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Unlearning for Creation’s Sake

September 3, 2017

Cate Thorn

Ordinary 22     Psalm 104     John 3:1-10

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This is the second of three Sundays we’re considering Climate Change – our responsibility to faithfully tend this gift of creation we receive daily, unsought, unbidden, without which we have no life, no home. Considering the precarious balance of our planet and the impact of this for our survival, I was struck by a piece of information shared with me this week, apparently when refugees arrive for resettlement they’re still wearing their house key around their neck. Even though the home is gone or inhabited by others now. They still hold the key. Given today’s theme there seemed something powerfully apt in this image.

 

Climate change, environmental destruction, the pace and scale of this is directly attributable to human acting. Despite those with vested interest who determinedly argue otherwise, the proof is pretty incontrovertible. This is the way things are.

 

It is hard to receive this information, it is hard to imagine that we have and do participate in this devastation, to imagine ourselves as agents of creation’s destruction. We do not knowingly choose this. Yet here we are.

 

What are we to do? How can we do things differently? Will what we do make any real difference unless joined to a larger group, a wider vision, a consolidated, concerted effort and intention for change? Who has and holds that vision? It is true we need to do differently for there to be an alternative outcome, a change in the way things are. And yet … is an intention to do differently sufficient if it’s simply another layer, overlaid on our usual way of doing and being, another should? How resilient is such veneer to the testing of everyday life? We’ve learned, had embedded in us through generations a way of understanding the human place in creation. In the Western world, even for those without a Christian affiliation, the shape the world is in now has become this way because of the actions and understandings of a particular worldview shaped by the Christian narrative.

 

From the beginning, the narrative goes, God breathes, speaks the world into being. We, male and female, are created in God’s image, or are formed of dust, we’ve divine breathe breathed into us – male then female we’re created. In this story we humans grant ourselves dominion over creation. We assume this role as we describe the coming into being of creation. As if we understand ourselves as co-creating, co-operating with divine breathing, bringing into being. Not as automatons, bound to or by divine directive, we say, no, we’re granted freedom to choose how we live out such creative genius, interpret the mantle we divinely bestow upon ourselves. As the creation narrative continues it tells of our flawed enacting of this.

 

As we consider our world, have we brought into being that which we speak? This creation story embedded in us, our speaking into being the way the world is, or the way of telling and hearing the story that dominates, is that human agency takes precedence in creation, that humans are granted controlling rights. In time it’s seems to mean we consider ourselves superior to the rest of the created world. The human capacity for self-reflection, self-awareness we imagine as unique to us and that which separates us from the less evolved rest of creation. Surely the disordered rawness of nature proves an absence or diminishment of divine indwelling, for God is a god of order and reason. Having escaped the chaotic miasma of heaving creation we’re tasked with creating order according to our likeness, to enact divine ordering. I wonder whether the Christian movement has particular culpability for driving the divine from the dross of this world to the heavenly realms, badge of holiness often granted those whose lives evidenced a shunning of this contaminated world. Yet I wonder how different we really are in our attitude toward the created world. I wonder how comfortable we are genuinely giving away our hold of superior power and knowledge in this created world.

 

To take seriously the idea that humans have and are simply a functioning part of creation, potentially means we need change how we understand ourselves as part of a whole living system. That in creation we’re equal in dependence and needfulness to plants, animals, insects, birds, fish, land and the water of rain and sea and rivers for our life. We’re just as vulnerable, not necessarily more purposed. We gain, understand our created completeness fully as we join to the creation around us for we’re part of a created whole not overseeing, above more than, as needful as not needful of each part of creation.

 

How many of us feel some resistance arising in us, a kind of indignant umbrage, for surely we’re more. Such ideas are fine for tree huggers, people who choose to work closely with nature, who like plants and animals and wilderness things but really not all of us are like that. After all look at all we’ve achieved, we’re superior in every way, we create new and innovative things, we’ve a deep understanding of the way the world works and we’ve learned to manipulate nature, to generate, improve health and extend life through such knowledge. We contribute to the world and society, we’ve different skill sets that we put to good use, all that stuff is fine but we have to negotiate the real world.

 

We don’t have to be a tree hugger or a person who likes to get hands in the soil or intimate with the natural world to understand and live in humility as part of creation, aware there’s real time impact in creation of the choices we make. Each and everything we do, thoughtless and thoughtful, reverberates through creation for we’re intimately interconnected. To comprehend this in an indwelt, in-depth way though may require us to unlearn, to recognise the narrative embedded in us of our human part in creation, to see it as it is, to see how we interpret and enact it, for its only one way of telling the story of creation.

 

Sharon Blackie, writer, mythologist, psychologist, and neuroscientist uncovers her experience of indwelling the creation narrative in this way “Before there was the Word, there was the land and it was made and watched over by women. Stories from almost every culture around the world tell us that once upon a time it was so. … Women: the creators of life, the bearers of the Cup of knowledge and wisdom, personifying the moral and spiritual authority of this fertile green and blue Earth.” Last week from Proverbs we heard of the feminine Wisdom, of her presence at the beginning, before the first acts of creation, from everlasting, in the beginning, before the world began. Today in Psalm 104 that which is created is she. Our faith stories are threaded through with feminine wisdom and presence, companion in creation.

 

Blackie continues, “Do you remember those days? Me neither. Other indigenous cultures around the world may still respect and revere the feminine but we Western women lost that story long ago. The story which I was given to carry as a very young child, the story which both defined me and instructed me about the place I occupied in this world, accorded no such significance to women. In this story, woman was an afterthought, created from a man’s body for the sole purpose of pleasing him. In this story, the first woman was the source of all humanity’s suffering: she brought death to the world, not life. She had the audacity to speak to a serpent. Wanting the knowledge and wisdom which had been denied her by a jealous father-god, she dared eat the fruit of a tree. Even worse, she shared the fruit of knowledge and wisdom with her man. So that angry and implacable god cast her and her male companion out of paradise and decreed that women should be subordinate to man for ever afterwards.

 

The stories we tell about the creation of the Earth and the origins of humankind show us how our culture views the world, our place in it, and our relationships with the other living things which inhabit it. And the key consequence of this particular creation myth is a belief, prevalent in the West, that women are naturally disobedient temptresses who must be firmly kept in their place. … The story of Eve in the book of Genesis is the underpinning for countless measures which have limited the actions, rights and status of women. No matter what women might achieve in the world, the fundamental message of the sacred texts of the world’s largest religious grouping, which for 2,000 years have supplied the foundational beliefs of our Western culture, is that men should not trust women, and that women should trust neither themselves nor each other.” [1]

 

Blackie sees a link, “The same kind of acts that are perpetrated against … our daughters and our mothers are perpetrated against the planet: the Earth which gives us life; the Earth with which women have for so long been identified. Our patriarchal … growth-and-domination-based culture has caused runaway climate change, the mass extinction of species and the ongoing destruction of wild and natural landscapes in the unstoppable pursuit of progress.” [2]

 

It might make us uncomfortable to hear the narrative interpreted this way, indignant and resistant to her strong assertions. After all, where does this leave us? Well we’re the ones now telling this story. We speak into being what we know. Like Nicodemus, we teach, though we do not understand, we experience this world yet do not know it fully. Are we willing to listen and learn from creation, to allow her wisdom to emerge? Direct our self-reflective attention to unmask and unlearn our embedded practices that are destroying creation. And act, yes act, deeply aware of our interconnected dependence upon creation and our part in restoring her wholeness.

 

Refugees flee from their homes for fear of losing their life, the key to their home they keep within grasping reach. We participate in ways of living that will destroy our only place of home and soon. We’ll soon be made refugees with no place to flee, no place for resettlement, we hold the key to retaining our home, it’s is still within our grasping reach, will we take hold of this and act?

 

[1] Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: the Journey to Authenticity and Belonging September Publishing: Tewkesbury 2016, 5

 

[2] Blackie, 8

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