Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest," Part 2

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

__________________________

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

__________________________

A short bulletin from Bill McKibben on the old culture and the new

I've put together below some brief excerpts from Bill McKibben's current work, the first from his book Deep Economy (2008), a critique of the concept of economic growth and persuasive case for a new economic model based upon sustainable local economies. The second - in a sense the expression of need to which Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest offers at least an interim response - is drawn from an essay McKibben contributed to the current issue of Yes Magazine. Bill McKibben teaches at Middlebury College and is a much admired journalist whose writing focuses primarily upon environmental issues. One of his current movement-building projects, attentive particularly to global warming, is described at 1sky.org. He has also suggested need for a vision of generosity bearing similarity to the Marshall Plan concept of Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and intriguingly, to the Christopher Reynolds Foundation's early focus on the US and China.

________________________

"The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy…In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time… [T]he new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.”

...............

"We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement—as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the automakers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change."

..............

"The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

"Which leaves us with the one piece of undeniably good news: we were built for community. Everything we know about human beings, from the state of our immune systems to the state of our psyches, testifies to our desire for real connection of just the kind that an advanced consumer society makes so difficult. We need that kind of community to slow down the environmental changes coming at us, and we need that kind of community to survive the changes we can’t prevent. And we need that kind of community because it’s what makes us fully human.

"This is our final exam, and so far we’re failing. But we don’t have to put our pencils down quite yet. We’ll see."

Pause for a political imperative

I want to pause in my review of Paul Hawken's book on environmental and social justice to note that the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania occurred yesterday with a solid victory for Hillary Clinton, but hardly the margin of victory that would have altered the likelihood that Barack Obama is moving toward nomination and a battle for the presidency with John McCain.

Still, with every day that the two Democrats undermine each other, revealing weaknesses in each other's plausibility as standard bearer, a McCain victory in November becomes more likely.

As the Times lead editorial put it this morning, "The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it." Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee said last night, “This is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen. They are going to just keep standing there and pounding each other and bloodying each other, and no one is winning. It underlines the need to find some way to bring this to conclusion.” The Times added, "At a time when the Democratic Party would dearly like to turn its attention to Mr. McCain, it now faces continued damage to the images of both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama."

So how could the Democratic party turn its attention to McCain, the catastrophically bloody and unwinnable war in Iraq and the dire need for economic and environmental turnabout at home? 

John Edwards or Al Gore or a significant number of still undecided superdelegates could make a difference if they endorsed Obama. But there is opportunity in another idea. Consider: if Obama now makes the turn that is publicly anticipated later--in May or June or July when it may or may not be too late. Preempt the high ground, declare the need, in the country's best interests, that starting now he will turn from damaging conflict with Clinton and focus on confronting the awful legacy of the Bush administration and the fact that a McCain presidency will be if possible more catastrophic.

Obama cannot forego the need to defend himself if Clinton continues her increasingly shrill and and vacuous attacks. But he can put the burden of such attacks squarely on Clinton, publicly and prominently declare the preeminent necessity to turn to Bush and McCain, to Iraq and the economy, and then do it, and do it now, in a series of highly publicized addresses.

Sabbath 2 - Reflections on a Parable

The following reflections and retelling - reimagining - of a familiar story are drawn from one of a series of talks shared in the winter and spring of 2007 with staff and patients at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital, retreat center and learning community in Vikersund, Norway.

I discovered Modum Bad in 2005, and returned for a second extended time as a consultant in February 2007. Of course I've learned more than I've taught. My first impressions of Modum Bad, gathered after a first leisurely visit in 2005, are gathered in an informal essay on Modum Bad's website. I am revising and extending that essay for publication later in 2007, Modum Bad's 50th anniversary year -  in fact,  its 150th anniversary year, as it began as a healing spa in 1857. Modum Bad means The Baths at Modum, gathered around St. Olavs Kilde, St. Olav's Spring. My own retelling of Jesus's parable owes a great deal to the translation and commentary of Stephen Mitchell in his Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2001).

The story I retell here is the last and longest of three parables of Jesus recounted in Luke's gospel. The thread they share is that of losing and finding and rejoicing in the renewal or life-redeeming experience. It is a tale of critical turning in life's journey. The theme of turning – a cycle of loss, of tender, halting discovery, and of redemption – is a central one in the history of the human psyche and soul, in the generations that gave us birth, in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth.

[continued]

                                                                            

Reflections on Soul: Loss and Redemption

More than a decade ago, Thomas Moore suggested that the greatest malady of our time was neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul: loss of wisdom about it, loss of interest in it. "When soul is neglected," he wrote, "it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning."

While Moore (in Care of the Soul) warns against efforts at precise definition, he associates the word soul with recognition of depth and genuineness or authenticity in our lives. As such it is no less present or absent in our ordinary daily rounds--work and love, play, active and contemplative times--than it is in rare moments of dramatic crisis, insight or vision. He argues, I think persuasively but less capaciously than is justified, that the instrument of soul is imagination. That is so if we understand imagination to include experience of all of our sensory, emotional and intuitive faculties, including the enormous range of bodily sensations in movement and at rest.

But, with that caveat, imagination is a useful word, because it conveys the important sense that soul is not merely more or less present or absent in our lives, but that there are crafts available for its cultivation, renewal and redemption. One further limitation of the term, however, is that it encourages us to conceive of soul as an exclusively human phenomenon. More classical notions of soul acknowledge that it is present in all animate creatures; indeed, it may be most usefully understood as the very principle of animation or vitality, and care of the soul as the craft of reanimation. Anima mundi, Moore reminds us, refers not to some abstract concept of  world soul or organizing divinity, but to "the soul in each thing," and our capacity truly to tend with lingering and loving attention.

Paradoxically, as spiritual traditions have commonly recognized, soul is more accessible, more nourished, when we are simply attentive and mindful, rather than when we deliberately seek. One of the most beautiful expressions is found in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (here in my own adaptation from several versions; I don't speak or read or write Chinese, but this book has been a treasured companion.)

Of old, he who was well versed in the way
was subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
and too profound to be known.
Just because he is unknowable,
The best one can do is describe him.

His alertness was as that of one crossing
        a river in winter.
His caution was as that of one who must meet danger on every side.
His gravity was as that of a guest.
He was fluid as melting ice,
simple as uncarved wood,
open as a valley.
inscrutable as murky water.

Who can be muddy and yet, settling,
        slowly  become limpid?
Who can be at rest
till the right action arises by itself?

He who preserves this way
does not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
he is present, and can welcome all things.

When we think of ways of caring for soul, tradition often suggests, rightly, that we think of the liturgies,  the music and other practices of our religious traditions, including prayer and meditation. For all of us, though--and especially for those who have lost effective connection with those traditions, it is worth recalling that soul makes no hard and fast division between sacred and secular. Reckonings time and again recognizes poetry as a deep well of imagining, reimagining, evoking soul.

One of the oldest and most treasured ways of gaining access to soul is through the ancient craft of storytelling. Many traditional tales, if written--or preferably spoken, sung or enacted--by a genuine artist, bring soul to life in ways that are both moving and profound. A contemporary example is the work of an old friend, Gioia Timpanelli, who, in her writing and (best) in the full presence of her telling before an evening fire, breathes new life into old tales in ways that reveal both the depth of their familiarity and their ineluctable mystery.

In her novella, Rusina, Not Quite in Love, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable in Sicilian guise, she weaves a tapestry of mutual awakening, that of the young woman Rusina and that of the reclusive Master Gardener, Sebastian, whom Rusina initially knows as both gentle and "the ugliest man I had ever seen." The story, of course, is that of their coming to know each other more deeply, and particularly that of Rusina's awakening, through kindness, care and love, to Sebastian's true nature. At story's end, when they are talking, Sebastian says, "My favorite part of the story, Rusina, is when you take my hand and look into my eyes and see me." Rusina replies, "As always, mine, Sebastian, is now when you will say for the first time and again, 'This has happened not because we have loved beauty but because it has loved us.'" (Gioia Timpanelli, Sometimes the Soul, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998)

Care of the soul, writes Moore, "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel."

I spent my professional life (as well as much of my childhood and adolescence) in schools, colleges and universities, which--particularly as one moves from high school to college and on to graduate study--pay too little attention to recognizing and developing the crafts of soul. The very pace and fragmentation of the school day, as well as preoccupation with information, cognition and skill, have more to do with socialization and functionality in the marketplace than with human development. Intellect and soul are not antithetical; at best, they complement and nourish each other. When they are out of balance, when intellectual accomplishment and physical prowess are rewarded in service to a narrow or superficial sense of vocation, soulfulness--a more capacious identity--withers.

Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
of My identity.

        - Emily Dickinson

_________________________________________

 

Turning III: Turning and Following

Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.

When I was eleven years old I had a paper route, a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.

The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.

In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.

I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.

But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before Satan snuck in to my heart and revealed to me the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak with impunity. Everybody else who tried would be instantly fried to a crisp.

I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.

It’s been a long time—fifty-six years, in fact—since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, for disbelief, for interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.
Now that I think of it, fifty-six years isn’t very long. (It may seem longer to some of you than to others.) I can talk more, and more articulately, about my confusion now than I could then. My grammar is both better and worse. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m as often as not inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.

When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.

There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.

“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]