Earth is our home: November 2005 Archives

This is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the annual Day of Mourning on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.  I was there in 1970, and while I have returned on many occasions, I have been there in spirit and solidarity every year.  It is hard to witness the fact of genocide in face of the national ritual of self congratulations and privilege.  But there are signs that more and more dominant culture people are willing to look at there past to help them understand the violence and arrogance of the present regime.  If one wants to understand Bush and Cheney one must look back to opening chapters of the European settlement of the Americas.  What was the first act of those who arrived on the Mayflower?  Upon arriving at what is now Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, a boat of armed men was sent ashore who stole the entire winter food supply of the village of Native people.  Then they proceeded to what is now Plymouth where the people of God founded their armed and aggressive Bible commonwealth.  The children of the Mayflower (joined by those who aspire to that heritage) now use their power to steal the natural resources of the entire world.

Robert Jensen writes:  "Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers. 
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."
Thomas Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them." 
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway." Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth." 

Jensen argues that those who overcome this legacy must join the witnesses on Copes Hill, and make the fourth Thursday in November into a day of awareness and renewal, by taking stock of the genocide that is foundational to the national history.

So let us  celebrate and feast, with awareness of our history and a commitment to transformation.

Today I spoke to a Garden Festival at the Treasure Coast Unitarian Universalist Church in Stuart, Florida. There were Master Gardeners, and two specialists from the University of Florida, artisans selling garden pottery, and stainglass plus several larger vendors selling flowers. People from the community came and visited our grounds looking for flowers to plant in their gardens this winter. I spoke, I felt sadden by my subject. It was a beautiful day. A great day for a garden festival.

I said:
This is the land of Ais, known to the the first Europeans as the Indians of the coast. They were a tall, healthy people who fished along the inlets, and rivers and planted crops. What we now call the Indian River was once known as River of Ais. There were 25000 Ais living here when the Spanish came in 1513. By 1610 the last Ais was dead. The Spanish enslaved the Ais people, and disease, forced labor, and the violence of oppression overcame an ancient community of fishers, growers and manufacturers. They built houses, including civic houses, developed manufacture of baskets, pottery, cooking ovens, colored woven clothing, and jewelry. They practiced settled agriculture.

To the people of this land the world was "alive with spirit." The animals and plants were relatives, and all the creatures lived together in one family under the loving care of our mother earth and our father sky - the earth world was a sacred realm in which people lived, and moved and had their being. They celebrated the earth. The people of this land spoke to animals, and sang to the plants. Dances celebrated planting and tending of plants. They told stories of each of the plants that sustained them in every day of their lives.

They found the world as a blessing. It was intregal to their lives to live in harmony with the world. Music and dance were an central part of the Ais everyday life, but these enchanting sounds and graceful movements were lost along with the people themselves. We have only tiny glimpses into that culture, such as the use of gourds for rattles, a drum created by beating on a large rock with a club, and flutes made from reed, cane or bark. The women were reported to have donned shell belts, formed themselves into a large circle, and danced with a side stepping motion around a central fire at a certain ceremony whose meaning is now lost. Based on knowledge of other communities we can assume it was a celebration of the renewal of the plants that they grew. These people are lost, however, we can imagine the haunting sound of those tinkling shells in the night.

These are the crops grown by the Ais for thousands of years before Columbus.

· maize · gourd · beans · citrons · squash · sunflowers pumpkins

Wild Plants Collected for food, baskets, fishing gear, clothing, housing.

· acorns · palm berries · smartweed · hickory nuts · wild cherries · plums · persimmon· bullrush · blackberries · blueberries nut sedge elderberries huckleberries· buttonbush peppervine poke weed watershield ground cherries amaranth · sea grapes bristlegrass broomgrass coco plums
· spatterdock cattail coontie · yucca ache prickley pear cabbage palm· morning glory sea oats water lily· saw palmetto
· goosefoot rivercane yaupon

The native people lived in relation with this land. Some people will say the Ais were animists, that they pre-modern, and superstitious. I am not impressed with such ideas.

I believe that they lived with wisdom, a wisdom that arose from their relationship to the earth, a wisdom that allowed them to relate to the storms and the rains and the dry times as well. For us in this beginning of a new millenium, we need to ask does are present way of living with this land, shows the wisdom that sustained the Ais, who resided here and sustained the environment for over six thousand years.

Today you will be hearing much discussion of native plants, and how much less intrusive these plants are to the Florida environment. I believe there is wisdom in cultivating native plants. I think they might also teach us about living in this place, this land of the Ais.

Day 12 after Hurricane Wilma, egrets on the lawn, nice sea breeze, its about 80° F.

Our church building stood fine, most of our damage was to the trees. Five days ago the lawn was full of trees, and branches and little pieces of roofing from somebodies home blown miles to land on our lawn. Eight trees were pulled up by their roots.

Six men from the congregation came and hauled the branches away, pulled the trees up by ropes being pulled by a car, built braces to support the uprooted now replanted trees and the lawn looks almost perfect. The winter flowers will need to be planted.

Hurricane Season is over in three weeks. For us, the hurricane thing has gotten old. Florida is wonderful from November through April. Then it becomes hot and stormy in May, that lasts through October.

It is paradise for a season.

Mircea Eliade wrote:

The process of the desacralization of the world, of life, and of history, which triumphs today is due above all to our inability to grasp the mystery of the camouflaging of the sacred in the profane.

The world in which we move, and live and have our being as sacred home, as Mother Earth, and Father Sky. The world as in which we relate to our extended family of fellow creatures. This has been lost by the modernist way of objectifying and manipulating nature, so that the world becomes a thing. And we become aliens to ourselves, to each other and the cosmos that is our source and sustains our lives.

Is it as simple as Eliade pronounces, an inability to grasp the hidden sacred in the ordinary? Perhaps.

We say desacralization, but the world is the same world that it always has been for us, it is we who have lost our way, and our ability "to grasp." it is interesting that Eliade uses the metaphor of tactile sense, rather than the metaphor of sight, or the metaphor of hearing.

It much of Western religious writing we "see" the truth, and "hear" the wisdom. But we also embrace, hold, and "grasp."

Gary Kowalski who serves the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Burlington, Vermont has written an important book for religious liberals, Science and the Search for God. The book provides its readers with a good introduction to relation between religion and genuine scientific inquiry, and helps its readers to make the distinction between the philosophical stance known as materialism and new findings of science. Materialism, a legacy of the ancient dualisms of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, mind and matter has become merged in the minds of many with science. But Kowalski in a popular style and with excellent illustrations argues convincingly that contemporary science has moved beyond the limits of reductionism and materialism, and introduces liberal religious thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne who have developed theological approaches that are more compatible with science as it is actually done.

But materialism continues to have its adherents. Kowalski writes:

Like some slow-growing disease, the ideology of materialism has gradually infected the scientific world-view and then popular culture, slowly but surely taking over the senses, one by one.  As defined by the dictionary, materialism is the "philosophical doctrine that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world, including thought, will and feeling can be explained in terms of matter alone."  

Materialism robs us of our vitality and saps the will to change.  And it's hard to imagine anyone crawling into such a mental straightjacket voluntarily.  Naturally, it didn't happen all at once.  The process began with the Copernican revolution as science addressed the question of where we are.    Human beings learned that they were living in a universe much larger than they supposed, but hardly one in which our kind held ay special place or privileged position.  In the nineteenth century came the Darwinian revolution,  which examined the question of how we got here.  The longstanding mystery of the origin of the species yielded to explanations based upon chance and necessity.  Finally, materialism invaded the inner world of the personality -the question of who we are-as within the twentieth century advances in genetics and molecular biology seemed to unlook the ultimate secret of the mind and consciousness itself.

Not too long ago, it was still possible to believe that each person possessed an eternal soul, a divine spark, a sacred essence. The individual was seen as a moral agent and creative force within the unfolding drama of history, but breakthroughs in genetics have seemingly reduced ingenuity and daring, heroism and sacrifice, to nothing more than the chance combinations of chromosomes.  As Francis Crick, the discover of DNA, has written, "the astonishing hypothesis is that €˜you,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your freewill, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells, and their associated molecules.?

But what is modern physics saying about matter? Kowalski continues his critique of materialism: "Ernest Rutherford , first discovered the atomic nucleas almost a hundred years ago.  When he was first asked to describe his discovery he replied to the effect that "Something - we don't know what - is doing something - we don't know how."

The bafflement among physicists that Rutherford expressed has only increased as the atom has revealed more and more of its workings, we have muons and mesons, which seem multiply geometrically, and even these subatomic particles have been analyzed and we find quarks and the quarks appear to be strings, not things at all.   Our universe rests on a firm foundation of one dimensional strings of vibrating energy."


Matter?  What matter?   The fundamental building block of all material existence, mere flashes in the microsphere.

Is it possible?  The Universe seems to be made up of nothing,  nothing but pulsating waves of energy.  How much to you weigh,  how tall are you?   Take away the empty space, and you and me would be reduced to sparks of energy no larger than grains of sand.  But wait, a grain of sand is full of energy.  Go to the beach, and get some.  There is enough energy stored in that sands atoms, to drive a city for a week.   A child's bucket full of sand if the energy could be released could power a hundred thousand automobiles for a year. 

Energy / mass / matter /stuff.

Empty space isn't what it used to be....we are now told that space is charged with cross currents of wave fields, and these field are constantly giving birth to particles,  energy taking form,  becoming what we once called matter.   And then disappearing again, in a fraction of a nanosecond.  

So much for God created the heavens and the earth,   and so much for the apocalypse, as well.   The beginning of matter happens every moment of eternity, and the end of matter as well. A different theology is needed for a universe in constant flux, neither materialist nor theist. My stance is pan-en-theist, the universe is holy, creative, and conscious of itself.

To the people of this land - as well as to many contemporaries who commit to living deliberately, and who seek to be aware of the world that has been given to us all - the world is "alive with spirit."

Some "intellectuals" would tells us that this world understanding is something they call animism,  and dismiss it as pre-modern and "superstitious."  The more mechanical and arrogant "science" that was in vogue in  the first half of the twentieth century lent authority to the imperiousness of modernist anthropologists of religion, whose own world view saw nature as an object to be manipulated, rather than the outward form of our mother earth and our father sky - that sacred realm in which we lived, and moved and had our being.

I am not in awe of "the science" of those who think of the cosmos as dead matter,  devoid of consciousness and vitality - I find that way of thinking dangerous and if my readers might indulge me  "unscientific."  Materialism as an intellectual movement has impoverished thinking and created the dangerous ideologies of the capitalism and communism.  Sometimes the materialists would have us believe that they are "naturalists."  The more materialist of the humanists are fond of that dodge.

Naturalists are those who seek a explanation of all events based on explanations drawn the processes of nature,  naturalists do not seek "supernatural" explanations.  Why did the Hurricane come?  The supernaturalist argues about a God that directs hurricanes,  a naturalist would point toward warm water causing updrafts of air, and wind currents forming convection cooling, and stirring currents.  But the naturalist is not compelled to the materialist conclusion that the earth is a mechanical system rather than a living ecology that learns and changes based on those learnings.  A naturalist is not compelled to ascend into "human only" ethics, but may assert with Gary Kowalski that animals have souls, and should not be subjected to vicious treatment nor raised for slaughter.

Edward Abbey speaks to me and for me as a cosmic mystic, pan-en-theist, religious humanist when he writes:
"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures.
The croaking thing with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. . .

How utterly rich and wild
Yet some among us have the nerve,
The insolence, the brass, the gall to whine
About the limitations of earthbound fate
And yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.

We are none of us good enough
For the world we have."

Some have argued that religious humanist perspectives necessarily descend into "anthro-centric" points of view,  incapable of self criticism directed at the hubris of modernism with its "humankind against nature" mythologies that provide the rationales for the ecological destruction that we witness.  But religious humanism is not inherently modernist, nor is religious humanism incapable of transcending the dominant culture's technocratic corporatism and imperialism.  A liberating, multicultural, anti-oppressive religious humanism that realizes that the earth does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to the earth is being born.  A religious humanism that proclaims with ancient wisdom that our earth is sacred,  we are part of nature, and we are connected intimately and passionately with the whole.