Where are We?

As we now apparently are on the verge of space tourism as a future industry, there is more talk of space - why we want to enter it, how much will its cost increase the sense of difference between the billionaires and the rest of us, whether we have just found a new place to pollute. There are larger questions which few are asking or responding to.

Enter Mary Evelyn Tucker who responds to a different question at the Center for Humans and Nature. It poses some of the real questions for our time and invites others to respond.

Tucker starts by noting that evolution is new in the scheme of things - only 160 years old and not something we think about as a concept. We think of the universe as something stable and find it hard to imagine it as expanding. That’s a challenge. She notes that most of the findings of cosmology, biology and humans was not known to our grandparents or even our parents. I grew up thinking that the milky way was the limit. Modern science tells me that the universe is a developing 14 billion year journey and two trillion galaxies exist. But this story has been laced with facts rather than with a poetic sense of wonder.

Science and religion have split as studies, and many have abandoned both in a world using shopping and entertainment to find meaning. Tucker outlines how hard it was for the church to accept a change in the solar system, where humans were no longer the centre of the universe. While scriptural literalism is decried, its creation story is still the one that is fixed in our western worldview. What Tucker suggests is a need for a change of context. She details the experience of mediaeval scientists and their suppression and goes on to outline the experience of modern ones like Einstein, who notes his most serious mistake in not recognizing an expanding universe.

Where does this leave us? She proposes that we see ourselves as situated not just in the world, but in the universe and as part of its expanding diversity - with the gift of consciousness and ability to reflect, not as the pinnacle with the right to exploit it, but as part of its creation with potential. She ends:

“. . .we need an integrated cosmology where science and story are interwoven, where facts and values are braided. As Einstein said: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”

The braid is a good metaphor as she reminds us that indigenous people have always understood the cosmos in an intimate way. Read this article - but also read Braiding Sweetgrass.

Importance

i’ve been re-reading Thomas Berry in the light of some current events in Canada - the reminder of the deaths in residential schools - well known and documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report - but not absorbed, so that recent findings are treated as news. Then there is the recent senseless killing of a family because of ethnic hatred of a disturbed young man. Last is an article by a Roman Catholic rightly decrying the theology of his church claiming that as an institution it can do no wrong - only individuals within it can.

Berry speaks of the moral dilemmas of our age which so-called civilized peoples and religions cannot deal with - suicide, homicide and genocide. He adds to them terms that we never hear from any of the religions by name - biocide and geocide. As creatures of the Anthropocene, we think we can do what we like. We fail to see the consequences.

Ponderings

An Easter weekend rather like no other. A minor knee injury made staying in less of a punishment than the current pandemic. And other experiences gave it some positive flavour that probably would not have happened otherwise.

I finished Elizabeth Wilkerson’s admirable book Caste. As a PBS Newshour watcher I feel in good company when I see it on the bookshelves of both Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks. Its strengths relate to its impeccable research and portrayals of three examples of caste systems - India, Nazi Germany, and the United States - with their long term effects on their cultures and how they handle them. Her personal experience in India and America also brings the experience of caste to light. This is a must read for anyone who wants to see a different outcome to our heritage of race and caste and gives a reality to any settler culture like our Canadian one.

The next was a presentation that happens once a month, led by a Roman Catholic leader called an eco-sabbath. In past times it would not be possible for me to attend these because of a time conflict, but in Zoom time, that changes. Dennis O’Hara noted that he had tried this presentation ten years ago and met considerable pushback - but decided to try it again on Easter Day. His main point was that resurrection applies not only to the Christian story but the story of the universe itself. These views come from his understanding presented in the writings of American “geologian” Thomas Berry and Australian theologian Denis Edwards. In both writers, the universe itself moves toward fullness and fulfillment. The resurrection for today happens through our meeting all the creatures and creations of the world with the opportunity to ease their suffering and help them realize their full reality and beauty.

His audience was far more accepting of this view this time - formed by the writings of Berry whose influence on the book and film presentation “Journey of the Universe” is also celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.

The last was a good column yesterday celebrating the views of indigenous leaders in The Globe and Mail. Known as Jaqueline Ottman where she is Vice Provost of Indigenous Engagement and Professor at the University of Saskatchwan. But she is also known as Misiwaykommigk Paypomwayotung in her Anishinabe first nations community. She is an advocate for indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Spending a lot of time with a grandmother who understood medicinal plants and astronomy, and who had escaped being sent to residential schools and retained her original language, was a rare advantage. Ottman learned both the language and her culture first hand. She had the rare privilege of seeing western culture through those eyes as she was able to continue her secondary school and further education. And this combination as well as encountering racism framed her search for social justice.

She notes that the closest ideas of western leadership to those of her own community would be servant or adaptive leadership, adding to this both respect for the views of the ancestors and a recognition that decisions look ahead to the next seven generations. Our North American culture contrasts strongly as we neglect our history and express concern for our grandchildren - only two generations ahead. It also has huge implications for how we treat the land - not as part of all our relations, but as something to exploit.

A good Easter - transformative and thought provoking. What actions can evolve?

Airborne - Revisiting the Black Death Now

As we settle into a marathon rather than a sprint of Covid-19, the word “plague” is on the rebound. Jill Lepore outlines several in her New Yorker article “Don’t’ Come Any Closer”. She notes that in 1666 people weren’t very different from us as they examined their bodies for possible changes. They prayed, raged and poured over “books that frighted them terribly”. While journalists wonder today whether they should cover the meandering utterances of the president, the British government then thought that banning books would help. People in Britain fled to Hampton Court rather than the Hamptons, and shortages of horses for travel parallel our empty shelves of toilet paper. Instead of Zooming, some people in Italy fled to quieter realms and told the stories of the Boccaccio’s Decameron while in hiding from the Black Death.

It reminded me to look at what Thomas Berry said about that same Black Death in his article, “A New Story”, written in 1978 — the first of many works that influenced a rethinking of theology in many quarters. Berry saw the Black Death as a turning point in human understanding.

The Christian world up to that point, he observed, had been predictable. Seasons arrived and passed in the mediaeval world and it was not without hardship and suffering, but there appeared to be balance and renewal. But in a Europe where a third to a half of the population was wiped out, things changed forever. To many, the Black Death was a punishment from God. That perception enhanced a need for redemption and emphasized personal salvation through repentance. This change in emphasis from reliance on the original creation story happened long before the Protestant Reformation, Berry notes, but the reaction to the plague set in motion the individualism that would later question the power of corporate Catholicism and a move to Protestantism.

The other change of direction was almost like being drawn to a fire in spite of fearing it — a fascination with the cause of the plague that led to exploration and ultimately to the development of modern science. It gave birth to geology, a science that explored the origins of the planet and initiated our ability to move beyond history, Its sister science. paleontology, with its new ways of extracting bones of our ancestors, enhanced our understanding of history even more. The telescope and the microscope gave us entry to new worlds not previously imagined, and we gained a growing understanding that humans as a species evolved from simpler life forms. Our growing consciousness gave us the additional sense of being a species with a right to dominate the earth. Medicine and biology could save us,

Those times resonate today. One the one hand we have thought with confidence that we are in control of the environments that surround us through our growing advances in biological research — but suddenly we’re not. On the other hand, we have individuals who resolutely say they are “washed in the blood of the Lamb” and can go to their megachurches no matter what. When asked whether these folk might put others in danger by getting infected, they simply don’t care - because they are saved. The more secular adherents of capitalism want everything to open up and if that means sacrificing the elderly, even including themselves, — well fine.

The impact of the modern virus is small compared to the loss of life in the Black Death, but today’s news travels with the speed of the virus itself. Viruses have always moved along trade routes. In another New Yorker article, Kate Brown notes that the modern crowding of humans and animals in some parts of the world has contributed to zoonotic disease transmittal not only from east to west, but quite possibly through American megafarms. Their monocultures sent diseases from chickens and livestock to other parts of the world. Viruses have little respect for border or walls.

The poor in crowded cities, Brown notes, are often dependent on foraging on urban borders to find wild animals to eat and survive. Their manufactured factory goods travel the world. More affluent modern traders include people who exchange their boring local lives for more exotic foreign shores on planes and cruise ships — hothouses for viruses to grow and penetrate. We congregate in conference centers, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and some of us even in churches. We’re totally focused on our self created worlds and pay no attention to corona viruses unless we are research scientists. And the news that reaches every point is processed selectively. We like the metaphor of butterfly wings flapping on one side of the world having a direct impact in organizational seminars as a neat idea without applying to us — until it does.

I also can’t help getting Clive Hamilton’s book, Defiant Earth, out of my head. Has Gaia looked around and pondered, “I sent them hurricanes, I sent them floods, I sent them tornadoes, I sent them fires — all with increasing intensity. While the environmentalists moan and the politicians deny or ignore, what do I have to do to get their attention? Are they not seeing what they are doing to despoil the earth? Maybe I should try something that they can’t see but has a universal effect to scare the bejusus out of them”.

One of the effects is that climate change and the Anthropocene have almost disappeared in favour of the viral scene front and centre. The omni-present press can talk of nothing but medical disaster and economic disaster in an endless news cycle and when there is no news, they turn to analysis to assign blame. The battle between economics and health can suck up all the oxygen. If that is isn’t enough, add in the drama of federal versus state. Paying attention to the news these days is a disaster leading to outrage or despair. It’s as though climate changes and its ongoing danger have disappeared. The only odd glimmer that “Hey the air is cleaner now that there are fewer cars on the road” disappears as we now decide that the contamination of the virus isn’t caused only by travel and congregating. It’s in the air.

A New Story

On a November morning, the sunrise can be spectacular, arousing a sense of awe.  It’s rare to take in the beauty of the natural world and the environment designed and built by humans from the same vantage point.  City dwellers may still enjoy seeing natural beauty during the day, but the bright lights have masked the visible stars of the night sky.  Those living in less populated areas may still have that advantage.

A recent exhibit, Anthropocene, on display at both the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, highlights what we humans have done to plunder and devastate our natural environment. This show is not the first to focus on this tragedy. More than thirty years ago, a Roman Catholic priest and cultural historian, Thomas Berry, expressed a need for a new story expanding on the one we find in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.  He reminds us that earlier theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas placed equal importance on learning from the Book of Nature.  What scientists now know about cosmology – the origin and nature of the universe - is astounding.

 Berry inspired colleagues to present this story in an award-winning film called Journey of the Universe. Since its release in 2014, the film and accompanying book have caused responses from a variety of Christian communities supporting Berry’s argument of the need for reassessment. This challenge is both complicated and contentious.  When Copernicus discovered that we were not the centre of the universe, his news was not well received. Nor were Darwin’s findings. Science has discovered that our milky way is only one among billions of galaxies.  The writers of the early books of the Bible had a lesser sense of history and it was limited to a very small part of planet earth.

 Journey and the first Genesis story share common elements.  Both start in darkness.  Light emerges, then water, then earth, then plants, then birds and animals and finally human beings.  In the Genesis story, creation is complete and humans become the focus of history.   In Journey, creation evolves in stages through billions of years and continues to do so.

 At the recent consecration of our new bishop in the Diocese of Toronto, we acknowledged that we are settlers.  What we celebrate less is indigenous peoples’ reverence for the earth - they see themselves as subjects alongside animals, vegetation and stars.  In contrast, we live in a world where anything other than ourselves is viewed as an object for our use and exploitation. The last 65 billion years of the Cenozoic geological period were the earth’s most creative and flourishing.  But in the last four hundred years we’ve managed to reverse the process of creative evolution - eliminating forests and species, polluting rivers and oceans, and robbing the earth of its resources.  And even as we put humans at the centre, we are selective about which humans, preferring those nearest and dearest and most like ourselves.

 Putting humans at the centre has a history and takes us back through 19th and 20th century industrialism and the earlier writings of Newton and Descartes, who proclaimed that everything that was not human was merely matter.  But we can also go further back to the two biblical creation stories, noting that the redemption story, where the world is dangerous and tempting, has prevailed over the creation account.  Within this context, we have taken the directive to have dominion over the earth and turned it into domination.

 People of faith now have an opportunity to learn.  Thomas Berry proposed more than 15 years ago that Christian and other religious communities can join with modern science communities to become part of a new Ecozoic era, where we return to intimacy with the earth and our place in the universe. When the earth itself becomes sacred to us, we recover both a sense of our miniscule presence as individuals – and at the same time, our sacred responsibility for it, owing to our gift of human consciousness.  It means rethinking the frameworks of theology and its implications - for liturgies, formation, stewardship, laws, governance, and for the challenges of our time – climate change, technology and the threat of annihilation by nuclear war. Meanwhile we have obsessed about gender and sexuality – not expressing with gratitude the wonder of the cosmos and our proper place in it.

 The first step is awareness.  Go to see Anthropocene.  Watch Journey of the Universe on YouTube.  Visit the associated websites: www.journeyoftheuniverse.org and

  www.theanthropocene.org. .  You will experience the universe and our small planet in new ways. These are first steps that may lead to increased understanding and commitment.