The most ancient path I know is the ecological one. Creation is an intricate living system that honors life, death and rebirth within Earth’s natural cycles; where reciprocity is honorable, and all life is sacred. We humans, who happen to be mammals (but also a bit of a virus), have trouble remembering the path of Creation.
In Her 4.5 billion years of being a planet, Earth has known great drama illustrated in superfluous gestures of creativity and supreme acts of destruction. If we used only this as our backdrop for religion what would our religion consist of?
Why, in all of this relatedness, do we feel so disconnected? Depleted? Empty? Because we mistakenly turn that which is divinely relational, into something inhumanely transactional. And, to make this sin livable, we turn our heads and forget our neoteny. Children don’t allow this sort of behavior. We are born into relatedness and unity.
There are 3 parts of Jesus’s birth story that we want to open here, like gifts. There are many parts of this story that, once unwrapped, hold great truth and importance including dreams, angels and what was going on for Joseph.
We could describe the pain we’re in right now as the colonial anesthesia wearing off. In epic fashion, events of the past many months have connected all the threads of the story: white supremacy and racism, detention centers and prisons, militarism and policing, the wealth of a few at the expense of essential workers, broken healthcare, hurricanes, derechos, and wildfires, and certainly others.
Since early March, a poem[i] by Kristin Flyntz has been circulating widely wherein she imagines what the Covid-19 virus might be saying. More than once it says, “Just stop. Be still. Listen. Ask us what we might teach you about illness and healing, about what might be required so that all may be well. We will help you, if you listen.”
Last Spring, Greta Thunberg’s statement to the European Parliament included the phrase, “Everyone and everything needs to change.” It’s become a mantra for me: Everyone, Everything, Me, Changing.
It has become so easy now to feel anxious, worried or irritable by the state of things, by the frantic commotion modeled all around us, focusing on just about everything except what’s actually important.
The progressive Christian practice, I believe, is founded on my (our) willingness to listen for and co-create the new story. And let me be clear about this word, “new.” I don’t mean the next bright and shiny object that allows me to toss the frayed one into the landfill. I mean “new,” as in emerging, fertile, and arriving with a willingness to acknowledge what has been before now.
At the beginning of November, I dizzied myself in a dervish with 7500 participants at the Parliament of World Religions. In a series of keynote presentations spanning Peace & Reconciliation, Climate, Women, Indigenous Voices, and the Next Generation, one unifying message was consistently offered, “Humans have caused this.” Whatever the challenge before us, it is our species who has created the conditions for our current reality.