Joe Holland, Art for Regeneration and the Power of the Female Imagination
Maddie: Let's talk about the issues we're facing as a world, politically, ecologically, and economically, and why the intersection of spirituality and sustainability is so important.
Joe: I believe that ecological spirituality and ecological philosophy together form the foundationally intellectual pathway out of the global climate crisis.
Something went wrong with the classical and modern spiritual-philosophical roots of Western Civilization. That is why modern Western technoscience, now globalized, is devastating our garden-planet Earth's beauteous but fragile community of life.
I wrote my 2017 book Postmodern Ecological Spirituality to address the spiritual side of this great problem. Now I am writing another book to address the philosophical side. It will be titled Ecological Failure of Modern Philosophy in the Anthropocene.
Our eco-spiritual and eco-philosophical roots are deep, but today they are too often forgotten. To tap those roots, ecological visionaries across our garden-planet Earth are creating a global intellectual renaissance networking spiritual, philosophical, theological, literary, and artistic ideas for global ecological regeneration.
This renaissance is already birthing powerful eco-spiritual and eco-philosophical energy. It will provide the visionary pathway that is essential for our global human family to journey toward a new and ecologically postmodern global civilization.
M: It's almost a whole reimagination, which is why it makes sense to have artists and intellectuals and those kinds of people involved.
J: We certainly need philosophical clarification. Again, that is what I'm now working on. But the deepest and most energizing level is the artistic one. Art comes first, followed by spirituality, and then intellectual areas like philosophy build on that deep artistic and spiritual ground.
Philosophy works like an x-ray machine, allowing us to see the structural logic. But philosophy doesn't give life. Art, including images, poetry, and music, does give life. Again, art comes first. Therefore, ecological art is the foundational ground first of ecological spirituality and then of ecological philosophy.
M: I think art gets to the heart of people, too, the heart of everyone. Obviously, the intellectual movement is important, but not everyone is going to connect to that. Not everyone is going to connect to philosophy.
J: We need to realize that the heart is cognitive and that our whole body is cognitive. For example, cognitive scientists now tell us that the second most intelligent organ in our body, after our brain, is our intestines.
Classical European philosophers traditionally associated our emotions with organs of the abdominal cavity and the heart. But, those classical European philosophers, most famously the Stoics, wrongly thought that emotions impeded the mind. They thought we had to repress the emotions to clear the mind.
Also, in an unfortunately related manner, classical European philosophers wrongly portrayed women as over-emotional and as not rational, indeed as not fully human.
But we now know that emotions are highly intelligent. There is even sometimes more truth in emotional intelligence than in mental intelligence. Our rational mind can lie to us, but our intelligent emotions more often tell the truth.
Further, our emotions tap into the deep intellectual power that I call mythic-symbolic. The mental-rational dimension is only an abstraction, albeit a valuable one, of the deep mythic-symbolic ground, which is profoundly emotive.
M: In the four webinars that you gave for the United States Association of Catholic Priests, you spoke about the hyper-masculine society and its dangers. Can you speak more to that, I hadn't heard anyone explain it that way before.
J: Expanding on the thought of Thomas Berry, I have been investigating four great eras in our journey of human evolution. I call them the Primal, Classical, Modern, and now Postmodern Eras. But I use the word "postmodern" in an ecological sense and not in its typically academic sense of philosophical Nihilism.
Further, I don't see these four great eras in a modern way as linear stages but instead as concentric circles like the rings of a tree. The old eras never go away but always stay with us, like the DNA in our biology.
When we all lived in tribes (the Primal Era), women's intelligence primarily created the human journey beyond the primates. Women provided the creative artistic-intellectual foundation for human development and human civilization. Women shaped the foundations of the human journey in powerful ways.
Remember that, from its Greek roots, the word "philosophy" (philia-sophia) means "the love of wisdom," and that Athena was a Greek goddess of wisdom. (Plato tells us that she was earlier an African-Egyptian goddess, called Neith whose temple lay in the Egyptian city of Sais.)
Women are still publicly powerful for indigenous peoples, who have never lost our human family's primal spiritual-philosophical foundations.
For example, within the ancient and democratic Native-American Haudenosaunee Confederation (Iroquois League), founded by Hiawatha more than one thousand five hundred years ago, only women could traditionally vote to elect chiefs.
The founders of the United States of America learned about democracy's separation of powers from leaders of the Haudenosaunee Confederation. That Confederation has for all its years been based on three separate branches of government: judicial, executive, and legislative.
At the time of the United States' founding, the separation of powers did not exist anywhere in Europe. It was still ruled by kings and queens. The concept came from the Haudenosaunee tribes in the northeast of the North American continent.
Also, the Haudenosaunee have always had a fourth branch of government. It is called the Council of Grandmothers. This Council can accept or veto any decision of its Confederacy by using a single criterion: "How will it affect the children seven generations from now."
Along with the separation of powers, this long-term "seven-generations" thinking has been central to the Haudenosaunee government. (You may have seen the line of ecological paper products with the label "Seventh Generation." That's what the label refers to.)
For indigenous people, human spirituality is rooted in Nature, of which we humans always remain a part. In this ancient but still relevant ecological spirituality, the plants and animals are our sisters and brothers.
Classical European civilization looked down on our primal and still foundational eco-spirituality. But they did not eliminate it. Rather, they patriarchally subordinated it.
The higher 'masculine' spirituality of the classical West's elite-male aristocratic class claimed to "transcend" (rise above) Nature. But that elite-male aristocracy could not prevent the primal "immanent" and 'feminine" Nature-based spirituality from continuing among women and the rural peasantry, over whom they ruled.
However, when we come to the Modern Era, we have something worse than classical patriarchy. We have modern bourgeois hyper-masculinity.
Following that spiritual-philosophical paradigm, modern bourgeois elite-males designed modern industrial-colonial civilization to technoscientifically conquer and plunder "Mother Nature." They set out to "penetrate" her interior in order to extract her "natural resources" for human "utility." (Fossil fuels soon became Modernity's primary "resource.")
That was indeed something new!
At the deep mythic-symbolic level, bourgeois Modernity has held up the hyper-masculine symbol of a deformed male warrior conquering and plundering 'feminine' Nature's community of ecological life. (By contrast, the traditional noble warrior was to defend and protect the community of life).
Thus, in bourgeois Modernity, technoscience gets designed exclusively out of a one-sided and imbalanced elite-male imagination. That is why it's so difficult for women to make advances in "hard" scientific fields like physics and engineering.
Before bourgeois Modernity, however, women's imagination had always remained central to shaping society, even when subordinated in the classical period.
By contrast, in bourgeois Modernity, women's imagination was no longer allowed to influence technoscientific design. Only the hyper-masculine imagination was allowed at the 'higher' elite-male technoscientific levels. (It was quite late in the Modern Era that women were finally admitted to the 'higher" educational level of the university.)
The founding 'visionary' of the modern hyper-masculine mandate for technoscience to conquer and plunder Nature was Sir Francis Bacon, an English lawyer, philosopher, and chancellor of England around the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Bacon is considered by many to be the founding visionary of modern technoscience.
The distinguished eco-feminist historian Carolyn Merchant has documented Bacon's foundational but negative contribution to modern technoscience. She did that in her magisterial 1983 book The Death of Nature; Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.
Bacon wrote a famous essay called The Masculine Birth of Time. In it, he defined Nature as "feminine" and technoscience as "masculine," and he directed modern 'masculine' technoscience to conquer and plunder 'feminine' Nature.
Bacon's mandate for modern technoscience was to force Nature (in effect, torturing her) to reveal her divinely embedded secrets of how she operates. Then, according to Bacon, modern technoscience could use Nature's divine secrets to extract her hidden "resources" for human "utility" and for building a new "modern" world.
Influenced by his mother's intense Puritan Calvinism, Bacon apparently also thought that the modern technoscientific conquest of Nature would restore the great knowledge supposedly lost by Adam in the "Fall" and bring about the Eschaton preached by Jesus.
But the long-term result has been the technoscientific construction of modern hyper-masculine industrial-colonial civilization, which we now know is ecologically unsustainable and which before long will collapse.
I describe Bacon's cruel 'vision' in Asian yin-yang terms as repressing yin (the Asian feminine symbol) and promoting only yang (the Asian masculine symbol). Modern industrial-colonial civilization has indeed been yang-warrior civilization.
Carolyn Merchant explicitly described it as waging an anti-ecological "war against Nature." It is also warring against rurally rooted peoples across the planet and against the urban poor and peoples of color.
Most fundamentally, it is trying to force women into the hyper-masculine mold.
Doing all that produces a hyper-masculine technoscientific society that is not cyclical or regenerative, but instead linear and degenerative. For example, steel and plastic cannot reproduce. They only wear out.
Again, modern technoscientific production is linear and degenerative, whereas Nature's economy is cyclical and regenerative. For that reason, the bourgeois economy of modern technoscience has become ecologically unsustainable, will certainly collapse, and perhaps do so in the near future.
Thus, late-modern industrial-colonial civilization, both in liberal-capitalist form and in scientific-socialist form, is hyper-masculine, linear, and degenerative. Its bourgeois paradigm of technoscientific production is devastating our garden-planet Earth's symbolically 'feminine,' cyclical, and regenerative community of ecological life.
In deep mythic-symbolic spiritual terms, modern bourgeois industrial-colonial civilization has lost consciousness of the ancient primal symbol of the divine feminine, which was often called the Mother Goddess.
Classical Catholic Christianity had kept that feminine symbol partly alive with its veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus. That happened especially through the artistic image of the female Madonna and her male child (Jesus) – a divine mother-son symbol which we now know is thousands of years old and originally African.
Now, for contemporary global Christianity, the Holy Spirit is re-emerging as the divine-feminine symbol. In that regard, we also now know that the ancient Syriac Christian Church called the Holy Spirit "God the Mother."
By the way, Antioch in Syria was the place to which the original Jewish followers of Jesus first fled when they were persecuted in Jerusalem, and where they were first called "Christians." They also spoke Aramaic, which was the primary language that Jesus spoke. So their naming of the Holy Spirit as "God the Mother" is foundationally important.
M: There is something I thought of when you were speaking about that, which also relates to the "seven generations", and it's the idea of sabbath, having the natural rhythms of renewal and rest baked in right from the beginning. I wonder if the idea of seven relates to the moon cycle, a woman's cycle, both twenty-eight-day feminine cycles.
J: Maybe that was it, the twenty-eight-day feminine cycle broken down into four weeks. It would be interesting to discover whether that cycle of seven came from women's exchange of information across ancient cultures.
Once again, our human family's ancient mythic-symbolic heritage of eco-spirituality and eco-philosophy, like the ancient cycle of seven with its sabbath, remains foundational for postmodern global ecological sustainability.
Trying to overcome the climate crisis by political legislation is good and important. But unless we dive down to the deep and ancient mythic-symbolic ground of eco-spirituality and eco-philosophy, I fear that our legislative-political efforts alone will ultimately prove shallow and therefore will fail.
Joe Holland, A Regenerative Vision for Christianity
Maddie: Let's start with your background. I want to hear about your life in general, and you as a person. You were formerly a catholic priest, correct?
Joe: Yes, I was ordained in 1965 and worked in Connecticut and Puerto Rico. I grew up in Connecticut and New York City in a very Irish Catholic home. My grandfather was the head of the Saloon Keepers Association in New York City. He had two Irish pubs in Manhattan, one right off Broadway's Times Square and one in Chelsea. My father was a commercial real-estate attorney, and his office was also on Broadway near my grandfather's pub. So I grew up on Broadway, hanging out at my grandfather's bars with my cousins as a little kid. It was like going to McDonald's, you could get hamburgers and coke and french fries, and all for free! It was right next to CBS, so the actors would come over, and they would bring us over to the studios. Then we moved to Connecticut, where my mother was from. That was a much different, rural experience. There I grew up hunting, fishing, and camping. So I had two sides in my youth - the urban and the rural sides. In Connecticut, I attended seminary after high school. I was going to go to Yale but decided on seminary instead. After that, I did undergraduate and graduate studies, first studying classical languages, then obtaining an undergraduate degree in philosophy, followed by four more years of theology. In my master's degree in biblical studies, I did a dissertation on the gospel of Mark in the original Greek. That was my first major writing project.
Maddie: Why did you choose Mark?
Joe: Mark is the oldest and earliest gospel. Clearly, in Mark, Jesus is not the figure that we often hear about as "Christ the King". Rather, he's a prophet like Moses. In the Old Testament, we have these two central figures - David and Moses. In the case of David the king, the word of God comes through the king and to the people. In the case of Moses the prophet, the word of God comes from the bottom up, from the people against the king, the pharaoh of Egypt. The two are very different. Western Christianity lived since the time of the Constantinian turn in the 4th century in what I call the Davidic mode. Christianity was appropriated, in the Catholic case, by the Roman Empire. Later, in the Protestant case, it became identified with national governments. It was all top-down. In Judaism, because the Temple had been destroyed and leveled by the Roman army, Jews in the diaspora identified with Moses more than David. Judaism in the diaspora became Mosiac, while Christianity in the Holy Roman Empire became Davidic. Now, we're at the collapse of the imperial age, the end of colonialism, and the rise of liberating movements, including Liberation Theology. Prophetic sectors of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, are shifting to the Mosaic mode and becoming critical of society. It's a different movement in Christianity. I think the Holy Spirit is leading us to this regenerative and prophetic form of Christianity. Also, in the Mosaic mode, the covenant links together the Creator, the people, and the land. So there's always an ecological dimension in the Mosaic covenant.
Maddie: It's interesting when you think about the Jewish tradition. They have a lot of practice being the outcast, and it would make sense that they wouldn't connect as much to the Davidic tradition. In America, we were founded on the idea of being religious exiles who are building a new government.
Joe: Yes, but the early white European settlers said, "This [America] is a new Jerusalem!" And then the black slaves listened to white preaching and, in disagreement, they said, "Oh no, this is not a new Jerusalem, this is Egypt land! We're slaves like the Jews were in Egypt. God is going to liberate us, and the white slave owners are Pharaoh." Those are two entirely different interpretations - white Christianity in the Davidic mode, and black Christianity in the Mosaic mode. In the black spiritual hymns, you get a very strong sense of Moses. In past European Christianity, you get king David and Christ the King.
But Jesus's first sermon was all about liberating the oppressed and the poor, freeing the captives and the prisoners. It was all in Moses' language.
Also, in the Hebrew Torah, there are lots of ecological legislations. The idea that the Bible holds nothing ecological is nonsense. In fact, the Hebrew word adam in the Book of Genesis is not a person's name. It means the earth-creature, who comes from the adamah, which in Hebrew means the Earth - almost like the earth mother brings forth the earth creature. Despite what some Western Christians may think, it is an ecological story. And the whole story happens in a garden.
Ensign Cowell, Daring to be Hopeful
Ensign hailed from northern New Jersey and settled in Cleveland, Ohio working for several public companies in corporate finance and strategic planning. Following that he joined a fledging investment/wealth management company and stayed in this field for almost forty years. His avocation and passion for environmental activism galvanized in 2012 after attending an acceptance talk by Canadian naturalist, David Suzuki. Since then, he has participated in founding environmental entities to advance major systems change initiatives and personal/spiritual consciousness through transformative learning.
Maddie: You don't hear about a lot of people coming from the business world of Standard Oil, and then becoming so passionate about the environment. I'd love for you to share more about your background and that transition in your life. It's inspiring.
Ensign: I've done a lot of reflecting in the last few years about environmentalism, and one of the things that I've come to realize is that we all grow up with a narrative. For me, the story was that the man was the head of the family, a wage earner (in my family at least), and the wife was the support person, child-rearer, and homemaker. My sisters were very accomplished and my mother was a part-time teacher. They were very capable people - I never thought of women as being less capable, but it did seem like they had roles. When I look back, I realize my whole personal narrative was, "You grow up, you go to school, you try to get good marks." My sister did well in school, so I was supposed to do well. I did okay and got into Dartmouth. I majored in chemistry for 2 years, but when my dad took me down to a factory to meet some chemists, I thought, "I don't want to be a chemist at all!". I loved the subject but learned I didn't want to do it professionally. Quickly, I switched to economics and then went to business school for the next 2 years to stay out of Vietnam. After that, I went into the National Guard. My narrative was the three boxes of life - learning, labor, and leisure. In other words, you would "learn" by going to school, you would "labor" to earn a living and take care of your family, and you would save enough so that when you retired, you could enjoy "leisure". I thought that life would go on like that forever, that there would not be any existential threats to human beings and the ecosystem. The word environment wasn't even around, the concept of Gaia, the idea of the earth as a living, breathing organism - these are relatively new concepts. I never conceptualized the environment other than my local stream and woods. Our son in law studied environmental science, environmental ecology, and sustainable development. I didn't even know what the heck that meant! It all changed in 2012 when I heard David Suzuki give an acceptance talk for the Inamori Ethics Prize. When you boil the talk down to two sentences, he essentially said, "We have seven billion-plus large mammals on the planet, and we're having too much impact on the whole system - too many chemicals, too many machines, too many roads, too much water pollution. We're just making too much impact." He cited a letter from the Union of Concerned Scientists (written 20 years earlier) as a warning to mankind. I thought, "Wow, this is real". This is near-term, and it calls me as a person who has business experience and who cares - this is something I should be involved in! When I got to Florida and came to know the Climate Action Team at a unitarian congregation, I found a place where I could attach and be active. Then we went to Assisi in 2018, where I met Drew Mearns. Now we have a Cleveland cohort and a Florida cohort through the Capra Course, and with the Climate Action Team, we formed another non-profit here called Reset. I've got tentacles in a lot of places and am constantly trying to figure out - what is mine to do? What is my special niche? What can I bring to the party and what do I bring to the party to really try and have impact?
Maddie: What does impact mean to you?
Ensign: Impact, to me, is visualized in total transformation - socially, economically, ecologically, racially - it's all tied together. You cannot think of a sustainable, peaceful, spiritually fulfilling place without a total transformation. It will look more egalitarian, you will either have tyranny or authoritarianism or you will have a much broader democracy. Take the example of flattened organizations in some modern companies. They're much more transparent and have a flatter management style. I'm trying to be a player, an agent, and a helper. I see it as a need for total transformation to not just a sustainable, but a regenerative and enriching human presence on the earth. That's the heart of it. It's a practical utopianism.
Right now, we have rampant mental health issues with young people, people are very unsatisfied - even in a wealthy country like the United States. We're in a cockeyed place in our evolution. For people like us (in the middle class), we have great material comfort and safety. I'm reading a book called The Divide, it's a myth-buster about how the developed countries are still, in effect, draining capital and are disadvantaging the global south. It's a big, hairy problem. Sustainability is important in everything we do.
Maddie: How does this passion and advocacy for sustainability play out in your life and conversations with people of varying beliefs?
Ensign: One day, I had a discussion with a friend about water rise, and he didn't have any belief in it. He said, "You know, an ice cube, when it melts, doesn't create any excess water than what already exists". I asked him if there was any ice over land, like the Greenland ice sheet. If you had snow at the top of the mountain, and it melted and went into a lake, would the lake level rise? The ice isn't icebergs in the water melting. It's land-based ice that will melt and will raise the water levels. He's a smart guy, but he'd never thought about the reality of that. I believe that man is impacting the environment and the climate. Even if that were not true, we've got only about 100 years left of carbon defined fuel, we'll have to transition away from carbon anyways. The idea of needing to deal with systems that we believe are sustainable is important. Technology has to be part of the answer. There are so many broken systems. Take the food system, for example. So much waste comes from it, and we're not even taking care of the third of the population that goes undernourished. I see it as a worldwide problem. We've never really cooperated on a worldwide basis, but you see some of that with covid. The good thing about covid is that it shows us we're all in one system. That's the beauty of the virus. Everybody has experienced it in one way or another, and they may have experienced it quite differently because of their circumstance. For us, it's been an inconvenience. For others, it's been an absolute disaster. We're all aware of it, all over the world. While it has been detrimental, that awareness is a good and unifying thing.
Drew Mearns, Acorns and Oak Trees
Part 2 of a conversation with Drew Mearns. Read part 1 here.
Maddie: I've been reading a lot of Richard Rhor and also the gospel of Luke, and I feel that a strong message in both is the story of embodiment. Just as you've talked about with coaching, making everything physically and spiritually connected, that's essentially the story of Jesus, that spirit is embodied and connected to everything physical.
Drew: That's essentially the theology of the incarnation. Again, I risk my own ignorance of theology, but it's the idea that God so loved the world that he came down and literally embodied himself in the person of Jesus, and in some way in all of us. I talk about that in the sense of entelechy, which is the idea that inside of an acorn is the oak tree if all the things and relationships surrounding are able to bring that greatness out of him or her. If that's in a runner, that person knows deep inside that he or she has a place and a future and can be a better runner or person. I see it and help to bring it out. I think that's what the best teachers or pastors or lovers do in and through their relationships.
Even Gurdjieff talks about that. He asks one of his students how many acorns he believes are in the oak tree out the window. The student says he doesn't know, so Gurdjieff asks again. The student answers, "Probably thousands." Gurdjieff asks, "Well, how many do you think will become a tree?" The student replies that maybe 5 will, and Gurdjieff asks, "What if it is only one?" All those thousands of acorns, all of us human beings…some of us will mature in one way and some in another way. Even the acorns that die will fertilize the lives of the others. It's a beautiful thought, not only the Aristotelian idea that inside of us and inside that acorn is an oak tree, but also Gurdjieff contributing that we might not all be oak trees or Olympic champions or financially successful. We're here to become that, or maybe in our love become part of the fertilizer for someone else to achieve a kind of greatness. We're in this all together. It's beautiful to think about.
Maddie: It's amazing. The more I look at the sciences and natural world and discover how they work, I realize so much more about the spiritual world, the soul world. Maybe they aren't so different. They both display the same patterns, like that story you just told.
Drew: Yes. And it comes back to the one thing that the great ones, the mystics and writers and saints, talk about. They see that connection, that we all are intertwined with everything else. Nature helps us understand that, the examination of trees and how the roots of one tree interact with another. We're all part of the same thing. Joe Holland has talked about that too regarding the future of our world, of humanity - that we're going to build this from the ground up again. It's a natural idea, that we're always growing. That's why I called my project Growing Runners, to influence the young runners early and connect them with the older ones before they're gone. So often, we forget even the names of the champions before in our focus on the present. We forget that our roots are in something that might not be with us but may still be feeding us.
Maddie: It helps you see patterns, that maybe this has happened before in a different sense. Everything that happens has happened before. Maybe that makes the world a little less overwhelming. For everything to reconstruct, it must be deconstructed. That's been a comforting thing for me to think about in the midst of this. For things to get reorganized, they have to be disorganized first.
Drew: I was at a conference with Michael Murphy, and one of the important points he made was that evolution meanders. It doesn't go in a straight line. So many kids want to get a personal best every time they run the race, but they don't understand that there's a build-up period, a season, a cycle. There's a process. Every day is not going to be your best. There's also the idea of entropy, that the world is heading for a kind of destruction and everything falls into evenness or death. But syntrophy is love. Love is the organizing principle that fights the idea of entropy, that looks backward. It's a very theologically Christian idea, that there's an end that is a wonderful reunion, almost like the reversing of our universe's time. There's a big bang at the start, a massive expansion that peters out. But love seems to be the organizing, energetic force that not only slows entropy but begins to reverse it. It's a beautiful thought. Evolution doesn't go straight, and there will always be a bit of degradation. The fertilization of a massive tree happens by the death of many other seeds, branches, and roots. I think of the gifts we have as former seeds planted that make us into who we are. I can imagine that Jesus or Saint Francis had something in their head that didn't exist yet where they were. They saw it as a reality, that the path they took was towards something they knew would happen at some time.
Maddie: This has been such a beautiful, enlivening, uplifting conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Drew: I feel so fortunate to be part of the SSGN, whose purpose and mission are directed towards building on the tradition and history of the Rome-Assisi conference, St. Francis, Thomas Berry, and all the people before us. We're then recruiting young people into an integrative movement, connecting nature with spirituality, connecting the kinds of things that we do with spirituality in a way that is not authoritarian or didactic, but experiential. I'm happy to be involved, learn more, and contribute where I can.
Drew Mearns, Leading with Listening
For more than 20 years since retiring from the management of elite, professional athletes, Drew Mearns has helped parents, coaches, high school teams and club programs improve performance, attitudes, and college opportunities for young distance runners. Through proven principles, programs and practice strategies, Drew has developed and grown runners (including five of his own children) into some of the top youth and high school distance runners and teams in the country.
Maddie: When we've talked about teaching and leadership in the past, we've talked about how you approach teaching from a coaching perspective. Can you tell us your thoughts on that subject and your background in that work?
Drew: Of all the different things that I've done, from coaching and teaching, being an aggressive big-firm lawyer, being a sports agent and owner of a sports management company, becoming involved with Q-Link, and also working as the theology department chair of a top high school, sport has been a common piece and a constant part of my life. Sport for me is running - not only running as an athlete and being a part of an athletic family, but also running in high school and college and professionally at New York Athletic Club. This continued into my professional life when I coached and taught at the University of Kentucky as well as at the University of Virginia, where I was the first head coach of the women's program after Title IX. I've been a runner all my life. I now have a professional program in D.C., and a youth program here (in the Williamsburg area) called Growing Runners. I've always connected sport and the mind-body-spirit aspects of physical performance to the things I've either been studying, teaching, or professionally working on. Running has been a constant theme in my life.
I like to connect the things that I'm studying, learning about, reading, and teaching and apply them to areas of human physical performance. For example, you can connect people like Huxley, Gurdjieff, Sartre, or Emerson (to name a few), not because they were athletes or coaches, but because those principles apply to my coaching and the relationships I have with young runners and their parents. That has been a really interesting part of my life, integrating the various pieces. That is what connected me with the Spirituality and Sustainability Global Network, particularly the Rome-Assisi conference, which gave birth to the SSGN.
Maddie: How did you initially get connected with the group?
Drew: A few years ago, I was invited by my friend Ken Kitatani to go to the most recent Rome-Assisi conference. I was actually born in Naples, Italy, and lived there with my parents and 7 younger sisters. At 10 years old, I went to an Italian school and learned the language. Later, when I was at Yale, I studied intensive Italian. When I graduated, I won a Fulbright scholarship to teach in Italy at the University of Bologna. The Italian government collapsed, and I never got to take advantage of that particular education opportunity. But because of my background, I've gotten to represent Italian clients, organize sports events in Rome, and was even at the first world championships in Rome in 1987. I loved my connection and my parent's connection with Italy and the fact that my sister and I were born there. My religious connection, having grown up in the Catholic church, and my love of Saint Francis, also connected me on a level. Ken, Joe Holland, and Elisabetta Ferrero allowed me to speak about sports and spirituality at a conference, so it was a unique thing, bringing that world to the group. There is so much I have learned from them.
Maddie: You're taking the world of the body and marrying it to the world of the mind. It's an interesting, important mix. Especially when it comes to running. Running is such a mind game.
Drew: Running is a sport of life, a sort of lonely physical activity that you can practice by yourself. There are many pieces to it, not only the performance and health components, but the practice of spirituality within the sport is important, too.
Maddie: It's a very contemplative thing, the only physical sport where you're not thinking about the next move or strategy. It's full of repetition.
Drew: That's kind of interesting, because, from the standpoint of coaching, it's not only the repetition. There are 3 'R' words I use in terms of athletes who are participating in the sport and desiring to improve themselves. The words relate to the future, the past, and the present, and I say it like this.
Everything we're doing today is a rehearsal - why am I doing this particular activity? That word is about looking forward, that everything we do today is preparing us for something down the road. The next word is reflection. I ask my kids or whoever is working with me to look back at what they did and what they learned from what they did. The most important of the 'R' words is relationship. My mantra is that "workouts don't work, relationships do". Nowadays, if you go online and search for information about how to improve your 5k time, you get 5 million answers. If workouts worked, then everybody would be fast.
What really happens is that I see something in an athlete, and because of our relationship of curiosity, openness, and acceptance (if a relationship is based on those things), that person hears, understands, and practices with much more effectiveness than if they just read and practiced a workout in a book. I love that part of what I do, and probably get so much more out of coaching than the kids who are coached by me.
Maddie: How would you explain your approach to combining sports and spirituality?
Drew: It's not denominational, but it springs off the word relationship, which is the idea that relationships with each other, even relationships with your adversaries or competitors, are something to consider and use as energy that powers your performance. It's the question, where should I be paying my attention? For example, G.K. Chesterson, who wrote a special biography of Saint Francis, talked about Francis's ability to mix his thoughts with thanks. As a coach, I try to get my athletes to mix their thoughts with what they're doing physically and emotionally. It's the idea of combining things. When I was growing up, we didn't talk about that. We went out to run and tried to do what the coach told us. When it came to mental training, the truly gifted athletes probably developed it themselves or had an instinct for it. It wasn't as studied, taught, or worked on like it is now. In a race, there are certain things that an athlete should be thinking about at different times in that race. It's not how you feel - "this is hard, these guys are too good for me". It's another directive, like in Saint Francis's great gift of thinking about running after the beggar or doing it for somebody else. Early in a race, it might be focusing on the plan that you developed with your coach. Later in the race, it may be emotional, trying to win for your team, or doing the best you can do. It's never focusing on how bad you feel.
The idea of a coach is not authoritarian. It's a partner in performance, a support person. The word itself comes from the idea of a carriage that carries a person towards his or her goal. I think of myself as that kind of coach, someone who can support and help someone in what her goal might be, as opposed to what I want. I want to be somebody who listens more.
Maddie: Thinking about growing up in running with different coaches, a lot of the models put fear in you to make you listen. Yours is one of inspirational leadership. It's even similar to religion, how many people believe or do because they're afraid of the wrath of god vs. wanting to enter into a transformational relationship. For a certain amount of time, being afraid can make you do something, but it's not lasting.
Drew: It's the difference between an authoritarian and a co-active coach, one that says we're in this together. You're going to be out there on the track, but I'm going to support you in what YOU want. That means I should be listening more than telling.
In the sense of entelechy, inside of an acorn is an oak tree - if all the things around and all the relationships and all of nature can bring that out of him. If it's a runner that I see something in, that person knows deep inside that they have a place and a future, and I see and help to bring it out. I think that's what the best coaches, teachers, pastors, or even lovers do through their relationships.
Rev. Dr. Gregory Simpson, Science and Spirituality
"Essentially, I got to meet the humanness in the problems I was dealing with. All along, I was just measuring things. I could tell you how many parts per million of an antibiotic was in milk, and I knew this was wrong. I wasn't looking at it through the human suffering associated with it, I was looking at it through the numbers. When I started to see the numbers in their humanness, through the struggles and the loss of life and the oppression of people, that painted another picture for me and made the different issues become a whole."
Dr. Gregory Simpson is the Pastor of Nauraushaun Presbyterian Church and Co-Founder & Senior Education Consultant of Learning for Life Solutions LLC. He is an active board member of the Spirituality and Sustainability Global Network.
What are your origins - where was your upbringing and what was it like? How have these things informed your passion for the work you do now?
I was born in Glasgow Scotland, where my parents studied at the University of Edinburgh. My dad studied electrical engineering my mom studied food technology. When I was 2, my family moved back to Jamacia, and most of my young years were spent there. At about age 6, we left Jamacia and came to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my dad studied hospital engineering. We later moved back to Jamaica, where I finished all my schooling and got a doctorate in organic chemistry. I worked in Jamacia for four years and came to the U.S., where I worked as a post-doc research fellow for UMass medical school. After that, I moved to New York City, and have lived there since 2010. That's the big picture. My adolescent years in Jamaica specifically oriented me towards issues of the environment. After my Ph.D., I started working in the Ministry of Agriculture as a food safety laboratory manager, where I managed a national program, and that was when I started focusing on issues of the environment. The role opened my eyes to what contaminants can look like, from heavy metals, to industrial waste contamination in the soil, to pesticides and antibiotic residues in milk and eggs. That was when I started understanding the significance of environmental issues. Jamacia is predominantly people of color, so I didn't have to wrestle with issues of race - it was just an issue of the environment. When I came to the U.S., I got a different sense and flavor of what the race issue meant as it related to issues of environment and ecology, dealing with issues systemically. By the time I arrived at seminary, I was focused on 2 things - issues of environment and issues of education. Both of them go hand in hand.
Why did you decide to move from working as a scientist to studying theology and becoming a pastor?
There are a couple of reasons. After a while, you do things so often that you become very competent at them and comfortable with them. After that post-doc, I realized I could somehow explain (with science) any problem that was thrown at me - I could usually figure out what was going on and why it was happening. Later on in my post-doc, the question that bothered me was WHY things were happening. My focus at that time was pregnancy-induced hypertension, and I studied the physiology of pregnancy. It blew me away. All my life, I'd studied plant chemistry. When I got to UMass medical school, it was the first time I'd engaged in physiology and anatomy, and I was astonished when I began to understand all the genes that were involved in regulating the pregnancy process. I could figure out how things were happening, but that never answered the question of why. That question of why couldn't be answered in a lab. It had to be answered somewhere else, and that is when I started inquiring about the spiritual instead of just the scientific. That experience prompted me to do a deeper study in theology and lead me to walk away from the laboratory perspective of my scientific work to studying theology, the bible, and connecting with religious groups. That was the biggest shift that took place in my life, in terms of my mindset and how I thought about things. I was focusing on why things happened as opposed to how. The more I studied, the more I realized there was a parallel track between the sciences and theology.
During the discussion panel you hosted on climate justice and environmental racism, activist Mustafa Ali said - "Whether it's the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc, no matter which book it is, they’re all leading us in the right path." How can we approach faith and spirituality from a place of unity rather than opposition?
The first step is having respect for humanity, for life, because all traditions that seek to identify a connection between the lived experience and god, a deity, strive to out of respect for that diety. In all of these traditions, the Abrahamic traditions and the non- Abrahamic traditions, there is sanctity that is related to life, valuing life through the lens of the diety. Once you have that framework in mind, if you follow those tenants, it is very difficult to dismiss another. Whatever diety you are identifying with is reflected in humanity in its broadest sense. The holistic nature of our response to God (a deity) is that the diety takes care of us and we take care of ourselves in worship to that deity. For that to happen, you must have respect for the other. It doesn't work like that in reality. People have biases, prejudices, and differences. These differences in behavior, culture, ethnicity, and religiosity all weigh into how we interact with each other. Someone will say, "I cannot be supportive of Jews/ Christians/ Muslims/ Buddhists." You can't do it because you can't see it through the ubiquitous experience of god shown through humanity, not in groups of individuals. It's a principle that is problematic for most of us.
I want to hear more about environmental justice and climate justice. How did you become involved in this work, and can you talk about the issues?
Moving to the U.S., I was very clear on issues concerning the environment, especially concerning contaminants, whether it be heavy metals in the soil or antibiotics in the milk. I understood that this was a problem. I came to the U.S. and ended up in seminary, which exposed me to the difference between biology and chemistry and the human suffering that went along with it. It also pointed to the systemic issues that we're now seeing defined as environmental racism, where communities of color are contaminated, they live beside petrochemical plants, dumps, fossil fuel refineries, or fracking sites. What I got exposed to were the social justice aspects of why that was wrong. I knew why it was wrong scientifically, but I didn't have an understanding of the social justice components and the activism that flows around it, and why it flows around it in that way.
Environmental racism, environmental justice, climate justice - these are all functionally related not just to civil rights issues but also to scientific issues, education issues, civil responsibility issues, and social contract issues. It's tied up in a very human experience, in our religiosity. You can't separate the science from the lived experience or the theology from the science. They're all intertwined. You can't see that easily unless you go and experience something in a certain space, you do the mapping. Once you see the maps, your life has to change. You'll either reject it as a fallacy, or you see the truth in it and act differently. That's where I have landed with my work.
Geraldine Patrick Encina, A Journey with the Wind
Geraldine Patrick Encina is executive director of Earth Timekeepers, an organization that promotes a way of living in sync with natural cycles, inspired in the ancestral philosophy of time-space and calendars, especially from Mesoamerica. Raised in the Canary Islands from Chilean parents with Scot-Gaelic and Mapuche ancestry, she settled in Mexico twenty years ago to start a family next to Mindahi Bastida. They have two children, Xiye and Danzaki.
1.What was your upbringing like? Where did you grow up, and how did your early experiences of life inform what you do now?
I was raised in Gran Canaria, one of the islands of the archipelago off the coast of Morocco. Together with my sister, we would go to the beach every single day, both in the summertime and in the school season. My connection to the sea, sand, Sun, and sea-life was profound, and it was enhanced thanks to the practice of Yoga that my Mum instilled in us. In that state of mind, she would bring to us the consciousness that we are all connected, and she would read to us poems of her grandfather who was raised with the Mapuche love for nature.
At the age of seven, while feeling the gentle breeze by the seashore, I started to wonder how I could take kids my age on a journey about how the wind came to be created. I came up with a story about the Lord of the Wind, in charge of sending out to the four directions the gasp that was blown by the creature of Mother Earth’s whose birthday it was on a certain day. There were two siblings (a girl and a boy) in charge of keeping close track of the onomastics that were shown in a special calendar that they had in their bedroom, and they would go to collect the animal or plant to be celebrated so to take it in a special vessel to the Lord of the Wind who dwelled on a very long and flat cloud in the deep sky, together with his helper beings.
2. Can you tell us about your work and research in Mesoamerican Timekeeping? What makes you passionate about this cause?
When I met Mindahi (whose name means Lord of the Wind in Hñahñu-Otomi, one of the most ancient languages in Central Mexico) it happened at the top of a hill in Quito, Ecuador. He was leading a beautiful ceremony for us, young environmental leaders coming together from every bioregion of the West Coast of the American continent. He was guiding us so that we would connect deeply with Mother Earth and ask her for forgiveness as we kneeled, touching her grassy, moist skin. That ceremony connected him and me to the next one, two years later, at the Otomi Ceremonial Site in Temoaya, Mexico State. There, he told me “You see how we greet the four directions, and the heart of Father sky and the heart of Mother Earth, and our own hearts, at the center. How can it be, then, that anthropologists and archaeologists say that our conception of time and space is not orderly enough, because our calendars cannot stay on track with the solar year, and so keeps lagging one day every four years forever?” That question echoed in my mind when I was studying Ethnoecology of ancient cultures in Mesoamerica, where the understanding of time-space philosophy and practice is of the essence. Why was a 360-day part of the 365-day calendar divided into 18 twenty-day segments called Zäna (‘Moon’ in Hñahñu-Otomi) or Uj (‘Moon’ in Yucatec Maya), and how did those 365 pa or k’iinoob (‘day’, respectively) enable the year-calendar to stay in sync with the Sun? These became two central questions in my postdoctoral research at the Ethnoecology Lab of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As my studies advanced, new questions arose: Why was there such fascination around Venus and its multiple appearances at dusk and dawn? And why did governors of most prominent dynasties have to guise as Deity GI (Venus) to re-enact the installation of orderly time-space as happened in Creation time, precisely on a date when evening Venus was in its first rising, preferably with the new Crescent Moon?
I have come to learn that the observance of Venus, Moon, and Pleiades were—and are—crucial to forecast weather conditions and prepare the community accordingly: cornfields, waterways, and wetlands are extremely susceptible to rainwater regimes. Unfortunately, the capacity to develop agroecological and ecological strategies based on those observations is something that very few communities can do with certitude nowadays. This reduces the resiliency of the socio ecosystem as a whole, so it becomes more vulnerable to extreme weather events—which are becoming more frequent as ocean surfaces and the atmosphere accumulate more heat.
Working with colleagues from communities in the Yucatan Peninsula about the Original Maya Calendar has been mutually enriching. They, as Yucatec language and culture teachers and chroniclers of their regions, are being able to refresh the ancestral memory and knowledge about natural events characterizing the seasons throughout the year cycle. For instance, according to scholars of the Maya and school books, twenty-day month Kéej (‘deer’) has no fixed articulation to a specific time of the year—as neither do the rest of the Maya months. On the contrary, when using the Ethnoecological framework I have developed, local promoters of Maya culture have come to understand that the role of month Kéej is to mark with precision the opening of March Equinox, which, according to bioregional lore, is the time when the newborn deer ‘spring’ to life. When they are able to link the long-forgotten Maya months to an actual event in their ecosystem, three things happen: they come to realize that seasonal patterns have been around for thousands of years, which explains why month name ‘deer’ made as much sense back two-thousand years ago as it does now; they recover a sense of pride for the intellectual product of their ancestors, i.e. the Maya calendar, the Ja’ab; and they become more open to talking about the problems they are facing now due to climate change and the ongoing destruction of their delicate ecosystems as a result of unsustainable projects. Re-signifying time-space as a practice is empowering local people in the Yucatan Peninsula to protect and defend their territories.
3. What else are you currently working on and advocating for?
I have always advocated for the healing of biocultural territories. Whether in Chile, Mexico, or other countries in the American continent, I believe that territories can be healed when human communities are permanently cultivating their spiritual connection to the land that hosts them. This kind of practice is only possible when the cultural philosophy of time-space is well known and has been maintained. It is a philosophy that has given symbolic meaning to time-space entities to the point that they are considered the legitimate caregivers of mountains, caves, forests, creeks, springs, wetlands, and seashores. It is them to whom we, as mere passers-by, owe respect and acknowledgment, and we express it by giving payments or spiritual food at their dwelling places. This mostly means music, songs, flowers, fruits, and incense, being delivered at certain times of the year through pilgrimage and traditional ceremonies.
Ever since 1492, when the Otomi-Toltec cycle 13 Reed was closed and a new one commenced, that philosophy was shattered: it was literally burnt to ashes, and its holders were brutally eliminated. The Elders said that Father Sun would depart, and that no light would shine for the People of the Corn for a long time; that during all that time ceremonial centers would remain covered, books hidden and sage people quiet. Five hundred and twenty years later, in 2012, as we entered a new 13 Reed cycle, we knew that the Sun would start to shine: right now, the People of the Corn are awakening to the dawning of Father Sun. All of us who are living in (not ‘on’ or ‘off from’) Turtle Island— the same turtle land that the Maya conceived in their creation story, when thirteen lordships were installed—have the responsibility to advocate for the healing of biocultural regions and territories. Whether our family’s root is deeply sunken in these lands or whether we have only recently been welcomed to them, we must be sure that all our actions are enabling the healing of rivers, lakes, and oceans, the restoration of forests and jungles, and, most importantly, the protection of sacred sites and holy grounds by the local people themselves.
4. Is there a personal, spiritual dimension to your life and work? Is that practice important to you?
I have always been very connected to the four elements of life and to the fifth, which, to me, is love-light emanating from Great Spirit. I try to stay connected to Great Spirit at all times; for this, I pay attention to the small details that moments bring. Every moment unfolds teachings—sometimes difficult to interpret due to our short-sightedness or because expanded information is veiled to most of us. Nevertheless, just like we can train ourselves to remember dreams—or fly in them—we can train ourselves to capture those instants that make life experience more meaningful. To me, it’s not about an individual achieving control over life events, people, and processes, but about a collective person developing the mastery of flowing like water in a stream, where moments—time-space entities—are those multi-colored pebbles, stones, and rocks that add mystery to our passing-by in this life. It’s a passing-by which “is not for long, just for a little while”—as an ancient Otomi-Toltec phrase reminds us when talking about human being’s humble and impeccable existence.
As we see the rage with which the four elements are acting in the wild and in urbanized areas, it may feel impossible to honor them, because there are so many emotions related to their destructive manifestation. However, it is more than ever that they need to be honored as living entities, as entities with consciousness; it is more than ever that we need to humbly see that they are doing the work of purification and release of toxic human behavior that we humans never did for thousands of years. For Catholics and Christians, Jesus’s main mission was to release toxic human behavior in the (past and forthcoming) history of humankind. For earth-based religions, elements are the ones playing that role. Each religion, in their own framework, has come to interpret the deluge that happened back some eight thousand years ago. Among very ancient cultures, the myth of a naturally-occurring event that shakes humanity’s consciousness and shifts human behavior is essential, and it can cycle back. My interpretation of Jesus is that he came to remind people they should equally love friend and foe, and that we should love, honor, and protect all mother figures, including nature and Earth. If today’s Christians focused on that basic mandate instead of whether salvation is achievable after having sinned, Earth would not have gone through the vandalization, exploitation, and desecration that has led her to the severe condition of instability that she is in today. Her atmospheric and ocean chemical composition and temperature, her geological and plate tectonics configuration, and her ecological and biological conditions are all evidence of a kind of involution that the universe had not yet registered. To many readers, Earth is not a ‘she’. Vanguard environmental lawyers pretty much have committed to represent Earth and nature as a legal entity or as a person. I, as many colleagues and young adults, am eager to support new court cases where rivers and other ecosystems come forward to demand their rights to exist and thrive. Surely, if and when they are in all their splendor, ecosystems would help mitigate the destructive effects of phenomena caused by greed-led human activities. But, ultimately, the only thing that humanity should be doing now, is to save herself from herself. And that is done by loving one another, loving life, and loving the biggest, unconditionally loving mother of all: Mother Earth.
5. Your daughter is a prominent young climate activist. What did you teach her about conservation as a child, and what are you learning from her now? What advice would you give to someone hoping to instill those values in their children?
There was not much that I had to teach Xiye. She brought to my consciousness the principle of love when she was in my womb. In a dream, she said to women members of our family: “You must love yourselves and love others, it is what humanity needs most at this time, and you must do it mindfully.” She was raised close to the family food garden and cornfield, participated in a traditional dance called ‘Cuantepecos’ at the yearly Fiesta of her community, and loved to “teach herself” to cook next to Grandma and to weave ‘Tule’ next to Grandpa. She went to a few public schools and, half-way through middle school, we made the effort to send her to one that enhanced the kind of Earth-based values and practices that we instilled at home. Four significant practices there were: to take on the responsibility of being a water protector; to give thanks to the people harvesting the vegetables, fruits, and cereals and cooking for lunch; to do Yoga and have music-making sessions, and to listen with empathy to every classmate's feelings and emotions in a circle whenever they needed it.
Cooking next to Grandma while listening to her life story, taking long walks in mountains and forests, observing the kind of unconditional dedication earth-people put so that life may continue unfolding and thriving; those were precious moments that we as parents intentionally enabled in her upbringing. Children learn from example. To live life with commitment, responsibility, and in service for Mother Earth requires that children enjoy connecting with water, earth, fire, and air in a sacred and loving way—and also in a reciprocal way. To thank them for their nurturing is as essential as to acknowledge plants and animals for their giving themselves in—to us or other beings in the web of life. Those small rituals are usually very well taken by children as they grow. I would advise people to put aside the fear and burden that brings the thought of an unlivable Earth, and to offer children these sacred moments of authentic connection to Mother Earth and her most pure expressions of love for her kin. So be it.
Claudia H. Herrera-Montero, Co-creation and the mystery of God in relationship with all that is created
Claudia is a Catholic practical theologian and educator and served as a lay pastoral leader in Catholic higher education for nearly the past ten years of her life. She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia where she pursued her undergraduate studies in International Relations and Political Sciences at Universidad del Rosario. Claudia holds an M.A. in Pastoral Ministries and a Ph.D. in Practical Theology from St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida. Her doctoral work with College-age Latinas in South Florida has expanded her research on participatory-action with Latinx communities in the classroom and ministerial settings, as she explores on their faith identity and social locations. She serves as the Secretary of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) and this Summer, she joined the board of the Spirituality, Sustainability Global Network. Claudia lives in South Florida with her husband and young daughter.
Maddie: What was your religious upbringing like? How have your personal faith and spirituality changed throughout your life? How has this impacted the work you do now?
Claudia: I grew up Catholic in Bogotá very closed to my abuelas (grandmothers). Their fierce and tender motherly figures created a significant impact on my life. I also attended all-girls Catholic school with the Piarists and Salesians sisters. My abuelas (grandmothers) and the Madres (Sisters) taught me about God through their love and care for their families and the poor. My faith, particularly a closer devotion to Jesus and La Virgencita (Mary), as well a passionate heart for service and justice was not an option or a component throughout my life. It is inherent to who I am and to the social context where I come from. When my family and I came to the United States, we learned to be the other. We encountered a place in which the social categories of language, immigration status, and ethnicity were new and difficult to avoid. I did not anticipate that we would be reminded of these categories not just in the academic enterprise or the classroom setting, but within the social spectrum of our everyday life. Throughout my life, I learned to appreciate the scriptures. My lived experience as an immigrant Latina in the US has shaped my spirituality and my work in the church and the academy. It is naturally at the core of who I am and my relationship with God and others. The language, Spanish, that once I used naturally in the public spectrum, became part of this in-between space of two worlds that I constantly negotiate and call home.
Maddie: We’ve been speaking about the idea of co-creation during many of our recent board meetings. What does the term mean to you, and why is this an important way of seeing the world?
Claudia: The study of theology has opened my lenses to reflect deeper into the mystery of God in relationship with humanity and all that is created. When I started studying theology, it was eye-opening - like those aha moments - to reflect on the meaning of participating in God’s ongoing creation. I affirmed my belief that I was not only created by God in God’s image and likeness, but I learned that I was an active participant and collaborator in God’s dynamic work in the world; visible through my ministry work, scholarship and teaching. Later on, I started to understand that my relationships with the world and all that surrounds me become a reflection of the ongoing collaboration and co-creation with the divine. During the past couple of years, I have been reading Pope Francis’ writings on integral ecology, particularly in his letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. I correlate this work with our ongoing discussions in our recent meetings. The concept of integral ecology or ecology of daily life moved me to reflect that everything is interconnected and therefore my daily actions and practices have a greater impact beyond myself, particularly in those who are more vulnerable. When I consume (for example, when I brew a rich cup of coffee in the morning), I impact significantly a network of relationships that are involved in the process of producing coffee (and I mention coffee for example is because I love coffee/Cafecito…smiles). The same dynamic happens when I take my students to learn and serve with the migrant farm-working community in Immokalee. This experience opens up the space for dialogue and communal learning and transformation. I have found profoundly transforming how my students’ active participation ultimately calls for justice and a more humane way of living as much as how the marginalized contexts they encounter have transformed their relationships with others, and ultimately with God.
Maddie: What are your favorite courses to teach? What subjects and topics do you get the most excited to talk about? What makes you so passionate about exploring participatory action in the classroom?
Claudia: I have found it profoundly transforming to teach undergraduate students in the areas of faith and spirituality. Each course and classroom community is very unique. I challenge my students to reflect on their very unique narratives and social contexts as a critical component of their spiritual journey. In addition, I have been teaching pastoral ministry in Spanish (particularly in the areas of Catholic Social Teaching and Pastoral Planning) for the past few years to pastoral leaders in South Florida. I have the opportunity not only to facilitate theological reflection in the classroom, but I also get to listen to how intentionally they correlate their pastoral work with class material, and we do this by departing with initial assumptions and a pastoral question. I call this journey the ministry of teaching beyond the classroom. Every time we meet, I see just a little piece of God’s work in their communities. I see myself as a facilitator and conversation partner who serves them as they make meaningful correlations and discover new insights as they collaborate with God in the world.
This dynamic connects directly with participatory-action. I believe my students are active agents of learning and new knowledge in the classroom, not just mere receivers of theories that do not always connect with the particularities of the contexts they come from. I have discovered this through my pastoral and teaching experience with Latinx and Caribbean students in the context of South Florida. I believe that when students are empowered to name their particular social location and claim the particularities of their communities, they can make meaningful connections in the process of learning and naturally bring new insights. Even though I facilitate class material and classwork plan, I will never anticipate the dialogue and the new knowledge that will spring up. I always remember the words from Dr. Elisabeth Conde-Frazier when I walk-in a new classroom for the first time: “Ultimately, one carries out participatory action research with fear and trembling because it depends on God’s Kairos and the movement of the Spirit.” and then, she goes: “It requires living in the borderland between God and the people…one learns to observe…think critically, imagine…in order to come up with insight and action.” (Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, “Participatory Action Research” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology).
Maddie: I read your piece on Mary Salome and was deeply moved. How have studying stories like hers inspired your role in the church?
Claudia: During the past years I have been deeply interested to read and research about the early women of the church. I recently concluded an extraordinary journey of serving as a lay female pastoral leader in the ministry of campus in Catholic Higher education. What an incredible, life-giving, and challenging journey of finding my voice every time I felt moved by the Spirit to preach the gospel and announce the Resurrection! I feel that this is an ongoing journey and challenging task for women who serve in communities of faith, the public, and the academy. Women disciples and apostles such as Mary Salome, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene ultimately transformed their communities with love, care, and fierce spirits and are remembered by many as powerful leaders. I am honored to be part of this journey.
Maddie: What shifted your academic interests from political science and international relations to theology and ministry?
Claudia: Each academic journey was very unique and brought significant encounters that led me to the next one. Thus, instead of “changing careers” I believe these fields were and are all interconnected. When I was in college, my faith moved me to work with the least fortunate and marginalized of society. At the end of my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to travel to Mexico City and do an internship with vulnerable families. Through this experience, I discovered my call as a Catholic to action and justice and this led me to learn later on about the social teachings of the Church. Then, when I came to the United States, I was invited to apply to the Pastoral Ministry Program at STU and bring both areas together. This is how the story started…
Maddie: What are you working on and writing about at the moment?
Claudia: I recently published a book chapter on “The practical theological journey of Participatory Action Research: Building the Bridge Between the Classroom and the Field.” I look forward to continuing to work in this area for the rest of this year.
Learn more about Claudia and her work here.
Cesar Baldelomar, A Conversation About Conversation
Cesar "CJ" Baldelomar is currently a second-year doctoral student in Theology and Education at Boston College. His research blends critical theory and decolonial thought, exploring how knowledge production and consumption inform identity formation and the development of ethical paradigms. He holds two law degrees (LL.M. in Intercultural Human Rights and a Juris Doctor) from St. Thomas University School of Law and two graduate degrees from Harvard University. CJ is co-founder of Learning for Life Solutions, LLC and a former legal intern at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He a board member and the new secretary of the Spirituality and Sustainability Global Network.
Maddie: What are you working on and writing about at the moment?
Cesar: I have always been interested in reading and writing. Growing up, I was always thinking "what is a person's outlet?". I've always been very creative. At 13 I used to freestyle, rap, and write poetry - I still write poetry. I went to law school and worked and taught high school for a bit, but then realized I needed a job that would allow me to have a creative outlet. I could think of no better profession than being a professor, writing, researching, lecturing, and meeting other people with different ideas. I'm all about divergent opinions. I really think that is something we have lost as a society, accepting people with different opinions without trying to change them. Lately, my research is focused on the imagination. What is the imagination? What do we mean when we talk about religion, when we talk about spirituality, when we talk about politics? Ultimately, it all comes from someone's imagination, whether collective or individual. To me, the best thing we can do right now is to shake up the imagination and envision what never was. My research is focusing on that, especially religious imagination - how to dislodge thinking from what is called narrative logic. In my work, the fight is in academia because the world of ideas still matters. I think that's where professors and students can work together to dislodge the normative scripts that we all operate under, that have gotten us to the point we're at now - the breaking point. It's time for fresh thinking. My work takes into account scholarly work, but also play, music, art, street performance, street theater.
Maddie: I've been listening to a book about Saint Francis over the past few days, and it's interesting because I'm discovering that the ideas the SSGN is talking about have been around for thousands of years. They aren't new ways of thinking.
Cesar: That's a good point. Sometimes it's a simple recovery of things that have been in the tradition. For example, Harvey Cox, a theologian from Harvard, wrote a book called when "Jesus came to Harvard". In the '70s and '80s, he taught a class on Jesus. One of the things he highlights are two events - one where Jesus turns the tables at the temples, and one when he marches into Jerusalem on a donkey. Harvey Cox says that these are both perfect examples of street theater or street protest. Riding a donkey into Jerusalem was the equivalent of mocking the emperor, who used to ride into conquered cities on a white horse. Here, you have a poor Jewish guy riding in on a donkey, mocking the emperor.
Maddie: I didn't know the context of that story, but it adds to the meaning.
Cesar: Exactly! Because the emperor used to march in on a horse, he had people waving palms at him like a savior, a conquerer, a mighty king. And what did Jesus do? He said, "Cool, I'll ride into Jerusalem on a donkey to mock the Romans." Harvey argues that this interpretation has been lost because people prefer to think of Jesus as a personal friend, a savior, instead of having this side concerned with public and social justice. You're right, sometimes it's all about digging into the resources of the tradition and opening them up for reconsideration for the times.
Maddie: I think that contextual elements are important - you could read the story about the donkey and put the personal friend spin on it very easily. But if you don't know where it's coming from and what the tradition of the time was, it becomes a different story.
Cesar: That's where knowing the facts, knowing what the historical context was, comes in handy. That is my vocation, to open people's minds, not necessarily to change them. That is where I think many people go wrong, in trying to change them. It becomes a remorseful activity. I believe in giving people the facts, opening up their minds a little bit. I think they'll reach a conclusion eventually. As an educator, I believe in making sure that everyone can voice whatever they're feeling because that's also the best way to expose biases. If I'm a professor coming into the classroom and initially divulging my point of view, then I will silence many voices in the process. Then those people will live with those biases and never be heard and those biases will never be judged. Normally, what I do in a classroom is slowly divulge who I am as the semester goes on. It is a gradual kind of disclosure, and by that point, I hope I have offered enough comfort that all of us can disclose some part of us.
Maddie: It sounds like it is important for you to create an environment of conversation.
Cesar: Absolutely. That is what I do in my work as a scholar too, not just in the classroom. I have a business partner, we co-founded a business called Learning for Life Solutions. We network people from all walks of life and bring them together to foster interactive learning. We try to foster an understanding of what education is, we try to foster divergent opinions and bring them together to not necessarily agree, but to at least open up a conversation and dialogue. For me, it's very important to get the conversation going. That is probably the most essential thing we can do right now.
Maddie: I'm a firm believer in that, in all areas of life. Conversation is so important, and we don't often seek out opportunities to converse with people who are different from us. But it's the best way to learn! You need to learn how someone is feeling, what their experiences are, that is what will empower you to do something and make change - not hearing a fact.
Cesar: Hearing about experiences, what people are going through, learning to empathize and sympathize - all of that takes imagination, to be able to say I will never be in your shoes, but let me try to imagine a little bit what it is like. Then you gain some understanding. That goes for everyone - we all have our biases, our assumptions that need to be challenged. It takes a lot to say that you are wrong about your perceptions. That's where the work begins. I believe it's Cornel West that said it best - "It takes more courage for someone to dig into the recesses of their own soul than it does for a solider to be on a battlefield."
Maddie: What are your favorite courses to teach? What subjects are topics do you get the most excited to talk about?
Cesar: Definitely any topic that deals with philosophy. I'm a philosophy junkie, I love to think about how we know the things we know. That digs into the assumptions. I also love to teach theological courses, especially historical ones. You start to see people's eyes open. People's perceptions change - they read scripture passages completely differently when they learn about the context. I enjoy teaching any courses from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Maddie: I read a book about the historical context of the bible, and it was so fascinating. It changes everything.
Cesar: Right. They tell you about the three worlds of biblical interpretations - the world behind the text, the world of the text, and the world in front of the text.
Maddie: There are so many layers. Why would you say that a creative, imaginative approach is so important, especially in the context of the classroom?
Cesar: I think artistic expression is one of the best ways to be heard. When I ask students to write poetry, perform skits - they come alive. When they're writing papers? Sure. But to encourage a classroom approach that is multidisciplinary and multifaceted - I think that's where you start to dislodge stagnant imaginations. Creativity frees the mind of any rubric, any taxonomies or categorizations that come with paper writing. When students don't have to worry about a grade or doing an assignment within the confines of academic discourse, they become different people.
Maddie: It's coming from a place of curiosity, wonder. Is there a personal spiritual dimension to what you are doing? Is that practice important to you?
Cesar: Yes. As much as I don't talk about it, I would consider my spirituality to be mystical. I don't have a set ritual, but I do leave myself open to experiences, and I do see spiritual significance in things. Of course, that's the challenge. Sometimes that clashes with my reason, and sometimes I think to myself "do these stones really mean anything?" or "do my beads really protect my energy?" But in a way, it's more tangible than other spiritualities. I think to myself "these things come from the earth, they are charged with energies from the earth, from the cosmos." I do feel spirituality in terms of an interconnectedness with all of creation.
Christina Furst, Building Sustainable Communities in Malawi
Christina is a retired Peace Corps Volunteer getting ready for her next steps in graduate school. She loves color, home-grown food, and small businesses. She lives in Virginia but loves to set up camp around the world. We chatted about her Peace Corps experience and how her views expanded during that time.
What was the purpose of your work and time spent in Malawi? What goal(s) was your program centered around?
The official purpose of my service was to be a trained professional that met the needs of the community. My specific role was that of an environmental volunteer. I worked to educate the members of my community about best farming practices (making compost, permagardens, small household gardens, and other environmental work). But any Peace Corps member's role essentially turns into assessing what your community wants/ needs at that time you are there. You’ll get the most out of a project if you are working with motivated individuals. Community members aren't going to be excited about painting a mural if they're hungry. They'll be more motivated to do work in that area.
That was the purpose of my work there, but my time was focused on relationships. When you spend time in a community with people…the friends you make are really what make a personal difference. That is hardly surprising to people who travel a lot. As you learn about people's struggles, joys, their day-to-day lives - that’s where your most meaningful time is spent, being in fellowship with them.
Can you tell us a bit about what your day-to-day life looked like in Malawi?
My neighbor Rebecca came to my bedroom window and would ask me to come to get water with her. I would help her pump, and that would help her with her chores. That's how I woke most mornings, I would get up early to do work before it got too hot. I liked to only make one fire a day for cooking, and I'd prepare all my meals in the morning, cooking tea and oatmeal for breakfast and rice and beans for later in the day. Then, I would fill my day with two big activities to keep me busy. In the morning, I did work in a community group presenting a demonstration or conducting a meeting. The afternoons were spent in schools doing wildlife club activities or HIV prevention work. Days would vary a lot because my job title was so varied and broad. The work I did was always changing, especially in regards to seasons of the year.
Were you leading these programs?
I’d lead them with a Malawian counterpart who would help me translate things I didn’t know how to say in Chichewa. They would help me lead sessions as well.
What does the word sustainability mean to you, both personally and in your work?
After studying sustainability in school and translating it to real life, the meaning shifted. I think about that a lot. There is rarely something you can do just once and leave to sustain itself. There’s the initial effort, but a lot of work comes in what you do after that - in maintaining it. People often get excited about starting something and never finish it. I remember doing that myself many times, starting a garden and never watering it, or purchasing fresh vegetables and never actually cooking them. It’s that last 10% - the behavioral change is the hardest part, the part that needs to change to make a difference. You can do a project in a weekend, but then it takes the behavioral change to incorporate sustaining it into your daily life. In my work, I would say it was really important to have both counterparts, that was how you ensured the leadership structure would continue after you were gone.
My counterpart Billy was amazing, and my most successful projects were with him. He called me last week and told me that the honey from the beehives we worked so hard in training people to maintain is now being harvested and sold. He can now let me know what is happening, which is really cool. It comes down to empowering people.
What exactly is a counterpart?
Someone you work closely with in the local community that helps you lead a group or activity, they are Malawian.
Why do you believe that a focus on building sustainable, global communities is important?
I think that a collaborative exchange of ideas is the best way for any important idea to evolve or move forward. An outsider coming in and telling someone a new way to do something isn't the way to go. We must work together and start a conversation instead of just coming in and handing things out. You learn as much (or more) from them, from the community, as they are learning from you. Finding best practices is about that conversation and exchange of ideas. Peace Corps members are there for 2 years to create those relationships. The way to move forward is to exchange those ideas.
I remember one man who was 97 years old and had a compost toilet. It’s exactly what one is now, but he's had one his whole life! It’s interesting that I'M not the smart one there. He taught me something. It’s all about collaboration.
Having the community give feedback on your ideas is important, they are already experts in their area. To move ideas forward, you need an exchange of knowledge.
Is there a personal, spiritual dimension to what you are doing? If so, how does this spiritual practice influence your life and work?
I’d say the best way to show God’s love is to be that love, to show it through your actions, and be a force of light and good, trying to walk in the steps of Jesus and bring that into your relationships. That is important to me. While I'm not one to evangelize, I think that showing your faith through works and the way you communicate and show your love to others is how I would gather a spiritual practice/ influence from the experience. Again, being there, your reason changes all the time. Maybe the reason why you went and the reason you continued to stay is different. They’re always changing. Sometimes it's to show God's love, sometimes it is simply to help because you can’t ignore the devastation. Sometimes it is because you’re so happy about the relationships you have there. I think your reason for doing something “good” is always changing, day by day, even hour by hour. Sometimes you’re there to stick it out, sometimes you have deeper reasons.
Any other words to share?
Putting yourself outside your comfort zone, doing as much as you can while you have the chance and not waiting - that is important and something I learned during my time in Malawi.