Eco-Spirituality in a Time of Crisis, Remarks by Kathleen Deignan
Remembering Thomas Berry in Assisi
Remarks by Kathleen Noone Deignan, CND
22 May 2021
I greet all of you in the Spirit of the living Earth
Which we convene to ponder together this day
Spirit of life
Spirit of cosmos
Spirit of God
Spirit inspiring you and me
Spirit conspiring with you and me
To sanctify and save us
To set us free for the Great Work before us
May the life-breath of our Mother Earth – be breathing us,
May her peace be upon us,
Her wildness be within us,
Her wisdom guiding us,
Her creativity flowing from us in this age of crisis
for all her creatures.
In this Spirit may we enter into dialogue and discernment today.
Let those gather be willing to say Amen.
First let me thank our conveners, the founders, and directors of the emerging Global Network of those engaged in supporting the cultivation of a vibrant spirituality to fund the great work of laboring for the sustainability of our common home.
And greetings to all of you who have chosen to engage in what we hope to be a deep and fruitful conversation on the creative relationship between spirituality and sustainability and - most urgently - how to support and accelerate movements for creation care especially among generations to come.
The conversation about the tensive relationship between spirituality and sustainability that we continue today began decades ago in Assisi, in the Umbrian region of Italy when a humble, soft-spoken prophet ascended a hilltop near the Temple of Minerva in the ancestral hometown of the renowned nature mystic Giovanni Bernadone, known to the world as saint Francis of Assisi.
Francesco is celebrated for composing a Canticle of Creation that echoes still throughout the valleys of his region and indeed throughout the world these 8 centuries since he intoned it,
enchanting all who have ever heard or sung it with new insight into the sacred commune of creation we are blest to become in our one living common home.
Indeed, this sacred song of praise to the One who continues to birth forth the glorious universe has become augmented for our time as another Francis, Pope Jorge Bergolio, takes it as the anthem, the work-song, of the greatest labor movement humankind will ever undertake: to remake our human selves and our civilizations in the image of the mysterious generosity and vitality that gave birth to us and all.
Pope Francis’ letter to the peoples of Anthropocene – Laudato si’ – sings il Poverello – the Poor One’s canticle in a new key,
in polyphony, inviting the choirs of humanity to enter into its poetry and prophecy, its rhythms and cadences intended to bring new harmony to a planet deafened by the bombast of machinery – of drills and horns and blasts and noise that crescendos to cacophony – silencing the choirs of creatures singing their God-given songs.
And so, the canticle of creatures, Saint Francis hymn of Earth, resounds again throughout the world as choristers learn the tune and the text of the manifesto Laudato si, and sing it loud in resonance with the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. One outcry that sets the tempo and sounds the key of this urgent of incantation.
Francesco’s canticle – Brother Sun, Sister Moon sung for Mother Earth – becomes humankind’s ultimate chorale, a song to save us if we will. A song to save us if we will compose new verses so it may be at once a lament for a passing age of terrestrial vitality– the dying Cenozoic - and a birthing song for the gestating Ecozoic – a new age for a new Earth now being dreamt – a waking dream.
But the voice summoning us today belongs to the one who came to Assisi to sing his own rendition of the song in the interval between the first and second Francis, in the 20th century, invited by a daring cohort of professors from Florida’s Saint Thomas University.
They wished him to teach them over several summers how to sing once again the terrestrial harmonies of this ever ancient ever new song as only he could.
But this composer scored the canticle differently letting modern dissonance remain of what was unfolding all around us and within us and we so dangerously unaware.
In post-modern fashion he let us to hear the din muffling the terrestrial harmonies – the deafening clash and clatter of machines and bombs, the blare, the blast and clamor of a planet being pummeled into submission, extracted into ruins.
He let us hear the babble of a civilization gone mad.
How sad was this prophet’s song and how glad we were to hear it,
be challenged to transform it into a new key, a new set of harmonies.
I refer of course to the patron of so many of our endeavors, Thomas Berry, the echoing voice still summoning us and
why we are all assembled here now today.
Though I was not fortunate to have been in Assisi those magical summers when Thomas intoned his own canticle to the cosmos, we can still hear the reverb of his spoken-word poetics of a new cosmology, an integral ecology, rapped in themes of wonder and wounding, speaking of ages and stages of a universe unfolding about us and within us.
And so, his incantation had the effect of revelation that awakened his hearers to a divine mystery spelling itself out in living code: the life-forms of every creature.
Thomas told the original story originally, lyrically, critically, familiarly, archetypally, scientifically, poetically – one might say religiously.
A still unfolding story though it is, he dared to tell it in the integrity of its materiality and of its inherent spirituality – not as two but as one in his saying. A psycho-physical unity from the start with all things woven on the singular loom of divine invisibility.
He foreclosed all boundaries and all hierarchies in the myriad singularities of an ineffably fertile infinity. He blew our minds. He set them on fire. With him it was always “in the beginning, is now and ever shall be…” mystery without end.
Say Amen somebody.
It was the story of everything and how it all began and how it all begins again and again in every instant of ineffable Being, being as it is, Being’s way of being: being cosmos, being this our living Earth, being everything we hear and see, being you and being me. What a story.
Thomas remains for this Anthropocene a rare and singular sort of teacher, a story-teller par excellence, a living seanchaí, servant to the one and only story within which all others find context and meaning. Find their glamor and their glory.
During his life like all shamans and prophets he cried for a vision and received one – of the sacrality, the sacramentality of the emergent universe laboring to sing its song in everyone and everything – and in an urgent way especially through you and me.
As the magic of the cosmic song sounds in us,
the singer begins to behold, believe, and belove the MORE we rarely see and it transforms us, it evolves us.
But as we noted earlier the song now sounding on Earth is a rhythmic eulogy, a lamentation for lost worlds we were meant to protect, and so a searing, weeping elegy.
The song of Earth now tasks us with the Great Work Berry was so gifted to notate in detail of what we must do now in the ravages of the great beauty and how to undertake the work
and what might be the greater energy to fund it beyond our incomprehension and lethargy...
And so, we ask of Thomas today, what would you say to us now?
What would you say today as the great Climate Clock says we’ve got about 8 years to turn this crisis around.
As our spiritual ancestors made their way to deserts in search of masters to bestow a word for salvation.
So what might you say to us today who come to you FROM our deserts seeking a word that will empower us, inspire us, ordain us to awaken our moribund species to the peril and the promise that lies before us for global salvation?
Because you have told us that the Great Work will be arduous demanding all our energies to undertake:
Once upon a time, over a half century ago, one of Thomas Berry’s most faithful students, Sister Miriam Therese mc Gillis, invited him to bring such a word to her Dominican community
asking him to address the theme of “contemplation and world order.” To which he replied, “well that all depends on what kind of “world order” you are contemplating.”
That signature inversion / a kind of cheeky koan is typical of the way Berry teased at breaking apart formulaic ways of thinking into a dialectical and new mind way of thinking.
That is how I imagine Thomas approaching the theme of our gathering: eco spirituality in a time of crisis.
Tossing it about, turning it upside down adding to the ferment needed to create contemporary spiritualities that can bring us to the Eozoic age he inspired us to with him envision.
The question of ecological spirituality was never ancillary for Berry regardless of the audience attending him – scientific, secular, multi-generational, multi-faithful, Nobel laureates, rich, progressive eco-entrepreneurs – no matter. There can be no right doing without right seeing, right intention, right action flowing from right might we call right “contemplation.” We shall not technologize our way out of this crisis.
For, Father Thomas says,
There is a certain futility in the efforts being made – truly sincere, dedicated, and intelligent efforts—to remedy our environmental devastation simply by activating renewable sources of energy and by reducing the deleterious impact of the industrial world.
The difficulty is that the natural world is seen primarily for human use, not as a mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder, beauty and intimacy.
To be celebrated in new liturgies of communion …
He refines our understanding to perceive that In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, even to be “protected and cared for” as if she were not our living suffering mother, a living corporate incarnate being,
As if she were not a sacred reality to be venerated.
A deep psychic shift is needed to withdraw us from the fascination of the industrial world and the deceptive gifts that it gives us…
Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us.
Thomas Berry, Foreword, When the Trees Say Nothing (Notre Dame: Sorin Books, 2003), 18
From the start and in the end, Berry will insist that the cultivation of a vibrant ecological spirituality is the primary and fundamental labor of The Great Work of our time without which all our efforts will miss the boat completely, miss the saving ark we are tasked to build expansive enough to gather and carry all beings with whom to make our way to the other Ecozoic shore.
If all this sounds really dreamy, it’s supposed to.
Berry says we have to dream our way out of this nightmare.
Dreaming is a psycho-spiritual work, a spiritual work.
If it sounds gloomy and depressing, it isn’t – it is the great game of our time – a win or lose challenge we only get one chance to play.
If it sounds like curious prophecy or poetry – it is.
This is the speech of the world to come by our labor and our love.
A speech beyond the jargon of so-called commodities or the calculus of commerce by which we sell our souls, sell the innocent nations of our world for silver and for gold.
And if it feels religious only more so, it is – in Thomas’ term it is the germination of a metareligious movement that will bring us into a viable, flourishing future – the smallest steps of an epic journey we take again today in this assembly.
Once upon a time Thomas set fire to the minds and hearts of a young generation of Eozoic seekers and his word went viral – inspired scholars and artists and teachers and nuns and nones and, I like to say, the Berrian School of Eozoic Wisdom began to be.
What happened in Assisi in the Berry Summer School was no small part of this emergence as we can see.
By now that school is a global university with curriculum and pedagogy all spelled out –a virtual school unlike any other, not just a training program for environmental action, but a school of wisdom for Eozoic transformation.
it even has a website, www.thomasberry.org
The bell rings, the wisdom school is now in session.
Let us enter in. Let us listen deeply and do the dialogue of discovery again, as it happened in Umbria with him.
Let us go to Assisi again today, together, imaginally.
To hear a word and be blessed by Thomas again,
and as if he were here, let the conversation begin…
