Journal #6: Spirituality and the Planetary Crisis

 (Continuation of the "Journal" series: July, 1993)

     Religious spirituality does have an irreplaceable role to play in the transformation of Western
civilization to a more biosphere-centred consciousness. It is possible, though by no means obvious, that religion itself, religious institutions, could play a positive role....
     It may be true to say that we need to find a whole different rleigious foundation. Perhaps, however, as Bernard Lonergan said,  this means that there is need for a "change of horizon." All the traditional elements might still be there afterwards but in an entirely different setting of inter-relationships.
     Horizon changes usually come about when some new but unintelligible element is serious added to a consistent pictukre. Because it cannot be integrated into the old order, the whole begins to come apart, come to chaos. Out of that chaos comes a new ordeer. One of the new elements in the picture of the latter part of this (20th) century is that of the "finite planet."  Taking seriously the finite character of our planet - which we have yet to do -  makes the whole consumer enterprise collapse. It also puts some serious questions to our Christian tradition.
     While belief that God created the universe, that God cares for it, that God is revealed in all the universe are important elements of our Christian tradition. But, I am not so sure that the specific finite character of our planet in its capacity to sustain human life had ever been addressed. (At most we can say that we were directed to care for the earth.)  ....

Hildegard of Bingen Liber Divinorum Operum

     Hugh of St. Victor, in the 13th century, tried to find the relationship between the microcosm of the human and the macrocosm of the universe. The search for an integrating relationship with the earth was part of the journey of St. Francis of Assisi. Perhaps we could learn something from those ventures.
     Certainly we need to acknolwedge the serious contribution of modern science, of physics, chemistry and biology, to a reformulation of the questions. What is important in the questions raised by both religious spirituality and science today ultimately are the subjects. It is not science that will ultimately pose the questions or find the answers but rather subjects: the scientists. Scientists and theologians can begin asking the same questions and finding common ground, not just because of what theology and science are but rather, among most importantly, because they are both subjects and, as such, can ask both theological and scientific questions.
     The gift of modern science has been its extraordinarily creative and effective method. The problem with the development of science is that sometimes it has thought it could provide all the answers to all the questions including the theological questions. (Even art, theatre, literature have been relegated at times to a purely private "aesthetic" experience that has no public relevance. We forget that the experience of art is public and has very public implications.) .... Some of the worst horrors of our century are due to the conflusion (between the various methods by which a question can be addressed by the subject who poses it. Economics is an example. It attempts to address a question about  experiential and political relationships with methodological tools of mathematical science.)
  

HOPE:Journal #5

Journal #5

(From a journal I kept: July, 1993)

Hope and despair, yuumei, deviant art

    Our hope has deep roots that go far into our pre-reflective consciousness. Hope does not depend on Meaning in Life, without hope, we simply give up and die.
the conditions we live in or even on the prospects for change or improvement. Sometimes people continue to hope even when there is precious little else to give any satisfaction in their life, when they are living in squalor and when the prospects for the satisfaction of even basic needs are remote. Yet they continue to get up each day and go about their labours. Sometimes their lives are reduced to repeating basic routines of survival, almost automatically. And they do it. It would seem that, at this point, there is nothing else to sustain them but a kind of automatic hope that is implicit in their survival rituals. I am not arguing that this is any kind of ideal or model hope. I am only saying that, when all else is stripped away, we can see how deeply hope is rooted in us and how it forms a kind of underpinning for everything else that makes up a full and complete life.  Victor Frankl was  a prisoner in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. He survived; many did not. In Meaning in Life, He observes that without hope, people simply give up and die.
    Hope is obviously very closely linked to the instinct for survival, the life principle From an educational point of view, touching the hope and the dreams of people is a powerful motivational force. Advertisers know this well and as educators we need to remember.

Journal #4: Women in the workplace

2012 - Delegation to Malarctic gold mine

Part of the consumer society is based on a patriarchal history. there is a connection between consumerism and traditional male exercise of power. There is a connection between domestic violence as an exercise of male (patriarchal) power and consumerism as an exercise of that same model of power. The consumer society is competitive, aggressive and hierarchical (rooted in status and dominance). Women bring another experience of work and its connection with life and social relationships. Not all women, not always but, there is another model implicit (and often explicit) in women's experience.

Journal #3: The World of the Indio

 (Continuation of the Journal begun in previous entries. The text dates from the early 1990s.)

Wall in Cuzco - 12 angle stone

 I got my hands on José María Arguedas' novel Los Rios Profundos, 1973 .(His only novel translated and published in English: The Deep Rivers.) How many times have I read it?  Yet it always drives me back into a re-examination of my soul. Young Ernesto sees the world through the "magincal" eyes of a child and of his native culture. He, like Arguedas himself , is a bridge between Western and Aboriginal cultures. (He was an anthropologist by formation, son of a lawyer but essential raised by a Quechua family while his father travelled.) Everything is alive and speaks of the stories of the people, especially the walls of Cuzco and their "living stones" - puk-tik: "stones of boiling blood." The Maria Angela of the Cathedral rings out its sad tones because it carries the blood of the Indians. The magical zumbayllu (a wooden top that hums as its spins) that sends out its cry and can be heard by his father as a voice of pleading from a small child across the valleys and mountains. These may be the imaginings of a child but they touch deep chords of  Quechua cosmology and provoke profound insights into the reality of our place in the universe. For Ernesto, all is alive, all speaks, all has a stgory to tell, all responds to the pain of the "indio." 

Journal #2: Sustainability

 (Continuation of the Journal begun in the previous entry. The text dates from the early 1990s.)

World March of Women 2015 - Quebec

    When I was born World War II raged. At the end there was a promise of a new age of prosperity and peace through technology and science. And through the fifties and then the sixties, it seemd to deliver. Lester Pearson (then Prime Minister of Canada) offered "Atoms for Peace." Among the very first books I ever read in the local library was a simple explanation of atomic theory. I learned how reactors worked. I became fascinated with science. The green revolution promised prosperity for poor countries. The United nations, which I visited when I was 15, promised an end to war between Nations. Kennedy came along, with Martin Lucher King, and we dreamed of racial equality (in the U.S.A.). And then ... it began to unravel. And we began to recognize the limiations and not only the limitation but we began to take stock of the dimensions of resistance (from privileged interests, from the transnationals, from governments and the media, from the military, even from the rigid attitudes of the poor who had bought the dream - and from the Church. It was not going to be either easy or quick. The entire structure had to be dismantled and reconstructed. Maybe we'd never see more than some signs of utopia in our own lifetime.   ...
     The struggle for a sustainable way of living, a sustainable economy and politics involves a careful mapping out of a new way of understanding fundamental human ventures. It means a new way of looking at science and technology, of the secular and the rleigious. It is a question of revisioning, but it is also a quesstion of evoling a strategy of moving from where we are now. ...
     Chicken Little cried, "The heavens are falling, the heavens are falling." And indeed they are. The world will end. I have seen the world end several times in my life. ... But we learn to survive the crises and the deaths. Each provides a challenge and also an opportunity.

Journal #1: State of the Planet

Quebec lake

Over the years I have done a lot of writing. Too much perhaps. Anyway, in the early 1990s I took a program called "Global Transformation Studies" at OISE (Toronto). One course required a journal. Over the next weeks, I will post a few excerpts from there. Here is the first:

My initial reaction to rereading the "state of the planet" is one of disbelief. It can't really be all that bad. After all, twenty years ago, the scientists were telling us that the worlds" resources would be exhausted by the end of the century. (Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlick, Ark II,W.H. Freeman & Co, 1974). et we seem to be going on with "business as usual." Then I listen to a CBC news report a couple of days ago: the last virgin forest in North America is opened to logging, the entire fishing industry of Newsfoundland (Newfoundland!!) has to be dimantled, there is a hold over Antarctica as big as the U.S.A. All in one news report.
The planet may be able to regenerate from our destructiveness - though there is no assurance of that. The critical issue for us as humans, is that we may not survive the process! When I read about how the CFC's operate in the stratosphere, it is frightening. We don't really know what we have unleashed!
...
Can we let go of the addiction to privilege? Can the Third World free itself from the encroaching enslavement to the same dream? Can we return to an earlier vision of our place in the scheme of things? - which is never really just a return but a reinventing of the old in an entirely new and transformed setting.   (to be continued...)

World Forum on Theology and Liberation

At the same time as the World Social Forum takes place in Montreal, a World Forum on Theology and Liberation will take place in Montreal from August 8-13. This second Forum will integrate itself into the World Social Forum as has happened in several recent occasions. About 300 participants are expected. From August 10-12 the Theology and Liberation activities will take place within the programming of the World Social Forum and will be available to all. An important part of this forum will be devoted to Indigenous people and to dialogue among spiritual traditions.