All is dance:
CREATION DANCE
Occasional scribblings
Boyd Wilson
1. The Dynamic Integrity of the Three (P.2)
2. The Singularity of Grace (4)
3. Words’ Inadequacy; let’s not pin name-tags to the ineffable (6)
4. Living humbly, faithfully, within Earth’s whole biosphere (7)
5. The becoming of Malkuth: a mini creation myth (9)
6. Interview with a clover plant: a Malkuth parable (14)
7. Creation poems (21)
8. Poems of expectation and birthing (40)
9. Poems of dying and renewal (45)
10. Sacramental connection with everything? (48)
11, Post-COVID recovery to what? (51)
12. Myths true and false (54)
13. A personal creed (57)
[pic]
“…. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
of something far more deeply inter-fused
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
a motion and a spirit that impels
all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls though all things.”
( - Wm Wordsworth)
The Dynamic Integrity of the Three
Teasing at loose threads of thought in detached old age I become more deeply aware that the idea of The Three points to universal truth from diverse vantage points: grassroots community, politics, ecology, mathematics, art, philosophy, theology, contemplation, whatever.
Those mind-threads are still loose but maybe are moving just a little toward coherence in strength symbolized by, say, the relational self-bracing of a tepee of stakes in our garden, the growth potential of geodesic dome construction.
Classically, the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis are not separate or contradictory realities but essential dimensions of a process moving the whole somewhere; revolution.
If there’s no process, no movement, one sees stagnation or worse.
Take politics. One sees the triad of established power/ grassroots movement/ energizing communication. If relational integrity of the three is lost, power and vision skewed, we have Engels’ and Marx’s simple vision of grassroots-up government prioritizing just gains in the common good corrupted into top-down suppression of dissent by communist regimes that lost both vision and healthy contact with the grassroots, and then the fascism seen now in Russia and China. In the West, we’ve had more than a generation embraced in the ideology of consumerist, monetarist, free-market capitalism. The measures of economic growth in such gross indicators as GDP are impressive. Less so is the stretching inequality gap, the lack of democratic mandate to accept the cost of sustainable, disruptive seeding of justice to the rest of life of the planet and to the common good of future human generations. Has neo-liberal, globalized capitalism lost its mojo? Is there a healthy, revolutionary movement waiting in the wings to seed a mandate with long, inclusive vision? Here in little Aotearoa New Zealand, we’re tempted to self-congratulation because we’ve a centrist government re-elected with a resounding majority and a record of dealing well with the COVID19 pandemic and other immediate issues. Will, a century from now, will it, too, be seen to have become a management hegemony lacking radical trust in revolutionary process in the long game. Blame the media? Plenty room to do so. But are the media not at least as much reflectors of culture as shapers?
An early influence on my formation was Process Thought, flowing from followers of Alfred North Whitehead, author of “Process and Reality.” This work confirmed my conviction that the really real is relational, all-inclusive, always in process in and from the grassroots. Yet much of the early Process thought-stream seemed to become subsumed into academic theology and philosophy. (See )
Always immersed in the life of land, including the human community of those who are of land’s life, husbanding, my deepening in earthed spirituality led to ordination as an Anglican priest specializing in rural context. That was mostly good, unregretted. But, looking back, I have to concede that too much of my work was in the service of an institution rather than a movement; in an insiders’ conversation rather than in dialogue with the world.
Lesley and I hope to remain on our twigs long enough to celebrate 60 years in marriage this year. Marriage for us is always in incomplete process. In the holy ground of the between in a relationship claiming the name of love inevitable lapses are not just unhelpful because deep down in the between of us is the incarnate presence of ultimate reality.
We find the same truth in all other realms of being.
In ecology: take a teaspoonful of garden topsoil and you have millions of invisible creatures of all manner of species, living and multiplying and dying and most of all relating with one another, making the land alive, evolving. So much of what is happening in that living earth is still mysterious in this scientific age! Quantum science says that whether we’re talking about the universe or specks of dust what we call “matter” or “objects” consists of atoms which consist of sub-atomic particles which when it’s all boiled down consist of ideas or energies in relationship.
The more you explore the really real, the more mystery you sense. And the mystery you sense is the mystery of that ultimate reality defying understanding and defining all meaning. Objectivize this reality and we lose the plot.
That’s never more so than in the saga of faith. No prizes for recalling at least a dozen examples from scripture and history of a fresh, radical insight of the Holy being shared with a few, the few becoming a movement of action rooted in deep truth, then …. what? The living process of continued leavening of the whole world with the love from love’s source or a retreat into comfortable, inward-facing, Spirit-deficient institutionalism?
And so, at last, a respectful nod to the Christian doctrine of the living, relational, Three: the creating foundational one; the world-facing revolutionary movement one; and the inspiring communicator of the whole, together embracing you and I and the universe in the dance of love. The truth has been far too much locked through the centuries in a box labelled religiosity. The truth, I reckon, is universal, integral to all being outside mere religion. Time, surely, to open the box wide!
In graced, down-to-earth relationship process I trust.
The singularity of grace
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared; smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights of the black West went
Oh morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(Gerald Manly Hopkins, 1844-1899)
In this slow twilight of life we geriatrics glimpse more often the utter simplicity of the really real.
The proposition is that everything, everywhere, everyone, all life, every moment of time, may be seen in the light of grace – present in the Big Bang and ever since. Each, then, is of equal value in the relational whole of this speck of a planet evolving in the boundless universe. Our co-celebrants of daily life include the trillions of good microbes in our garden soil. Indeed, their species, which gave life to the earth long before mine, is more likely than ours to survive healthily into future epochs.
That, of course, was the long view. Meanwhile, we cannot abide the view that polarized elitism and poverty in the economy of grace are natural and unavoidable within our own species and in the wider sphere. But the perceived grace-singularity disallows passive self-righteousness. The really real is, for us, intimate, not only nurturing the inner person but also disturbing, challenging. The wholeness is clearly marred by malignancies of injustice within our species and by our arrogance toward the rest of creation.
We’ve learned in sharing the response to the COVID-19 pandemic that we must accept and share humble vulnerability if, together, we are to sow the seeds of true, hopeful justice for the children’s children’s children and the wide world our society bequeaths its duty of care to them.
How can this sort of shared discipline and energy be unleashed in a war of generations against the short-vision injustice seen in our yawning inequality gap and global warming? Both are fertilized by quasi-faith in non-sustainable growth measured in monetary numbers of questionable real value in the ultimate economy. Directive, top-down power can never suffice; indeed, our Government’s cash support of commerce during the COVID crisis may have unintentionally helped widen the rich-poor gulf; such is the amoral power of money. Tiny steps from the grassroots up by the anonymous in communities sharing long vision based on science and earthed, natural, universal faith, and readiness to accept cost to the present generations, must be vital. The science and faith are at hand. We need look no further than the younger generations of our own whanau to know that the human capacities are ample.
Time to avert a tipping point beyond which climate change may accelerate out of control while socioeconomic polarization leads to violent revolt, has not yet run out. The universal simplicity of the “really real” is, we reckon, the most common ground on which we may all build communities of the diverse acting in hope.
Meanwhile, Lesley and I dodder along gently, gratefully, hopefully, simply, one day at a time, trying to be in creative relatedness with all around our tiny bubble of life in the graced world.
Words’ inadequacy: Let’s not pin name-tags to the ineffable.
Something of a wordsmith most of my life, I’ve published and preached millions – all drops and trickles long gone downstream in the great river of life. Writing is how I stumblingly seek to grasp a little of what’s lurking in the back of my mind. Increasingly, in my geriatric detachment from obligation to write, I’m now more interested in unanswerable questions than in suggesting answers to others.
As a child in a comfortably Christian family I dutifully recited the Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer, Apostles Creed and so on as the only acceptable answers to Catechism questions. Responding to questions with questions seemed not an option. To wonder was to be classed among mere dreamers.
Today I guess some may class me among modestly groping contemplatives, more deeply centred in what I understand to be key truths of “life, the universe and everything” yet open to fresh questions and insights, with fewer objective certainties while subjectively standing under more dimensions of truth via listening in humility, vulnerability. I find ample wonder in the natural world of things, people, relationships, with no pressing need to turn to dualistic supernatural propositions. Others are free to approach the same truths from quite different perspectives. I respect them.
I listened a day or two ago to a fine performance of the Shaker Hymn, Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free. Those three words - gift, simple, free - stand for me as portals to truth. All is gift. The truth is where “true simplicity is found.” Freedom is essential to the natural grace to be sought in everything, everyone, every relationship.
It’s easy to conclude that science in my lifetime has fuelled more spiritual depth and breadth than religious traditions; quantum, cosmology, ecology and much more opening portals to awe. Each is natural, relational, opening mystery. Of course, science, spirituality in and out of religious traditions, and the arts should not be seen in compartments. They belong together in a harmony of mutually respectful, responsive listening. But that seems too seldom the popular understanding in a culture of brands consumption. .
Then there’s consciousness. Just what is that? Individual consciousness is a natural preoccupation in a “me” centred culture but what about collective consciousness? Might the network extend so far as to embrace not only human culture as a whole but also the web of all life? And then, of course, there’s the proposed unnameable unity believed by many to be beyond categories, to be sought, encountered in everything, everyone; universally both infinite and intimate, hugely more disturbing than the semi-remote architect and interventionist playing favourites in the witness of some popular religion; the lighter (as imagined in one of my attempts at poetry) of the Big Bang fuse, dancing sometimes in joy, sometimes in grief as the universe evolves in the freedom of grace.
Yes, while avoiding the traps in use of the G word in a fragmented culture, I am declaring myself a theist, but one tempered by the imperative that it’s not our words but what we do that matters. I remain Christian despite my grumpy muttering about blinkered religiosity, excited by such notions as Trinity and Incarnation, neither offering neatly objective answers; both relational, universal, leading to questioning, earthed wonder.
One of the loveliest songbirds of Aotearoa New Zealand is the korimako (bellbird). Each pair is mutually committed to mating for life. We recall when one of a pair entered our home through a window, became disoriented and panicky while its mate flapped in empathetic distress outside until we gently helped the trapped bird to fly free.
Lesley and I are in the sixtieth year of marriage. What is in the inner content of our relationship making it truly marriage, distinct from mere sentimentality, co-dependency, cultural habit and so on? Does the answer mean our partnership within humankind is somehow holier than that of the pair of korimako, indeed the inner content of every relationship constituting life’s web and the material universe? The answer, I reckon, must always have an element of mystery. Enough for us to say yes to the mystery as each new day dawns.
+++
"When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children's life may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests
In his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water,
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
- Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems
“Do you really want this moral sense of yours projected onto the universe? Do you want a god who is only a larger version of a righteous judge, rewarding those who don’t realise that virtue is its own reward and throwing the wicked into a physical hell? If that’s the kind of justice you’re looking for you’ll have to create it yourself. Because that is not my justice.” – Stephen Mitchell’s succinct summary of the “Voice from the Whirlwind” in his commentary and translation from Hebrew of The Book of Job.
“There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” - Thomas Merton.
Living humbly, faithfully, within Earth’s whole biosphere
We, the 7.7 billion big-brained biped mammals, Homo sapiens, may feel a bit less full of ourselves in light of the fact that our bodies are said to weigh in at just 0.1% of the mass of all life on Earth. The rest is dominated by plant life with 80%, bacteria with 13%, then fungi with 2%. Animal life (insects having the biggest share) make up a mere one-sixth of fungi’s modest portion.
That’s roughly the science. What does faith say to me?
For every 100 humans stocking the planet when I was born there are now about 370. Yes, I’m old, but my 84 years amount to less than a flicker in the timescale of life on Earth. Our impact on the whole web of life and its resource base has soared scarily faster in that little flicker. The rush gets more out of control despite voices of wisdom both ancient and modern.
It may help to note that while the Hebrew and Greek scriptures were being written in the form we have in our Christian Bibles, around 19 to 26 centuries ago, the human tally grew to less than 3% of what it is now.
The thing is, it’s not all about us and our time. Our species is a latecomer in the 4.3 billion years since the first primitive life cells began the saga of evolution.
Let’s first rubbish the old notion that Homo sapiens is somehow immune from the ecological truth that species exceeding the limits of gross consumption in the wider context of life become extinct. We have no exclusive, supernatural, rights and expectations regardless of the rest of the biosphere. Yes, there’s plenty fuel for claims of divinely ordained exclusiveness in selective readings of ancient traditions. But there are deeper grounds for a holistic, ecologically earthed faith acknowledging vulnerable interdependence.
Here’s a funny thing: in 1967 or around then a series of articles I published in The Southland Times on sustainably productive husbandry of farmland were accorded New Zealand’s top award for economic journalism. The joke? The values described and discussed didn’t include a single number preceded by a dollar sign.
For me, the key to hope is that elusive truth - glimpsed, sometimes felt, pointed to in nature, art, science, all healthy religion but never to be objectively defined – I know as The Incarnation. This truth, I believe, is from before the Big Bang, is eternal and embraces all people, indeed all creation. And, for me, the window upon the Incarnation is the thoroughly earthed, natural, human life of Jesus.
Whatever perceptions people begin their search from, the challenge, I say, is to together seek faith within this truth, agreeing that it’s bigger than we can possibly contain within any and all of our boxes of religiosity, spiritualty, science, art, knowledge, cultures, traditions, whatever… ; indeed, bigger and more potentially life-giving than we can more than begin to imagine. Yet imagination is precisely the gift our species has to share in hope for all life on Earth.
Perhaps I’ve lost most who have read this far. That’s OK. I, too, am lost, but lost in challenging wonder expressed speculatively in brief pieces of writing such as those that follow. Critics may well judge at least some to be less poetry than prose in short lines and that the word creation is itself ambiguous. Fair enough.
Boyd Wilson, 2019
By virtue of creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1881-1955
“If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture – it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives – we believe that we ‘make’ them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.”
- Parker J. Palmer, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
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Toitu he kainga: whatu nga-rongaro he tangata. (People are transient but the land endures).
Greed is idolatrous. – cf Ephesians 5.5
The becoming of “Malkuth:”* a mini creation myth
Malkuth is a fictitious block of sheep farm in the South Island high country, context of a series of parables published by DEFT in 1997.
A little wraith of gases -
nothing you could see
or measure or capture as an idea,
you understand, even if you
could play it back -
spirals uncertainly from a modest star
in a modest galaxy,
cools, without hurry or sense;
takes tiny shape like a
fuzzy idea of a flat ball sat upon,
layered like a fractured onion;
a speck of red-hot dust noticed
as it passes
drifting
through a star beam.
The noticer is
in the becoming
of even that.
Brooding, bubbling rock
breathing,
breaching
breeding,
becoming
untamed,
wild.
[pic] (If you think, mate, that this world
or any part of it
was once,
and should again be,
an ordered machine,
programmed and fueled to move
sedately down a straight and narrow rut
to a nicely defined goal,
managed by clear objectives,
sit on a Malkuth mountain
and think again!)
In profusion of the letting be,
a crinkling crust
of lighter stuff
like rock
floats and buckles,
belching a zillion atoms
of the stuff with which
it all began:
hydrogen.
Air and water become ideas
worth dreaming;
and one plate of the scum
floating on the molten pond
is Gondwana.
Hydrogen couples strolling in thin air
meet lonesome oxygen,
descend as threesomes,
drip by drip,
few and tentative at first,
then torrent enough for
rivers and sea.
A group of molecular adolescents,
left to themselves,
experimenting
somewhere in the flux
(drinking god knows what)
conceive and bear a baby,
shockingly
precocious protein.
(Of course that's soon what
everyone's doing).
Sooner or later
(you just knew it had to happen)
things are out of hand
in the spawning of the first
socialist cell groups;
tiny movements in soupy puddles,
diversity unbounded in
symbiotic togetherness.
And the noticer notices;
is amazed, delighted,
joins the dance
of all life
while, Gondwana,
uncertain mat of debris
on the planet's nether end,
breaks up,
drifts every which way;
some scrappy bits
get left
(no one else wanted them)
betwixt and between,
are dunked,
emerge, take breath,
dunked again,
emerge, start breathing life
(Well, let's not make the story too long, eh?).
while the noticer notices, dances
in the becoming.
Mountains, hills laid low?
Not here, friend!
Here, sea bed is hoisted to the sky,
dries off, keeps a few shells as souvenirs,
becomes mountain and hill
where water,
freely falling,
freezing, running,
enjoying, as only water can,
furrows the land;
the tops, still rising, show their bones,
silt softens plain, basin, valley floor.
Lumbering lizards,
bashful bugs,
tenacious tussock,
pioneering podocarps,
birds of ground and air,
fungi, bacteria, protozoa,
worms, frogs, fish
evolve, immigrate, learn to
live together.
Life in far places is birthed from wombs
to suckle and diversify.
Not here, not yet.
Far creatures of this and yet
another kind rear up,
hold heads up high,
hold tools,
make fire (and war),
converse, reflect,
give names to things,
become conscience for
the planet if they wish
(they can but seldom do).
Not, here, not yet.
A land awaiting destiny?
Not really; this land is
happy enough, knows
nothing different,
feels no need for fences,
titles, browsing beasts;
but destiny happens
anyway to bugger up
the peace.
One corner, then, of
brooding valley,
ice-scraped rock,
living earth and scrabbling scree,
gentle hill,
patchy bush, expansive tussock,
birds galore,
floods and droughts
becoming, unreflectively,
unpresumptiously: Malkuth
• Malkuth: Aramaic, in this work meaning a realm of being in process.
Interview with a clover plant: a “Malkuth” parable
Do you remember the sower's hand?
Only in jumbled dreams, really. What seems to be there is more about feeling than facts I can put words to. I don't want to avoid the question but right now I find it too big, too disturbing. Can we come back to it?
Okay. Would it help to start with some of your background?
Well, I've since learned a bit about who I am and why, where I came from, but I didn't know [pic]
much at all then. I've learned that my genus is Trifolium, my species repens. White clover. We mightn't be holier than thou, but we seem to have a place in the scheme of things. The first white clover seed sown in this land came from some place called the Mother Country. It did well enough on ploughed flats when sown with the immigrant grasses it had learned to live with for a thousand years. But, from what I've heard, they tried to make it behave on scorched earth after bush burns, and on scungy tussock country, as if it was in dinky little paddocks. They had a lot to learn, and they had to learn it the hard way.
Were they really as insensitive as we've been told they were?
They, the two-leggeds, were mostly wounded, lonely, frightened, dislocated from their homeland which had turned upside down. Here they were in a land unlike anything in their experience. It is a younger and more fragile land than they had known, and its life had never had to learn to live with grazing or browsing animals. They didn't have a language with which to listen and respond to this to new land. And they didn't have time or inclination anyway. They had to survive. Their way was to do battle; to tame the living land, slash and burn.
At first, even out here on the shallow soils with hard climate in the hills, results were not too bad. But impoverishment of the life of the soil followed. The companions we work in partnerships with - above-ground plants, the life-giving creatures your eyes cannot see below the surface - were not there. Sometimes that was because they couldn't survive, sometimes because no one understood who and why they were in relation to the rest of us.. Sometimes, native creatures with whom we may have learned to live mutually were utterly extinguished by the fires, the overgrazing, the introduced plants and animals which turned out to be monsters able to ravage this land..
A lot of those early, white clover ancestors perished miserably in the hills. But, of course, every seed in a sack is differently gifted. Some just happened to have what it takes to survive modestly out here in spite of all that's stacked against us.
My great-grandparents were pioneers on a hard block of country that was overgrazed, never topdressed. No one knows just how they got there or when. Eventually, some expert came looking for pasture plants doing alright in spite of the abuse and the droughts and the rabbits and reckoned that those ancestors of mine were worth a look. So she took some seed from them, sowed them in trial plots and compared the quantity and quality of their growth with various clovers from other places . Those seeds included my grandparents. They did okay, and never did give a toss for their lack of pedigree. So they yielded more seeds, including my parents who were grown to make heaps more seed on a flat paddock down country.
So that was me - just one seed among millions. Hard and roughly round and a blotchy sort of yellow. Small? You could get more than a dozen of us under your little fingernail!
I've heard you were given, as seed, a special treatment?
Yes, very special, but not because we specially deserved it. Nor was the treatment with some rare commodity unavailable to others. In fact, enough for all creation can be multiplied up in no time at all! We were coated with a special brew of our bacteria mates, Rhizobia. While it was important that my forebears were specially selected for this environment, these bacteria we live with are able to enrich life anywhere white clovers are committed to contribute in the community of pasture. They seem to offer something more than any other species of life, or all. It sounds more than natural, doesn't it? I remember feeling that rhizobium inoculation as a comfort; a deep sense of belonging and being belonged to, deeper and wider than dreams, encompassing everything of true importance. I'm still trying to understand that gift and promise and connectedness. All I know is that without that inoculation we clover seeds would have had nothing of real worth to offer at all. Without it, there would be no point in you asking me anything.
Anyway, we were mixed with a whole lot of ryegrass seed, bagged up and brought here to Malkuth, taken out to this hill block.
And then the bag was opened, the hand appeared?
Oh, God! The hand was wonderful. It was calloused and scarred but warm and gentle and welcoming. To be with other seeds in that hand was bliss. I just wanted to bask securely in that hand, under the gaze of those eyes, for ever.
But it didn't turn out like that?
Oh, the terror! That trusted hand threw us out! Deliberately. Into the wind. Into an immense space. Blown away. Tossed and falling, afraid, vulnerable. It was the end of everything I had known. I couldn't know that it was also the beginning of everything beyond my knowing. I was shocked. My memories, my dreams, my friends, my meaning, just thrown out over that unknown land.
I thumped down on a little patch of barren earth. Alone. Helpless in this desert place. Nearby, a struggling thistle, a gorse seedling, an unpromising wisp of dry grass. Neither comfort nor protection here.
Not only was I hopeless but also I was hurting. How could the hand which seemed able to hold and mold not less than everything in ordered, protected care not merely let me go - let us go - but actually throw us out into a terrifying freedom of chaos? Why? Well, I didn't then look for a why. I felt utterly abandoned. There seemed to be neither meaning nor purpose to my life nor to all life.
What later turned to hope?
I lay in the dust in dozing apathy for an age. It may have been an hour or a year. Apathy is like that, isn't it? Without celebrated moments, time is just a fog. I just lay inside my shell.
I had one visitor. A lamb. A lamb with the eyes of the sower. My hope began to stir. The lamb loomed, gazed at me for a with full attention and with what seemed infinite compassion, then disappeared. My hope began to die again. Back into the cocoon of apathy under the sun on that parched bit of earth. The store of energy inside me dwindling. My friends the rhizobia looking more and more like the surrounding dust.
The next thing I remember is a breeze smelling of rain. Well, I thought, so now that I've had most of the life baked out of me the little that's left is about to soggily drown. I was past caring.
Then those eyes upon me again. This time they seemed filled with more than compassion. There was another expression in them. A message? If so, I didn't understand it at the time. I was not afraid, but that may have been due more to apathy than hope.
Then a fore-hoof extended above me and descended. Deliberately. I couldn't have rolled aside even if I wanted to. Scared? I was scared alright! Imagine what it would be like if a foot the size of the woolshed was coming down on you!
Well, those eyes kept flashing as that hoof kept coming. Yet it was so gentle in the end. At first, more of a caress. Then I was guided into a safe space between the claws of the hoof as it kept pressing down, firmly, into the earth. Then the hoof was as gently withdrawn and I was alone again.
So now you were no longer on the earth; you were of the earth?
Yes. That was okay. Dark but safe. Warm and airy enough. Not a bad place, I thought, to sleep and dream as the last of my shimmering energy ran out. You see, I thought the lamb had simply set up a more comfortable death for me.
Then strange, new things began to reach down around me.
It must have rained on the surface. Wonderful water! Seeping, warm moisture drew me to yawn, stretch.
The colloids of surrounding clay became coated with molecules of phosphate scattered on the surface. I didn't know why that should be significant to me; I just knew it was. Encouraged by lime and moisture, earthworms got on the move, bringing scraps of humus down to enliven the clay. And the merest trace of blessed molybdenum - ample as yeast to dough.
As my world came alive, so did I. I felt a deep, stirring wonder inside while my hard shell softened, stretched.
And my little mates, the rhizobia, sleeping with me until yesterday, were now dancing all over and around me to the song of the earth:
"Creation here is again beginning:
This is a time for every molecule
to harmonize in singing.
Awake and join in:
lose yourself in the dance
and you will discover
yourself in the becoming
of the dream of the earth."
That doesn't scan.
Why should it scan? Real life doesn't scan.
It was an utterly mad moment. I've no idea how the energy of the dance and song penetrated my shell to allow the recklessness of it all to enter me. But something from quite outside of my self was at work, otherwise I could not have forgotten myself enough to allow the next thing to happen.
And that was?
I swelled and softened so much as I absorbed all that life around me that my shell split.
Was that painful?
Yes. Incredibly painful. A sort of hyper-pain. A pain that consumed everything but its meaning.
I thought: God, I'm bursting!
And then: is this pushy tendril me?
I was weeping for the seed that I was, the days of self-containment encased in that brittle shell now in tatters en route to compost.
But the pain became caught up in the excitement of it all.
As the tendril of my being reached up, the beginnings of the root of my being reached down. A puny thread of a thing at first. But you should have seen and heard the rhizobia! Their dance became a swarming multiplication of ecstasy. They who had seemed less significant than dust were doubling and re-doubling their population, grouping on my root; each nodule a vast community, yet one with me.
I was about to learn an amazing thing. Those rhizobia could make their home, achieve fulfilment, only with me and my family. The grasses around us needed the rhizobia. Why? Because to send up leaves to gather the sun's energy to live abundantly, the grasses needed, through their roots, to draw on nitrogen dissolved in the soil moisture. Now, there's limitless nitrogen in the air everywhere, but there was pitifully little in a form of use to grasses in this soil until we, the white clover and rhizobia, got our act together.
You see, the rhizobia are not only a joy in themselves. They take in nitrogen carried into the soil community by raindrops from the free abundance of air. But what arrives here from the air is as much use to grasses as hot water to an ice-skater. The rhizobia take that form of nitrogen and convert it into a dissolved form which really gets the grasses growing. Do you see how we just naturally work together? This cycle was beginning to get cranked up even before I knew whether I was still a seed or already a seedling.
While that was happening in and around your roots, what about that tendril reaching up?
The tip of that top growth of my being probed and pushed, eel-like, upward, squeezing past stones and clods, eventually bursting into dazzling light.
It was the same square centimeter of paddock on which I had lain as a dormant seed. The little patch was still bare on the surface, but it was now vibrating with all the abundance of life dancing beneath. Nearby, I could see six fresh, new leaves of grass leaping into joyous greenness, and two of my cousin clovers emerging to greet the world and me.
I didn't know the world could be changed almost overnight from such tired hopelessness to such zinging, erupting life. It still seems a miracle. Yet it wasn't some sort of magic. It was all wonderfully natural, if you know what I mean. Each one's special giftedness - mine, the grasses, the bacteria, the minerals, the earthworms - seemed to be recognised and celebrated and harmonised in a process of community of all. None of us had much power in ourselves. I know I had none. The power, the hope, the drive seemed to come out of the relationships as we learned to live together.
As for me, my first leaves, threefold, opened to the energy of the sun, breathing in life for myself and breathing out life for others. My roots were exploring deeper into the earth and outward to intertwine companionably with others. My rhizobia mates were singing and multiplying and dancing and breathing and synthesizing tonnes of available nitrogen. Life was great.
Did you ever see the hand of the sower again?
Not the hand as such, but the lamb, yes. The lamb, you see, is not separate from the sower. How do I know? Well, I just know. Everyone who listens to the song of the earth knows.
How I love the lamb's visits! Those eyes! Careful, gentle, compassionate. And that other expression I first failed to recognise: true friendship; for me in a special way, and for this whole becoming of pasture involving all of us here.
But a lamb surely eats plants like you?
Of course! That's not a worry. It's a blessing, really. The lamb prunes me gently enough at intervals not too short, not too long; encouraging me to reach out new stolons, each a habitat for more rhizobia communities; swallowing my protein-richness; stepping aside to reverently piss the nitrogen-richness into the root zones of my friends the grasses.
It's funny, really. To be grazed would be a diminishment outside of this great web of living relationships. Inside it, under the lamb's gentle grazing, everyone is enhanced.
What about weeds and pests? You've sung the praises of the rhizobia, but what about disease organisms?
Well, of course, there's a useful, balanced place for everyone somewhere in the grand scheme of things. You're talking about creatures out of balance, out of harmony, fighting, poor souls, in response to their own insecurities. Sure, that can be a problem. But if the community of life I've talked of is working in harmony as a pasture it is always strong enough to absorb a challenge. I told you that when I was thrown from the sower's hand onto the still-scungy land I landed near a thistle and a gorse seedling. You don't see thistles or gorse here now, do you?
And droughts? And frozen winters?
There was never a promise from the sower or the lamb that life would get lovelier in every way, every day, mild and moist for ever and ever. This is the real world. Out here in the hills, we're less insulated from the real than they are down in the paddocks. Droughts and frosts are facts of life in the real world.
Sure, I can remember summers when it seemed this whole world would blow away as dust, winters when all life froze to a standstill. Yes, there was dying. There is always dying. If you live in topsoil you know that there can be no life without death. In the hardest times there has been much dying, deep grieving in the land. But out of that sharing in the desolation of grief, new life always germinates. Rain eventually comes. Thaw happens. Seeds sprout. Roots which seemed dead come to life, draw on nutrients, send new shoots up. Free-living azobacter, symbiotic rhizobia, all bacteria, protozoa, mites and earthworms, fungi and spiders, beetles and viruses, minerals and all of the others in the teeming millions of my partners in the becoming of life from beneath the surface resume the song and the dance of the earth.
And, above the ground, I send up different, erect stalks in summer, each with a galaxy of florets, pink and white to gladden the lamb. And the lamb's friends, the bees, come to accept my proffered nectar and to leave their gift of yellow, seminal pollen. And I, once a self-contained seed, produce seeds for the hand of the sower. And, thanks to the bees' gifts, every seed is uniquely gifted to surprise and be surprised in the joy of the land.
And every renewal of life is even better than the last. If we didn't have droughts and hard winters we couldn't know that.
I've heard you referred to as, "The seed growing by itself." Are you happy with that?
No. The lamb was misreported. No one either lives or dies in relation to self alone. Not really. You can subsist, just, in disconnected apathy inside your shell as I once did. But that's not really living. The lamb had something else to say about there being no harvest without the death of seeds. If I had just withered alone in my shell on the baked earth, that would not have been a real death. It would have been merely an expiration, without much meaning. It was precisely in being inoculated with the rhizobia by the sower, trodden into the earth by the lamb, released from my shell into this boundless community of abundant becoming, that my dying became a real death.
You can sometimes tell when a death is a real death. You can tell from the passion in the dying and the grieving. You can tell from the passion, the celebration in togetherness, of our whole life here later being enhanced in its renewal.
The life of the land is never static. The life of the land is far greater than what you might guess by just adding up all the lives that take part. The difference between the sum of the parts and the quality of our life together as land is not something you can define or analyse or own or control. Yet that difference is the meaning and purpose of everything. And it indwells this whole process.
Creation Poems
Aspire to peasantry
Each of us deeply carries life from peasants past,
bequests of simplicity in living and loving,
working and playing, birthing and dying, all
these connected in the place each knew as home.
Prejudice of course, superstition certainly,
suffering much from disease and deprivation,
no less humanly errant as us, but at one with
the real (thus small, local) economies of
community-inclusive landed homes where
wholeness was a sacramental given, free from
many of the oppressions measured in unreal
notions like money, living with the land, knowing
bone-deep that mystery is the essential core of life.
In such as these is the rule of hope and joy,
peace and justice conceived and born now
in absolute vulnerability for all this world.
Blinkered pronouns
“I am; central to all being;
I want, I own, I wish, I feel …”
“ME first always; then, just incidentally,
every thing, every one else.”
“MY life, house, car, partner, kids,
money, beliefs, mates …”
“MINE and no other’s is the moment,
the story, the choice, the stuff,
and, of course, O-MY-god.”
“WE (humankind, particularly people
like me) are meant to fill a
closed, elite apex above all other
life and matter, privileged.”
Bread-making
Mix dry, unpromising yeast with honey, warm water.
Many one-cell critters come to bubbling, sexy life.
Add to salted flour, mix, knead-knead-knead, rest while
the lively critters each release molecules: enzymes.
How many? Uncountable but busy, each making too
little difference to measure, yet the proving is that
dough rises, becomes bread, not biscuit. Meanwhile,
one by one, each enzyme molecule is spent, job done.
That’s life. It’s plenty.
Celebrating a new day
Another day to celebrate
As every new day is.
It’s my 31,046th day ex utero.
Happens to be a birthday,
Eighty-fifth.
Many of the dwindling number
Aware of my existence may
Say, “Aged, defining you
In painful hobble behind walker,
Gasping lungs, cognitive slippage,
Manifold medications,
Economically redundant.”
Well, bugger that!
I’m gratefully defined not by
What others expect, nor by
All I’ve done and do, nor by all I’ve
Failed to be and do, nor by
The self I’m tempted to
Wish I was, nor by mere words
But by who I am right now,
At home where love grows still
With a beloved who knows much
Of my being better than I do.
I may occasionally fool some,
Even myself, my beloved never.
This celebration is not of
The transitory me.
It’s of life in all its evolving,
Infinitely diverse mystery.
It’s good to wake here and now
Still on my tiny twig in the
Boundlessness of all that is.
Choice
If I think
In the box
Of me
I am stagnant,
Anxious,
Empty.
If I think
In the free,
Holy,
Vulnerable,
Uncontrolled
Betweens of
Marriage, family,
Friendship,
Neighbourhood,
Land’s myriad life
(Including mine),
Seen and hidden,
I move, fill out
Just a bit.
Breathe easy,
Grateful to be
Incomplete
Here and now.
Creation dance
All is dance.
Love-maker dancing to the rhythm
of all the becoming of the set-free
universe, the integrity of each atom,
in the abundant joy of delighted surprise.
All is then, now and not yet
within every nanosecond,
every quark, of time-space.
And we, we, embody the first-fruits
Of consciousness of the whole,
and (darn it) of conscience.
Get it? Of course not:
We can but wonder, care, celebrate,
join the dance, reflect
and share the love.
Cyclic Water
Hydrogen couples meet oxygen singles
back when all was flux,
get their act together,
vaporize, drip as
life-promise on
thrusting mountains,
gather as frozen tarn, glacier,
wait, it seems forever,
then melt, trickle, pond,
reflect, go deep as aquifer,
emerge from rock as
miracle creeks,
splashing like Easter over stones,
give nothing but delight, sing
of nothing more serious
and practical
than the meaning of
life, the universe
and everything.
More drops fall, giving life to land,
with run-off joining glacier melt,
so lakes become,
limpid-still, baptism-deep,
home first to single life-cells,
then tiny ika, bigger tuna,
(all this, you understand,
takes aeons).
From the lakes
the outflows join
as the great river,
ploughing its way to ocean,
re-energized,
only life-source
undiminished in
depth of promise
as a new cycle begins;
each H2O molecule
intact in every phase.
Earthworm
[pic]
This earthworm’s
worldview is a bit
smaller than mine.
But is it less valid,
valued, in the big
picture of all life?
This worm and its kind
always leave the
earth richer for
their presence.
No way can I and my
kind match that.
But I’ll die trying.
Extravagance
It seems so wasteful:
all that winter of waiting,
all that spring awakening,
all that gorgeous blossom,
all that bee-evangelism,
the rain in due season,
(not to mention my care and toil),
all those millions of seeds;
and what, now it’s
autumn, is there to show?
Three struggling seedlings –
and two of them mortally sick.
The parameters of your garden
of life seem so inefficient,
so extravagant in this world
of hunger and profit squeeze;
and dare I say a bit primitive
too, in the age of GE?
And why the weeds?
And yet you’re happy in all of
this living and loveliness and
seeding and dying and chancy
renewing in your let-it-be garden.
I should just delight, observe,
reflect, enjoy, be thankful, celebrate?
Okay: it’s enough, isn’t it?
Fecundity of Desolation
Without fuss or crisis,
while just going with the flow,
settling in for a rest of the psyche,
nothing bigger or deeper in view;
just resting on my back,
mind floating on the surface of that limpid dam,
you drew me down,
down into your desolation,
and I never gave drowning a thought.
Your being out of which you yell,
Eli, Eli, lema’ sa-bach’tha-ni!
becomes not an agony of my despair
(I can take none of that from you);
your being, your burden, your pain, your cry
envelop me in writhing warmth
as the placenta of my birth
and rebirth
and continuing rebirthings.
And down in these deepest depths,
beneath reflections,
beneath all water’s life,
beneath all history’s mud,
I see millions of conceptions
each involving a death and your death,
each in the uterus of God;
each conceived
in love,
in hope
of nurture in
and birthing from
the placenta
of your
desolation
Gift and giver
Gift
and giver
are one
in
LIFE
lived generously,
LIFE
lived joyously,
LIFE
lived mutually,
LIFE
lived sensually,
LIFE
lived justly,
LIFE
lived thankfully,
LIFE
lived attentively,
LIFE
lived honestly
here
and now
by you
and I.
The cost?
Why ask?
It’s gift,
prepaid
in full;
just overflow
with life.
If the economy
If the economy,
the emptiness and froth beneath
all those fiscal digits so beloved
of politicos and economists and moguls –
If the economy,
that faith-object measuring its subjects’
worth in mere usury, and consumption
of whatever else is measurable in dollars –
If the economy,
valuing living land just as it claims worth
in a chain of junk-food troughs, and giving no
worth at all to family and neighbourhood –
If the economy was subject to the unfettered forces
of the marketplace of universal justice and hope
for the children’s great-grandchildren and all life on Earth,
would it last even a week?
IN THE IMAGE …
Something seemed missing from those familiar, sacred lists of gifts and fruits of the inspirer.
Then, Duh! Of course!
In the Word’s participation in the beginning, before any thing of substance, there was image-ination. Always, everywhere, this original spirit-gift was, is, and always shall be.
All the entities and relationships, atom to galaxy in this universe, then and now, are not prescribed from on high but consequences of infinite imagination set free here below to always become whatever they may, shared by all, both celebrated and grieved by the great imaginer, responded to by whomever among we, the Earth-bound, pauses to listen, see, feel, contemplate, share, enact.
The eternal fount of imagination simply ignores institutionalism’s efforts to tame its flow. No matter how sternly blinkered religion has tried, and still tries, to constrain this holiness in its sanctuaries, it still bursts forth here below in art, music, poetry, ecology, cosmology, beauty, wonder and love wherever manifest.
We, mere ants but seekers, channels, of hope for all, are invited to accept the gift of the ultimate freedom to lift our eyes, to imagine more freely.
(cf 1 Cor. 12.4-11, Gal. 5.22f, etc.)
Growth-faith
(To be read aloud as a rant)
Fervent faith in alleged hidden powers beneath “economic growth”
is chanted by apostles in politics, corporate wheeling-dealing and
remote fiscal whiz-kidding in the language of good ol’ trad. religion.
And the people who count in the winners-losers polarity say, “Amen! Grant us more gross consumption, pass the dodgy bucks faster, faster”
as ecology and humanity and water and soils and justice and hope
for all the children’s children’s children erode and dollar-debts against the life of the planet only a few generations hence go even deeper. There is, they say, a mysteriously remote dispensary of more and more values-less gross domestic product and magical technology for ever and ever, Amen.
Yeah, right.
Is there, perhaps, a source of hope for truer growth toward re-creation, sustained simplicity, the primordial possibility glimpsed today as one bee and one flower rejoice in one another in our garden, in the care of a neighbour, in the interstices of music and poetry and marriage and family and community, all in the welling of necessarily vulnerable justice and joy for all life, all this planet?
The currency of such a source is maybe counted not in many-zeroed dollars but in tiny sharings of grace, family celebrations of freedom, and growth toward
what it may yet mean to be fully human, interdependent
within the life of the earthed whole.
Costly, scarily disturbing, uncomfortable, real.
And good ol’ trad. religion, having given away its native language, clings to the inevitable priorities for self-justification and perpetuation of cold institutionalism, kneels head-down, eyes-shut, blowing on dying embers of the old.
Might we yet raise our heads and lift our eyes and reach out and step forward in this kairos time when it may yet all come together in reasons why untold generations will live in thankful, simple generosity, that rarity today, knowing love to be the enveloping ultimate that excludes no one, no thing?
Husbandry
[pic]
In this handful of topsoil are more creatures than the human overpopulation of this little planet. The soil’s life and minerals and each cell of my body descend from the stardust of this 14-billion-years-old universe. So we’re all related.
To gaze at land in careless passing or to husband? Share love and delight, colour and nutrients with the earth or to ignore, trample, rape? To restore, preserve, set aside from our two-legged short-vision avarice or to husband as farm, garden, orchard?
Whatever the choice, the earth invites the human rootless to pause, settle, observe, receive and reflect grace.
Not for nothing does the call to husbandry go out equally to two humans risking the mutuality of true marriage, to relationships with particular bits of land and to the vocation of all humankind to care for the whole planet in this scary epoch Anthropocene while there’s time.
… isms
Signage on the highway to the ultimate void:
Individualism, consumerism, materialism,
Spiritualism, hedonism, elitism, monetarism,
Atheism; equally theism imaging a Great
Overarching, All-knowing Technocrat
Invulnerable in his (yes, his) remote control,
Allotting treats and wrist-slaps on the
Eternal journey to nowhere, demanding
Ersatz faith-substitute devoid of wonder.
Signage on the narrow, twisting track to life:
Love, grace, community, beauty, mystery,
Surprise, humility, healing, hope first for the
Lost and least, costly peace and joy without
Winners or losers, pain and grief balanced by
Fun shared in the presence always of the one
Who eschews control, joins the journey in the
Vulnerable, mysterious hope of a new-born
Love-child as all life, every atom, glows sacred.
Where the life-track is alongside the highway
Are one-way gates: wide to the highway,
Narrow to the track. The greatest grace is that
I, the compromiser, can begin again through the
Narrow gate today and every day.
Thank you, Mr Eliot: arriving in life we’ll indeed
Be where we started, seeing the place
Clearly for the first time.
(T S Eliot, “Little Gidding;” Matthew 7.13f)
Muttering with spade
You who dance in the wonder of all lives’ becoming,
the relationships of all living,
the grief of all dyings
and the joy of all life’s renewals,
I am digging a small patch of your earth.
A spoonful of such topsoil includes more creatures than there are people on this planet:
bacteria, viruses, fungi, mites – plus giants like spiders, insects and earthworms.
So there’s a whole universe of life in this spade-full as I turn it.
Some expressions of your gift of life are multiplying at astonishing pace even as I dig.
Millions will die in this spade-full today if I husband your earth with care;
tens of millions if I do not.
But life will go on. Some of these species will survive when mine is extinct,
always with the possibility of abundance beyond pain and loss.
Some species of your creatures relate to one another to the enhancement of each and all.
Some seem terribly destructive from any viewpoint.
(Except yours?)
Some help our garden to be fruitful, healthy and beautiful.
Some we know only for the disease they bring.
None, I suppose, gives a damn; has any vision of the whole.
All struggle simply to survive until younger generations can dance with you.
Yet as I think of all this living in such a tiny morsel of your creation,
I know the fact that I can so think does not make me more valuable,
with more rights, than the life in a teaspoonful of this earth.
I know I cannot justify myself either by thinking or by digging.
I know that we, the two-leggeds with the big heads, are no holier than these,
or separate from these, in the economy of your love.
All life is grace, isn’t it?
So teach me to be reverent more often.
Teach me to dance more creatively, more freely, with you in the ballet of all life.
Teach me to husband the land in the presence of your love so as to glorify you with the increase of your justice and joy for the children’s children of all that lives in all the earth – the strange people down the road and the bacteria in this soil.
Remind me to more often see the whole web from your point of view.
Teach me your love for life in every one of its little bits.
Help me to discern the world of difference between this love and mere sentiment.
Teach me that there is no limit to your inclusiveness.
Now
In this now, the sage advice is to just be:
be the true, humble, vulnerable self beneath
self-deceptive fog of needing to do stuff;
just be, in the tiny orbit of this, our love, family,
friends, within the web of all life sacramented
in garden, giving nothing to GDP,
anything measureable.
Just gratefully live this tiny moment of
now before it’s lost.
Harder than you think.
Why so long and busy the story-line of this old
life before learning that to jump around the
fullness of this here, this transitory now,
may mean limping the rest of the journey in a
dull, fading replica of real life?
Pruning
Five minus naught equals five, right?
So five minus two equals three?
“Well, it depends, doesn’t it?”
said the earth-voice.
“Why do you prune and burn
so much of that apricot tree?
Take out a fifth of dead and sick wood,
Another fifth of sappy top growth:
five minus two of wood,
plus six months of feeding
from roots and leaves
while bees to do their thing
will equal more and better fruit, right?”
You’re not just on about pruning, are you?
There’s always more to what you say
than meets the eardrum;
more to any bit of life than meets the eye.
It’s about a focus on the good wood, right?
Taking the wide and long view of the whole?
Acting, not just thinking about it?
The cutting and the thinking and the balance
between what stays and goes
and the hope in the whole
make sense.
So maybe this job won’t quite bore me
out of my tiny mind after all.
Simplest arithmetic
1+1= 3.
Wrong? Oh no; rather the base
equation for vibrancy in life.
That + in the between is the
enzyme without which
the sum lacks completion.
In ecology, in the partnership between
husband-folk and land,
in the between of you and I
dwells that presence, no less real
for being non-intrusive, indefinable.
Name it Grace, name it Love,
name it Disturbing, Humbling Truth,
name it Wholeness, name it Mystery,
name it Responsive Listening,
name it The Incarnation:
call it what you will, but name it.
We, perhaps alone among creatures,
are free to choose the 1+1=2 default option,
thus dying as incomplete,
unfulfilled, as we’ve lived.
Spring Prayer
Intimate Christ, may this spring’s growth, no matter how uncertain its emergence, mature in me through a long season from abundant blossoming to bountiful fruiting.
Help me to let the roots of my life be drawn more deeply into prayer that I may grow in your life-renewing presence within all the garden of the world.
Let my prayer be more than when I feel like it and when I need help for myself and others.
Let me be aware of your prayer for me germinating and growing in my life like the seeds in the living earth.
Give me joy in prayer as you help me to know that your Spirit prays within me even when I am distracted or asleep.
Give me more of your compassionate understanding as I contemplate in my garden the reality that there are always deaths and diseases as well as new beginnings and renewals.
And help me to witness to the fact that your loving presence is as close to every other life as to mine.
Let my life be grafted securely into your life, Lord Christ, that I may live your passion and resurrection as faithfully and joyously as spring follows winter.
Amen.
The land
Not just the living land of farm, garden, wilderness.
What’s gifted into our husbandry in this era of urban
sophistry excludes nothing in earthed reality:
includes all that will stand true beneath the dodgy creature
our blind lords call “the economy” after the idolatry, the
deepening overlay of fiscal froth, the polarising drivers of
fear and greed, are blown away by the wind that has borne
grace since before this little planet took form, gave life.
So shops, factories creating and channelling goods that are
truly good; schools, hospitals channelling wisdom, wholeness;
technologies enabling real community;
the family and its home whether in town or country.
The remnant wise who truly husband the environment of
soil and water have the spirit to share with the world of the
fiscal rat-racers. The test is sustainable justice for all people,
all life, all that constitutes Planet Earth,
now and through many centuries ahead.
The powers-that-be say ‘Unrealistic’ and ‘Too Late,’ and “We,
the winners in the widening winners-losers gap,
must consume and despoil and polarise more and more
until the end of the tiny morsel of time within our clenched grasp.”
Well, bugger that.
There’s healthier hope that’s always been on tap.
It comes with humility, simplicity, community, living well
with care for the whole,
a thoroughly grounded awareness of thenuminous.
We needn’t keep dumping more and more of that hope into
this money-measured abyss of ultimate unreality.
[pic].
What’s marriage?
For Emma and Mark, Easter 2012 (adapted)
What, then, makes marriage marriage?
If more than product of unctuous rite plus civil
record just an answer to loneliness and lust,
diminishing deep selves in co-dependency?
Is love a word too corrupted?
How about grace; grace in all your goings and comings,
in passionate joy and in gentle silence,
in hurts and healings, from this day forward?
What else can daily refresh
this glow we see in the between of you?
Grow well then, that as you learn more
each day about who each really is and may become
and what’s happening and not happening in the dynamic
indwelling the space between,
and in the balance between celebration and ordinariness,
you may listen well and live your hope and have fun
and always be for real.
Who thinks, M Descarte?
I think.
Therefore
I think I am not
The object self
Sought in mirrors,
Words of imagined
Polite applause,
Hoping it’s true
That the universe
Is made of definable
Categories
Centred in me.
I think.
Therefore
I think I may be
The subject self,
Ordinary, vulnerable,
Ambiguous,
Dimly self-understood
Yet reckoning under
The light of truth
That it’s okay to
Begin to better
Know, celebrate
This self as it is
Really known,
Body-mind-spirit,
Oneness in the
Mystery of truly
Relating in
All life, all matter,
All that transcends,
All gifted for freedom,
One in reality
Intimate,
Infinite,
Known,
Unknowable.
You are
(A response to such biblical “I am...” passages as Ex.3.14, Jno.8.58 that defy any attempt to objectify the being of universal holiness.)
You are in:
The living memory of scuttled skink
as lifted rock is rested;
Both undreamed galaxies
and the ecology of topsoil boot scrapings;
Energy more mysterious than a quark,
more expansive than all dark matter;
The powerful humility of the faithful
who don’t bother to deflate the clever preacher;
The despair of the hopeless, drunken
adolescent and her child;
All responsive, true listening of the heart;
all friendship;
The pain of those
who feel trapped in sinkholes of conflict;
The dying in the heart of the wealthy one
who trusted the image of money;
The yearning anger of the powerless one
who knows poverty all too well;
The small act of the one
with little to offer but care;
Water, no mere unearthed sign
but the stuff that sacraments all real life;
The leavening of bread dough,
crop from paddock worked by our hands;
Wine, fruit of vine
fashioned for communal joy;
Hope, grief, high and holy times,
times of plain ordinariness;
Celebrations of your presence,
in and out of mere religion;
You are….
Psalm 104 reflected
You are clothed in the glorious light of your love within all your creation.
You dance with the furthest-flung stars of the universe, fly with the wind, exult in storms.
This little planet has a special place in your celebration. Its life-giving waters sacrament your love.
The life of the land responds, giving you glory and channelling your providence.
The roots of trees reach down to draw on holiness; their tips reach up in worship.
Animal life, too, dances with you night and day, sharing your joy.
The tides keep rhythm with the moon as all the life of the sea reflects your light in the ecology of the depths.
All your creation, every particle of it, witnesses to your spirit as you renew the face of the earth.
May we cherish this vision of earthed holiness, sharing the dance, sharing your care and your joy, banishing shadows of injustice to your creation by celebrating, nurturing, its life and light.
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POEMS OF EXPECTATION AND BIRTHING
Advent
It’s big-questions season.
Where’s it all going?
Why?
What to do? Not do?
What next?
The One glimpsed dancing in delight
in the Big Bang expansion,
the One dancing on,
the One gifting the view through the window
of the Stable-to-Cross story,
awaits our answers.
It can’t be all about us, the two-legged bigheads
within the ecology of all life on this
little planet in this modest galaxy.
And yet the place and moment that surely
matter in the awesome context
of the space-time continuum
have to be right here, right now.
So what? When?
Well, as good parents have always answered
their knee-high kids,
Wait and see.
So now we wait, watch, listen, tremble, hope,
gather strength, as those among the summoned
to share big-answers action.
Christmas is not yet.
May we get to it disturbed into a vision of
joyous hope for everyone, everything.
Blanked Women
The blokes kept exclusive story rights
As the empowered do.
But they couldn’t have the birth
Without one woman: that scared,
Far-from-home, bulging teenager.
And so, the painful labour and the baby.
They bundled him in rags, say the blokes,
And put him down in a feed trough.
Who were the “they?”
Not male, for sure, in that there and then.
So women. Women to share the pain,
The joyful relief as the squalling morsel
Arrived, and clean up the mess,
Reserving the placenta/whenua for burial:
Whenua to whenua.
All credit to the dithering, faithful dad,
The publican who at least offered what
He could, the shy, low-rank sheep-smelling
Males who sensed something special,
The foreign mystics who came to see.
And special homage to that down-to-earth
Young mother who nurtured the child
Along with his siblings ‘til he left the nest.
But let’s paint those blanked women
Back into our nativity scenes,
And live in vulnerable, prophetic natural,
Inclusive simplicity, bearing and sharing pain,
Listening expectantly to everyone, everything.
BW, 11.10.20
NAMASTE
The Sanskrit greeting’s roots imply
a spark in each of us here reaching to
greet a spark in each of you and yours.
We reckon such sparks shine from everyone
and everything so let’s not get exclusive
in calling them holy.
But in the holy between of us, in this moment
of even distant, casual greeting is, we reckon,
a unique, fresh seed of the life of what we dare
call the Incarnation.
Whatever name given the ineffable, each such
seed is to be celebrated, sown in good earth,
released to vulnerable germination, growth,
fruitfulness.
Perhaps such is the universal message of the season;
about love inside relationships,
not possessed positions.
Holiness has no favourites, but requires of we
the blessed priority for wherever less-than-full life
is within reach, released sparks firing weed-growth
that chokes hope, joy, fun, justice in the universe of
love so those seeds get more chance.
Deep aroha to you, in and out of the season.
Christmas Unsweetened
The season’s reason maybe says
‘This incarnation thing we’re in
gives scant comfort, no magic,
much urgent disturbance,
joy via the narrow gate.
‘Let’s first and always seek and
celebrate the good stuff: all that’s free
and lovely like grace, beauty, wholeness,
friendship, neighbourhood, faith, laughter,
topsoil, life in every guise wherever found.
‘We, of fleeting dust, are here to learn love;
the listen-think-listen-share-do … cycle
feet on ground together; natural, earthed.
But face the facts: we Homo sapiens have
overstocked Farm Earth, are mining the
biosphere, those able consuming
without value or vision while the vulnerable
drop off the back tit, unblessed. Each of us –
faith, goodness or none – has precisely
the same worth in the currency of this
incarnation thing. It’s too often served as
comfort food, only from sacerdotal
pulpits to the self-content.
‘How many generations of hope and wholeness
can we muster for all life on Earth, starting
with the world’s most damaged, unloved, the
spots where the biosphere is at tipping point?
Let’s listen and know our calling. Learn
inclusive community from our kin, the ants.
‘The cost of commitment? You know me so
you know it’s big. What other option
that lasts? None: so commit afresh and
together we’ll sow and tend seeds of hope.
We can’t leave it to the powers-that-be:
the revolution is to be seeded now at
grassroots. Let’s treat ourselves this
Christmas to clear-eyed, vulnerable,
costly, local simplicity. Face
the powers powerless as loved new-borns.
Bloke-birthing
Friend, I’m happy about your birth
into the
humanity
of that time
in that world
with nice people
religiously.
Truth is, I’m not so keen on this
stuff about your
birthing
through me and us
in the here and now
of our being and doing;
my body, its functions.
I mean, birthing’s bloody, isn’t it?
Hurts, too. And
once fully pregnant
you can’t just stop:
“Coming, ready or not!”
you’ll yell, and
then where will I be?
Anyway, as a male of the species
I’m exempt
from birthing
for God’s sake
am I not?
No? It’s not just for holy
women? Oh God!
And what of the religious bit?
I mean, what life can
the Church have if
your life pops out of
the un-catechized
unwashed beyond
the stained glass.
Who, anyway, cares beyond
our holy huddles?
You do? Oh!
Okay then:
dilate this
silly carcass and
do your thing.
Christmas intrusions
We wish you Christmas intrusions:
not of the warm-fuzzy-dreamed-up-
sterile-cry-less-manger-doll kind but
the disturbance of substance-abused
adolescents who don’t hope and don’t
care and reckon no one else cares either,
the intrusion of ancient wisdoms
insisting on unconditional love and justice
paving the only track to uncompromised truth,
the disturbance of the world’s hungry homeless
suffering within reach long after their disasters
are cut from the tear-jerk news,
the facts of finite material providence for
the children’s children and all life on earth
insisting that sustainable hope will cost us big-time,
the presence among us of clear-eyed, vulnerable
human beauty where true holiness is indeed incarnate,
reminding us that we’re all in poverty
as it was there and then,
is in the here-and-now,
and hopefully shall be
seeding deep, fresh joy for you and yours,
every day in every way through the coming year.
A reflection on Psalm 96
The song we offer you today has never been sung before. Because we daily experience your love poured into us afresh, we could not sing old and tired lyrics even if we wished to.
Nor can we live today in the rut of comfortable habits. You disturb us, rebirth us, again and again in your Spirit to be a people for your service and your praise. We sing in harmony with all the life of your planet Earth, seeing that you set no boundaries to the light of your renewing love.
We seek to draw all the people of the earth into this worship, this happiness at being embraced in your joy.
Let the stars dance and the living land offer gladness, the thunder of sea and storm offer praise, both roots and tips of trees reach into holiness as your rule of love is renewed in joy, in truth and in justice.
POEMS OF DYING AND RENEWAL
Either we move
Either we move
on through the
narrow gate
or we do
not move at all.
Either we move
in the practice of peace
or we remain
vague shadows
in the night;
some slinking back
to the salt-less
mirages whence we came;
some wedged in
the lonely centre
of self service;
some bogged in
the ooze of
mere sentiment;
a few quixotes
tilting at windmills
while the crucified
hope dies in pain again
and the world’s hope
turns to idols.
Either we move
toward unity
or, like the
indecisive hedgehog,
rot into the
static surface
of the road.
Carefully upwind
There we were
praying preenishly
before our mirror;
smooth word games in
the sanctuary of non-creation;
there we were
helping out our fellow man
(utmost righteousness
in self’s right thing you know);
there we were
carefully upwind of
cross carcass in the
gulley of the gutless and guilty;
there we were
rapt in praise for the
magnified image of
our corporate navel;
when you flicked us
as with a thumb
high enough to glimpse
beyond this rut
(I suppose those other
poor cows saw nothing)
and we were still
and clear-eyed for once.
H2O
Say’s the dying one, “All I’ve done and been Were just a couple of trickles under the bridge, Down the great river, Drops in the ocean, Soon forgotten. Gone.”
Not so, my friend: every H2O molecule – in sea, lake, Ice, steam, cloud, creek, soil, aquifer, rain, snow, Your body, whatever – keeps on cycling in the Global whole. None is lost. As Earth remains each drop counts, of equal Value in the real economy of the infinite. Such is a life.
‘Mine’s a bit polluted, though,” you say. Well, aren’t we all! But the H20 molecule itself retains Its integrity. The body returns to the earth but The gifted wellspring of all life – yours included - Will sing on in the great, continuing, hymn of all creation; Joys, regrets, suffering, loves, failures, griefs, confusions, Thoughts, works, every drop of you, in this world.
‘No conscious me joining the righteous in another world, Then, or at least parked up out of sight waiting my turn?’ Mm, let’s you and I wait and see, eh? But dead’s okay. Earthed new life comes by no other way.
Remembrance is not just soon by few: know that Each tiny moment of this, your life, – good, regretted, just ordinary - Remains in the great ocean of Love forever.
Good Friday
Good morning you
of the nail-holes,
I speak self-comfort
to your pained face.
It’s both done
and not done,
right?
It’ll not do
at all,
will it?
Let’s compromise;
how about we
pretend
until
tomorrow?
Tomorrow is
a vacuum day,
a day of emptiness.
Scare the hell
out of me
then
if you like.
Silly as it sounds,
might we not
till after the
weekend
pretend
there’s life after life?
No? Okay,
die beneath
all death then
and let me see again
your un-dismay
as I again
behold the wood.
Holy Saturday
This is a nothing day.
Hope snuffed yesterday.
All life that’s left:
The life of soil,
Of plants, birds,
All creatures great and small,
Of family, neighbours,
Seems poised,
Empty,
Waiting perhaps.
But for what?
Some folk say they know;
Look forward to trad.
Re-callings of
A long-ago renewal.
I think, I hope, that
It must be infinitely bigger
Than any category,
Any old story.
Maybe glimmers of
Fresh meaning
On yesterday’s darkness
And the suffering and
Dying of all yesterdays.
Maybe earthed, rebirthed
life for all the loved
World tomorrow and all
Tomorrows.
Perhaps.
For now I must
Empty my self
And wait.
Easter learning from cats
Just when we think we’ve got You sussed
as we wander the garden in sedate self-comfort
You leap out at us from
behind the least likely bushes
yelling, “Yo! Get a life!”
I’ve lived with cats like that
with mutual enjoyment,
both comfort and disruption,
each doing its own thing,
unowned, uncontrolled.
Another thing about cats:
they purr and rub
on laps I wouldn’t
be seen dead on.
Reflecting on Psalm 148
I sense that I am offering worship today in harmony with every particle of the universe, with all that has being, physical and spiritual.
I rejoice with sun and moon, with stars I can see and with vast galaxies where matter is created and uncreated beyond my vision.
I rejoice with all creatures of land and sea, seen and microscopic, above and beneath the surface.
I rejoice with the land: mountains, hills, valleys and plains, trees, all plant life giving food, shelter and beauty.
I rejoice with all water: each raindrop and snowflake falling as life for the land, all creeks, rivers and lakes, the vastness of the oceans.
I rejoice with all the peoples of the earth: every race and culture, city-dwellers and rural nomads, rich and poor, overworked and unemployed, children, youths and elders.
I sense this the joy chorused throughout the universe, as we offer it at the wellspring of grace.
Alleluia!
=============
Sacramental Connection with Everything?
|“All things by immortal power, |
|Near and Far |
|Hiddenly |
|To each other linked are, |
|That thou canst not stir a flower |
|Without troubling of a star.” |
|Francis Thomson |
Detached from the gathered life of the Church by limitations of my body and the layout of the local place of worship, I’m nevertheless happy, knowing that Word and Sacrament are celebrated in this little corner of the universe whether or not I’m physically involved. Spiritual detachment also seems to have a rightness in this twilight phase of life.
With time to spare, I’m moved to share a couple of earlier bits of my journey away from religiosity toward abandonment to the mystery of what I begin to understand as the all-inclusive Incarnation.
That word “sacrament” is ambiguous to some, hackle-raising to others. So let me share a small bit of my personal creed (written when I caught myself being far too ready to decry others’ stated beliefs than state the markers of my own faith):
I believe one needs to be aware of such subtle enemies of healthy, growing, searching, vulnerable faith as:
• Certainty: denial of doubt, deafness to challenge, clinging to texts out of context of the whole of scripture and of the time of their writing, without the benefit of modern critical scholarship.
• Superstition masquerading as faith.
• Trust that there are people, and institutional castes, with such special access to the wellspring of ultimate truth that one can rest easy as a passive, individualist consumer. (There is always need for leadership and mentoring in community of our own spirituality but clergy are not to be seen as being set over the lay faithful).
• Religious exclusiveness oblivious to truths presented by art, science, nature, other faith traditions.
[pic]
Okay, so here follow a couple of my growth experiences:
AUTUMN, 1951: A fifteen-year-old farm worker, I’m volunteered, along with a couple of old huntaway dogs, to help with the autumn muster on a neighbouring high country sheep station. Two A.M. breakfast, then slog on foot up in the moonlight with the mustering gang to reach starting positions by dawn. We’re to sweep the scattered sheep ahead of us across the mountain face. I, the greenhorn, am to take the top beat because all my dogs and I need do is keep in line and make a lot of noise. I arrive at my spur, sit puffing amid the snowgrass, look out upon the awakening of a wide, wide, wonderful world of mountains, farms, village, sparkling water, arching sky. I know that the creation is vast, a work in progress, indwelt by Holiness, earthed, natural not supernatural yet transcending all I’ve ever known. I know that all, even my ant-sized existence, is grace. Awe!
Next Sunday is Easter Day. I line up with my faithful Anglican family at the village church. I'm hoping that the liturgy (Book of Common Prayer 1662) will somehow connect in my mind and heart with the “mountain-top” experience of being overwhelmed, caught up in, vibrant, all-inclusive holiness. It doesn’t. The ministry of word and sacrament is competently delivered by a good man. Perhaps I’m not tuned to the right frequency. Perhaps my hope is unreasonable. But my experience that day seems to be of just another nice service in a church that tidily keeps within its place, a place defined not so much by deep theology and searching spirituality as by many generations of comfortable culture. The emphasis seems to be on doctrines suggesting the supernatural, not much about the mysteries, the wonders, the beauty of the earthed, natural world of land (including the human presence) beyond the stained glass.
+
ROLL FORWARD A QUARTER-CENTURY: I’ve learned a bit by not only head-learning but also listening to the land in hands-on work, as a Department of Agriculture livestock instructor and an agricultural journalist – well, learned that there’s always infinitely more to learn, especially in the light of scripture and theology. I’m still seeking the sense of deep connection I sought as a fifteen-year old at Easter. I’m a guest for a while of the then West German Government, invited to indulge my quest for understanding how the stories of land-inclusive human community may play out. One happy evening is spent over a bottle of Moselle in the Presbytery in Flintsbach, a picturesque village in the Inn Valley, Upper Bavaria. The parish priest (let’s call him Fr Willem) speaks good English because he had spent the latter years of World War 2 in a British POW camp. Fr Willem tells of how he and parishioners revived the traditional procession on the feast of Corpus Christi. After morning Mass that day, the Thursday after Trinity, they paraded the Blessed Sacrament to every store and workshop, home, cowshed, garden in the district. “Just to Catholic folk?” I ask. “No,” replies the good Father, “Everyone, everywhere.” You’d be fully vested with the Sacrament held high in an ornate monstrance” I suppose. “Oh, no, nothing so high and mighty,” says Fr Willem. “Just day clothes, ciborium and lidded chalice. We had a bit of a yarn with everyone we met, chatted about what the deep reality represented by the Sacrament might mean in the down-to-earth contexts of these folks’ lives, answered questions, shared a few words of prayer, and the Sacrament itself wherever accepted, and wandered on. It was great fun!”
+
This is where I’m tempted to toss out a lot of smart and patronising stuff from theological and liturgical tradition about what is really happening in Eucharistic worship. The fact is I have yet to find a neatly packaged answer to even the simple question I began struggling with in that mountain-top moment 68 years ago. When I turn to Jesus in contemplative prayer he’s inclined to laugh at me as he laughed with his mates as they struggled to get their heads around the feeding miracles; Do you not yet understand? (John 8.21) As with them, he leaves me to work things out without resort to cop-out dogma.
I guess I’ll still be asking questions as I drop off my twig. But one thing I know: that in which we take part in the sacramental worship is earthed, invoking Jesus then and there, Jesus here and now, radiating light and renewed life everywhere and in all time. This infinite Christ is equally the intimate Jesus, the host who calls us as friends to share his costly love, share his vibrant life, be refuelled to spread the love 24/7.
Jesus in life, Jesus in death, is revealed as the most earthed person ever; bearer of the greatest love for all this world – a world ”filled with the grandeur of God” as Hopkins put it, a world in which one inhales both spirit and matter in every breath. I fear some of my cultural upbringing as a Christian and an observer of the life of land suggested that, depending on context, I could choose: spiritual or material, natural or supernatural, No so! All or nothing!
Yes, I've been overwhelmed by wonder during church worship as well as out in the loved world, usually when my soul is stilled and the liturgy not too busy. I wish there was a great deal more listening silence in many faith communities. In spite of the fact that I’m very serious indeed about the Church ministry of the sacrament, I wonder whether an odd service of the Word should be inserted into the worship schedule of local churches where most people experience an unvaried diet of Eucharist. I wonder whether some of us are prey to a spirit of passive, individual consumerism, denying that what’s offered represents the entirety of God’s loved world beyond the stained glass. I wonder how to speak to the un-churchy majority of folk of the deeply, joyously disturbing reality of our faith without being greeted with rolling of eyes.
It’s not all about me. It’s not all about those of us who call ourselves Christian. As we offer bread to be broken, wine to be shared, ourselves soul and body, I imagine the Incarnate One offering back as sacrament the entire being of this little planet representing the vast universe in its beauty and its suffering, challenging us to live as grateful, healing celebrants where we are at every day.
Post-COVID recovery to what?
(May 30 2020)
[pic]
THIS ABANDONED COTTAGE SPEAKS TO ME OF THE ENORMOUS POST-COVID CHALLENGES AHEAD AND OF SOME OF THE SOCIAL HERITAGE IN OUR RECOVERY TOOLBOX.
It’s at Fruitlands, Central Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand, and was the home of Mary and Cornelius Murphy from the mid-1870s. They were my great-grandparents. Immigrants from Co. Clare and Tipperary, they raised eight children here, Cornelius taking whatever work he could find to augment their small-holding yield. Mary served as local midwife. My mother and her mother were both birthed into her hands. Sometimes called the “sod cottage,” the construction seems to have evolved bit by bit using whatever was at hand: sundried brick, stone, recycled timber and roofing iron.
Surely I’m not suggesting that this is what mid-21st Century life may typically look like. Of course not!
Yes, many in this blessed little country are already suffering loss of jobs and income resulting from the steps to protect us all from the COVID-19 pandemic, and clearly there’s worse to come in the next few years. Yet I reckon there’s to be opportunity to make it better in key areas. It helps my inherent optimism that our Government acted quickly and decisively when the threat first loomed and that the public, by and large, responded with commendable discipline and common sense even at sacrificial personal cost. Our country’s record of infection, control, deaths, care for the needy and so on is among the world’s best as we move down the Levels toward some semblance of normalcy.
Surely, I hoped, the proliferating rhetoric of “economic recovery” cannot be to either colonial or earlier conditions or to the assumptions seeded in erosion of commons and so on, spread from the West two or more centuries ago, taking more invasive root in the neo-liberalism of the last couple of generations? Surely the pause to reflect communally during lockdown must bare fruits of deep, wide justice for all human society and the life on Planet Earth several generations ahead?
So I was dismayed in a recent conversation with bright, critically informed representatives of the two generations younger than mine, to hear them assume that the movement will be inexorably back to individualistic, short-vision, materialism, money being the base reality, driven by greed; the inequality chasm widening further; the health of the planet still treated by the forces of power as distinct from the health of the human species, to be given more priority even if that faith-object “economic GDP growth” is seen to be moving us ever closer to an ecological tipping point.
Yes, my prejudice may as well be bared; I insist stubbornly that everyone, everything, each and the whole, is to be seen in the ultimate economy as of infinite value. I cannot abide dualistic talk of winners/losers, saved/unsaved, deserving/not so. I believe we have vocation, imagination and deep, compassionate wisdom enough to seed grassroots movements toward what may be seen centuries ahead as more sustainable, just, hopeful and happily egalitarian communities. Meanwhile the precursors of widespread vulnerability, adjustments to that frothy mix “The Economy,” are so deep-seated, so long-lasting, that few dare to project them objectively as far into the future as they have taken so long to achieve dominance as much of humankind remains in pandemic crisis or begins to take emergent steps.
I suggest that the long-term issues need to be addressed now, not later, in conversations beginning in and fermenting from local (neighbourhood, rural district) folk who each bring not an agenda but a listening heart. Such a conversation may begin casually between two, growing to no more than say nine individuals, each bringing concern for the future within and beyond the next generation or two, priority for the most vulnerable, questions rather than rehearsed answers. Diversity – of gender, age, faith tradition or none, degree of poverty whether material, of education, hope – will be vital but with no place for fixed belief in an exclusivist elite. The shape and direction of the local process must not be imposed or mentored “from above.” Nor should it adopt a defined goal. Participants should seek to share deeper understandings of local context – the story of the natural environment, of how the human presence changed through the generations and what it looks like now, of the good news and the bad in the addressing of justice. Actions – small, each perhaps unimpressive alone, even ridiculed – will ensue as the process ferments. Local conversations may connect with others but each should retain its own integrity. Wider resources to be referenced should include excellence in objective journalism (too often, it seems, subsumed by shallow froth and slanted op-ed pieces), the arts, faith narratives without pat institutional dogma, books (Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a very long time ago inspirational as I sought the meaning of being community in full context).
All this will be recognised as idealistic. Grassroots reality is always messy. Some local processes will simply peter out. Others may be absorbed into institutions (political, religious) that may seem to at least acquiesce to power sources feeding the underlying, threatening issues. Real life is surely not meant to be tidy! But shared, grassroots passion for deep hope is much more powerful than the powers-that-be can grasp. It’s about gentle subversion, the practice of living generously, vulnerably, in simple dignity in the face of the forces of me-first individualism, dependency on faith that the establishment mysteriously knows best.
I’m far too old to offer a credible prescription even if I had one but will offer a few more (admittedly gratuitous, even trite) principles:
• Let’s rebuild foundations of local community where every person, nice or not, rich or poor, is recognised, gifts valued, needs acknowledged. Let’s remember that the Latin roots of the word “community” mean a process not of abstraction but of actual sharing. So local means small. If wider society is to be leavened with hope and justice the process must be from the grassroots up, beginning with partnership, family, closest neighbours. Be sensitive to neighbours who appear to be invisible to, ignored by, the
• dominant community process.
• Let’s acknowledge that the future belongs to the most gifted young generations in all of history.
• Let’s know in our bones that a just future requires simpler lifestyles.
• Let’s not be miserable; rather, let’s always gratefully celebrate what’s good, beautiful, hopeful, naming the values immeasurable in mere monetary digits.
• Let’s balance the wonderful toolbox of digital technology with deep wisdom, a realistic mandate of hope extending at least two generations. We must be informed by science rather than gossip. Yet we must trust in the inherent goodness of people and in true (thus open, searching, deeply centred, earthed) faith.
• We inheritors of the game-changing industrial-technological revolution, the taking into elite ownership of what had been common resources and The Enlightenment in Europe, need to listen to the wisdom of more mythic, more grounded, cultures. In Aotearoa New Zealand that obviously begins with Tikanga (the cultural way of) Maori and Pasifika but the listening needs to be global.
• Let’s re-think what we mean by money. That doesn’t necessarily mean a lurch away from historic capitalism but away from the “economic growth” mantra of the neo-liberalism that fails to value whatever is not measured in, for example, the Gross Domestic Product. Whatever the merits claimed for faith in unfettered, un-earthed, market forces, we must accept that the so-called “trickle-down” effect has resulted in greater inequality not only of material measures but also of hope. Ultimately, this trend can surely end only in disaster for most.
• Let’s acknowledge that humankind belongs within the ecology of all life on Earth, but with the special gifts of information, imagination, power and spiritual mandate to care for the whole planet. We must re-learn the deep meaning of land.
• In both social justice and ecological healing, priority must be given to the most damaged and marginalized, often the hardest-to-love. (Yes, that may sometimes be via empowering for the greater good people and resources that may not at first be deemed among the poorest of the poor.)
• Let’s be patient. Whatever the developments in the last two generations for which we’ve cause to be grateful, the trends now proving non-sustainable are likely to take at least another two generations to correct.
• Boyd Wilson is a former agricultural journalist who turned to church ministry in full rural context. He lives in detached, somewhat contemplative retirement in Auckland, New Zealand.
Myths true and false
Myths are understood here as narratives, both ancient and modern, embodying popular ideas about natural or social phenomena. A myth never defines a deep truth in a verifiably objective manner, nor do its originators make such a claim. Nevertheless, myths (including, for example, the creation myths of all ancient cultural traditions including the Judeo-Christian and Maori) often convey insights into truths deeper than the scientifically verifiable. Yet in this age of confusing abstractions it is all too easy for people at the grassroots to passively accept a myth that conveys verifiable falsehood. This piece of writing describes only one myth said to be “true,” then discusses several popularly spread myths that may not stand up to critical scrutiny.
A MYTHIC TRUTH
In the deep core of each of us from conception grows
the seedling of the loveliest truth: life is wondrous.
We emerge breathing delight: embracing, wide-eyed,
immediate unquestioned openness to joy,
love, beauty, grace, wonder, relationships;
pain of course as the necessary obverse of delight,
death to be seen far off in the undreamed future
as the necessary precursor to vibrant new life.
But the new-born’s tiny universe is known to be
embraced, nourished, centred, in the wonder of now.
Thus, unlearned, we arrive ready-gifted with the
mythic vocabulary, the inner reality, of early childhood.
Those of us who reckon we’ve outgrown the life-myth
need to observe, truly listen to, small children
if we’re to be reborn in the spirit of truth.
Their wisdom is the wisdom of all the ages.
The true mystics, today and since the dawn of human
inquiry, are indeed childlike. They may be hard to find,
not at all famous in the eyes of the world and its institutions
because the invariable trait of those who go really deep,
beneath the smokescreens of the hoped-for but false self
and of trite religiosity, is joyous humility.
FALSE MYTH 1
Space-time is finite, linear, complete.
Nope.
There’s no outer boundary.
Yet this moment in this tiny spot in the universe is the
only one presented to you personally right now.
Read the ancient myths again and the latest in science.
Know that the creation is always in process,
that humankind is a very recent presence in the story of
life’s evolution, that everything, everyone, from sub-atomic
particle to galaxy, the life of topsoil and your life in
partnership-family-neighbourhood-community-society-
work-farm-garden is centred not in individual positions
but in the inner content of relationships.
Know too that “heaven” is not just for “later.”
FALSE MYTH 2
Gifted faith among us humans is to do with an all-powerful,
supernatural, remote being playing favourites
(mainly favouring humankind),
contactable when we feel like it,
occasionally intervening from “out there.”
Nope.
How about vulnerable self-giving love: natural, down-to-earth,
here and now, poured out indiscriminately for all, to be
encountered in all that is natural including all people,
enjoying and caring for all life, graciously inviting our
responsive celebration and sharing, individually and together,
in the same work of the presence of love incarnate in the world?
FALSE MYTH 3
We humans are supernaturally endowed with unique,
elite status in the universe, each of us having an individual value
in a bell-curve of worth, whether allotted from “on high”
or by trickling down to passive consumers from powers here below.
Nope.
Those who seek deep truth using the eye of the soul via
contemplation, whether in a religious tradition
(Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, shamanist, whatever)
or a superficially secular tool like modern mindfulness,
are rendered humble by that truth, knowing the love at the
beginning and end of everything is for each intimately and
all unconditionally.
True mystics rubbish the notion that the leaders
and scholars of at least some religious institutions have,
as it were, supernatural hotlines to the throne of grace
so the rest of us think we can leave the deep stuff to them.
As for elite species status, look and listen to what’s happening
in the vast ecologies of topsoil, forest floor, ocean depth,
bee populations!
Our gifts of freedom, consciousness, language,
are not for our gratification but for sharing and caring
in grateful works of healing, nurture and justice for all people,
indeed the creation. “The environment” is not there mainly for us
to use and admire. It has its own integrity whether our species
is there or not. It’s not “ours” but we are invited to play a special
role as fellow-species within it, acknowledging our duty of care.
FALSE MYTH 4
The global behemoth known as The Market can be trusted
to channel growth of sustainable well-being with justice for all, both
the human species and the entire biosphere, through future centuries.
Nope
Let’s begin by asking who and what are the drivers of
the mysterious creature called The Economy in the media.
Who is accountable? To whom? Personally and locally, as
experienced by all the people who work, consume, create,
husband resources, nurture family life, under its power?
Are values like health, justice and long vision into future
generations assigned more preciousness than
drivers of fear and greed?
To what extent has monetarism parted company with the
realities of the planet, the quality of all its life, including the
most vulnerable of our species, now and
through the centuries ahead?
Is this thing “The Economy” more real, more earthed,
than a mega-abstraction?
Why the widening inequality gap? Why is excessive gross
consumption encouraged daily by the marketers?
Why is net per-capital debt (household, state, local businesses)
so high? Such questioning will confirm that some influential
leaders, corporations, financiers, politicians and other players
indeed act with reasonable ethics given their unavoidable
constraints. But surely it’s important to the inheritance
of human generations far into the future, indeed to the health
of the whole planet, that such questions are asked,
and the answers debated, at the grassroots of society.
FALSE MYTH 5
Science can diagnose all that’s wrong in the
world now and all that threatens life’s fullness in future
generations, offering the seeds of remedies for development
by the wonder-workers of technology.
Nope
Science in a historically short recent time has achieved
and continues to achieve wondrous understandings of
“life, the universe and everything.”
As every important piece of research is completed,
more new theories, more questions, more mysteries emerge.
I suggest that there are points at the leading edge of research
calling for meetings of minds and souls between scientists and
true mystics. Mysticism, as understood here, addresses the
really real, the natural world, not supernaturalism.
That, problematic as it is, raises one
caveat to the idea that science merits all-encompassing faith.
A second is raised by posing many of the questions raised
about faith in “The Market.”
To what extent does the funding of science compromise its
integrity as seeker after unbiased truth?
The same question is more obviously answered in respect
to technology.
There’s need for critically informed public forums on this;
a challenge to education, to free journalism and to religion.
Creed
Challenged to clarify a bottom line of my Christian belief rather than fence-sitting lists of what I doubt or deny, I came up with this document. It will always be a work in progress.
A personal creed
(Emphasizing freedom and avoiding the dangers in usage of the word “God.”)
I believe that in the beginning, before the Big Bang and in the vastness of all the ensuing universe, there was that which one recognizes as Holiness, Love.
I believe all that is known and yet-to-be known is always evolving, observed and celebrated by this graciously creative consciousness that transcends and intimately pervades all. I believe an essential consequence of Love is freedom to become. This is perhaps the costly, vulnerable freedom of the sort gifted by loving parents as their children venture from home. The creative care of the freedom-giver is discerned in beauty, in the wonders of the universe, in the miracle of life, in what it means to be human, in acts of grace in love for each and all, in hope, in both grief and joy, in true justice.
I believe that the Ultimate Reality one discerns in Love, Grace, is universal. Thus, each atom of matter, each life, is infinitely, unconditionally loved; no exclusions, no hierarchies of value in a consciousness embracing yet infinitely exceeding all earthly streams of consciousness, human and not.
Control and intervention by the One would limit the beloveds’ gifted capacity to grow toward mature fullness. Creation, from sub-atomic particles to galaxies, person to entire ecology, can be seen as an infinite web of free relationships, all in process.
I imagine the relational Triune Love-maker dancing, sometimes sharing surprised delight, sometimes in sadness, always patiently watching and listening as a consciousness deeply aware of the most intimate and the most infinite relationship processes as creation happens in the ambiance of the love that does not impose.
In consequence of love-gifted freedom there must be a wide range of possibilities within each occasion of creation, from simplest organisms to cosmos. Whatever the objective data of individual positions in creation, there is always mystery in the inner content of relationships. Creation becomes the primary sacrament of the ultimate reality of the Threefold One when any relational process is seen to reflect the simple beauty of costly love. Reality is natural, not primarily supernatural.
I believe humankind to belong within the ecology of all life with specially gifted capacity, freedom and calling to imagine, to choose to care within the whole being of this planet, celebrating beauty, seeking renewal by way of forgiveness not only for self but also for all, practising wholeness, always drawing from the infinite aquifer of the Creator’s love, always grateful.
I believe that this calling involves the practice of grace in inclusive community, involving costly justice, vulnerability and servant-hood in responsive listening to the voice of the One.
I believe that this calling is discerned through the story of Jesus. The story of the vulnerably human Jesus (putting aside for a moment supernatural elements of the received story to focus on his natural, earthed humanity) for me is a window into the ultimate reality approached, however tentatively in awe, as the relational Trinity. Jesus supremely practised the responsive listening of the heart. He journeyed in earthed, humble, vulnerable, radical freedom, channelling indiscriminate wholeness by way of gracious love. He was so free, so deeply grounded in his humanity, that the powers of short-sighted, narrow-vision elitism and religiosity sought to put an end to him in the most lonely and shameful suffering and death. Jesus was as naturally dead as he had so naturally lived. Yet his friends and countless others, then and now, experienced and experience in this natural world his transfigured life as the Christ: personal, relational, grace and love unbounded. His story is for me the window upon ultimate truth, the eternal Word from the beginning, prevailing despite such powers as ridicule and the sort of cheap religious practice that gives to the cause of the One known as love a mere comfortable nod.
My life is centred in the current life of Jesus Christ who patiently calls me daily back to faith lived radically, subversively, as witness to the truth that is more disturbing, more hopeful, than all else. I believe that I am unconditionally loved as I am in a true, humble self, seen clearly by the Holy One despite my failings and confusions, the false self I am tempted to try vainly to hide behind.
I confess that my cultural conditioning leaves echoes of belief in a hierarchy of value, thus I need often to be reminded that nothing, no one, is valued more or less than all others in the whole.
I believe that the One calls and gifts people to live out the faith of Christ in the here-and-now world, drawing inspiration and energy in worship, in praying the Scriptures, always open to fresh understandings, recognizing and listening to the Incarnate Presence in the world, identifying radically and at much cost with calls to be actively with the poor and marginalized in human society and to have a care for all the life of Planet Earth through future centuries.
I believe in that Church dreamed in the heart of the One: unified, holy, all-embracing, sent out into the world to witness in active works of love, justice, long and all-embrscing vision. Accepting that today’s fragmented, confused, compromised Christian institutions fall far short of the divine dream, I believe I must stand with others in response to the One who, in Jesus, insists disturbingly that renewal by way of reconciliation is to begin with humble doubters like me. With all our failings, it is within these processes of communal faith peopled by humble listeners that the renewing way of Christ is to be poured out into all the world.
I believe other traditions of faith follow valid spiritual pathways from roots of deep truth and that all should be in respectful conversation. I believe that the present event I name as the mystical Incarnation of Christ in the world is robust enough to be fully inclusive, unlimited by presumption and dogma. I believe that all people of faith are called to stand before the throne of grace humbly representing all humanity; indeed, all life. I believe that all humankind is called at this moment in the planet’s history to give absolute priority to the healing of the wounds inflicted by our species on Earth, and to injustice within our species, while there is still time to offer real hope to the life of future centuries. I believe that the inclusive Incarnation offers the ground of the needed vision.
I believe one needs to be aware of such subtle enemies of healthy, growing, searching, vulnerable faith as:
• Certainty: denial of doubt, deafness to challenge, clinging to texts out of context of the whole of scripture and of the time of their writing, without the benefit of modern critical scholarship.
• Superstition masquerading as faith.
• Trust that there are people, and institutional castes, with such special access to the wellspring of ultimate truth that one can rest easy as a passive, individualist consumer. (There is always need for leadership and mentoring in community of our own spirituality but cleric are not to be seen as being set over the lay faithful).
• Religious exclusiveness oblivious to truths presented by art, science, nature, other faith traditions.
I believe that my prayer cannot draw me closer to the Holy One, or draw the Holy One closer to me, for, in the Incarnation, the Holy One is already closer to me than I am to myself; and if that is so then the Holy One is equally close in love to everyone and everything else. For me, prayer begins with silent awe in approaching the beauty of holiness. Next comes unloading of whatever I, personally and as a representative of a fallen-short world, must confess. Third is the offering of thanks for all things. All this is within the silence of the listening heart in openness to deep, mutual connection beyond mere words and images. Intercession is offered but not as requests for supernatural intervention. When my ordinary daily living does not reflect such prayer, seeking and finding the One known in love in everything, everyone, then I fall short, yet am constantly recalled by the One known in grace.
I believe that nature and the story of Jesus show life’s renewal to be always by way of death. I believe the being of holiness is to be discerned and responded to in this natural world. I respect those who major on supernatural, unearthed propositions but these are not essential to my faith today. I believe, that, ready or not, I will die, leaving slender threads of the loves in my life, remembered by a few for a while but soon forgotten, yet woven into the vast, lengthening fabric of loved life on earth. However hesitant and questioning, I hope to continue following the way of Christ, listening to the Spirit of truth, giving all worth to the One in whom every fragment of this world has its being from the beginning. I believe that life on Earth and the planet itself will come to an end but the all-embracing love of the One known as holiness will continue forever, transcending our limited understanding of space-time.
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