Fox, 1991).
Building connectedness then must be a significant component in returning to an Earth-centered spirituality (it is important to note here that this implies a cosmic spirituality as Earth and the entire cosmos, which is all of Creation, cannot be separated). As God shows Job in the Biblical story, healing comes with a cosmic awareness in which we are able to look beyond ourselves as part of the vast universe. As Fox says, "If our world is too small, so are our souls" (1991).
Since ritual and practice are crucial in making connection an integral part of ourselves, religion becomes very important here. The Latin root of the word religion is religare which in fact means "a bond; a binding back to something". And this is what it should be about: building and strengthening our ties to each other. Part of the reason for ritual is that in order to have compassion, we need to have identification. We must learn to identify ourselves with the community of all living and non-living beings. For some this may mean performing ceremonies such as the Council of All Beings, in which people attempt to visualize and enact what it might be like to be another part of Creation (Seed et al, 1988). Or it may be as simple as taking time for walks in the woods, being a diligent recycler, being environmentally and socially conscious in purchasing, and baking your own bread.
We would also do well to discover the healing power of nature which can allow us to reconnect to the cycles of life and fully embrace all of it: the pain and death with joy and birth. In doing so, we not only build wholeness for ourselves, but improve relationships with other people. Clinebell writes that "…relationships are often enriched when people share experiences in natural settings. Earth bonding and people bonding are complimentary needs that, when satisfied, are mutually reinforcing" (1996).
It is important that people realize that love of self and love of others are inseparable. We must come to see that in loving ourselves we must love the Earth and that love of Earth flows out of love for ourselves. Mahatma Gandhi recognized this when he upheld every being’s right to fulfillment of life. He would even allow snakes and scorpions to come into his house because he believed in coexistence (Seed et al, 1988). Buddha followed a similar path, saying that the atman (self) should embrace all living beings as a mother cares for her only son (Seed et al, 1988).
Finally, action is what must come out of true spiritual wholeness; action in fact helps us to develop wholeness so that the two are reciprocal and one cannot exist without the other. This action must involve the working for justice and the breaking down of boundaries that have established a hierarchy of dominance and power and alienated us male from female, race from race, upper from lower class, and species from species. Luxury breeds boredom and feeds violence, drugs, and other addictions meant to escape it, while poverty forces people to sacrifice their spirits in order to survive. And the suppression of female spiritual wisdom alienates both sexes from true nurture and caring. We must get rid of the gods we have made of money, individual "success", and military might. At the same time, organized religion needs to stop being so concerned with how each of us defines our "Higher Power" and focus instead on the actions which come out of spirituality. We will never all agree in our theologies, but we can promote belief-systems which are life-affirming and which allow us to hold some common values for how we will live in the world.
In the movement for action, therapy and education may be the keys to affecting real change. As philosopher Immanuel Kant says, it is important to remember the difference between moral acts, which are done out of duty to codes and laws, and beautiful acts, done out of positive inclination and with joy (Seed et.al., 1988). We are better off in attempts to influence others by motivating them to beautiful acts than by bashing them over the head with morals and duty. In the environmental movement, people often have the impression that they are constantly being asked to sacrifice. Instead, we need to open people’s eyes to the joy of Creation. Clinebell suggests that we work at teaching nature-alienated people to hear themselves and creation into speech; to learn to hear earth’s joy and suffering (1996). We need to learn to see with new eyes Earth’s problems and how they are related to us; for example, the problems of pollution, erosion, and cultural eutrophication. And we need to begin by looking at our own homes and communities, rather than pretending that the problem exists only far away in something exotic like rainforest destruction.
Through rediscovering our earth-based spiritual heritage, recognizing the roots and the pathway through which our present culture and religious tradition have developed, and realizing the possibilities for a new way, we can each begin to take part in the creation of a more beautiful future.
"They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits, and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business." ---Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953)
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