Monthly Archives: April 2020

“Water the earth with the tears of your joy”: An Earth Day Reflection

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Marilyn in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Felton, CA, 2016 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

–– Richard Powers, The Overstory

 

Toward the end of the last century, I sat in a circle of religious environmentalists in a California wilderness. Each of us wore a mask we had made to represent a species or element of the nonhuman world: bear, eagle, butterfly, elephant, whale, mountain, river, redwood, maple leaf, wind, ocean, wetland, desert––some part of Creation which had “chosen” us to speak for them in a Council of All Beings.[i]

We began by describing our particular existences, what it was like to be whatever we were.  Then we shared our worries and our sorrows over the harm being inflicted upon us by the human race. At some point, two volunteers removed their masks, resuming their human identity in order to receive the complaints of their fellow creatures––complaints so often unheard or ignored.

Listen. There’s something you need to hear.
If your mind were only a slightly greener thing,
we’d drown you in meaning. [ii]

The Council spoke its anger as well as its hurt. Afterward, participants in the exercise seemed both surprised and shaken by the surges of fierce emotion in such a playful exercise. It was a foretaste of the Last Judgment: humanity has a lot to answer for. But judgment was not the last word. Before the Council adjourned, each of its nonhuman members was asked to give the humans one of its own attributes to assist them in the healing of a wounded Creation. The mountain gave patience. The butterfly, transformation. The bear, strength. The river, ceaseless flow. The leaf: letting go. Renewed by such generous wisdom, we departed in peace.

On the 50th annual celebration of Earth Day, despite decades of progress in both awareness and behavior, the wellbeing of “all creatures great and small” remains under grave threat. Climate change, mass extinctions, degradations of air, water and soil, destruction of habitats, deforestation, deregulation. . . who can count the ways? And the incapacity of our political and economic systems to respond justly, rapidly, or effectively is disheartening at best, fatal at worst.

In the United States, we can certainly point to the unfettered greed, stupidity, and maliciousness in White House and Senate as deplorable accelerants of environmental conflagration, but the problem goes deeper than the heartless actions of particular villains. Our entire culture has an attitude problem. Or rather, we have lost track of the narrative. We have forgotten what kind of story we are in.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world and all who dwell therein. (Psalm 24:1)

Who believes this anymore? Fewer and fewer. And even the faithful among us find ourselves deeply embedded in the systems and premises of secularity, where nature is not divine creation or sacred web, but an exploitable resource, valued primarily for the usefulness it provides or the pleasure it gives. Drained of its inherent sacredness, it no longer commands reverence. Its value is entirely contingent on human needs and desires.

Erazim Kohák, Czech philosopher and environmentalist, frames this epistemic crisis in the starkest terms:

“If there is no God, then nature is not a creation, lovingly crafted and evolved with purpose and value by its Creator. It can only be a cosmic accident, dead matter contingently propelled by blind force, ordered by efficient causality. In such a context, a moral subject, living his life in terms of value and purpose, would indeed be an anomaly, precariously rising above it in a moment of Promethean defiance only to sink again into the absurdity from which he rose. If God were dead, so would nature be––and humans could be no more than embattled strangers, doomed to defeat, as we have largely convinced ourselves we in fact are.” [iii]

Fifty years ago, the first Earth Day initiated an impressive legacy of awareness and action on behalf of the earth and all that is in it. And I pray that today will be a time of renewal and rededication to the immense labor of protecting, preserving and nurturing the natural world. But our work must not be limited to the scientific, the political and the economic. It must also, I believe, include the spiritual––the recovery of the Sacred in our collective awareness.

Christian ethicist Richard L. Fern has written, “the experience of living in an ‘enchanted world,’ a place of belonging where personal and communal destinies matter all the way down, depends, not surprisingly, on the adoption of a religious point of view.”[iv] But what would that look like? And how might we get there?

I have no idea. Maybe we begin by entering a forest, or sitting by a lake, becoming still enough to listen, letting our mind become “a slightly greener thing.” Perhaps then the earth may whisper its forgotten secret.

Thrush song, stream song, holy love
That flows through earthly forms and folds,
The song of Heaven’s Sabbath fleshed
In throat and ear, in stream and stone,
A grace living here as we live . . .

–– Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths, 1982––IV”

May each of us, in our own unique way, realize the grace of belonging to the “holy love that flows through earthly forms.” And may our collective awareness likewise awaken to the mystery of the world. And then . . . ?

In The Brothers Karamozov, the young monk Alyosha, suddenly filled with grace after a spiritual crisis, falls prostrate on the bare earth to kiss it, just as the Orthodox do reverence to holy icons. This scene has raised theological eyebrows, but Rowan Williams interprets Alyosha’s dramatic gesture to mean that “the earth is another defaced icon, whose inner and nonnegotiable dignity is secured only when its relation to the creator is acknowledged.”[v] In other words, when the earth is understood as a created reality, a material expression of divine intention and divine love, it becomes, like an icon, a window into the eternal reality in which it lives and moves and has its being. Dostoevky’s description[vi] of Alyosha’s revelation is one of literature’s most ecstatic moments:

The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars. . . Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth.

He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears. . . ,” rang in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and “he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.” It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, “touching other worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything. . .

Comet Falls, Mount Rainier National Park, July 2005 (Photo by Jim Friedrich/Karen Haig)

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The divine power that sustains the universe has been described as an immeasurable flow or fountain of energy, and in celebration of Earth Day’s semicentennial, I offer this video pairing of Charles-Marie Widor’s exuberant Toccata for organ, played by Paul Roy, with footage of three western rivers I shot over the last two summers. May it be an icon of the divine energeia, pouring ceaselessly through the life of the world.

 

 

 

[i] The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual developed by Joanna Macy. https://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Joanna%20Macy.htm

[ii] Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 4. See epigraph above. Powers’ extraordinary novel takes the reader into a new way of seeing the natural world and one’s own place in it.

[iii] Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 1984, p. 5), cited in Richard L. Fern, Nature, God and Humanity: Envisioning an Ethics of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 120. Kohák died at 86 on Feb. 8, 2020.

[iv] Fern, 121.

[v] Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008), 225.

[vi] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Richard Pever & Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 362.

Lost at Sea: Retelling the Flood Story in a Pandemic

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Row on, row on, another day
May shine with brighter light.
Ply, ply the oars, and pull away,
There’s dawn beyond the night.

–– Traditional sea shanty

 

At the Easter Vigil, we light a fire in the dark and tell our sacred stories. One of them is the saga of the Flood from the Book of Genesis. Tonight, as we stream the Vigil liturgy from our living room for our local parish, this is how it wants to be told. 

When we wonder about things, we tell stories.  One of our oldest stories describes a great flood that sweeps away everything in the world until there is nothing left but an endless sea. Some people say it’s a story about God getting fed up with the world’s violence and greed and wanting to start over. Others say the story is about everything being thrown out of balance by human sin––the harmonies break down, and God’s beautiful creation is swallowed up by chaos.

But tonight, when a new kind of flood is sweeping across the earth, washing away the world we know, maybe the story needs to be about the ark. We’re all in this boat together, hoping and praying we can survive the raging sea until the storms are over and we can anchor in some safe and peaceful harbor.

That’s where we are now, in the middle of the story––cooped up in this ark with a bad case of cabin fever, wondering if the flood is ever going to subside so things can get back to normal. It’s not easy, being stuck in this boat. It’s strange and stressful for us. Meanwhile, the sea gets rougher, the storms wilder.

It’s like that Psalm we say in Holy Week:

Save me, O God! The waters have risen up to my neck.
I am sinking in a deep mire. The waves wash over me.
Do not let the flood swallow me up! (Psalm 69)

That’s how it feels, here in the middle of the story, in the middle of the flood. We have our fears. We have our doubts. We have our losses. And frankly, some of us are getting sick and tired of this stupid ark. Been in the storm so long, Lord! How long? Too long.

But this isn’t where the story ends, with us lost at sea, sinking into oblivion. The One who made us will not forget us. The One who loves us will not forsake us. Already, God is imagining a future for us. Maybe it will be something better.

God never said we won’t be afflicted.
God never said we won’t be disquieted.
God did say we shall not be overcome.

When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not thee overflow,
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

Dancing with Death: Mortality in Cinema

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Caravaggio, St. Jerome Writing, 1605-06

In the midst of life we are in death.

–– Burial Office, Book of Common Prayer

It is life that is the danger.

–– Pascal Garnier, C’est la Vie

 

Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about mortality on a daily basis. There’s no skull on my desk as I write. But the pandemic has changed a lot of things. A single sneeze or a stranger’s touch is now a memento mori. Death lurks everywhere––the supermarket, the subway, the street. Where can we go to flee from its presence?

While sheltering in place, I took a break from virtual choirs and amusing videos to screen a pair of films where death draws near during a pandemic: Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). In each film, death is an embodied figure to whom the protagonist is inseparably bound. However, for Bergman’s medieval knight death’s visage is terrible and stern, while for Visconti’s ailing artist the gaze of death is youthful and alluring.

Death (Bengt Ekerot) in The Seventh Seal

Tadzio (Björn Andresen) in Death in Venice.

The Seventh Seal takes place during the Black Death of the 14th century, when bubonic plague killed as many as 200 million people in just five years. Antonius Block is a knight who has just returned home from the Crusades only to find Death waiting for him there. Whether by war or by plague, the knight’s fate is inescapable. He is doomed no matter what he does. It is not accidental that this film was made in the wake of the Second World War, and in the shadow of nuclear annihilation.

Another medieval knight, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, blames God for the injustice of the human condition:

How is mankind more blessed by you
Than sheep who cower in the field?
For slain is man just like the beasts,
Locked in prison cages, and given sickness
And great adversity, often for no good reason.
What governance is in this prescience,
That thus torments guiltless innocence? [i]

But Bergman’s knight isn’t even sure God exists. Death appears to him, but not the Divine––at least not in any way he recognizes. Although Bergman was an atheist, believers will discern God in the traveling players: Jof, Mia and their baby, a “holy family” who embody the life force carrying on despite every mishap. God may also be seen in the sacrificial act of the knight, who helps the players escape Death even when he himself cannot. And in the sweetest moment of this anguished film, the family share their strawberries and milk with Block, who receives it like a sacrament, a taste of unconquerable life:

“I shall remember this hour of peace: the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk, Michael asleep, Jof with his lute. I shall remember our words, and shall bear this memory between my hands as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk. And this will be a sign and a great content.”

 

Antonius Block, the knight (Max von Sydow), plays chess with death.

As Block makes his way toward the refuge of his castle stronghold, he sees Death at work everywhere, working furiously through both plague and human cruelty. The knight tries to postpone the inevitable by engaging Death in a chess match. Death is amused, but not outwitted. Always the supreme ironist, he lets the knight get all the way home before finally taking his life. No one gets out of here alive.

And yet, in the famous dance of death at the film’s end, six of the film’s characters are missing. The “holy family” still wander the earth, untroubled by death because they belong to grace. And three who died (a woman executed for witchcraft, Jof’s wife, and an enigmatic maid) are also absent from Death’s chorus line, perhaps because they had chosen acceptance over fear when their end came.

The Dance of Death in The Seventh Seal.

Death in Venice, adapted from Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, follows a German artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, to Venice, where he hopes to restore his health and sooth his nerves. In the book he is a writer, but Visconti makes him a composer, modeled after Gustav Mahler, whose Third and Fifth symphonies amplify the film’s luscious imagery and deep feeling.

While enjoying the Belle Epoque luxury of the Grand Hotel des Bains, Aschenbach becomes obsessed with the beauty of Tadzio, an adolescent boy on holiday from Poland with his family. Mann aestheticizes the composer’s forbidden desire into a metaphor for immortal beauty and perfection, comparing the boy to the finest Greek sculpture. But in the cinematic version, the explicitness of a visible gaze is hard to defuse with metaphorical rationalizations, and the film was indeed controversial when it came out fifty years ago.

But as I watched through quarantined eyes, I could not escape the idea of the comely boy as the angel of Death, drawing Aschenbach out of himself toward a kind of oblivion. For the artist, mortality means incompleteness. There is never enough time to reach perfection, to say everything that wants to be said. So Tadzio’s evanescent, unattainable beauty mocks the artist’s failure to find a lasting container for the longings of his heart.

The story’s title and content support this interpretation. Death––the sense of an ending––is everywhere in Venice. A plague of cholera is approaching from the east, and despite official assurances that everything is fine, tourists have begun to flee, leaving a kind of ghost city behind. Aschenbach’s heart is beginning to fail. And Venice itself, ever threatened by rising seas, suffers the melancholy of a diminishing future.

In the film’s final scene, Aschenbach is sitting in a beach chair, watching Tadzio wade into the bright sea beneath a declining sun. From a distance, the boy looks back at him, then points off toward a formless blur of light, as though only the infinite can receive the fullness of our longing. As Mann put it, “To rest in what is perfect (ideal, complete in itself) is the longing of those who strive for what is excellent, and is not nothingness itself a form of perfection?”[ii] If the angel of death mocks our incompleteness, does it not also invite us into an ultimate wholeness beyond our imagining, what Mann calls “an immensity full of promise?”[iii]

Tadzio points to “an immensity full of promise.”

We see Aschenbach struggle to stand up, reaching a desperate hand toward the sea, Tadzio, infinity, God. Then his heart fails; he falls back lifeless into the chair. Visconti then cuts to a long shot of the beach. Aschenbach is now barely noticeable on the wide expanse of sand. Hotel attendants carry his body away. What happens to him after that, God only knows.

When a monk composed the chant, Media vita in morte sumus (In the midst of life we are in death), it was on a New Year’s Eve early in the 14th century. Little did he know that a few decades later, a third to a half of Europe would perish in the Black Death. But I doubt he would have changed a word to sound more comforting. Whatever our fate––calamity or blessing––Death keeps us company every step of the way. Can we learn to live with that?

My friend Bill Coats, theologian and priest, recently wrote:

“It is hard for us not to put life first. We live longer, we are healthier, our medical system assumes and acts as if we can live forever. But a pandemic, even with a plethora of scientific and medical information is, in the last analysis, about death. Of course, in a pandemic not all will die, indeed the vast majority will live even if and when the virus strikes them. Yet the environment in the meantime is open to fear and is predicated on the nearness of death. Our generally optimistic culture is hardly prepared for this.”[iv]

 

Bengt Ekerot and Ingmar Bergman on the set of The Seventh Seal.

Death is near. It has always been so for mortals. We can’t change that fact, but perhaps it is time to rethink our relationship. I like this photo of Bergman talking with Death on the set of The Seventh Seal. They seem so companionable. No one is threatening, no one is afraid. They look like friends. Maybe it will be like that, in the end.

 

 

Related post: The Weight of These Sad Times

 

[i] Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” 440-451, Canterbury Tales.

[ii] Thomas Mann, quoted in Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 174.

[iii] Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Clayton Koelb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 63.

[iv] The Rev. William Coats, personal correspondence, March 2020.