Christology: Kenosis, Climate Change, and Befriending NatureShow full title
By Sallie McFague
About this ebook
For decades, Sallie McFague lent her voice and her theological imagination to addressing and advocating for the most important issues of our time. In doing so, she influenced an entire generation and empowered countless people in their efforts to put religion in the service of meeting human needs in difficult times.
In this final book, finished in the year before her death in 2019, McFague summarizes the work of a lifetime with a clear call to live in "such a way that all might flourish." The way, she argues, is the "kenotic interpretation of Christianity: the odd arrangement whereby in order to gain your life, you must lose it. The way of the cross is total self-emptying so that one can receive life, real life, and then pass this life on."
A masterful and life-giving summing-up of a theology that makes a profound difference for us, our communities, and our planet.
Release dateNov 2, 2021
ISBN9781506478746
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Contents
Publisher’s Note
Prologue: Jesus Christ and Climate Change
Introduction: Kenosis, Christ, and Climate Change
1. The Kenotic Stories of Jesus and God
2. Postmodern Insights for Climate Change
3. Divine and Human Relational Ontology
4. God as Friend and We as Friends of the World
5. Christian Theology in View of Kenosis, Theosis, and Postmodernism
Afterword: A Reflection on Kenosis and Christianity
Notes
Index
==
Introduction Kenosis, Christ, and Climate Change I believe there is a basic story that subconsciously or unconsciously dictates many of our actions. We humans love stories. We love them because our lives are stories—we are stories. Our lives have a beginning, middle, and end, and during the time of our story, we try to see meaning in it. Who are we in our story, and what should we be doing? In a recent book titled Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the author, Yuval Noah Harari, in- forms us that for large groups of humans (beyond 150 people) to act together in light of a goal, a fiction or story is necessary. The story is what people fight—and even die—for. It is very hard to tell a good story, “yet when it succeeds, it gives human beings immense power, because it enables mil- lions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could only speak about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees, and lions.”¹ Thus with what Harari calls the cognitive revo- lution, human beings live in two “realities,” with the imagined reality the more powerful of the two. The Western story, anchored by a monarchical, all-powerful God, is no longer functioning to give meaning to people’s lives. In a popular version of this story, Christians have had a narrative of a supernatural God telling them how to behave, and when they fail, he pays the price for their sins so that they can have eternal life in heaven. However, this religious story is no longer credible in con- temporary culture. A story is most effective when it aligns the religious dimension with the secular: when they are mutually reciprocal and supportive. When the distance between the two interpre- tations becomes too great, the link between them breaks, and people are left adhering to just one or to none at all. The latter stance is scarcely credible, and folks will fight to hold on to their story, even an “incredible” or mediocre one, rather than be bereft of any story. Human life must have meaning at all costs. The Western, Christian model of God and the world is losing credibility in most quar- ters. It can be “patched up” only so many times, and then it doesn’t “work” any longer. However, this does not mean that all stories are useless. For instance, when folks say that they no longer “believe in God,” it may mean not that they don’t believe in any God but that the Western, supernatural picture of God as the all-powerful creator and controller of earthly life no longer works for them. It doesn’t necessarily mean that no interpretation would work for them. We need a new basic model, paradigm, of the relationship of God and the world. Currently, in most Protestant circles, the prime model is not of God and the world but of God and the human being, specifically the male human being. While Roman Catholicism has had a doctrine of the world, since the Reformation, the Protestant focus has been narrowed to human individuals, a di- vine and a human one. This picture of two beings only marginally related, very independent, highly anthropocentric, is all about who has the power. It is a competitive model of two isolated monads, each vying for the gold medal, as in sports. The supposition is that God can intervene on the behalf of individual human beings for their good (or not). At its most crude, the model is two competitive human beings (males) vying for controlling power. Therefore, power is the heart of the issue. Who has the most? The model we choose makes all the difference. But where do we get our models? The individualistic model is a combination of Enlight- enment philosophy and anthropology and market capitalism. However, Christians believe Jesus is “the face of God”; Jesus’s life and death and teachings are reflections of the “ways of God.” A very different model emerges from this source—what can be called the “kenotic” model. Why accept one or the other? It is a jump, a leap of faith. There is no hard and fast evidence that one is better than
the other. In terms of one’s most basic, deepest commitment, one cannot be certain. The test (and it is only a test, not a certainty) is that one is “better” for oneself, the planet, and other creatures. Hence Christians start with the story of Jesus. We move from there to talking about God and the world. We understand who God is (God’s transcendence and immanence) and who we are because of Jesus. Does this mean literalism? Does it mean that Jesus is God and therefore we know what we Christians say is the “truth,” that we need nothing else than the story of Jesus to say both who God is and who we are? No, but we do get some clear clues and directions from that story. A kenotic theology is a story of self-sacrificing love, a model that upends the Enlightenment at its most vulnerable place. It is contrary to all we as Westerners value, expect, reward, and honor. But what if the cross (dying to one’s old life, trying to live a new, self-sacrificing love) is the way? What if we choose this as our model? How should we conceive of the transcendence/immanence of God and God’s relation to the world if we take the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as our model in a time of climate change? And what if some of the insights coming to us from postmodernism— especially its anthropology, its understanding of how we fit into the scheme of things—have some interesting overlaps with the Christian kenotic picture? What if some of the novel insights into this basic “worldview”—that is, the assumed, underlying assumptions about the human place in the world on issues of power, exceptionalism, responsibility, body, materialism, dependence, and so on—give us a very different picture than the traditional Protestant picture of two superbeings, God and man, struggling for dominance? What if we might learn something about how to live a kenotic life from the very different picture of our place on our planet from an anthropology challenging us to face up to our radical dependence, fragility, and even weakness? The seeming absurdity of living a life of sacrificial love for others that is at the heart of most religions, and certainly of Christianity, may find a partner in insights from postmodern science and philosophy in terms of its insistence that primarily and centrally, we are animals, bodies dependent on other bodies, incarnational beings at the mercy of the many sources of power in our planet—among them, climate change. The focus on the body at the heart of the Christian story of the incarnation of God should make this tradition open to some of the distinctive insights of postmodernism: its profound materialism; its suspicion of “spirit”; its call for a biocracy (in which all life-forms have a vote, unlike a democracy); its focus on human responsibility for our own actions; the call to love this world, not another; the insistence that we learn to face despair and death; the end of thinking in terms of “substance”; its claim that agency (subjecthood) is not limited to human beings; and so on. So to return to our present dilemma, we might wish we could believe in an all-powerful, super- natural God who could solve all our problems, but that no longer is a persuasive argument. Why is the picture of this God no longer credible, no longer powerful? In part, it is because we no longer believe in ourselves as powerful individuals. Our whole picture of who we are and who God is has changed, so say the postmoderns. The individualistic, solitary, isolated human being who was a product of Enlightenment philosophy and Newtonian science has been undermined and with it be- lief in a similar picture of God. The pictures we have of ourselves and of God go together, and both have been undermined in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Let us look at what has happened to the happy picture of progress in the latter part of the nineteenth century at the hands of the three masters of suspicion: Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche. These folks undermined the sense of discovery, progress, and human control during that century. The Industrial Revolution, the colonization of Africa and the East by Western powers, and advances in medicine and the other sciences combined to make human beings feel confident and, for the first time, in control of nature. This was to be short lived, however. Freud destroyed the sense of clarity
that people used to feel about their “insides,” their motives and desires. Until Freud, things seemed relatively straightforward, but he opened up a vast internal swampy jungle, sowing seeds of doubt, mistrust, and deceit even in our most intimate secretive selves—our relations with parents and sexuality. One could no longer trust what people said about their motives, promises, or wishes. In fact, we didn’t even know what our insides were telling us, and to the extent we did figure it out, we didn’t like what we saw. Whereas Freud generated an internal revolution—we could no longer trust our desires and our will to obey us (or even figure out what they were about)—Darwin worked on the “outside,” the world or cosmos and our place in it. Our success at industrial, scientific, and colonization levels had led people to believe in human centrality and exceptionalism. We were vastly different from all other animals. Descartes claimed we were unique because we could “think”—the rational mind set us off absolutely from all other creatures, making us the only subjects, and everyone and everything else became mere objects. Hence it created a picture of human beings as rightful owners and users of the planet. We are living organisms, and everything else is more like a machine with removable parts that could be used without damaging the whole. It is difficult for us to imagine how it felt to be the hegemonic human being in such a world. By “hegemonic,” I mean the classic, desirable model of the human being: Western, young, male, white- skinned, well-to-do, educated, confident, Protestant, able-bodied. To be sure, most people did not fit this model: women, children, all non-Westerners, physically or mentally challenged, old, colored skin, poor, uneducated, and so on. Immanuel Kant said that one owed such people as himself—the hegemonic human being—moral regard; that is, one should treat such people fairly and justly. This human being is the “neighbor” that the New Testament says we should “love.” The rest—all the other human beings, all other animals and life-forms of any sort, and certainly plants, trees, moun- tains, oceans, land, and so on—fell outside of “moral concern.” What is left, of course, is a small elite of the planet’s inhabitants, less than 1 percent. So when Darwin claimed that we came from and are similar to—let alone completely dependent on—all other life-forms, this elite club of human beings felt threatened to the core. I recall my ancient New England matriarchal aunt saying that certainly she was not related to the apes! However, not only are we not at the top of the planet’s creatures, but we are the most vulnerable and least needed. If we were to disappear tomorrow from the planet, everything else would be better off. (Our pets would miss us for a few days until they adjusted!) Climate change is an excellent example of how far we have fallen from our old status as the most powerful, brilliant, necessary animal on the planet to its worst enemy. Climate change, which we now know is the result of our greedy use of fossil fuels to energize our insatiable consumer market economy—our triumph, as it were, over the planet’s resources—has boomeranged back on us as our greatest threat. What we thought we could control, the planet’s energy to feed our insatiable de- sire for the comfort and pleasure of a few (the 1 percent!), has come back to haunt us as the power that may well be our death knell. What we thought was just another “object” in our planet—the weather—has become the greatest, most powerful “subject,” whose agency we have every right to fear as greater than ourselves. Can “weather” act? Apparently yes, and act with awesome power. So far we are defeated in our attempts to control or even to mitigate the consequences of what we have let loose—the burning up of our planet, our one and only home. It is not only scary—it is terrifying. No wonder that most teen literature these days is apocalyptic: young people’s deepest fear is that they are losing their home (of course they cling to their heli- copter parents). But all of us deep down fear this. It is the unacknowledged elephant in the room
that many of us avoid talking about. It is not discussed in polite society, the way sex and cancer were not discussed when I was a kid. How could we have come to this? We, the planet’s darling and most complex, glorious creation—we can, after all, imagine the universe in our heads—have come to the point where we can also imagine our planet’s demise, either quickly with a nuclear bomb or more slowly with climate change. We are at a fork in the road where we have never been before— capable of destroying our own home. So we come to our third master of suspicion: Nietzsche and his notion of “ressentiment,” a deep, pervasive fear that we are out of our depth, completely out of our depth. Nietzsche expressed it as “the death of God”—that is, the end of our confidence that regardless of our sins, we are in the hands of the Almighty God who would not let his children perish. We now need reasons to believe in our world, for without God, it is all up to us. Deep down, not only apocalyptic teenagers are afraid of the future, but we so-called grown-ups are also. We are deathly afraid. Without belief in God, however weak it is—just an assumption of our culture—even if I don’t believe in God, others do. But if no one believes anymore, if even that cultural assumption is gone, then what stands in the way of a deep, pervasive, all-consuming despair? One might as well try to take care of one’s tiny lit- tle corner of the world, since hope for the greater good, the “commons,” is beyond us. This is not usually a “voiced” despair; rather, it is like a rotten stain throughout everything, a stain that cannot be erased. In fact, if asked to identify it, most of us could not. But we feel things are not right; there is something wrong at the core, but we do not know what. It used to be that “sin” was the problem, but “sin” meant something wrong with individuals, not with the whole world, as is now the case. But now the stain has spread throughout the world, certainly the political but also the cosmic world. It is much bigger than any of us can handle. We are overwhelmed with its horrendous dimen- sions. The specters of climate change collapse and uncontrollable poverty as manifest in millions of immigrants are too terrifying to contemplate, especially if we—mere human beings minus a provi- dential, caring, powerful God—have to deal with it. The economic world (market capitalism) and the biological (climate change) are both infected, and the issue seems totally beyond individual solutions, at the same time that our Western political systems are increasingly dysfunctional, espe- cially the American system. “Things have gotten out of hand,” and we despair of any solutions. Everything has gone awry, and a deep melancholy has settled over us. What should we do? We are now ready, perhaps, to delve into some of the distinctive notes from postmodern thinking that I believe open up ways to help us see how a sacrificial life for others in our world, a world characterized by extreme inequality and climate change, might be relevant. We must give up the pic- ture of ourselves as in control, as “managing” the planet, as deserving all the riches of the planet we can hoard for ourselves, as able to come up with the technological magic bullet for fighting climate change. What if we really opened our minds and hearts to a very different worldview that suggests a type of power that our society sees as wrong, ineffective, and maybe even foolish? What if we took the kenotic life and death of Jesus as our model and considered how contemporary science and postmodern reflection might help us live as Christians in our time? One of the tasks that theologians have is to suggest to people alternative interpretations of the God/world relationship. No one has ever seen God, so all talk about God is necessarily metaphor- ical—that is, assertions that say something about God but do not say all that needs to be said. As with all language about what we cannot see but is nonetheless important to us, such as love, peace, happiness, fear, death, and so on, we use what we can see to stand for what we cannot. Thus all reli- gious and poetic language is metaphorical, and it is critical to use metaphors appropriate for our deepest experiences of these matters.
Thus I am suggesting that the phenomenon of climate change, which is destabilizing all our hopes and plans for human and planetary well-being, needs different metaphors from the standard monarchical one. It needs ones that are less individualistic and anthropocentric. It needs ones that are more social, relational, and immanent than the monarchical one. The Story of Jesus A powerful candidate is one that begins with the story of Jesus, particularly the story that under- scores the self-sacrificial or kenotic character of all Jesus’s words and actions. Such an interpre- tation is summed up in Philippians 2:5–8: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be ex- ploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” Here we see an inversion of the power in the monarchical model in preference for a kenotic, sacrificial model, “a joyous, kind and loving attitude that is willing to give up selfish desires and make sacrifices on behalf of others for the common good and the glory of God.”² This is both a salvation and a discipleship model; that is, it speaks to how God “saves” the world, and it tells us human beings how we should act in the world. In this model, Jesus does not “do it all”—that is, suffer on the cross as a substitute for us, paying a price for our sins. Rather, it suggests that our salvation is patterned on Jesus’s life and action: we join Jesus in living lives of sacrificial love for others and, as such, attain deification. We become like God. Made in the image of God, we become fully who we are, fully human, by participating in God’s own life and love. Moreover, as some sug- gest (and I am among them), “kenosis is not only an explanation of Jesus’ real humanity, but it is also the pattern of all reality.”³ The range of kenosis is understood here to be both broad and deep. The Story of Evolution For instance, we see our religious and secular lives coming together, for the same protoaltruistic ac- tions that we see in evolution reach an epitome in the Christian understanding of the Trinity. Keno- sis as “the pattern of all reality,” from evolution to the Trinity, is a big assertion. How is this so? Holmes Rolston refutes Richard Dawkins’s assertion of the survival of the “selfish gene,” insisting instead that in evolution, “the survival of the fittest turns out to be the survival of the sharers.” He asserts this position because in evolution, “fitness means dying to self for newness of life in a generation to come,” thus suggesting an unconscious kenosis at the most basic biological level. Rolston writes, “The picture coming more and more into focus has a great deal of one kind of thing being sacrificed for the good of another. The lives of individuals are discharged into, flow into, ‘emptied into’ these larger currents of life.”⁴ In fact, the process of evolution is nothing but this complex and continuous process of compe- tition and interdependence. There is nothing mysterious about this process: all that is being claimed is that the upper levels of evolution depend on the lower levels in order for the complex, di- verse world we actually have to exist. As Rolston says, “If the higher forms had to synthesize all the life materials from abiotic materials (also degrading their own wastes), they could never have ad- vanced very far. The upper levels are freed for more advanced synthesis because they depend on syntheses (and decompositions) carried out by lesser organisms below.”⁵ And this process is pre- cisely the one of death for the purpose of new (and more complex, diverse) life that we see every- where about us. It is the process of life preying on life, since advanced life requires food pyramids,
eating and being eaten. Thus while there is no kenosis in nature, there is limitation, struggle, sacri- fice, and death everywhere: it is the heart of the process. Take Rolston’s comment on plants, for example: “Seen in this more comprehensive scheme of things, plants function for the survival of myriads of others. We could say, provocatively, for our ‘kenosis’ inquiry, that they are ‘emptied into,’ given over to, ‘devoted’ to, or ‘sacrificed’ for these others in their community.” But of course it is not just a one-way scheme. The plants also “benefit”: “Plants become insects, which become chicks, which become foxes, which die to fertilize plants.”⁶ We must keep in mind, however, that none of this is conscious but is simply the way the system works. It works in a self-interested fash- ion but within a system of interdependencies that demands “sharing.” While it is not necessary for our purposes that we understand all the intricacies of the evolu- tionary process, it is essential that its major outlines, stressing both radical individuality and radical unity, be given full expression. Thus while “individualism” in the sense of existence by and for one- self is anathema in evolution, it is also the case that it works by “individuality”; that is, each part, no matter how small or large, makes its contribution to the creation of more and more complex and di- verse forms of life. Hence were we to make a leap to the human scene, we could at least say that if reality is put together in this fashion, then it is impossible to imagine fulfillment for any individual apart from the whole. It is not as if individuality is added to the process when it reaches the human level; rather, we become the individuals we are only through the unimaginably old, complex, intri- cate, gradual process that has created all the individuals (of whatever species) in the world. At the very least, this new way of looking at individuality should make us open to contemplating the possi- bilities for the abundant life for human flourishing, not with terms such as me and mine, but with ones like us and ours. Relational Ontology What we see in evolution we see also in the story of Jesus and the Trinity: radical relationality. In contrast to Descartes’s “I think; therefore I am,” what we see emerging in evolution and in our inter- pretation of the Jesus story as well as its implications for understanding God is a different mantra, “I relate; therefore I am.” What we see, in other words, is a “relational ontology” in which kenosis is a necessary first step at evolutionary, christological, Triune, and discipleship levels. Thus kenosis, the unconscious or conscious sacrifice of one for the other(s), shows that there is a correlation be- tween the Trinity and the basic structures of the universe. The new story that we are suggesting is not merely a “religious” or a “secular” one but both, a story that stretches all the way from the most primitive one-celled creature to an understanding of God. However, while the sacrifice of one for the others is unconscious at the prehuman level, it must be conscious at our level—and this is very challenging. As John Zizioulas tells us, Communion with the other requires the experience of the Cross. Unless we sacrifice our own will and subject it to the will of the other, repeating in ourselves what our Lord did in Gethsemane in relation to the will of his Father, we cannot reflect properly in history the communion and other- ness that we see in the triune God. Since the Son of God moved to meet the other, his creation, by emptying himself through the kenosis of the Incarnation, the “kenotic” way is the only one that befits the Christian in his or her communion with the other—be it God or one’s “neighbour.”⁷
In other words, there is no “escape” to “let Jesus do it,” if we accept this story of relational ontology as basic to our universe. The Stories Unpacked From this sketch, we can see several features of this story. First, it must be anchored in an interpre- tation of the life and work of Jesus because Christians see God “in the face of Jesus.” Second, it must be in line with the understanding of reality current in our time. In other words, one criterion is that the religious and the secular stories of our time must be compatible. Third, it must be an engaging, powerful story in order to replace the monarchical engaging powerful story. Do we have such a story? I believe we do, and I am trying to make a case for it. First, the story of Jesus: There are many “stories” of Jesus, but here I will sketch just one as a substitute for the standard one. This story takes as its primary biblical text Philippians 2:5–8, where the central movement is the self-emptying of God, becoming incarnate in a humble human being whose eventual end is death on a cross. Unlike the standard model where God is expressed as a powerful overlord, here we have the complete reversal. According to Lucien Richard, “The self- emptying of Jesus is the revelation that to be God is to be unselfishness itself. Being God means to be the giver.”⁸ Whereas the monarchical model underscores God’s power at all levels—in the cre- ation as the Creator ex nihilo and on the cross as the One who heroically takes our sins upon him- self—the kenotic story is completely different. It is a mystery how the two stories could exist side by side for hundreds of years when their foundations and implications are exact opposites. The kenotic Jesus, as the incarnate God, is epitomized in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables in which reversals of the powerful and the powerless are common. But the story of Jesus is most powerfully expressed in the cross. Jürgen Moltmann could not be more emphatic: “The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology.”⁹ The stan- dard interpretation of the cross claims it is central because here Jesus, as our substitute, relieves us of punishment for our sins. “Let Jesus do it all”—this mantra is the “faith” we need in order to be “saved,” to inherit eternal life. A kenotic understanding of the cross is very different. To begin with, it tells us who God is. As Moltmann writes, “When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more pow- erful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity. The nu- cleus of everything that Christian theology says about ‘God’ is to be found in this Christ event. The Christ event on the cross is a God event.”¹⁰ Because Christians see God in the life, teachings, and death of Jesus, kenosis, or self-sacrificing, is not just the story of Jesus, but it is also the story (interpretation) of God. Thus theology (theos- logos), “talk about God,” begins with talk about Jesus. And it is talk about a kenotic Jesus, or as John Caputo puts it, “Suppose we think of God as someone who prowls the streets . . . disturbs the peace. . . . Suppose we imagine God as a street person with a definite body odor.”¹¹ How shocking! The shock is necessary to save us from imagining Jesus and thus God in a sanitized, spir- itualized way. The “incarnation” is a messy business, or it should be. It is about God as really, truly, deeply being one of us, one who is with us in all the dark, dreary, and shocking parts of our lives. As we have noted, Christians see God as both transcendent and immanent. However, Christians have emphasized, overemphasized, the transcendence of God. A kenotic theology demands that we start with and stay with immanence—that is, the worldly, fleshly, messy, despairing side of God. At the deepest level of “immanence,” of God being present with us, are the calls to a form of self-sacrifice,
calls very apt for our consumer culture: Jesus says in Matthew 19:21, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give . . . to the poor . . . then come, follow me”; in Luke 9:3, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money”; and in Matthew 16:24 KJV, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Kenosis as an Interpretation of Reality These typical sayings by Jesus have always been hard for well-off people to brush aside. Surely, God does not expect us to follow him to this extent! However, if a kenotic theology includes discipleship, then we must admit that it does include our lives as well. Apparently, what is becoming clear is that a kenotic theology moves in several directions to include what we say about God and what we say about ourselves. In other words, it is a total interpretation, a new, different way of being in and understanding the world. It is saying that in order to get a glimpse of what this new worldview is about, begin with the lowly story of a carpenter who lived in a strange, self-sacrificial way—a way to- tally different from our selfish, consumer-oriented way—and yet a way where glimpses of both evolutionary and Trinitarian reflection were present. How odd that the countercultural life of an in- significant peasant should touch on such seemingly esoteric topics as evolution and the Trinity. What is going on here? It seems to be saying that kenosis is both a form of knowledge and a way to live. Is it suggesting that in clear opposition to individual human self-fulfillment (which is one inter- pretation of the twenty-first-century creed), a model of sacrificial love for the neighbor is not only “good” for the other but also close to “reality” as understood by evolutionary theory and some inter- pretations of the Christian understanding of God, the Trinity? Does all this loosely hold together— that is, give us a different picture of how to live on planet earth in the twenty-first century than the consumer, individualistic model? Kenosis and the Great Exchange This demanding discipleship is only possible because and as we participate in the life and love of God, in “the great exchange.” Let us look more deeply into the kenotic track of interpretation. Michael Gorman summarizes it as “cruciform theosis.”¹² What this phrase means is that divinity is qualified by the cross, that the cross takes place in, participates in, God. This kenotic track of inter- pretation suggests something entirely different from the standard Western story of Jesus, which, as we have seen, is a grim, negative one. The kenotic story suggests what the early church called “the great exchange.” As Irenaeus puts it, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself provided the most compelling and often-repeated form of the perennial cur deus homo for generations to come, even until today.”¹³ In other words, God (in Jesus Christ) became incarnate in humanity so that we, par- ticipating in Christ through the sacraments and our actions, might become Godlike. The grand ex- change is deep incarnation; it means that God is deeply, totally immanent in the flesh and, by impli- cation, in all of creation—that the entire creation participates in, lives in, God. God lives in us, our world, and hence our world—and we humans by acknowledgment—live in God. This is an onto- logical statement about “reality.” It is claiming that everything that is exists because it lives within God and therefore has a certain character—a “cruciform” character. Hence the signs of sharing, symbiosis, and life and death that we see in evolution and the pattern of give-and-take, of mutual reciprocity, in the Trinity are clues to the kenoticism inherent in the world. In other words, kenoti- cism, self-sacrificial behavior, is not strange but common; in fact, it is how the universe operates
(says evolution), and it is how divinity operates (says the Trinity). Hence the goal of kenotic interpretation is not negative but joyously positive, for it says this is the way both reality and God are. It does not say that everything will turn out as we wish or that death (and sickness, wars, etc.) will not take place, but it does claim that we live kenotically in God—not on our own but with God and with reality. Hence the grand exchange is indeed joyful, for through it, we participate in “the way things are,” according to both reality and God. It claims that God partic- ipates in (is incarnate in) the world and the world exists within God: this is the way kenotic interpre- tation works. Thomas Merton expresses it in a personal, powerful, and persuasive way in the fol- lowing passage: “Christ Himself . . . ‘breathes’ in . . . me divinely in giving me His Spirit. . . . The mystery of the Spirit is the mystery of selfless love. We receive Him in the ‘inspiration’ of secret love, and we give Him to others in the outgoing of our own charity. Our love in Christ is then a life both of receiving and of giving. We receive from God in the Spirit, and in the same Spirit we return our love to God through our brothers.”¹⁴ This wonderful passage expresses how the kenotic ex- change works at the most basic, physical level—the level of each breath we take. With each incom- ing breath, we receive Christ’s selfless love into ourselves, making it possible when we breathe out to do so selflessly. So Christ works in me, in my every breath (the ground of our physical existence), to make selfless love possible. Christ loves us selflessly with our intaking breath, empowering our physical being (our breath and our will) so that we can love selflessly. A wonderful continuity is appearing here among various levels: personal, scientific, and religious. What Merton expresses at the level of the individual Christian trying to do the impossible—be a dis- ciple of the kenotic, self-sacrificing Jesus—shows how this is possible. He is doing what religious folk have always done—use the deepest, most physical phenomenon of our lives (here the very breath that sustains us in life) as a metaphor for the greatest conundrum of the religious life in most traditions: how to love the neighbor. This seemingly simple universal law has proven to be impossible for human beings, even the most saintly ones.¹⁵ But the grand exchange (God becoming incarnate in the world) means that with each breath we take, God is in us doing what we cannot— love the neighbor. Hence as we “exhale,” we can love the neighbor, not with our own love, but with the only source of all life and love—God. Therefore, the “impossible” parables, the commands to “take up one’s cross” and follow Jesus, are not impossible, not because we are acting, but because God is. God, who first reached out to us in the incarnation, has given us the power to love. What we see at a personal level of the lonely Christian trying to do the impossible—the saintly thing of loving the neighbor—is now empowered to do so. Such persons are channels of divine love, breathing in God’s love to empower them and breathing God’s love out in their actions. What we see in the individual example we also see at scientific and religious levels. Thus the glimmers of kenosis, albeit unconscious, are seen in evolution in the pattern of death for the pur- pose of new life and all the different forms of it: symbiosis, sharing, interdependence, and so on. In other words, the world works this way—what empowers the incredibly diverse, complex, intricate give-and-take of evolution is in continuity with Merton’s personal experience of how faith in Jesus works. And it is also in continuity with the Christian Trinity: the movement of giving and receiving, the dance in which each “person” takes the lead and then passes it on, and on and on. Kenosis and Discipleship Certainly the way in which self-sacrificial love operates at these various levels is very different, yet the pattern is similar. It is not a movement in which one succeeds while all the others fail (the tri- umph of the individual); rather, it is a movement in which through sacrifice, new possibilities
emerge. The “sacrifice” is not always fair, just, or pretty; in fact, it is often unfair and painful for some. It is neither a just nor a pretty story, but its believers claim it is the way the world works; hence it must be accepted. What religions such as Christianity claim is that the particular form of kenosis they practice is one that tries to take actions that help make up for the “losers” to the ones who suffer most. Here we see another difference between the levels of kenosis: at the level where science func- tions, there are no operating agents who can attempt to make things more just. However, God’s reaching out in the person of the Son (God incarnate in the world) offers the possibility of empow- ering love to even things out. So Christians do not claim that evolution is just; rather, what they suggest is that by God working through us, things can turn out differently. While no creature but us can choose to be a participant in the grand exchange, we can so choose to be empowered by love. In other words, the individual Christian (as well as religious bodies) looks for possibilities where sacrificial love can make a difference in worldly outcomes. Because we believe that God is kenotic love, self-sacrificial love, we have an ally in God for helping the grand exchange take place even in the worst of worldly realities: Syria, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Hiroshima. The same power, sacrificial love that operates at the individual level, can also be active at public and scientific levels, helping the realities at these levels “bend” in the direction of kenotic love. Are we assured of victory? Does God’s will for sacrificial sharing always win? By no means. Ours is a “minimal” faith, operating with eyes wide open to the negativities of existence at both personal and other levels, refusing to turn from inconvenient truths, naming them as objectively as possible. And yet working with this faith, our hope remains open to the possibilities that God can bring about by working through us. We pray “to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20).
Introduction
Kenosis, Christ, and Climate Change
I believe there is a basic story that subconsciously or unconsciously dictates many of our actions. We humans love stories. We love them because our lives are stories—we are stories. Our lives have a beginning, middle, and end, and during the time of our story, we try to see meaning in it. Who are we in our story, and what should we be doing?
In a recent book titled Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the author, Yuval Noah Harari, informs us that for large groups of humans (beyond 150 people) to act together in light of a goal, a fiction or story is necessary. The story is what people fight—and even die—for. It is very hard to tell a good story, yet when it succeeds, it gives human beings immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could only speak about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees, and lions.¹ Thus with what Harari calls the cognitive revolution, human beings live in two realities, with the imagined reality the more powerful of the two.
The Western story, anchored by a monarchical, all-powerful God, is no longer functioning to give meaning to people’s lives. In a popular version of this story, Christians have had a narrative of a supernatural God telling them how to behave, and when they fail, he pays the price for their sins so that they can have eternal life in heaven. However, this religious story is no longer credible in contemporary culture. A story is most effective when it aligns the religious dimension with the secular: when they are mutually reciprocal and supportive. When the distance between the two interpretations becomes too great, the link between them breaks, and people are left adhering to just one or to none at all. The latter stance is scarcely credible, and folks will fight to hold on to their story, even an incredible or mediocre one, rather than be bereft of any story. Human life must have meaning at all costs. The Western, Christian model of God and the world is losing credibility in most quarters. It can be patched up only so many times, and then it doesn’t work any longer.
However, this does not mean that all stories are useless. For instance, when folks say that they no longer believe in God, it may mean not that they don’t believe in any God but that the Western, supernatural picture of God as the all-powerful creator and controller of earthly life no longer works for them. It doesn’t necessarily mean that no interpretation would work for them.
We need a new basic model, paradigm, of the relationship of God and the world. Currently, in most Protestant circles, the prime model is not of God and the world but of God and the human being, specifically the male human being. While Roman Catholicism has had a doctrine of the world, since the Reformation, the Protestant focus has been narrowed to human individuals, a divine and a human one. This picture of two beings only marginally related, very independent, highly anthropocentric, is all about who has the power. It is a competitive model of two isolated monads, each vying for the gold medal, as in sports. The supposition is that God can intervene on the behalf of individual human beings for their good (or not). At its most crude, the model is two competitive human beings (males) vying for controlling power.
Therefore, power is the heart of the issue. Who has the most? The model we choose makes all the difference. But where do we get our models? The individualistic model is a combination of Enlightenment philosophy and anthropology and market capitalism. However, Christians believe Jesus is the face of God; Jesus’s life and death and teachings are reflections of the ways of God. A very different model emerges from this source—what can be called the kenotic model. Why accept one or the other? It is a jump, a leap of faith. There is no hard and fast evidence that one is better than
the other. In terms of one’s most basic, deepest commitment, one cannot be certain. The test (and it is only a test, not a certainty) is that one is better for oneself, the planet, and other creatures. Hence Christians start with the story of Jesus. We move from there to talking about God and the world. We understand who God is (God’s transcendence and immanence) and who we are because of Jesus. Does this mean literalism? Does it mean that Jesus is God and therefore we know what we Christians say is the truth, that we need nothing else than the story of Jesus to say both who God is and who we are? No, but we do get some clear clues and directions from that story.
A kenotic theology is a story of self-sacrificing love, a model that upends the Enlightenment at its most vulnerable place. It is contrary to all we as Westerners value, expect, reward, and honor. But what if the cross (dying to one’s old life, trying to live a new, self-sacrificing love) is the way? What if we choose this as our model? How should we conceive of the transcendence/immanence of God and God’s relation to the world if we take the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as our model in a time of climate change? And what if some of the insights coming to us from postmodernism—especially its anthropology, its understanding of how we fit into the scheme of things—have some interesting overlaps with the Christian kenotic picture? What if some of the novel insights into this basic worldview—that is, the assumed, underlying assumptions about the human place in the world on issues of power, exceptionalism, responsibility, body, materialism, dependence, and so on—give us a very different picture than the traditional Protestant picture of two superbeings, God and man, struggling for dominance? What if we might learn something about how to live a kenotic life from the very different picture of our place on our planet from an anthropology challenging us to face up to our radical dependence, fragility, and even weakness? The seeming absurdity of living a life of sacrificial love for others that is at the heart of most religions, and certainly of Christianity, may find a partner in insights from postmodern science and philosophy in terms of its insistence that primarily and centrally, we are animals, bodies dependent on other bodies, incarnational beings at the mercy of the many sources of power in our planet—among them, climate change. The focus on the body at the heart of the Christian story of the incarnation of God should make this tradition open to some of the distinctive insights of postmodernism: its profound materialism; its suspicion of spirit; its call for a biocracy (in which all life-forms have a vote, unlike a democracy); its focus on human responsibility for our own actions; the call to love this world, not another; the insistence that we learn to face despair and death; the end of thinking in terms of substance; its claim that agency (subjecthood) is not limited to human beings; and so on.
So to return to our present dilemma, we might wish we could believe in an all-powerful, supernatural God who could solve all our problems, but that no longer is a persuasive argument. Why is the picture of this God no longer credible, no longer powerful? In part, it is because we no longer believe in ourselves as powerful individuals. Our whole picture of who we are and who God is has changed, so say the postmoderns. The individualistic, solitary, isolated human being who was a product of Enlightenment philosophy and Newtonian science has been undermined and with it belief in a similar picture of God. The pictures we have of ourselves and of God go together, and both have been undermined in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Let us look at what has happened to the happy picture of progress in the latter part of the nineteenth century at the hands of the three masters of suspicion: Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche.
These folks undermined the sense of discovery, progress, and human control during that century. The Industrial Revolution, the colonization of Africa and the East by Western powers, and advances in medicine and the other sciences combined to make human beings feel confident and, for the first time, in control of nature. This was to be short lived, however. Freud destroyed the sense of clarity
that people used to feel about their insides, their motives and desires. Until Freud, things seemed relatively straightforward, but he opened up a vast internal swampy jungle, sowing seeds of doubt, mistrust, and deceit even in our most intimate secretive selves—our relations with parents and sexuality. One could no longer trust what people said about their motives, promises, or wishes. In fact, we didn’t even know what our insides were telling us, and to the extent we did figure it out, we didn’t like what we saw.
Whereas Freud generated an internal revolution—we could no longer trust our desires and our will to obey us (or even figure out what they were about)—Darwin worked on the outside, the world or cosmos and our place in it. Our success at industrial, scientific, and colonization levels had led people to believe in human centrality and exceptionalism. We were vastly different from all other animals. Descartes claimed we were unique because we could think—the rational mind set us off absolutely from all other creatures, making us the only subjects, and everyone and everything else became mere objects. Hence it created a picture of human beings as rightful owners and users of the planet. We are living organisms, and everything else is more like a machine with removable parts that could be used without damaging the whole.
It is difficult for us to imagine how it felt to be the hegemonic human being in such a world. By hegemonic, I mean the classic, desirable model of the human being: Western, young, male, white-skinned, well-to-do, educated, confident, Protestant, able-bodied. To be sure, most people did not fit this model: women, children, all non-Westerners, physically or mentally challenged, old, colored skin, poor, uneducated, and so on. Immanuel Kant said that one owed such people as himself—the hegemonic human being—moral regard; that is, one should treat such people fairly and justly. This human being is the neighbor that the New Testament says we should love. The rest—all the other human beings, all other animals and life-forms of any sort, and certainly plants, trees, mountains, oceans, land, and so on—fell outside of moral concern.
What is left, of course, is a small elite of the planet’s inhabitants, less than 1 percent. So when Darwin claimed that we came from and are similar to—let alone completely dependent on—all other life-forms, this elite club of human beings felt threatened to the core. I recall my ancient New England matriarchal aunt saying that certainly she was not related to the apes! However, not only are we not at the top of the planet’s creatures, but we are the most vulnerable and least needed. If we were to disappear tomorrow from the planet, everything else would be better off. (Our pets would miss us for a few days until they adjusted!)
Climate change is an excellent example of how far we have fallen from our old status as the most powerful, brilliant, necessary animal on the planet to its worst enemy. Climate change, which we now know is the result of our greedy use of fossil fuels to energize our insatiable consumer market economy—our triumph, as it were, over the planet’s resources—has boomeranged back on us as our greatest threat. What we thought we could control, the planet’s energy to feed our insatiable desire for the comfort and pleasure of a few (the 1 percent!), has come back to haunt us as the power that may well be our death knell. What we thought was just another object in our planet—the weather—has become the greatest, most powerful subject, whose agency we have every right to fear as greater than ourselves. Can weather act? Apparently yes, and act with awesome power. So far we are defeated in our attempts to control or even to mitigate the consequences of what we have let loose—the burning up of our planet, our one and only home.
It is not only scary—it is terrifying. No wonder that most teen literature these days is apocalyptic: young people’s deepest fear is that they are losing their home (of course they cling to their helicopter parents). But all of us deep down fear this. It is the unacknowledged elephant in the room
that many of us avoid talking about. It is not discussed in polite society, the way sex and cancer were not discussed when I was a kid. How could we have come to this? We, the planet’s darling and most complex, glorious creation—we can, after all, imagine the universe in our heads—have come to the point where we can also imagine our planet’s demise, either quickly with a nuclear bomb or more slowly with climate change. We are at a fork in the road where we have never been before—capable of destroying our own home.
So we come to our third master of suspicion: Nietzsche and his notion of ressentiment, a deep, pervasive fear that we are out of our depth, completely out of our depth. Nietzsche expressed it as the death of God—that is, the end of our confidence that regardless of our sins, we are in the hands of the Almighty God who would not let his children perish. We now need reasons to believe in our world, for without God, it is all up to us. Deep down, not only apocalyptic teenagers are afraid of the future, but we so-called grown-ups are also. We are deathly afraid. Without belief in God, however weak it is—just an assumption of our culture—even if I don’t believe in God, others do. But if no one believes anymore, if even that cultural assumption is gone, then what stands in the way of a deep, pervasive, all-consuming despair? One might as well try to take care of one’s tiny little corner of the world, since hope for the greater good, the commons, is beyond us. This is not usually a voiced despair; rather, it is like a rotten stain throughout everything, a stain that cannot be erased. In fact, if asked to identify it, most of us could not. But we feel things are not right; there is something wrong at the core, but we do not know what. It used to be that sin was the problem, but sin meant something wrong with individuals, not with the whole world, as is now the case.
But now the stain has spread throughout the world, certainly the political but also the cosmic world. It is much bigger than any of us can handle. We are overwhelmed with its horrendous dimensions. The specters of climate change collapse and uncontrollable poverty as manifest in millions of immigrants are too terrifying to contemplate, especially if we—mere human beings minus a providential, caring, powerful God—have to deal with it. The economic world (market capitalism) and the biological (climate change) are both infected, and the issue seems totally beyond individual solutions, at the same time that our Western political systems are increasingly dysfunctional, especially the American system. Things have gotten out of hand, and we despair of any solutions. Everything has gone awry, and a deep melancholy has settled over us. What should we do?
We are now ready, perhaps, to delve into some of the distinctive notes from postmodern thinking that I believe open up ways to help us see how a sacrificial life for others in our world, a world characterized by extreme inequality and climate change, might be relevant. We must give up the picture of ourselves as in control, as managing the planet, as deserving all the riches of the planet we can hoard for ourselves, as able to come up with the technological magic bullet for fighting climate change. What if we really opened our minds and hearts to a very different worldview that suggests a type of power that our society sees as wrong, ineffective, and maybe even foolish? What if we took the kenotic life and death of Jesus as our model and considered how contemporary science and postmodern reflection might help us live as Christians in our time?
One of the tasks that theologians have is to suggest to people alternative interpretations of the God/world relationship. No one has ever seen God, so all talk about God is necessarily metaphorical—that is, assertions that say something about God but do not say all that needs to be said. As with all language about what we cannot see but is nonetheless important to us, such as love, peace, happiness, fear, death, and so on, we use what we can see to stand for what we cannot. Thus all religious and poetic language is metaphorical, and it is critical to use metaphors appropriate for our deepest experiences of these matters.
Thus I am suggesting that the phenomenon of climate change, which is destabilizing all our hopes and plans for human and planetary well-being, needs different metaphors from the standard monarchical one. It needs ones that are less individualistic and anthropocentric. It needs ones that are more social, relational, and immanent than the monarchical one.
The Story of Jesus
A powerful candidate is one that begins with the story of Jesus, particularly the story that underscores the self-sacrificial or kenotic character of all Jesus’s words and actions. Such an interpretation is summed up in Philippians 2:5–8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Here we see an inversion of the power in the monarchical model in preference for a kenotic, sacrificial model, a joyous, kind and loving attitude that is willing to give up selfish desires and make sacrifices on behalf of others for the common good and the glory of God.² This is both a salvation and a discipleship model; that is, it speaks to how God saves the world, and it tells us human beings how we should act in the world. In this model, Jesus does not do it all—that is, suffer on the cross as a substitute for us, paying a price for our sins. Rather, it suggests that our salvation is patterned on Jesus’s life and action: we join Jesus in living lives of sacrificial love for others and, as such, attain deification. We become like God. Made in the image of God, we become fully who we are, fully human, by participating in God’s own life and love. Moreover, as some suggest (and I am among them), kenosis is not only an explanation of Jesus’ real humanity, but it is also the pattern of all reality.³ The range of kenosis is understood here to be both broad and deep.
The Story of Evolution
For instance, we see our religious and secular lives coming together, for the same protoaltruistic actions that we see in evolution reach an epitome in the Christian understanding of the Trinity. Kenosis as the pattern of all reality, from evolution to the Trinity, is a big assertion. How is this so? Holmes Rolston refutes Richard Dawkins’s assertion of the survival of the selfish gene, insisting instead that in evolution, the survival of the fittest turns out to be the survival of the sharers. He asserts this position because in evolution, fitness means dying to self for newness of life in a generation to come, thus suggesting an unconscious kenosis at the most basic biological level. Rolston writes, The picture coming more and more into focus has a great deal of one kind of thing being sacrificed for the good of another. The lives of individuals are discharged into, flow into, ‘emptied into’ these larger currents of life.⁴
In fact, the process of evolution is nothing but this complex and continuous process of competition and interdependence. There is nothing mysterious about this process: all that is being claimed is that the upper levels of evolution depend on the lower levels in order for the complex, diverse world we actually have to exist. As Rolston says, If the higher forms had to synthesize all the life materials from abiotic materials (also degrading their own wastes), they could never have advanced very far. The upper levels are freed for more advanced synthesis because they depend on syntheses (and decompositions) carried out by lesser organisms below.⁵ And this process is precisely the one of death for the purpose of new (and more complex, diverse) life that we see everywhere about us. It is the process of life preying on life, since advanced life requires food pyramids,
eating and being eaten. Thus while there is no kenosis in nature, there is limitation, struggle, sacrifice, and death everywhere: it is the heart of the process. Take Rolston’s comment on plants, for example: Seen in this more comprehensive scheme of things, plants function for the survival of myriads of others. We could say, provocatively, for our ‘kenosis’ inquiry, that they are ‘emptied into,’ given over to, ‘devoted’ to, or ‘sacrificed’ for these others in their community. But of course it is not just a one-way scheme. The plants also benefit: Plants become insects, which become chicks, which become foxes, which die to fertilize plants.⁶ We must keep in mind, however, that none of this is conscious but is simply the way the system works. It works in a self-interested fashion but within a system of interdependencies that demands sharing.
While it is not necessary for our purposes that we understand all the intricacies of the evolutionary process, it is essential that its major outlines, stressing both radical individuality and radical unity, be given full expression. Thus while individualism in the sense of existence by and for oneself is anathema in evolution, it is also the case that it works by individuality; that is, each part, no matter how small or large, makes its contribution to the creation of more and more complex and diverse forms of life. Hence were we to make a leap to the human scene, we could at least say that if reality is put together in this fashion, then it is impossible to imagine fulfillment for any individual apart from the whole. It is not as if individuality is added to the process when it reaches the human level; rather, we become the individuals we are only through the unimaginably old, complex, intricate, gradual process that has created all the individuals (of whatever species) in the world. At the very least, this new way of looking at individuality should make us open to contemplating the possibilities for the abundant life for human flourishing, not with terms such as me and mine, but with ones like us and ours.
Relational Ontology
What we see in evolution we see also in the story of Jesus and the Trinity: radical relationality. In contrast to Descartes’s I think; therefore I am, what we see emerging in evolution and in our interpretation of the Jesus story as well as its implications for understanding God is a different mantra, I relate; therefore I am. What we see, in other words, is a relational ontology in which kenosis is a necessary first step at evolutionary, christological, Triune, and discipleship levels. Thus kenosis, the unconscious or conscious sacrifice of one for the other(s), shows that there is a correlation between the Trinity and the basic structures of the universe. The new story that we are suggesting is not merely a religious or a secular one but both, a story that stretches all the way from the most primitive one-celled creature to an understanding of God. However, while the sacrifice of one for the others is unconscious at the prehuman level, it must be conscious at our level—and this is very challenging. As John Zizioulas tells us,
Communion with the other requires the experience of the Cross. Unless we sacrifice our own will and subject it to the will of the other, repeating in ourselves what our Lord did in Gethsemane in relation to the will of his Father, we cannot reflect properly in history the communion and otherness that we see in the triune God. Since the Son of God moved to meet the other, his creation, by emptying himself through the kenosis of the Incarnation, the kenotic way is the only one that befits the Christian in his or her communion with the other—be it God or one’s neighbour.⁷
In other words, there is no escape to let Jesus do it, if we accept this story of relational ontology as basic to our universe.
The Stories Unpacked
From this sketch, we can see several features of this story. First, it must be anchored in an interpretation of the life and work of Jesus because Christians see God in the face of Jesus. Second, it must be in line with the understanding of reality current in our time. In other words, one criterion is that the religious and the secular stories of our time must be compatible. Third, it must be an engaging, powerful story in order to replace the monarchical engaging powerful story. Do we have such a story? I believe we do, and I am trying to make a case for it.
First, the story of Jesus: There are many stories of Jesus, but here I will sketch just one as a substitute for the standard one. This story takes as its primary biblical text Philippians 2:5–8, where the central movement is the self-emptying of God, becoming incarnate in a humble human being whose eventual end is death on a cross. Unlike the standard model where God is expressed as a powerful overlord, here we have the complete reversal. According to Lucien Richard, The self-emptying of Jesus is the revelation that to be God is to be unselfishness itself. Being God means to be the giver.⁸ Whereas the monarchical model underscores God’s power at all levels—in the creation as the Creator ex nihilo and on the cross as the One who heroically takes our sins upon himself—the kenotic story is completely different. It is a mystery how the two stories could exist side by side for hundreds of years when their foundations and implications are exact opposites. The kenotic Jesus, as the incarnate God, is epitomized in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables in which reversals of the powerful and the powerless are common.
But the story of Jesus is most powerfully expressed in the cross. Jürgen Moltmann could not be more emphatic: "The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology."⁹ The standard interpretation of the cross claims it is central because here Jesus, as our substitute, relieves us of punishment for our sins. Let Jesus do it all—this mantra is the faith we need in order to be saved, to inherit eternal life. A kenotic understanding of the cross is very different. To begin with, it tells us who God is. As Moltmann writes, "When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity. The nucleus of everything that Christian theology says about ‘God’ is to be found in this Christ event. The Christ event on the cross is a God event."¹⁰
Because Christians see God in the life, teachings, and death of Jesus, kenosis, or self-sacrificing, is not just the story of Jesus, but it is also the story (interpretation) of God. Thus theology (theos-logos), talk about God, begins with talk about Jesus. And it is talk about a kenotic Jesus, or as John Caputo puts it, Suppose we think of God as someone who prowls the streets . . . disturbs the peace. . . . Suppose we imagine God as a street person with a definite body odor.¹¹ How shocking! The shock is necessary to save us from imagining Jesus and thus God in a sanitized, spiritualized way. The incarnation is a messy business, or it should be. It is about God as really, truly, deeply being one of us, one who is with us in all the dark, dreary, and shocking parts of our lives. As we have noted, Christians see God as both transcendent and immanent. However, Christians have emphasized, overemphasized, the transcendence of God. A kenotic theology demands that we start with and stay with immanence—that is, the worldly, fleshly, messy, despairing side of God. At the deepest level of immanence, of God being present with us, are the calls to a form of self-sacrifice,
calls very apt for our consumer culture: Jesus says in Matthew 19:21, If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give . . . to the poor . . . then come, follow me; in Luke 9:3, Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and in Matthew 16:24 KJV, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."
Kenosis as an Interpretation of Reality
These typical sayings by Jesus have always been hard for well-off people to brush aside. Surely, God does not expect us to follow him to this extent! However, if a kenotic theology includes discipleship, then we must admit that it does include our lives as well. Apparently, what is becoming clear is that a kenotic theology moves in several directions to include what we say about God and what we say about ourselves. In other words, it is a total interpretation, a new, different way of being in and understanding the world. It is saying that in order to get a glimpse of what this new worldview is about, begin with the lowly story of a carpenter who lived in a strange, self-sacrificial way—a way totally different from our selfish, consumer-oriented way—and yet a way where glimpses of both evolutionary and Trinitarian reflection were present. How odd that the countercultural life of an insignificant peasant should touch on such seemingly esoteric topics as evolution and the Trinity. What is going on here? It seems to be saying that kenosis is both a form of knowledge and a way to live. Is it suggesting that in clear opposition to individual human self-fulfillment (which is one interpretation of the twenty-first-century creed), a model of sacrificial love for the neighbor is not only good for the other but also close to reality as understood by evolutionary theory and some interpretations of the Christian understanding of God, the Trinity? Does all this loosely hold together—that is, give us a different picture of how to live on planet earth in the twenty-first century than the consumer, individualistic model?
Kenosis and the Great Exchange
This demanding discipleship is only possible because and as we participate in the life and love of God, in the great exchange. Let us look more deeply into the kenotic track of interpretation. Michael Gorman summarizes it as cruciform theosis.¹² What this phrase means is that divinity is qualified by the cross, that the cross takes place in, participates in, God. This kenotic track of interpretation suggests something entirely different from the standard Western story of Jesus, which, as we have seen, is a grim, negative one. The kenotic story suggests what the early church called the great exchange. As Irenaeus puts it, "Our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself provided the most compelling and often-repeated form of the perennial cur deus homo for generations to come, even until today."¹³ In other words, God (in Jesus Christ) became incarnate in humanity so that we, participating in Christ through the sacraments and our actions, might become Godlike. The grand exchange is deep incarnation; it means that God is deeply, totally immanent in the flesh and, by implication, in all of creation—that the entire creation participates in, lives in, God. God lives in us, our world, and hence our world—and we humans by acknowledgment—live in God. This is an ontological statement about reality. It is claiming that everything that is exists because it lives within God and therefore has a certain character—a cruciform character. Hence the signs of sharing, symbiosis, and life and death that we see in evolution and the pattern of give-and-take, of mutual reciprocity, in the Trinity are clues to the kenoticism inherent in the world. In other words, kenoticism, self-sacrificial behavior, is not strange but common; in fact, it is how the universe operates
(says evolution), and it is how divinity operates (says the Trinity).
Hence the goal of kenotic interpretation is not negative but joyously positive, for it says this is the way both reality and God are. It does not say that everything will turn out as we wish or that death (and sickness, wars, etc.) will not take place, but it does claim that we live kenotically in God—not on our own but with God and with reality. Hence the grand exchange is indeed joyful, for through it, we participate in the way things are, according to both reality and God. It claims that God participates in (is incarnate in) the world and the world exists within God: this is the way kenotic interpretation works. Thomas Merton expresses it in a personal, powerful, and persuasive way in the following passage: Christ Himself . . . ‘breathes’ in . . . me divinely in giving me His Spirit. . . . The mystery of the Spirit is the mystery of selfless love. We receive Him in the ‘inspiration’ of secret love, and we give Him to others in the outgoing of our own charity. Our love in Christ is then a life both of receiving and of giving. We receive from God in the Spirit, and in the same Spirit we return our love to God through our brothers.¹⁴ This wonderful passage expresses how the kenotic exchange works at the most basic, physical level—the level of each breath we take. With each incoming breath, we receive Christ’s selfless love into ourselves, making it possible when we breathe out to do so selflessly. So Christ works in me, in my every breath (the ground of our physical existence), to make selfless love possible. Christ loves us selflessly with our intaking breath, empowering our physical being (our breath and our will) so that we can love selflessly.
A wonderful continuity is appearing here among various levels: personal, scientific, and religious. What Merton expresses at the level of the individual Christian trying to do the impossible—be a disciple of the kenotic, self-sacrificing Jesus—shows how this is possible. He is doing what religious folk have always done—use the deepest, most physical phenomenon of our lives (here the very breath that sustains us in life) as a metaphor for the greatest conundrum of the religious life in most traditions: how to love the neighbor. This seemingly simple universal law has proven to be impossible for human beings, even the most saintly ones.¹⁵ But the grand exchange (God becoming incarnate in the world) means that with each breath we take, God is in us doing what we cannot—love the neighbor. Hence as we exhale, we can love the neighbor, not with our own love, but with the only source of all life and love—God. Therefore, the impossible parables, the commands to take up one’s cross and follow Jesus, are not impossible, not because we are acting, but because God is. God, who first reached out to us in the incarnation, has given us the power to love. What we see at a personal level of the lonely Christian trying to do the impossible—the saintly thing of loving the neighbor—is now empowered to do so. Such persons are channels of divine love, breathing in God’s love to empower them and breathing God’s love out in their actions.
What we see in the individual example we also see at scientific and religious levels. Thus the glimmers of kenosis, albeit unconscious, are seen in evolution in the pattern of death for the purpose of new life and all the different forms of it: symbiosis, sharing, interdependence, and so on. In other words, the world works this way—what empowers the incredibly diverse, complex, intricate give-and-take of evolution is in continuity with Merton’s personal experience of how faith in Jesus works. And it is also in continuity with the Christian Trinity: the movement of giving and receiving, the dance in which each person takes the lead and then passes it on, and on and on.
Kenosis and Discipleship
Certainly the way in which self-sacrificial love operates at these various levels is very different, yet the pattern is similar. It is not a movement in which one succeeds while all the others fail (the triumph of the individual); rather, it is a movement in which through sacrifice, new possibilities
emerge. The sacrifice is not always fair, just, or pretty; in fact, it is often unfair and painful for some. It is neither a just nor a pretty story, but its believers claim it is the way the world works; hence it must be accepted. What religions such as Christianity claim is that the particular form of kenosis they practice is one that tries to take actions that help make up for the losers to the ones who suffer most.
Here we see another difference between the levels of kenosis: at the level where science functions, there are no operating agents who can attempt to make things more just. However, God’s reaching out in the person of the Son (God incarnate in the world) offers the possibility of empowering love to even things out. So Christians do not claim that evolution is just; rather, what they suggest is that by God working through us, things can turn out differently. While no creature but us can choose to be a participant in the grand exchange, we can so choose to be empowered by love. In other words, the individual Christian (as well as religious bodies) looks for possibilities where sacrificial love can make a difference in worldly outcomes. Because we believe that God is kenotic love, self-sacrificial love, we have an ally in God for helping the grand exchange take place even in the worst of worldly realities: Syria, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Hiroshima. The same power, sacrificial love that operates at the individual level, can also be active at public and scientific levels, helping the realities at these levels bend in the direction of kenotic love.
Are we assured of victory? Does God’s will for sacrificial sharing always win? By no means. Ours is a minimal faith, operating with eyes wide open to the negativities of existence at both personal and other levels, refusing to turn from inconvenient truths, naming them as objectively as possible. And yet working with this faith, our hope remains open to the possibilities that God can bring about by working through us. We pray to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine (Eph 3:20).
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Two
Postmodern Insights for Climate Change
With the new worldview coming to us from various corners of postmodernism, we have a rich set of insights to join company with the kenotic view of Christianity in our attempt to provide an answer to the turning point of climate change. The contributions from postmodernism are deep and broad, ranging from changing our place from “outside” nature to “inside,” with the accompanying change in both epistemology (how we know) and ontology (who we are). This is a profound shift that af- fects both our basic worldview and our behavior. We will look at Timothy Morton’s “ecological thought” and Karen Barad’s “agential realism” to see how postmodernism has changed “who we are in the world” and “how we know the world.” We will then summarize some of the postmodern insights relevant to our project of a kenotic theology and climate change. “Who We Are in the World” (Timothy Morton) and “How We Know the World” (Karen Barad) With Timothy Morton’s “ecological thought,” we human beings move from our imagined stand- point as “outside” nature, and thus as “transcendent” over the world, to our more honest place as entirely “inside” nature.¹ Thus “nature” as a reality external to us disappears. It is an illusion, a dan- gerous one, about our place in the scheme of things. To the extent we live within this lie, we are un- able to live fruitful lives on our planet because we believe ourselves to be in charge of the world and able to manage it. Capitalism is an example of our wrong-headed, false, and dangerous thinking. It has resulted in vast human financial inequality and a deteriorating planet. The “ecological thought,” on the other hand, is the admission of our total connection within our planet, so completely inside that we are like fish trying to explain what water is. Buddhists use the expression “dependent co-arising” to suggest how everything emerges through coexistence— nothing “exists” by itself. Hence in evolution, life-forms do not “adapt” to their environment but evolve along with it. We are, at this time in evolutionary history, the most complex, nuanced prod- uct of the planet’s fifteen-billion-year-old history of evolution from a tiny bit of matter to all the com- plex, varied, wonderful life-forms on earth. Each and every part of us, from the bacteria in our gut to our opposable thumb and our magnificent brain, is a product of millions of years of tiny mutations in that initial bit of matter. As the most complex example of evolution, we are more “inside” the planet than anything else. We, who think we rule over and are superior to our planet, are actually its most amazing product—and a very vulnerable one. Our evolution is so amazing that we have ended up being able to imagine our creator (the planet) as our creation: we can hold a picture of the planet in our minds and imagine that it lies within our power to control. It is as if a child believed that it was/is its own parent. The story of our emergence from a spoonful of matter to our present reality is so slow, complex, mysterious, and amazing that we have trouble believing it. Take but one fea- ture: our thumb. Tracing that one distinctive human characteristic throughout the billions of years is beyond human capacity. Yet it is the task we should undertake if we are ever to truly imagine our incarnation, our embodiment, from within the planet. The heart of evolution, then, claims to be a continuous story with no dualisms and plenty of fuzzy edges between connections, which is radically different from our standard interpretation. Con- sider just one example—sex and sexual orientation. Rather than strict divisions between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on, evolution says that we are all male and female, straight and gay, in different ways and to different degrees. Likewise, features that we used to
imagine were uniquely human—such as thinking, grieving, playing, sympathizing, and so on—are being discovered in other animals. Our exceptionalism and the radical dualistic divisions among life-forms are being questioned. Hence Martin Buber’s addressing a tree as “thou” or a child playing that she is a tiger is not pure fantasy or merely primitive behavior. The false picture of ourselves culminated with the Enlightenment interpretation of the human individual as the epitome of evolu- tionary success. This picture is the total opposite of our true status, being made clear to us now in the disaster of climate change. Our helplessness before this twenty-first-century phenomenon is forcing us to acknowledge our false self-image. We have taken a selfie of ourselves posed on top of planet earth, but with our feet teetering on the edge as we try to save ourselves from plunging to our death. So it is understandable why it is difficult for us to accept “the ecological thought” when we have lived for several centuries in the lie that this planet is ours for the taking, providing us with endless food and shelter. We are now being told that even our best environmental interpretations, ones where other life-forms are not simply oriented toward our well-being, are inadequate. Actually, the postmoderns say that we live with other creatures not as a community but as an origami, or a mesh network, or a rhizome set of roots and sprouts. The models we should now follow are not hierar- chical but horizontal, not of a kingdom but of a democracy and even a biocracy, including all crea- tures, especially sentient ones, within the circle of our moral concern. However, “the ecological thought” is not that of a cozy, harmonious kind of relationship. It is not on the model of an organism where every part has its place and contributes to the overall well-being of the whole. Rather, it is “connectionism” through differences, the microscopic mutations in the evolutionary story that connect us all through a complex mix of law and chance. The kinds of con- nections we see in evolution—composed of billions, zillions, of mutations in ways beyond our abil- ity to imagine—connect us to other beings and other things. Such interdependence goes all the way down to every cell in our bodies; how each of us is “created” within the fifteen billion years of the earth’s history is a process that has no center, no design, no goal. In addition, the more one knows about “the ecological thought,” the more one realizes that everything is included, even our own shit, and as a matter of fact, in a highly populated consumer-capitalist society, we are surrounded by our own waste to a terrifying extent. As Morton insists, consciousness “sucks,” and as T. S. Eliot in- sisted, human beings cannot bear very much reality. “The ecological thought,” then, is not only the pleasant rolling hills of English romantic poetry; it is also the piles of garbage produced by every major city. The implications of moving in this direction are, of course, immense—from what and how we eat to land claims, education content and styles, financial justice, and so on. Would not every aspect of human dwelling on our planet change at a deep level if we were to see ourselves not as the owners of our planet but as one of its most needy occupants? Would it not also change our understanding of the divine, of what is sacred, from a blown-up version of a superman to—well, what and who? Morton suggests that at the very least, it should cause us to move away from our macho Western sky god to a more receptive, open, compassionate, sacrificial picture of the divine. If we believe that the model of ourselves and the model of God are interrelated—we are made in the image of God and God is understood on the model of ourselves—then these two issues will always be considered together. Therefore, how we imagine God and how we imagine ourselves are dangerous issues and should be handled with care. Would we not, at least, see ourselves as within God, as living and moving and having our being within God (with the world understood, perhaps, as God’s body), rather than of God as a supernatural, distant, isolated being controlling but not being influenced by
the world? Our goal is to try to reimagine who we are in the world, and I suggest here is a good start: we live within our world and within God. We have been looking at ourselves “within nature,” but Karen Barad’s agential realism is an at- tempt to retain some measure of objectivity against extreme positions of knowing, doing, and being. Barad rejects both naïve realism and social constructivism. A one-paragraph summary of her somewhat daunting thesis is as follows: “In summary, the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming. The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfiguring/entanglements/relationalities/(re)-articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dy- namism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing configurations of the world.”² Hers is a vision of reality that denies the radical separation of subject and object as well as other forms of dualism. Her phrase “exteriority within” attempts to summarize her position, which rejects the Cartesian model of “outside/inside” (subject vs. object, humans vs. the world), substituting for it a model where everything is “inside” but that saves a measure of “objectivity.” She is against dualism and stasis, opting for a form of “differentiation in motion.” She asks, How can we have an imma- nental picture of reality and still retain a place for both change and responsibility? Agential realism says that agents of all kinds (human and nonhuman, living and dead) construct the world but are not totally absorbed by it. In fact, the kind of immanentalism she imagines depends on difference (diffraction) rather than on sameness (reflection). The entire “mechanism” by which her picture of reality operates is by difference—nothing would “happen” without differences. However, while nei- ther humans nor any other subject totally constructs or controls reality, humans are not entirely determined by it. We have agency (and hence responsibility) in and for the world. The critical thing is trying to imagine ourselves as “inside” the reality that we help construct but of which we are also a product. We are both player and product of reality. The world is an “inside” job—an immanental picture that is constantly changing—of which we are a major player but cer- tainly not the only one and increasingly a vulnerable one. It is probably impossible to describe Barad’s interpretation of reality, since we are so thoroughly embedded in it. One analogy, however, that comes to mind is panentheism as a model of the God/world relation. In that model, the world and human beings are imagined as within God who embraces the world but is not identical with it or reduced to it. God and the world are intrinsically entangled with one another, but God and the world are also separate. In relation to God, the world (especially we human beings) is never apart from, standing outside of, or able to “describe” God. Likewise, the first step in understanding agen- tial realism is to change where we are “standing,” the point of view from and in which we imagine both our construction of and our dependence on the world. Barad is telling us to move from the privileged (but false) position of standing outside the world and talking about it—what it is, who is responsible for it, and so on—and deal with the very different picture of ourselves and our world when we put ourselves totally within reality. The only difference between us and other major subject players in the world is that we have self-consciousness—we know that we know. And what we know must start with the recognition that while our point of view gives us the rare privilege of knowing about the world (both its glories and its horrors), it does not change our place in the world, which is inside, like everything and everyone else. The point is to overcome our allegiance to a subject/object epistemology and ontology in regard to our understanding of reality. We aim to move from a static, essentialist, substance view to one that pictures reality as always changing and in which its quasi subjects and objects (what Barad calls “phenomena”) are made and unmade. The players in this view of reality are not only human
beings (and not even just “the living”) but everything that makes a difference. This means that agen- cy is wide open: What is there that does not make a difference? Hence one is always dealing with continuity (subjects, objects, etc. compose the world but always in different ways and to different degrees). This revised picture sees everything as becoming. Agency need not be human or con- scious, for agency covers whatever matters, whatever makes a difference. So while there are not solid subjects in this way of thinking, there are phenomena that in different ways and to different de- grees participate in the building of the world. All are subjects and all are objects; hence agential real- ism is an appropriate term for different kinds of agency creating reality, creating the world. If we accept our inside place, we make a huge jump that will influence everything else we say about selves, other forms of life, other bits of matter, and so on. Where we stand—on a hillside on top of and outside the rest of the world or within the world in the most radically entangled, embed- ded fashion imaginable—is the first change we must make. Then, but only then, can we look for quasi descriptions, analogies, pictures, and so on that will help us say more about the world and who we are in it—and in it in some interesting, distinctive ways. We are agents, subjects, but so are some unlikely candidates, such as “climate change,” that may not know they are players but surely are. Our epistemological advantage is a plus and a minus: it allows us to shout with joy on a gor- geous Vancouver spring morning when the cherry trees are blooming; however, it also makes us aware that not only will this beauty end but so will we. Living with the joy and the terror of existence is the distinctive human experience. Conclusion As a summary model of the postmodern view, I would suggest Gilles Deleuze’s picture of an origa- mi. Here the same material is used over and over again, designed into billions of different forms of matter. In this model, we see the world and all of its folding and unfolding, with the same material recycled into different shapes and modes of complexity. Our worldview is not one of hierarchy, sub- stance, dualism, or subjects and objects but one of a continuous borrowing and sharing, interde- pendence, death and new life. We need to begin to think about ourselves not as the masters or even the highest beings on our planet but as part of a biocracy, which includes all creatures, who, there- fore, as in a democracy, have intrinsic value and “rights.” Again, the one thing that distinguishes us apart from our particular form of rationality is our awareness of responsibility. We have become the one creature who knows that we live within the billion folds that make up our “origami” planet. We do not own or control it, but we can influence how it folds and who is included within the folds—at least to some degree. Another attempt at a summary is Jane Bennett’s riff on the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one matter- energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by hetero- geneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.”³ Finally, a summary of postmodernism from a more homely standpoint of a human being: How does it feel to be a human being living on planet earth in the twenty-first century with eyes wide open? It feels like radical relationality at all levels and ways—relationality is the primary feature of postmodernism. Moreover, it is a relationality from the “inside” as we humans participate in what we know: we are thoroughly embedded in the earth in both our knowing and our doing. We are not primarily “individuals” but exist only in community and within interrelatedness at cosmic,
microscopic, and quantum levels. We often have a sense of wonder and awe the more we engage “eye to eye” with other species and realize how complex, diverse, and rich the world is. While we are increasingly aware of our vulnerability (and even disposability) on planet earth, nonetheless, we also feel increasingly responsible for the state of the planet, as our awareness of climate change grows. We are no longer the primary species on the planet, with all others inferior to us as mere “objects.” More than anything else, we humans see ourselves as thoroughly embedded in our world, with one distinction—we are self-conscious. We know that we know, and what we know is that we are totally the product of evolution—and yet of an evolutionary pattern that functions on a pattern of new life through death. Some religions, including Christianity, take this model of self- sacrifice as the way to planetary flourishing and personal fulfillment.
Two
Postmodern Insights for Climate Change
With the new worldview coming to us from various corners of postmodernism, we have a rich set of insights to join company with the kenotic view of Christianity in our attempt to provide an answer to the turning point of climate change. The contributions from postmodernism are deep and broad, ranging from changing our place from outside nature to inside, with the accompanying change in both epistemology (how we know) and ontology (who we are). This is a profound shift that affects both our basic worldview and our behavior. We will look at Timothy Morton’s ecological thought and Karen Barad’s agential realism to see how postmodernism has changed who we are in the world and how we know the world. We will then summarize some of the postmodern insights relevant to our project of a kenotic theology and climate change.
Who We Are in the World (Timothy Morton) and How We Know the World (Karen Barad)
With Timothy Morton’s ecological thought, we human beings move from our imagined standpoint as outside nature, and thus as transcendent over the world, to our more honest place as entirely inside nature.¹ Thus nature as a reality external to us disappears. It is an illusion, a dangerous one, about our place in the scheme of things. To the extent we live within this lie, we are unable to live fruitful lives on our planet because we believe ourselves to be in charge of the world and able to manage it. Capitalism is an example of our wrong-headed, false, and dangerous thinking. It has resulted in vast human financial inequality and a deteriorating planet.
The ecological thought, on the other hand, is the admission of our total connection within our planet, so completely inside that we are like fish trying to explain what water is. Buddhists use the expression dependent co-arising to suggest how everything emerges through coexistence—nothing exists by itself. Hence in evolution, life-forms do not adapt to their environment but evolve along with it. We are, at this time in evolutionary history, the most complex, nuanced product of the planet’s fifteen-billion-year-old history of evolution from a tiny bit of matter to all the complex, varied, wonderful life-forms on earth. Each and every part of us, from the bacteria in our gut to our opposable thumb and our magnificent brain, is a product of millions of years of tiny mutations in that initial bit of matter. As the most complex example of evolution, we are more inside the planet than anything else. We, who think we rule over and are superior to our planet, are actually its most amazing product—and a very vulnerable one. Our evolution is so amazing that we have ended up being able to imagine our creator (the planet) as our creation: we can hold a picture of the planet in our minds and imagine that it lies within our power to control. It is as if a child believed that it was/is its own parent. The story of our emergence from a spoonful of matter to our present reality is so slow, complex, mysterious, and amazing that we have trouble believing it. Take but one feature: our thumb. Tracing that one distinctive human characteristic throughout the billions of years is beyond human capacity. Yet it is the task we should undertake if we are ever to truly imagine our incarnation, our embodiment, from within the planet.
The heart of evolution, then, claims to be a continuous story with no dualisms and plenty of fuzzy edges between connections, which is radically different from our standard interpretation. Consider just one example—sex and sexual orientation. Rather than strict divisions between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on, evolution says that we are all male and female, straight and gay, in different ways and to different degrees. Likewise, features that we used to
imagine were uniquely human—such as thinking, grieving, playing, sympathizing, and so on—are being discovered in other animals. Our exceptionalism and the radical dualistic divisions among life-forms are being questioned. Hence Martin Buber’s addressing a tree as thou or a child playing that she is a tiger is not pure fantasy or merely primitive behavior. The false picture of ourselves culminated with the Enlightenment interpretation of the human individual as the epitome of evolutionary success. This picture is the total opposite of our true status, being made clear to us now in the disaster of climate change. Our helplessness before this twenty-first-century phenomenon is forcing us to acknowledge our false self-image. We have taken a selfie of ourselves posed on top of planet earth, but with our feet teetering on the edge as we try to save ourselves from plunging to our death.
So it is understandable why it is difficult for us to accept the ecological thought when we have lived for several centuries in the lie that this planet is ours for the taking, providing us with endless food and shelter. We are now being told that even our best environmental interpretations, ones where other life-forms are not simply oriented toward our well-being, are inadequate. Actually, the postmoderns say that we live with other creatures not as a community but as an origami, or a mesh network, or a rhizome set of roots and sprouts. The models we should now follow are not hierarchical but horizontal, not of a kingdom but of a democracy and even a biocracy, including all creatures, especially sentient ones, within the circle of our moral concern.
However, the ecological thought is not that of a cozy, harmonious kind of relationship. It is not on the model of an organism where every part has its place and contributes to the overall well-being of the whole. Rather, it is connectionism through differences, the microscopic mutations in the evolutionary story that connect us all through a complex mix of law and chance. The kinds of connections we see in evolution—composed of billions, zillions, of mutations in ways beyond our ability to imagine—connect us to other beings and other things. Such interdependence goes all the way down to every cell in our bodies; how each of us is created within the fifteen billion years of the earth’s history is a process that has no center, no design, no goal. In addition, the more one knows about the ecological thought, the more one realizes that everything is included, even our own shit, and as a matter of fact, in a highly populated consumer-capitalist society, we are surrounded by our own waste to a terrifying extent. As Morton insists, consciousness sucks, and as T. S. Eliot insisted, human beings cannot bear very much reality. The ecological thought, then, is not only the pleasant rolling hills of English romantic poetry; it is also the piles of garbage produced by every major city.
The implications of moving in this direction are, of course, immense—from what and how we eat to land claims, education content and styles, financial justice, and so on. Would not every aspect of human dwelling on our planet change at a deep level if we were to see ourselves not as the owners of our planet but as one of its most needy occupants? Would it not also change our understanding of the divine, of what is sacred, from a blown-up version of a superman to—well, what and who? Morton suggests that at the very least, it should cause us to move away from our macho Western sky god to a more receptive, open, compassionate, sacrificial picture of the divine. If we believe that the model of ourselves and the model of God are interrelated—we are made in the image of God and God is understood on the model of ourselves—then these two issues will always be considered together. Therefore, how we imagine God and how we imagine ourselves are dangerous issues and should be handled with care. Would we not, at least, see ourselves as within God, as living and moving and having our being within God (with the world understood, perhaps, as God’s body), rather than of God as a supernatural, distant, isolated being controlling but not being influenced by
the world? Our goal is to try to reimagine who we are in the world, and I suggest here is a good start: we live within our world and within God.
We have been looking at ourselves within nature, but Karen Barad’s agential realism is an attempt to retain some measure of objectivity against extreme positions of knowing, doing, and being. Barad rejects both naïve realism and social constructivism. A one-paragraph summary of her somewhat daunting thesis is as follows: "In summary, the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming. The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfiguring/entanglements/relationalities/(re)-articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing configurations of the world."² Hers is a vision of reality that denies the radical separation of subject and object as well as other forms of dualism. Her phrase exteriority within attempts to summarize her position, which rejects the Cartesian model of outside/inside (subject vs. object, humans vs. the world), substituting for it a model where everything is inside but that saves a measure of objectivity. She is against dualism and stasis, opting for a form of differentiation in motion. She asks, How can we have an immanental picture of reality and still retain a place for both change and responsibility? Agential realism says that agents of all kinds (human and nonhuman, living and dead) construct the world but are not totally absorbed by it. In fact, the kind of immanentalism she imagines depends on difference (diffraction) rather than on sameness (reflection). The entire mechanism by which her picture of reality operates is by difference—nothing would happen without differences. However, while neither humans nor any other subject totally constructs or controls reality, humans are not entirely determined by it. We have agency (and hence responsibility) in and for the world.
The critical thing is trying to imagine ourselves as inside the reality that we help construct but of which we are also a product. We are both player and product of reality. The world is an inside job—an immanental picture that is constantly changing—of which we are a major player but certainly not the only one and increasingly a vulnerable one. It is probably impossible to describe Barad’s interpretation of reality, since we are so thoroughly embedded in it. One analogy, however, that comes to mind is panentheism as a model of the God/world relation. In that model, the world and human beings are imagined as within God who embraces the world but is not identical with it or reduced to it. God and the world are intrinsically entangled with one another, but God and the world are also separate. In relation to God, the world (especially we human beings) is never apart from, standing outside of, or able to describe God. Likewise, the first step in understanding agential realism is to change where we are standing, the point of view from and in which we imagine both our construction of and our dependence on the world. Barad is telling us to move from the privileged (but false) position of standing outside the world and talking about it—what it is, who is responsible for it, and so on—and deal with the very different picture of ourselves and our world when we put ourselves totally within reality. The only difference between us and other major subject players in the world is that we have self-consciousness—we know that we know. And what we know must start with the recognition that while our point of view gives us the rare privilege of knowing about the world (both its glories and its horrors), it does not change our place in the world, which is inside, like everything and everyone else.
The point is to overcome our allegiance to a subject/object epistemology and ontology in regard to our understanding of reality. We aim to move from a static, essentialist, substance view to one that pictures reality as always changing and in which its quasi subjects and objects (what Barad calls phenomena) are made and unmade. The players in this view of reality are not only human
beings (and not even just the living) but everything that makes a difference. This means that agency is wide open: What is there that does not make a difference? Hence one is always dealing with continuity (subjects, objects, etc. compose the world but always in different ways and to different degrees). This revised picture sees everything as becoming. Agency need not be human or conscious, for agency covers whatever matters, whatever makes a difference. So while there are not solid subjects in this way of thinking, there are phenomena that in different ways and to different degrees participate in the building of the world. All are subjects and all are objects; hence agential realism is an appropriate term for different kinds of agency creating reality, creating the world.
If we accept our inside place, we make a huge jump that will influence everything else we say about selves, other forms of life, other bits of matter, and so on. Where we stand—on a hillside on top of and outside the rest of the world or within the world in the most radically entangled, embedded fashion imaginable—is the first change we must make. Then, but only then, can we look for quasi descriptions, analogies, pictures, and so on that will help us say more about the world and who we are in it—and in it in some interesting, distinctive ways. We are agents, subjects, but so are some unlikely candidates, such as climate change, that may not know they are players but surely are. Our epistemological advantage is a plus and a minus: it allows us to shout with joy on a gorgeous Vancouver spring morning when the cherry trees are blooming; however, it also makes us aware that not only will this beauty end but so will we. Living with the joy and the terror of existence is the distinctive human experience.
Conclusion
As a summary model of the postmodern view, I would suggest Gilles Deleuze’s picture of an origami. Here the same material is used over and over again, designed into billions of different forms of matter. In this model, we see the world and all of its folding and unfolding, with the same material recycled into different shapes and modes of complexity. Our worldview is not one of hierarchy, substance, dualism, or subjects and objects but one of a continuous borrowing and sharing, interdependence, death and new life. We need to begin to think about ourselves not as the masters or even the highest beings on our planet but as part of a biocracy, which includes all creatures, who, therefore, as in a democracy, have intrinsic value and rights. Again, the one thing that distinguishes us apart from our particular form of rationality is our awareness of responsibility. We have become the one creature who knows that we live within the billion folds that make up our origami planet. We do not own or control it, but we can influence how it folds and who is included within the folds—at least to some degree.
Another attempt at a summary is Jane Bennett’s riff on the Nicene Creed: "I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests."³
Finally, a summary of postmodernism from a more homely standpoint of a human being: How does it feel to be a human being living on planet earth in the twenty-first century with eyes wide open? It feels like radical relationality at all levels and ways—relationality is the primary feature of postmodernism. Moreover, it is a relationality from the inside as we humans participate in what we know: we are thoroughly embedded in the earth in both our knowing and our doing. We are not primarily individuals but exist only in community and within interrelatedness at cosmic,
microscopic, and quantum levels. We often have a sense of wonder and awe the more we engage eye to eye with other species and realize how complex, diverse, and rich the world is. While we are increasingly aware of our vulnerability (and even disposability) on planet earth, nonetheless, we also feel increasingly responsible for the state of the planet, as our awareness of climate change grows. We are no longer the primary species on the planet, with all others inferior to us as mere objects. More than anything else, we humans see ourselves as thoroughly embedded in our world, with one distinction—we are self-conscious. We know that we know, and what we know is that we are totally the product of evolution—and yet of an evolutionary pattern that functions on a pattern of new life through death. Some religions, including Christianity, take this model of self-sacrifice as the way to planetary flourishing and personal fulfillment.
Previous Chapter
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Three
imagine were uniquely human—such as thinking, grieving, playing, sympathizing, and so on—are being discovered in other animals. Our exceptionalism and the radical dualistic divisions among life-forms are being questioned. Hence Martin Buber’s addressing a tree as “thou” or a child playing that she is a tiger is not pure fantasy or merely primitive behavior. The false picture of ourselves culminated with the Enlightenment interpretation of the human individual as the epitome of evolu- tionary success. This picture is the total opposite of our true status, being made clear to us now in the disaster of climate change. Our helplessness before this twenty-first-century phenomenon is forcing us to acknowledge our false self-image. We have taken a selfie of ourselves posed on top of planet earth, but with our feet teetering on the edge as we try to save ourselves from plunging to our death. So it is understandable why it is difficult for us to accept “the ecological thought” when we have lived for several centuries in the lie that this planet is ours for the taking, providing us with endless food and shelter. We are now being told that even our best environmental interpretations, ones where other life-forms are not simply oriented toward our well-being, are inadequate. Actually, the postmoderns say that we live with other creatures not as a community but as an origami, or a mesh network, or a rhizome set of roots and sprouts. The models we should now follow are not hierar- chical but horizontal, not of a kingdom but of a democracy and even a biocracy, including all crea- tures, especially sentient ones, within the circle of our moral concern. However, “the ecological thought” is not that of a cozy, harmonious kind of relationship. It is not on the model of an organism where every part has its place and contributes to the overall well-being of the whole. Rather, it is “connectionism” through differences, the microscopic mutations in the evolutionary story that connect us all through a complex mix of law and chance. The kinds of con- nections we see in evolution—composed of billions, zillions, of mutations in ways beyond our abil- ity to imagine—connect us to other beings and other things. Such interdependence goes all the way down to every cell in our bodies; how each of us is “created” within the fifteen billion years of the earth’s history is a process that has no center, no design, no goal. In addition, the more one knows about “the ecological thought,” the more one realizes that everything is included, even our own shit, and as a matter of fact, in a highly populated consumer-capitalist society, we are surrounded by our own waste to a terrifying extent. As Morton insists, consciousness “sucks,” and as T. S. Eliot in- sisted, human beings cannot bear very much reality. “The ecological thought,” then, is not only the pleasant rolling hills of English romantic poetry; it is also the piles of garbage produced by every major city. The implications of moving in this direction are, of course, immense—from what and how we eat to land claims, education content and styles, financial justice, and so on. Would not every aspect of human dwelling on our planet change at a deep level if we were to see ourselves not as the owners of our planet but as one of its most needy occupants? Would it not also change our understanding of the divine, of what is sacred, from a blown-up version of a superman to—well, what and who? Morton suggests that at the very least, it should cause us to move away from our macho Western sky god to a more receptive, open, compassionate, sacrificial picture of the divine. If we believe that the model of ourselves and the model of God are interrelated—we are made in the image of God and God is understood on the model of ourselves—then these two issues will always be considered together. Therefore, how we imagine God and how we imagine ourselves are dangerous issues and should be handled with care. Would we not, at least, see ourselves as within God, as living and moving and having our being within God (with the world understood, perhaps, as God’s body), rather than of God as a supernatural, distant, isolated being controlling but not being influenced by
the world? Our goal is to try to reimagine who we are in the world, and I suggest here is a good start: we live within our world and within God. We have been looking at ourselves “within nature,” but Karen Barad’s agential realism is an at- tempt to retain some measure of objectivity against extreme positions of knowing, doing, and being. Barad rejects both naïve realism and social constructivism. A one-paragraph summary of her somewhat daunting thesis is as follows: “In summary, the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming. The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfiguring/entanglements/relationalities/(re)-articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dy- namism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing configurations of the world.”² Hers is a vision of reality that denies the radical separation of subject and object as well as other forms of dualism. Her phrase “exteriority within” attempts to summarize her position, which rejects the Cartesian model of “outside/inside” (subject vs. object, humans vs. the world), substituting for it a model where everything is “inside” but that saves a measure of “objectivity.” She is against dualism and stasis, opting for a form of “differentiation in motion.” She asks, How can we have an imma- nental picture of reality and still retain a place for both change and responsibility? Agential realism says that agents of all kinds (human and nonhuman, living and dead) construct the world but are not totally absorbed by it. In fact, the kind of immanentalism she imagines depends on difference (diffraction) rather than on sameness (reflection). The entire “mechanism” by which her picture of reality operates is by difference—nothing would “happen” without differences. However, while nei- ther humans nor any other subject totally constructs or controls reality, humans are not entirely determined by it. We have agency (and hence responsibility) in and for the world. The critical thing is trying to imagine ourselves as “inside” the reality that we help construct but of which we are also a product. We are both player and product of reality. The world is an “inside” job—an immanental picture that is constantly changing—of which we are a major player but cer- tainly not the only one and increasingly a vulnerable one. It is probably impossible to describe Barad’s interpretation of reality, since we are so thoroughly embedded in it. One analogy, however, that comes to mind is panentheism as a model of the God/world relation. In that model, the world and human beings are imagined as within God who embraces the world but is not identical with it or reduced to it. God and the world are intrinsically entangled with one another, but God and the world are also separate. In relation to God, the world (especially we human beings) is never apart from, standing outside of, or able to “describe” God. Likewise, the first step in understanding agen- tial realism is to change where we are “standing,” the point of view from and in which we imagine both our construction of and our dependence on the world. Barad is telling us to move from the privileged (but false) position of standing outside the world and talking about it—what it is, who is responsible for it, and so on—and deal with the very different picture of ourselves and our world when we put ourselves totally within reality. The only difference between us and other major subject players in the world is that we have self-consciousness—we know that we know. And what we know must start with the recognition that while our point of view gives us the rare privilege of knowing about the world (both its glories and its horrors), it does not change our place in the world, which is inside, like everything and everyone else. The point is to overcome our allegiance to a subject/object epistemology and ontology in regard to our understanding of reality. We aim to move from a static, essentialist, substance view to one that pictures reality as always changing and in which its quasi subjects and objects (what Barad calls “phenomena”) are made and unmade. The players in this view of reality are not only human
beings (and not even just “the living”) but everything that makes a difference. This means that agen- cy is wide open: What is there that does not make a difference? Hence one is always dealing with continuity (subjects, objects, etc. compose the world but always in different ways and to different degrees). This revised picture sees everything as becoming. Agency need not be human or con- scious, for agency covers whatever matters, whatever makes a difference. So while there are not solid subjects in this way of thinking, there are phenomena that in different ways and to different de- grees participate in the building of the world. All are subjects and all are objects; hence agential real- ism is an appropriate term for different kinds of agency creating reality, creating the world. If we accept our inside place, we make a huge jump that will influence everything else we say about selves, other forms of life, other bits of matter, and so on. Where we stand—on a hillside on top of and outside the rest of the world or within the world in the most radically entangled, embed- ded fashion imaginable—is the first change we must make. Then, but only then, can we look for quasi descriptions, analogies, pictures, and so on that will help us say more about the world and who we are in it—and in it in some interesting, distinctive ways. We are agents, subjects, but so are some unlikely candidates, such as “climate change,” that may not know they are players but surely are. Our epistemological advantage is a plus and a minus: it allows us to shout with joy on a gor- geous Vancouver spring morning when the cherry trees are blooming; however, it also makes us aware that not only will this beauty end but so will we. Living with the joy and the terror of existence is the distinctive human experience. Conclusion As a summary model of the postmodern view, I would suggest Gilles Deleuze’s picture of an origa- mi. Here the same material is used over and over again, designed into billions of different forms of matter. In this model, we see the world and all of its folding and unfolding, with the same material recycled into different shapes and modes of complexity. Our worldview is not one of hierarchy, sub- stance, dualism, or subjects and objects but one of a continuous borrowing and sharing, interde- pendence, death and new life. We need to begin to think about ourselves not as the masters or even the highest beings on our planet but as part of a biocracy, which includes all creatures, who, there- fore, as in a democracy, have intrinsic value and “rights.” Again, the one thing that distinguishes us apart from our particular form of rationality is our awareness of responsibility. We have become the one creature who knows that we live within the billion folds that make up our “origami” planet. We do not own or control it, but we can influence how it folds and who is included within the folds—at least to some degree. Another attempt at a summary is Jane Bennett’s riff on the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one matter- energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by hetero- geneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.”³ Finally, a summary of postmodernism from a more homely standpoint of a human being: How does it feel to be a human being living on planet earth in the twenty-first century with eyes wide open? It feels like radical relationality at all levels and ways—relationality is the primary feature of postmodernism. Moreover, it is a relationality from the “inside” as we humans participate in what we know: we are thoroughly embedded in the earth in both our knowing and our doing. We are not primarily “individuals” but exist only in community and within interrelatedness at cosmic,
microscopic, and quantum levels. We often have a sense of wonder and awe the more we engage “eye to eye” with other species and realize how complex, diverse, and rich the world is. While we are increasingly aware of our vulnerability (and even disposability) on planet earth, nonetheless, we also feel increasingly responsible for the state of the planet, as our awareness of climate change grows. We are no longer the primary species on the planet, with all others inferior to us as mere “objects.” More than anything else, we humans see ourselves as thoroughly embedded in our world, with one distinction—we are self-conscious. We know that we know, and what we know is that we are totally the product of evolution—and yet of an evolutionary pattern that functions on a pattern of new life through death. Some religions, including Christianity, take this model of self- sacrifice as the way to planetary flourishing and personal fulfillment.
Two
Postmodern Insights for Climate Change
With the new worldview coming to us from various corners of postmodernism, we have a rich set of insights to join company with the kenotic view of Christianity in our attempt to provide an answer to the turning point of climate change. The contributions from postmodernism are deep and broad, ranging from changing our place from outside nature to inside, with the accompanying change in both epistemology (how we know) and ontology (who we are). This is a profound shift that affects both our basic worldview and our behavior. We will look at Timothy Morton’s ecological thought and Karen Barad’s agential realism to see how postmodernism has changed who we are in the world and how we know the world. We will then summarize some of the postmodern insights relevant to our project of a kenotic theology and climate change.
Who We Are in the World (Timothy Morton) and How We Know the World (Karen Barad)
With Timothy Morton’s ecological thought, we human beings move from our imagined standpoint as outside nature, and thus as transcendent over the world, to our more honest place as entirely inside nature.¹ Thus nature as a reality external to us disappears. It is an illusion, a dangerous one, about our place in the scheme of things. To the extent we live within this lie, we are unable to live fruitful lives on our planet because we believe ourselves to be in charge of the world and able to manage it. Capitalism is an example of our wrong-headed, false, and dangerous thinking. It has resulted in vast human financial inequality and a deteriorating planet.
The ecological thought, on the other hand, is the admission of our total connection within our planet, so completely inside that we are like fish trying to explain what water is. Buddhists use the expression dependent co-arising to suggest how everything emerges through coexistence—nothing exists by itself. Hence in evolution, life-forms do not adapt to their environment but evolve along with it. We are, at this time in evolutionary history, the most complex, nuanced product of the planet’s fifteen-billion-year-old history of evolution from a tiny bit of matter to all the complex, varied, wonderful life-forms on earth. Each and every part of us, from the bacteria in our gut to our opposable thumb and our magnificent brain, is a product of millions of years of tiny mutations in that initial bit of matter. As the most complex example of evolution, we are more inside the planet than anything else. We, who think we rule over and are superior to our planet, are actually its most amazing product—and a very vulnerable one. Our evolution is so amazing that we have ended up being able to imagine our creator (the planet) as our creation: we can hold a picture of the planet in our minds and imagine that it lies within our power to control. It is as if a child believed that it was/is its own parent. The story of our emergence from a spoonful of matter to our present reality is so slow, complex, mysterious, and amazing that we have trouble believing it. Take but one feature: our thumb. Tracing that one distinctive human characteristic throughout the billions of years is beyond human capacity. Yet it is the task we should undertake if we are ever to truly imagine our incarnation, our embodiment, from within the planet.
The heart of evolution, then, claims to be a continuous story with no dualisms and plenty of fuzzy edges between connections, which is radically different from our standard interpretation. Consider just one example—sex and sexual orientation. Rather than strict divisions between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on, evolution says that we are all male and female, straight and gay, in different ways and to different degrees. Likewise, features that we used to
imagine were uniquely human—such as thinking, grieving, playing, sympathizing, and so on—are being discovered in other animals. Our exceptionalism and the radical dualistic divisions among life-forms are being questioned. Hence Martin Buber’s addressing a tree as thou or a child playing that she is a tiger is not pure fantasy or merely primitive behavior. The false picture of ourselves culminated with the Enlightenment interpretation of the human individual as the epitome of evolutionary success. This picture is the total opposite of our true status, being made clear to us now in the disaster of climate change. Our helplessness before this twenty-first-century phenomenon is forcing us to acknowledge our false self-image. We have taken a selfie of ourselves posed on top of planet earth, but with our feet teetering on the edge as we try to save ourselves from plunging to our death.
So it is understandable why it is difficult for us to accept the ecological thought when we have lived for several centuries in the lie that this planet is ours for the taking, providing us with endless food and shelter. We are now being told that even our best environmental interpretations, ones where other life-forms are not simply oriented toward our well-being, are inadequate. Actually, the postmoderns say that we live with other creatures not as a community but as an origami, or a mesh network, or a rhizome set of roots and sprouts. The models we should now follow are not hierarchical but horizontal, not of a kingdom but of a democracy and even a biocracy, including all creatures, especially sentient ones, within the circle of our moral concern.
However, the ecological thought is not that of a cozy, harmonious kind of relationship. It is not on the model of an organism where every part has its place and contributes to the overall well-being of the whole. Rather, it is connectionism through differences, the microscopic mutations in the evolutionary story that connect us all through a complex mix of law and chance. The kinds of connections we see in evolution—composed of billions, zillions, of mutations in ways beyond our ability to imagine—connect us to other beings and other things. Such interdependence goes all the way down to every cell in our bodies; how each of us is created within the fifteen billion years of the earth’s history is a process that has no center, no design, no goal. In addition, the more one knows about the ecological thought, the more one realizes that everything is included, even our own shit, and as a matter of fact, in a highly populated consumer-capitalist society, we are surrounded by our own waste to a terrifying extent. As Morton insists, consciousness sucks, and as T. S. Eliot insisted, human beings cannot bear very much reality. The ecological thought, then, is not only the pleasant rolling hills of English romantic poetry; it is also the piles of garbage produced by every major city.
The implications of moving in this direction are, of course, immense—from what and how we eat to land claims, education content and styles, financial justice, and so on. Would not every aspect of human dwelling on our planet change at a deep level if we were to see ourselves not as the owners of our planet but as one of its most needy occupants? Would it not also change our understanding of the divine, of what is sacred, from a blown-up version of a superman to—well, what and who? Morton suggests that at the very least, it should cause us to move away from our macho Western sky god to a more receptive, open, compassionate, sacrificial picture of the divine. If we believe that the model of ourselves and the model of God are interrelated—we are made in the image of God and God is understood on the model of ourselves—then these two issues will always be considered together. Therefore, how we imagine God and how we imagine ourselves are dangerous issues and should be handled with care. Would we not, at least, see ourselves as within God, as living and moving and having our being within God (with the world understood, perhaps, as God’s body), rather than of God as a supernatural, distant, isolated being controlling but not being influenced by
the world? Our goal is to try to reimagine who we are in the world, and I suggest here is a good start: we live within our world and within God.
We have been looking at ourselves within nature, but Karen Barad’s agential realism is an attempt to retain some measure of objectivity against extreme positions of knowing, doing, and being. Barad rejects both naïve realism and social constructivism. A one-paragraph summary of her somewhat daunting thesis is as follows: "In summary, the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming. The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfiguring/entanglements/relationalities/(re)-articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing configurations of the world."² Hers is a vision of reality that denies the radical separation of subject and object as well as other forms of dualism. Her phrase exteriority within attempts to summarize her position, which rejects the Cartesian model of outside/inside (subject vs. object, humans vs. the world), substituting for it a model where everything is inside but that saves a measure of objectivity. She is against dualism and stasis, opting for a form of differentiation in motion. She asks, How can we have an immanental picture of reality and still retain a place for both change and responsibility? Agential realism says that agents of all kinds (human and nonhuman, living and dead) construct the world but are not totally absorbed by it. In fact, the kind of immanentalism she imagines depends on difference (diffraction) rather than on sameness (reflection). The entire mechanism by which her picture of reality operates is by difference—nothing would happen without differences. However, while neither humans nor any other subject totally constructs or controls reality, humans are not entirely determined by it. We have agency (and hence responsibility) in and for the world.
The critical thing is trying to imagine ourselves as inside the reality that we help construct but of which we are also a product. We are both player and product of reality. The world is an inside job—an immanental picture that is constantly changing—of which we are a major player but certainly not the only one and increasingly a vulnerable one. It is probably impossible to describe Barad’s interpretation of reality, since we are so thoroughly embedded in it. One analogy, however, that comes to mind is panentheism as a model of the God/world relation. In that model, the world and human beings are imagined as within God who embraces the world but is not identical with it or reduced to it. God and the world are intrinsically entangled with one another, but God and the world are also separate. In relation to God, the world (especially we human beings) is never apart from, standing outside of, or able to describe God. Likewise, the first step in understanding agential realism is to change where we are standing, the point of view from and in which we imagine both our construction of and our dependence on the world. Barad is telling us to move from the privileged (but false) position of standing outside the world and talking about it—what it is, who is responsible for it, and so on—and deal with the very different picture of ourselves and our world when we put ourselves totally within reality. The only difference between us and other major subject players in the world is that we have self-consciousness—we know that we know. And what we know must start with the recognition that while our point of view gives us the rare privilege of knowing about the world (both its glories and its horrors), it does not change our place in the world, which is inside, like everything and everyone else.
The point is to overcome our allegiance to a subject/object epistemology and ontology in regard to our understanding of reality. We aim to move from a static, essentialist, substance view to one that pictures reality as always changing and in which its quasi subjects and objects (what Barad calls phenomena) are made and unmade. The players in this view of reality are not only human
beings (and not even just the living) but everything that makes a difference. This means that agency is wide open: What is there that does not make a difference? Hence one is always dealing with continuity (subjects, objects, etc. compose the world but always in different ways and to different degrees). This revised picture sees everything as becoming. Agency need not be human or conscious, for agency covers whatever matters, whatever makes a difference. So while there are not solid subjects in this way of thinking, there are phenomena that in different ways and to different degrees participate in the building of the world. All are subjects and all are objects; hence agential realism is an appropriate term for different kinds of agency creating reality, creating the world.
If we accept our inside place, we make a huge jump that will influence everything else we say about selves, other forms of life, other bits of matter, and so on. Where we stand—on a hillside on top of and outside the rest of the world or within the world in the most radically entangled, embedded fashion imaginable—is the first change we must make. Then, but only then, can we look for quasi descriptions, analogies, pictures, and so on that will help us say more about the world and who we are in it—and in it in some interesting, distinctive ways. We are agents, subjects, but so are some unlikely candidates, such as climate change, that may not know they are players but surely are. Our epistemological advantage is a plus and a minus: it allows us to shout with joy on a gorgeous Vancouver spring morning when the cherry trees are blooming; however, it also makes us aware that not only will this beauty end but so will we. Living with the joy and the terror of existence is the distinctive human experience.
Conclusion
As a summary model of the postmodern view, I would suggest Gilles Deleuze’s picture of an origami. Here the same material is used over and over again, designed into billions of different forms of matter. In this model, we see the world and all of its folding and unfolding, with the same material recycled into different shapes and modes of complexity. Our worldview is not one of hierarchy, substance, dualism, or subjects and objects but one of a continuous borrowing and sharing, interdependence, death and new life. We need to begin to think about ourselves not as the masters or even the highest beings on our planet but as part of a biocracy, which includes all creatures, who, therefore, as in a democracy, have intrinsic value and rights. Again, the one thing that distinguishes us apart from our particular form of rationality is our awareness of responsibility. We have become the one creature who knows that we live within the billion folds that make up our origami planet. We do not own or control it, but we can influence how it folds and who is included within the folds—at least to some degree.
Another attempt at a summary is Jane Bennett’s riff on the Nicene Creed: "I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests."³
Finally, a summary of postmodernism from a more homely standpoint of a human being: How does it feel to be a human being living on planet earth in the twenty-first century with eyes wide open? It feels like radical relationality at all levels and ways—relationality is the primary feature of postmodernism. Moreover, it is a relationality from the inside as we humans participate in what we know: we are thoroughly embedded in the earth in both our knowing and our doing. We are not primarily individuals but exist only in community and within interrelatedness at cosmic,
microscopic, and quantum levels. We often have a sense of wonder and awe the more we engage eye to eye with other species and realize how complex, diverse, and rich the world is. While we are increasingly aware of our vulnerability (and even disposability) on planet earth, nonetheless, we also feel increasingly responsible for the state of the planet, as our awareness of climate change grows. We are no longer the primary species on the planet, with all others inferior to us as mere objects. More than anything else, we humans see ourselves as thoroughly embedded in our world, with one distinction—we are self-conscious. We know that we know, and what we know is that we are totally the product of evolution—and yet of an evolutionary pattern that functions on a pattern of new life through death. Some religions, including Christianity, take this model of self-sacrifice as the way to planetary flourishing and personal fulfillment.
Previous Chapter
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Three
Divine and Human Relational Ontology
Having accepted the shift from “outside” to “inside,” we must turn to what difference it makes to be “inside” in terms of the postmodern view of transcendence and immanence. It is the movement from the supernaturalism of the traditional understanding of God and the world to one where tran- scendence becomes radically immanental, specifically the world is seen as within God and God is incarnated in the world. To see “transcendence become immanent” in the world, we will look at “wonder” (Mary-Jane Rubenstein), “adoration” (Jean-Luc Nancy), and “divine enticement” (Karmen MacKendrick). We will end the chapter with a suggestion of what difference the “inside” view makes when we consider the issue of “talking with trees” (Stephanie Kaza). Overall, this chapter is a study of the many differences that occur when our location is “inside nature” rather than the modern “outside view.” Wonder, Adoration, and Divine Enticement From the challenging insights of Timothy Morton and Karen Barad on “where” we stand, we now turn to “what” we perceive, see, and hear from this new “inside” perspective. We will look briefly at the contributions of three postmodern thinkers who help turn our interest from supernaturalism to the wonder of earthly, human existence and to our responses of adoration and divine enticement. Until the last few decades, Western philosophy was principally focused on language, either the British variety of analyzing simple sentences of moral intention or the closed world of language (words refer to nothing apart from themselves). With the latter view, one could not talk about the world (and certainly not God), since language only referred to itself. However, there has been a turnabout in philosophy, especially European philosophy, and with some of these folks, “wonder” has returned. Hence what is going on in philosophy is of growing interest to theologians, with its concerns for both the beauty and the horror of existence. Philosophy has returned to its ancient partners—poetry and religion—and our next three authors move in this direction: Rubenstein and wonder, Nancy and adoration, and MacKendrick and divine enticement. Like Christian incarna- tionalism, this thinking focuses on the extraordinary as being located in the ordinary, not in spite of it or apart from it. This “new spirituality” is not about directing our attention to another world; rather, it is advising us to dig more deeply into this world. There is, therefore, a genuine opening for interpreting the doctrine of the incarnation more broadly—that is, not limiting it to one person, Jesus of Nazareth, but including the entire creation, human and beyond. The focus on the sacred in this world opens the doors for a kenotic theology where human beings work with God. What Rubenstein, Nancy, and MacKendrick do is open the doors and windows of the world to en- courage imaginative thinking about new metaphors and models of the relationship between God and the world. Each of these thinkers adds insight to the finite/infinite relationship. For all three of them, the self is only the self in relationship; hence “togetherness” is critical to the “self,” and in fact, the Buddhist terminology of “dependent co-arising” describes ontology more accurately for them than anything in Western philosophy. In other words, “withness” is the essence of existence. Therefore, “kenosis,” or self-sacrificial being, is the only existence there is—self-emptying love is not “added” to existence but defines it from the beginning. Here we see the connections with the life/death symbiotic pattern of evolution as well as the epitome of kenosis in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, the new worldview with its stress on interdependence is ideal for revising Christian theology in the direction of sacrifice and new life as the form of action that we
find everywhere in the natural world. The primacy of touch oversight expresses the centrality of “withness” for these authors. In an- other place, I have described this primacy in the following way: The first thing that mammals do with their newborns is to touch them. Animal mothers lick their young to form the bond necessary to their offspring’s life. . . . Human beings can exist without their other senses, but we could not exist without touch: unless we are touched and can touch, we have no way of knowing that we even do exist—where, for instance, I begin and end, what is me and not-me. . . . If our understanding of the self, of who we are in the scheme of things, were to begin with touch (as our experience of actual selves does) rather than sight, we would have a basically different sense of self. Abandoning the Western subject-object dualistic sense of self would reveal an ecological self, a relational self, a self that would not, could not exist apart from others. It would be a sense of self as relational and responsive. It would not be an individ- ualistic self that decides to form relationships, but a responsive one that from its prenatal exis- tence on is created by relationships. It would not be an abstract, rationalistic sense of self (I think, therefore I am), but a concrete, embodied sense of self (I am touched and touch, therefore I am).¹ However, ever since Plato, sight has been the privileged faculty in human epistemology. As a consequence, the Western focus on sight over touch has allowed our knowing to be done from a distance, without touching—in fact, we can actually “hide” while seeing and not allow others to see us. Sight is the most distant of all our faculties, even hearing demands a speaker and a spoken to. As Rubenstein writes, “Thinking’s (un)work is to get in touch with this chaotic touch of the world— and not, it cannot be emphasized enough, to hold itself above the fray. For unlike vision, which al- ways collapses a perceived otherness back into the gazing self, touch exposes the infinitely inappro- priable alterity between and within all beings, preventing the self’s self-position.” The “world is nothing except the touch of all things.” Rubenstein speaks of “transimmanence,” meaning the pro- found enfolding of the transcendent in the immanent. Thus the place of wonder (transcendence) is in the everyday (immanence). Rubenstein points to “the strangeness of the everyday,” which opens up for us both the shock and the terror as well as awe and care. Thus while modernity kills wonder in its focus on technology, wonder breaks through to new possibilities, both negative (shock and terror) and positive (awe and care). Thus the relational network of touch that is our world is also the opening to a double possibility—“Shock unworks; awe makes sense.”² Hence Rubenstein’s main focus, given its reliance on touch, is on the ethical, not the ontological. As a good Jew, Rubenstein focuses not on “belief” in God but on “love” to the neighbor. The law of hospitality thus rules her reflections: she mentions “saints” as people who practice “unconditioned hospitality,” as epitomizing what she means by living the good life. She ends her book on learning how to breathe as the closest expression of “withness” or relationality: “Humanly speaking, air makes the self most properly itself; insofar as I breathe, I am no one else but me. At the same time, breathing opens the self essentially onto every other, taking in and releasing others and self and oth- ers-in-self-as-other at each moment. . . . With every exhalation, one sends oneself out into the lives of others, for better or worse.” The last sentence of the book sums it up: “Perhaps that is it, then: perhaps dwelling in wonder is merely a matter of learning to breathe.”³
From Rubenstein’s “wonder” we move to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “adoration,” which is another attempt to move from a supernatural understanding of God to a view of transcendence as immanence. “The form of spirit as it awakens is adoration”—this quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein opens Nancy’s book and sums it up. It is a different step beyond Rubenstein’s “wonder” in that Nancy attempts to substitute adoration of this world for the supernatural God. This sentence says that spirit awakens not to adore “God” but simply to adore what is—that is, our world. Nancy “deconstructs” Christian doctrines by giving transcendence totally immanental meanings. In the final paragraph of the book, Nancy speaks of Augustine’s view of singing: he says it is to pray twice, and the second time it is simply a shout beyond all expectations—a hallelujah! salute from human beings and the chirping birds and thrumming cicadas: “Or again, the world saluting itself, via all of ‘nature’ up to ‘mankind.’” It is a salute, a greeting, without salvation, without a god, without another world. As Nancy writes, “Adoration: the movement and the joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world.”⁴ We are considering various attempts to reimagine transcendence and immanence, especially as a critique of present-day supernatural views of God, and also to consider proposals that find tran- scendence in our world. Would Nancy’s position be just another form of atheism? One might think so from comments such as the following: “There is no other world, no world beyond”; “Adoration consists in holding onto the nothing . . . of the opening”; “The world, our world. Open to nothing other than itself. Transcendent in its own immanence.”⁵ And yet, and yet . . . what does one make of the following: “This existence makes sense or is sense and with it the whole world can make sense from ‘salut,’ from one to another. Do not the morning sun, the plant pushing out of the soil, address a ‘salut’ to us? Or the gaze of an animal?”⁶ “The gaze of an animal”—let us stop here and reflect on this. Nancy is asking us to relive those rare moments when one makes contact, real contact, with another species—that shocking, amazing experience of looking into the eyes of an animal and recognizing another subject, another living being with intentions and purposes. And furthermore, a “plant pushing out of the soil” is also, in its own way, a presence making itself felt. It is giving a “salute,” a greeting, if one can pay close enough attention and open one’s mind to an alive world. This is the uncanny effect of finding ourselves entangled with nature as an encounter with another living center of existence. One of the most important insights from postmodernism is the expansion of our sense of agen- cy, of who acts. It is summed up in the First Nations’ reference to “all our relations,” meaning all the life-forms in the world. It is an exercise in including more and more others within the param- eters of our respect and moral concern, as subjects with agency who demand our attention and compassion. Nancy expresses it well: the love that is owed to every existent simply because of its intrin- sic worth. In other words, love is justice, and love is a way of thinking; it is not merely a feeling. It is coming to the conclusion that nothing short of universal love is called for. From recognizing that something else really exists, that all life-forms have the right to the basics of existence, we have ar- rived at the “impossible” conclusion that there is no line of exclusion: all are welcome! Be careful what you pay attention to, with whom you “lock eyes, with what/who you believe is a ‘subject.’” This is a cautionary tale: subjects do not always stay quiet or accept being considered as objects. What is essential is this universal coexistence of all to all, the call and the response, the respon- sibility to respond each to each. How does this work out in terms of some central doctrines of Christianity? Evil consists in refusing to recognize that there is no singular “I” but only the “we” of life with others: “we are ourselves the relation among all beings” as we respond each to the other in self-giving love.⁷ Sin is the condition of humankind closed in upon itself. Thus touching each other,
sharing, greeting, caring for others: this is what is left. Nancy speaks of creation and salvation, the terms we used to reserve for what God did for us—now we do this for one another. But we are not alone: God is the “with” that empowers all this loving activity. Hence revelation, another Christian term, is not the revealing of some secret information but awakening to the presence of the world—the revelation is keeping the opening always open to the other. Moreover, the incarnation is “flesh itself as sense”—in other words, “the body is the event of the spirit,” or “spirit does not hold itself out- side the world, it opens in its midst.”⁸ Thus also, the resurrection is not a second life but the ver- tical life (the heavenly life) as made fully horizontal (realized in our world). Nancy’s interpretations of Christian doctrines are imaginative and engaging, but they ask a lot of us. Can we accept the substitution of this world for our former “two worlds”? He quotes a lovely passage from William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun, where the central character says, “I be- lieves” (not in something but just “believes”). What could this mean? Not believing that a Messiah will come to save us but simply adoring the “movement and joy of recognizing ourselves as exis- tents in the world,” which he compares to sexual ecstasy in the sense that it comes with the greatest shout of celebration that one could imagine: simply to be, to be here in all its beauty and horror, with the task of giving equality and justice to all.⁹ Simply to be, to be here. Are we up to it? Karmen MacKendrick proposes something different from Rubenstein or Nancy and more posi- tive: “The world as the very sign of divine enticement.”¹⁰ We have been looking at various post- modern strategies for relating transcendence and immanence, ways that avoid supernatural, two- world thinking. We began with Rubenstein’s call for us to wake up and stay awake to the wonders of this world, followed by Nancy’s claim that “‘God’ is a name for the relation among all beings— therefore, [a name] for the world in the strongest sense of the word.”¹¹ Now we come to MacK- endrick, who, along with Augustine, speaks of “the world as the very sign of divine enticement.” We can see a progression here from waking up to this world to seeing this world as the sign, sacra- ment, symbol of the divine. Transcendence has not disappeared (except in its supernatural interpre- tation), but it has become embedded, incarnated, in this world, and we are called upon to “read” these intimations of transcendence in the world. MacKendrick sees in Augustine’s Confessions the form of “paying attention” that she supports. It is the classic Catholic, sacramental view where the world is rich with divine enticement in the form of all the loveliest things of this world. Augustine says, “Yet in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God—the light and the voice and the fragrance and the food and embrace in the soul, when that light shines upon my soul which no place can con- tain, that voice sounds which no time can take from me, I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I love in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder. This is that I love, when I love my God.”¹² The world in its beauty calls out the name of its Creator, not in a simple or direct way, but through signs, which are seductive. From this network of signs, we get a sense of the divine as “within” and “around” the world: a sense of a call, a pull, that does not draw us out of the world but leads us more fully into it. Augustine’s theology is significant because it sees the divine in the entangled complex that is the world. God “‘dwells’ in the world precisely as the perpetual invitation of and to our questions, our exploration, our delight.”¹³ The Word becomes flesh, not just mere words, and hence theology becomes “seductive episte- mology,” a kind of knowing that embraces even food and sex. The Augustinian world of signs is not a sterile, intellectual, spiritual, narrow world but the fullest, ripest, richest, most seductive one imag- inable. MacKendrick claims that “the implication of reading the world as written by God is that the world reader is pulled by the reversible draw of divine desire.”¹⁴ God proposes; we respond. The
power of this understanding of the God-world relation is that it believes in a God who is constantly inviting us, through each and every particular of the world (the lowliest slug included), to wake up, pay attention, and read God in the world—because God is in the world, or better still, the world is within God. We have come quite a distance since Morton’s claim that we human beings are “inside” the world to MacKendrick’s claim, along with Augustine, that the world is within God. We have left the supernatural, dualistic world of modernism, trading it in for one world that is a sign of God. How- ever, postmodernism is not just a return to the sacramentalism of Augustine. As a matter of fact, there are other postmoderns, influenced by quantum theory, who propose more radical embed- dedness of the human being in the world than our sources have so far suggested. Talking with Trees If we accept our new standpoint as “inside” nature, along with all the other elements of nature, then we should feel “closer to trees”—in fact, close enough so we could “talk with them.” If this does not strike you as absurd (or childish), then you have already made a big leap into the “knowing” and “doing” that is typical of postmodernism. There are several fine practitioners of this position: I would recommend to you the writings of both Richard Nelson (The Island Within) and Jane Bennett (Thoreau’s Nature). After careful attention to Timothy Morton’s insistence that the “ecological thought” is not about humans versus nature but about the radical interdependence of all forms of life, including the human form, as well as Karen Barad’s undermining all dualisms, including sub- ject versus object, perhaps now we can “talk with trees” without blushing. We have been focusing on the conceptual part of the new worldview; can we now ask, What does it feel like? Can we, for in- stance, imagine a biocracy as the proper form of planetary government that gives trees, mountains, birds, and even slugs “rights” to live and to flourish? Can we really include all others? Whose world is it, anyway? One of the most important insights we have noted in postmodernism is its insistence that the world is alive. Therefore, we have to make a radical change. We can no longer assume that the world is composed of us, the one living subject, with everything else objects for our use. Now we must realize that the world is composed of many subjects with whom we relate in different ways. Part of coming to awareness of the relational quality of all life is to learn different techniques of being in relation with these many Others. One of the most important changes is to “feel” differently about them. Stephanie Kaza, in her book The Attentive Heart, suggests that we practice a Zen form of medi- tation in which one’s primary orientation to a tree is not as a symbol or resource but as a “Thou” (as Martin Buber would put it). This means that a tree can be seen as one party in an I-Thou rela- tionship, not to speak “about” trees, but to speak “with” and “to” these Others. How can this occur without slipping into some sort of romantic consumerism, where in Morton’s critique, we “con- sume” these Others into our own orbit or ego? Kaza calls the needed practice “just sitting,” being present with a tree as Other. Her stand toward trees is evident in the grammatical structure of the first sentence in her book: “The first tree to make my acquaintance as a child was the large-canopied apple tree in my backyard.”¹⁵ Notice that the tree initiates the relationship—the tree makes her acquaintance. She also speaks of trees as her “daily companions.” She finds that over the years, her students have come “to see that the environment is everything. It is not just where we live; it is the very reason we are alive.”¹⁶ This is the transformation that we need, that our new science is telling us is our reality—that
without “nature,” we would not even be. But it is crucial that we see our relationship with trees not in a sentimental way. We are not just “tree huggers,” although a deeper appreciation for children’s instincts of trees and other animals as “daily companions” is a good beginning. Why, I wonder, are almost all good children’s books about animals? Is it because children “naturally” feel more com- fortable with “them” than with members of their own species? Whatever is the case, most of us lose that sense of identification with other life-forms (and our culture encourages putting aside such “childish” attitudes). We have to practice what Kaza calls developing a “mutually respectful relation with trees.” The crucial steps in this practice are as follows: 1. The first step is to recognize things as they are. A mountain is a mountain, a tree is a tree: this mountain, this tree. An aesthetic moment of appreciation for the other as having intrinsic worth and particular features is the first step. Compare it with God’s view in Gen- esis after making each creature and feature in nature that it is good—not good for you (a human being) or even for me (God) but just plain good. 2. A second step is to look more deeply into the lives of particular trees, trees as both vic- tims and shapers of human activities. Be specific: a good naturalist can spend pages de- scribing in deepest details the habits of a particular kind of tree (for instance, the nature writings of John Muir). 3. The third step is to address the tangle of tree-human relationships—stories of fear, killing, suffering, exploding into waves of “despair, greed, and helplessness.” Practice to deepen one’s attentive mind from the insights of evolution and oneself as having a body made of flesh, even as trees also have bodies (different from ours) made of living matter. 4. In the last step, all this should climax in a greater, deeper internal consciousness and appreciation of trees so that one will make better decisions regarding trees in a time of horrible devastation of our planet’s trees. The goal is a deeper conversation with trees, our “daily companions.” With the help of various readings from postmodern thinkers, we are trying to disorient and reori- ent ourselves in the world. Needless to say, this is an unsettling business. It doesn’t always feel good: as Morton says, “Consciousness sucks.” We are being asked to give up the comfortable, flat- tering picture of ourselves as at the center of the world and hence presumably in charge of things for a picture of ourselves in which we are not only decentered but among the most dependent and vulnerable of all creatures. On the other hand, this perspective and these practices open us to an alive world, full of other subjects with fascinating, diverse lives. At present, as the only subject, we live lonely lives in a seemingly dead world. We are being called to end living in a boring, consumer- oriented world, trading it in for a disorienting world, to be sure, but one interesting and alive, full of other subjects with intentions, practices, and gifts beyond any of our imaginings. We are being in- vited to really live in and with the rest of the world. Will we accept the invitation?
Three
Divine and Human Relational Ontology
Having accepted the shift from outside to inside, we must turn to what difference it makes to be inside in terms of the postmodern view of transcendence and immanence. It is the movement from the supernaturalism of the traditional understanding of God and the world to one where transcendence becomes radically immanental, specifically the world is seen as within God and God is incarnated in the world. To see transcendence become immanent in the world, we will look at wonder (Mary-Jane Rubenstein), adoration (Jean-Luc Nancy), and divine enticement (Karmen MacKendrick). We will end the chapter with a suggestion of what difference the inside view makes when we consider the issue of talking with trees (Stephanie Kaza). Overall, this chapter is a study of the many differences that occur when our location is inside nature rather than the modern outside view.
Wonder, Adoration, and Divine Enticement
From the challenging insights of Timothy Morton and Karen Barad on where we stand, we now turn to what we perceive, see, and hear from this new inside perspective. We will look briefly at the contributions of three postmodern thinkers who help turn our interest from supernaturalism to the wonder of earthly, human existence and to our responses of adoration and divine enticement. Until the last few decades, Western philosophy was principally focused on language, either the British variety of analyzing simple sentences of moral intention or the closed world of language (words refer to nothing apart from themselves). With the latter view, one could not talk about the world (and certainly not God), since language only referred to itself. However, there has been a turnabout in philosophy, especially European philosophy, and with some of these folks, wonder has returned. Hence what is going on in philosophy is of growing interest to theologians, with its concerns for both the beauty and the horror of existence. Philosophy has returned to its ancient partners—poetry and religion—and our next three authors move in this direction: Rubenstein and wonder, Nancy and adoration, and MacKendrick and divine enticement. Like Christian incarnationalism, this thinking focuses on the extraordinary as being located in the ordinary, not in spite of it or apart from it. This new spirituality is not about directing our attention to another world; rather, it is advising us to dig more deeply into this world. There is, therefore, a genuine opening for interpreting the doctrine of the incarnation more broadly—that is, not limiting it to one person, Jesus of Nazareth, but including the entire creation, human and beyond. The focus on the sacred in this world opens the doors for a kenotic theology where human beings work with God.
What Rubenstein, Nancy, and MacKendrick do is open the doors and windows of the world to encourage imaginative thinking about new metaphors and models of the relationship between God and the world. Each of these thinkers adds insight to the finite/infinite relationship. For all three of them, the self is only the self in relationship; hence togetherness is critical to the self, and in fact, the Buddhist terminology of dependent co-arising describes ontology more accurately for them than anything in Western philosophy. In other words, withness is the essence of existence. Therefore, kenosis, or self-sacrificial being, is the only existence there is—self-emptying love is not added to existence but defines it from the beginning. Here we see the connections with the life/death symbiotic pattern of evolution as well as the epitome of kenosis in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, the new worldview with its stress on interdependence is ideal for revising Christian theology in the direction of sacrifice and new life as the form of action that we
find everywhere in the natural world.
The primacy of touch oversight expresses the centrality of withness for these authors. In another place, I have described this primacy in the following way:
The first thing that mammals do with their newborns is to touch them. Animal mothers lick their young to form the bond necessary to their offspring’s life. . . . Human beings can exist without their other senses, but we could not exist without touch: unless we are touched and can touch, we have no way of knowing that we even do exist—where, for instance, I begin and end, what is me and not-me. . . . If our understanding of the self, of who we are in the scheme of things, were to begin with touch (as our experience of actual selves does) rather than sight, we would have a basically different sense of self. Abandoning the Western subject-object dualistic sense of self would reveal an ecological self, a relational self, a self that would not, could not exist apart from others. It would be a sense of self as relational and responsive. It would not be an individualistic self that decides to form relationships, but a responsive one that from its prenatal existence on is created by relationships. It would not be an abstract, rationalistic sense of self (I think, therefore I am), but a concrete, embodied sense of self (I am touched and touch, therefore I am).¹
However, ever since Plato, sight has been the privileged faculty in human epistemology. As a consequence, the Western focus on sight over touch has allowed our knowing to be done from a distance, without touching—in fact, we can actually hide while seeing and not allow others to see us. Sight is the most distant of all our faculties, even hearing demands a speaker and a spoken to. As Rubenstein writes, Thinking’s (un)work is to get in touch with this chaotic touch of the world—and not, it cannot be emphasized enough, to hold itself above the fray. For unlike vision, which always collapses a perceived otherness back into the gazing self, touch exposes the infinitely inappropriable alterity between and within all beings, preventing the self’s self-position. The world is nothing except the touch of all things. Rubenstein speaks of transimmanence, meaning the profound enfolding of the transcendent in the immanent. Thus the place of wonder (transcendence) is in the everyday (immanence). Rubenstein points to the strangeness of the everyday, which opens up for us both the shock and the terror as well as awe and care. Thus while modernity kills wonder in its focus on technology, wonder breaks through to new possibilities, both negative (shock and terror) and positive (awe and care). Thus the relational network of touch that is our world is also the opening to a double possibility—Shock unworks; awe makes sense.²
Hence Rubenstein’s main focus, given its reliance on touch, is on the ethical, not the ontological. As a good Jew, Rubenstein focuses not on belief in God but on love to the neighbor. The law of hospitality thus rules her reflections: she mentions saints as people who practice unconditioned hospitality, as epitomizing what she means by living the good life. She ends her book on learning how to breathe as the closest expression of withness or relationality: "Humanly speaking, air makes the self most properly itself; insofar as I breathe, I am no one else but me. At the same time, breathing opens the self essentially onto every other, taking in and releasing others and self and others-in-self-as-other at each moment. . . . With every exhalation, one sends oneself out into the lives of others, for better or worse. The last sentence of the book sums it up: Perhaps that is it, then: perhaps dwelling in wonder is merely a matter of learning to breathe."³
From Rubenstein’s wonder we move to Jean-Luc Nancy’s adoration, which is another attempt to move from a supernatural understanding of God to a view of transcendence as immanence. The form of spirit as it awakens is adoration—this quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein opens Nancy’s book and sums it up. It is a different step beyond Rubenstein’s wonder in that Nancy attempts to substitute adoration of this world for the supernatural God. This sentence says that spirit awakens not to adore God but simply to adore what is—that is, our world. Nancy deconstructs Christian doctrines by giving transcendence totally immanental meanings. In the final paragraph of the book, Nancy speaks of Augustine’s view of singing: he says it is to pray twice, and the second time it is simply a shout beyond all expectations—a hallelujah! salute from human beings and the chirping birds and thrumming cicadas: Or again, the world saluting itself, via all of ‘nature’ up to ‘mankind.’ It is a salute, a greeting, without salvation, without a god, without another world. As Nancy writes, Adoration: the movement and the joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world.⁴
We are considering various attempts to reimagine transcendence and immanence, especially as a critique of present-day supernatural views of God, and also to consider proposals that find transcendence in our world. Would Nancy’s position be just another form of atheism? One might think so from comments such as the following: There is no other world, no world beyond; Adoration consists in holding onto the nothing . . . of the opening; The world, our world. Open to nothing other than itself. Transcendent in its own immanence.⁵
And yet, and yet . . . what does one make of the following: "This existence makes sense or is sense and with it the whole world can make sense from ‘salut,’ from one to another. Do not the morning sun, the plant pushing out of the soil, address a ‘salut’ to us? Or the gaze of an animal?"⁶ The gaze of an animal—let us stop here and reflect on this. Nancy is asking us to relive those rare moments when one makes contact, real contact, with another species—that shocking, amazing experience of looking into the eyes of an animal and recognizing another subject, another living being with intentions and purposes. And furthermore, a plant pushing out of the soil is also, in its own way, a presence making itself felt. It is giving a salute, a greeting, if one can pay close enough attention and open one’s mind to an alive world. This is the uncanny effect of finding ourselves entangled with nature as an encounter with another living center of existence.
One of the most important insights from postmodernism is the expansion of our sense of agency, of who acts. It is summed up in the First Nations’ reference to all our relations, meaning all the life-forms in the world. It is an exercise in including more and more others within the parameters of our respect and moral concern, as subjects with agency who demand our attention and compassion. Nancy expresses it well: the love that is owed to every existent simply because of its intrinsic worth. In other words, love is justice, and love is a way of thinking; it is not merely a feeling. It is coming to the conclusion that nothing short of universal love is called for. From recognizing that something else really exists, that all life-forms have the right to the basics of existence, we have arrived at the impossible conclusion that there is no line of exclusion: all are welcome! Be careful what you pay attention to, with whom you lock eyes, with what/who you believe is a ‘subject.’ This is a cautionary tale: subjects do not always stay quiet or accept being considered as objects.
What is essential is this universal coexistence of all to all, the call and the response, the responsibility to respond each to each. How does this work out in terms of some central doctrines of Christianity? Evil consists in refusing to recognize that there is no singular I but only the we of life with others: we are ourselves the relation among all beings as we respond each to the other in self-giving love.⁷ Sin is the condition of humankind closed in upon itself. Thus touching each other,
sharing, greeting, caring for others: this is what is left. Nancy speaks of creation and salvation, the terms we used to reserve for what God did for us—now we do this for one another. But we are not alone: God is the with that empowers all this loving activity. Hence revelation, another Christian term, is not the revealing of some secret information but awakening to the presence of the world—the revelation is keeping the opening always open to the other. Moreover, the incarnation is flesh itself as sense—in other words, the body is the event of the spirit, or spirit does not hold itself outside the world, it opens in its midst.⁸ Thus also, the resurrection is not a second life but the vertical life (the heavenly life) as made fully horizontal (realized in our world).
Nancy’s interpretations of Christian doctrines are imaginative and engaging, but they ask a lot of us. Can we accept the substitution of this world for our former two worlds? He quotes a lovely passage from William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun, where the central character says, I believes (not in something but just believes). What could this mean? Not believing that a Messiah will come to save us but simply adoring the movement and joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world, which he compares to sexual ecstasy in the sense that it comes with the greatest shout of celebration that one could imagine: simply to be, to be here in all its beauty and horror, with the task of giving equality and justice to all.⁹ Simply to be, to be here. Are we up to it?
Karmen MacKendrick proposes something different from Rubenstein or Nancy and more positive: The world as the very sign of divine enticement.¹⁰ We have been looking at various postmodern strategies for relating transcendence and immanence, ways that avoid supernatural, two-world thinking. We began with Rubenstein’s call for us to wake up and stay awake to the wonders of this world, followed by Nancy’s claim that "‘God’ is a name for the relation among all beings—therefore, [a name] for the world in the strongest sense of the word."¹¹ Now we come to MacKendrick, who, along with Augustine, speaks of the world as the very sign of divine enticement. We can see a progression here from waking up to this world to seeing this world as the sign, sacrament, symbol of the divine. Transcendence has not disappeared (except in its supernatural interpretation), but it has become embedded, incarnated, in this world, and we are called upon to read these intimations of transcendence in the world.
MacKendrick sees in Augustine’s Confessions the form of paying attention that she supports. It is the classic Catholic, sacramental view where the world is rich with divine enticement in the form of all the loveliest things of this world. Augustine says, Yet in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God—the light and the voice and the fragrance and the food and embrace in the soul, when that light shines upon my soul which no place can contain, that voice sounds which no time can take from me, I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I love in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder. This is that I love, when I love my God.¹² The world in its beauty calls out the name of its Creator, not in a simple or direct way, but through signs, which are seductive. From this network of signs, we get a sense of the divine as within and around the world: a sense of a call, a pull, that does not draw us out of the world but leads us more fully into it. Augustine’s theology is significant because it sees the divine in the entangled complex that is the world. God ‘dwells’ in the world precisely as the perpetual invitation of and to our questions, our exploration, our delight.¹³ The Word becomes flesh, not just mere words, and hence theology becomes seductive epistemology, a kind of knowing that embraces even food and sex. The Augustinian world of signs is not a sterile, intellectual, spiritual, narrow world but the fullest, ripest, richest, most seductive one imaginable. MacKendrick claims that the implication of reading the world as written by God is that the world reader is pulled by the reversible draw of divine desire.¹⁴ God proposes; we respond. The
power of this understanding of the God-world relation is that it believes in a God who is constantly inviting us, through each and every particular of the world (the lowliest slug included), to wake up, pay attention, and read God in the world—because God is in the world, or better still, the world is within God.
We have come quite a distance since Morton’s claim that we human beings are inside the world to MacKendrick’s claim, along with Augustine, that the world is within God. We have left the supernatural, dualistic world of modernism, trading it in for one world that is a sign of God. However, postmodernism is not just a return to the sacramentalism of Augustine. As a matter of fact, there are other postmoderns, influenced by quantum theory, who propose more radical embeddedness of the human being in the world than our sources have so far suggested.
Talking with Trees
If we accept our new standpoint as inside nature, along with all the other elements of nature, then we should feel closer to trees—in fact, close enough so we could talk with them. If this does not strike you as absurd (or childish), then you have already made a big leap into the knowing and doing that is typical of postmodernism. There are several fine practitioners of this position: I would recommend to you the writings of both Richard Nelson (The Island Within) and Jane Bennett (Thoreau’s Nature). After careful attention to Timothy Morton’s insistence that the ecological thought is not about humans versus nature but about the radical interdependence of all forms of life, including the human form, as well as Karen Barad’s undermining all dualisms, including subject versus object, perhaps now we can talk with trees without blushing. We have been focusing on the conceptual part of the new worldview; can we now ask, What does it feel like? Can we, for instance, imagine a biocracy as the proper form of planetary government that gives trees, mountains, birds, and even slugs rights to live and to flourish? Can we really include all others? Whose world is it, anyway?
One of the most important insights we have noted in postmodernism is its insistence that the world is alive. Therefore, we have to make a radical change. We can no longer assume that the world is composed of us, the one living subject, with everything else objects for our use. Now we must realize that the world is composed of many subjects with whom we relate in different ways. Part of coming to awareness of the relational quality of all life is to learn different techniques of being in relation with these many Others. One of the most important changes is to feel differently about them.
Stephanie Kaza, in her book The Attentive Heart, suggests that we practice a Zen form of meditation in which one’s primary orientation to a tree is not as a symbol or resource but as a Thou (as Martin Buber would put it). This means that a tree can be seen as one party in an I-Thou relationship, not to speak about trees, but to speak with and to these Others. How can this occur without slipping into some sort of romantic consumerism, where in Morton’s critique, we consume these Others into our own orbit or ego?
Kaza calls the needed practice just sitting, being present with a tree as Other. Her stand toward trees is evident in the grammatical structure of the first sentence in her book: The first tree to make my acquaintance as a child was the large-canopied apple tree in my backyard.¹⁵ Notice that the tree initiates the relationship—the tree makes her acquaintance. She also speaks of trees as her daily companions. She finds that over the years, her students have come to see that the environment is everything. It is not just where we live; it is the very reason we are alive.¹⁶
This is the transformation that we need, that our new science is telling us is our reality—that
without nature, we would not even be. But it is crucial that we see our relationship with trees not in a sentimental way. We are not just tree huggers, although a deeper appreciation for children’s instincts of trees and other animals as daily companions is a good beginning. Why, I wonder, are almost all good children’s books about animals? Is it because children naturally feel more comfortable with them than with members of their own species? Whatever is the case, most of us lose that sense of identification with other life-forms (and our culture encourages putting aside such childish attitudes). We have to practice what Kaza calls developing a mutually respectful relation with trees. The crucial steps in this practice are as follows:
1. The first step is to recognize things as they are. A mountain is a mountain, a tree is a tree: this mountain, this tree. An aesthetic moment of appreciation for the other as having intrinsic worth and particular features is the first step. Compare it with God’s view in Genesis after making each creature and feature in nature that it is good—not good for you (a human being) or even for me (God) but just plain good.
2. A second step is to look more deeply into the lives of particular trees, trees as both victims and shapers of human activities. Be specific: a good naturalist can spend pages describing in deepest details the habits of a particular kind of tree (for instance, the nature writings of John Muir).
3. The third step is to address the tangle of tree-human relationships—stories of fear, killing, suffering, exploding into waves of despair, greed, and helplessness. Practice to deepen one’s attentive mind from the insights of evolution and oneself as having a body made of flesh, even as trees also have bodies (different from ours) made of living matter.
4. In the last step, all this should climax in a greater, deeper internal consciousness and appreciation of trees so that one will make better decisions regarding trees in a time of horrible devastation of our planet’s trees. The goal is a deeper conversation with trees, our daily companions.
With the help of various readings from postmodern thinkers, we are trying to disorient and reorient ourselves in the world. Needless to say, this is an unsettling business. It doesn’t always feel good: as Morton says, Consciousness sucks. We are being asked to give up the comfortable, flattering picture of ourselves as at the center of the world and hence presumably in charge of things for a picture of ourselves in which we are not only decentered but among the most dependent and vulnerable of all creatures. On the other hand, this perspective and these practices open us to an alive world, full of other subjects with fascinating, diverse lives. At present, as the only subject, we live lonely lives in a seemingly dead world. We are being called to end living in a boring, consumer-oriented world, trading it in for a disorienting world, to be sure, but one interesting and alive, full of other subjects with intentions, practices, and gifts beyond any of our imaginings. We are being invited to really live in and with the rest of the world. Will we accept the invitation?
Previous Chapter
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find everywhere in the natural world. The primacy of touch oversight expresses the centrality of “withness” for these authors. In an- other place, I have described this primacy in the following way: The first thing that mammals do with their newborns is to touch them. Animal mothers lick their young to form the bond necessary to their offspring’s life. . . . Human beings can exist without their other senses, but we could not exist without touch: unless we are touched and can touch, we have no way of knowing that we even do exist—where, for instance, I begin and end, what is me and not-me. . . . If our understanding of the self, of who we are in the scheme of things, were to begin with touch (as our experience of actual selves does) rather than sight, we would have a basically different sense of self. Abandoning the Western subject-object dualistic sense of self would reveal an ecological self, a relational self, a self that would not, could not exist apart from others. It would be a sense of self as relational and responsive. It would not be an individ- ualistic self that decides to form relationships, but a responsive one that from its prenatal exis- tence on is created by relationships. It would not be an abstract, rationalistic sense of self (I think, therefore I am), but a concrete, embodied sense of self (I am touched and touch, therefore I am).¹ However, ever since Plato, sight has been the privileged faculty in human epistemology. As a consequence, the Western focus on sight over touch has allowed our knowing to be done from a distance, without touching—in fact, we can actually “hide” while seeing and not allow others to see us. Sight is the most distant of all our faculties, even hearing demands a speaker and a spoken to. As Rubenstein writes, “Thinking’s (un)work is to get in touch with this chaotic touch of the world— and not, it cannot be emphasized enough, to hold itself above the fray. For unlike vision, which al- ways collapses a perceived otherness back into the gazing self, touch exposes the infinitely inappro- priable alterity between and within all beings, preventing the self’s self-position.” The “world is nothing except the touch of all things.” Rubenstein speaks of “transimmanence,” meaning the pro- found enfolding of the transcendent in the immanent. Thus the place of wonder (transcendence) is in the everyday (immanence). Rubenstein points to “the strangeness of the everyday,” which opens up for us both the shock and the terror as well as awe and care. Thus while modernity kills wonder in its focus on technology, wonder breaks through to new possibilities, both negative (shock and terror) and positive (awe and care). Thus the relational network of touch that is our world is also the opening to a double possibility—“Shock unworks; awe makes sense.”² Hence Rubenstein’s main focus, given its reliance on touch, is on the ethical, not the ontological. As a good Jew, Rubenstein focuses not on “belief” in God but on “love” to the neighbor. The law of hospitality thus rules her reflections: she mentions “saints” as people who practice “unconditioned hospitality,” as epitomizing what she means by living the good life. She ends her book on learning how to breathe as the closest expression of “withness” or relationality: “Humanly speaking, air makes the self most properly itself; insofar as I breathe, I am no one else but me. At the same time, breathing opens the self essentially onto every other, taking in and releasing others and self and oth- ers-in-self-as-other at each moment. . . . With every exhalation, one sends oneself out into the lives of others, for better or worse.” The last sentence of the book sums it up: “Perhaps that is it, then: perhaps dwelling in wonder is merely a matter of learning to breathe.”³
From Rubenstein’s “wonder” we move to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “adoration,” which is another attempt to move from a supernatural understanding of God to a view of transcendence as immanence. “The form of spirit as it awakens is adoration”—this quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein opens Nancy’s book and sums it up. It is a different step beyond Rubenstein’s “wonder” in that Nancy attempts to substitute adoration of this world for the supernatural God. This sentence says that spirit awakens not to adore “God” but simply to adore what is—that is, our world. Nancy “deconstructs” Christian doctrines by giving transcendence totally immanental meanings. In the final paragraph of the book, Nancy speaks of Augustine’s view of singing: he says it is to pray twice, and the second time it is simply a shout beyond all expectations—a hallelujah! salute from human beings and the chirping birds and thrumming cicadas: “Or again, the world saluting itself, via all of ‘nature’ up to ‘mankind.’” It is a salute, a greeting, without salvation, without a god, without another world. As Nancy writes, “Adoration: the movement and the joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world.”⁴ We are considering various attempts to reimagine transcendence and immanence, especially as a critique of present-day supernatural views of God, and also to consider proposals that find tran- scendence in our world. Would Nancy’s position be just another form of atheism? One might think so from comments such as the following: “There is no other world, no world beyond”; “Adoration consists in holding onto the nothing . . . of the opening”; “The world, our world. Open to nothing other than itself. Transcendent in its own immanence.”⁵ And yet, and yet . . . what does one make of the following: “This existence makes sense or is sense and with it the whole world can make sense from ‘salut,’ from one to another. Do not the morning sun, the plant pushing out of the soil, address a ‘salut’ to us? Or the gaze of an animal?”⁶ “The gaze of an animal”—let us stop here and reflect on this. Nancy is asking us to relive those rare moments when one makes contact, real contact, with another species—that shocking, amazing experience of looking into the eyes of an animal and recognizing another subject, another living being with intentions and purposes. And furthermore, a “plant pushing out of the soil” is also, in its own way, a presence making itself felt. It is giving a “salute,” a greeting, if one can pay close enough attention and open one’s mind to an alive world. This is the uncanny effect of finding ourselves entangled with nature as an encounter with another living center of existence. One of the most important insights from postmodernism is the expansion of our sense of agen- cy, of who acts. It is summed up in the First Nations’ reference to “all our relations,” meaning all the life-forms in the world. It is an exercise in including more and more others within the param- eters of our respect and moral concern, as subjects with agency who demand our attention and compassion. Nancy expresses it well: the love that is owed to every existent simply because of its intrin- sic worth. In other words, love is justice, and love is a way of thinking; it is not merely a feeling. It is coming to the conclusion that nothing short of universal love is called for. From recognizing that something else really exists, that all life-forms have the right to the basics of existence, we have ar- rived at the “impossible” conclusion that there is no line of exclusion: all are welcome! Be careful what you pay attention to, with whom you “lock eyes, with what/who you believe is a ‘subject.’” This is a cautionary tale: subjects do not always stay quiet or accept being considered as objects. What is essential is this universal coexistence of all to all, the call and the response, the respon- sibility to respond each to each. How does this work out in terms of some central doctrines of Christianity? Evil consists in refusing to recognize that there is no singular “I” but only the “we” of life with others: “we are ourselves the relation among all beings” as we respond each to the other in self-giving love.⁷ Sin is the condition of humankind closed in upon itself. Thus touching each other,
sharing, greeting, caring for others: this is what is left. Nancy speaks of creation and salvation, the terms we used to reserve for what God did for us—now we do this for one another. But we are not alone: God is the “with” that empowers all this loving activity. Hence revelation, another Christian term, is not the revealing of some secret information but awakening to the presence of the world—the revelation is keeping the opening always open to the other. Moreover, the incarnation is “flesh itself as sense”—in other words, “the body is the event of the spirit,” or “spirit does not hold itself out- side the world, it opens in its midst.”⁸ Thus also, the resurrection is not a second life but the ver- tical life (the heavenly life) as made fully horizontal (realized in our world). Nancy’s interpretations of Christian doctrines are imaginative and engaging, but they ask a lot of us. Can we accept the substitution of this world for our former “two worlds”? He quotes a lovely passage from William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun, where the central character says, “I be- lieves” (not in something but just “believes”). What could this mean? Not believing that a Messiah will come to save us but simply adoring the “movement and joy of recognizing ourselves as exis- tents in the world,” which he compares to sexual ecstasy in the sense that it comes with the greatest shout of celebration that one could imagine: simply to be, to be here in all its beauty and horror, with the task of giving equality and justice to all.⁹ Simply to be, to be here. Are we up to it? Karmen MacKendrick proposes something different from Rubenstein or Nancy and more posi- tive: “The world as the very sign of divine enticement.”¹⁰ We have been looking at various post- modern strategies for relating transcendence and immanence, ways that avoid supernatural, two- world thinking. We began with Rubenstein’s call for us to wake up and stay awake to the wonders of this world, followed by Nancy’s claim that “‘God’ is a name for the relation among all beings— therefore, [a name] for the world in the strongest sense of the word.”¹¹ Now we come to MacK- endrick, who, along with Augustine, speaks of “the world as the very sign of divine enticement.” We can see a progression here from waking up to this world to seeing this world as the sign, sacra- ment, symbol of the divine. Transcendence has not disappeared (except in its supernatural interpre- tation), but it has become embedded, incarnated, in this world, and we are called upon to “read” these intimations of transcendence in the world. MacKendrick sees in Augustine’s Confessions the form of “paying attention” that she supports. It is the classic Catholic, sacramental view where the world is rich with divine enticement in the form of all the loveliest things of this world. Augustine says, “Yet in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God—the light and the voice and the fragrance and the food and embrace in the soul, when that light shines upon my soul which no place can con- tain, that voice sounds which no time can take from me, I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I love in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder. This is that I love, when I love my God.”¹² The world in its beauty calls out the name of its Creator, not in a simple or direct way, but through signs, which are seductive. From this network of signs, we get a sense of the divine as “within” and “around” the world: a sense of a call, a pull, that does not draw us out of the world but leads us more fully into it. Augustine’s theology is significant because it sees the divine in the entangled complex that is the world. God “‘dwells’ in the world precisely as the perpetual invitation of and to our questions, our exploration, our delight.”¹³ The Word becomes flesh, not just mere words, and hence theology becomes “seductive episte- mology,” a kind of knowing that embraces even food and sex. The Augustinian world of signs is not a sterile, intellectual, spiritual, narrow world but the fullest, ripest, richest, most seductive one imag- inable. MacKendrick claims that “the implication of reading the world as written by God is that the world reader is pulled by the reversible draw of divine desire.”¹⁴ God proposes; we respond. The
power of this understanding of the God-world relation is that it believes in a God who is constantly inviting us, through each and every particular of the world (the lowliest slug included), to wake up, pay attention, and read God in the world—because God is in the world, or better still, the world is within God. We have come quite a distance since Morton’s claim that we human beings are “inside” the world to MacKendrick’s claim, along with Augustine, that the world is within God. We have left the supernatural, dualistic world of modernism, trading it in for one world that is a sign of God. How- ever, postmodernism is not just a return to the sacramentalism of Augustine. As a matter of fact, there are other postmoderns, influenced by quantum theory, who propose more radical embed- dedness of the human being in the world than our sources have so far suggested. Talking with Trees If we accept our new standpoint as “inside” nature, along with all the other elements of nature, then we should feel “closer to trees”—in fact, close enough so we could “talk with them.” If this does not strike you as absurd (or childish), then you have already made a big leap into the “knowing” and “doing” that is typical of postmodernism. There are several fine practitioners of this position: I would recommend to you the writings of both Richard Nelson (The Island Within) and Jane Bennett (Thoreau’s Nature). After careful attention to Timothy Morton’s insistence that the “ecological thought” is not about humans versus nature but about the radical interdependence of all forms of life, including the human form, as well as Karen Barad’s undermining all dualisms, including sub- ject versus object, perhaps now we can “talk with trees” without blushing. We have been focusing on the conceptual part of the new worldview; can we now ask, What does it feel like? Can we, for in- stance, imagine a biocracy as the proper form of planetary government that gives trees, mountains, birds, and even slugs “rights” to live and to flourish? Can we really include all others? Whose world is it, anyway? One of the most important insights we have noted in postmodernism is its insistence that the world is alive. Therefore, we have to make a radical change. We can no longer assume that the world is composed of us, the one living subject, with everything else objects for our use. Now we must realize that the world is composed of many subjects with whom we relate in different ways. Part of coming to awareness of the relational quality of all life is to learn different techniques of being in relation with these many Others. One of the most important changes is to “feel” differently about them. Stephanie Kaza, in her book The Attentive Heart, suggests that we practice a Zen form of medi- tation in which one’s primary orientation to a tree is not as a symbol or resource but as a “Thou” (as Martin Buber would put it). This means that a tree can be seen as one party in an I-Thou rela- tionship, not to speak “about” trees, but to speak “with” and “to” these Others. How can this occur without slipping into some sort of romantic consumerism, where in Morton’s critique, we “con- sume” these Others into our own orbit or ego? Kaza calls the needed practice “just sitting,” being present with a tree as Other. Her stand toward trees is evident in the grammatical structure of the first sentence in her book: “The first tree to make my acquaintance as a child was the large-canopied apple tree in my backyard.”¹⁵ Notice that the tree initiates the relationship—the tree makes her acquaintance. She also speaks of trees as her “daily companions.” She finds that over the years, her students have come “to see that the environment is everything. It is not just where we live; it is the very reason we are alive.”¹⁶ This is the transformation that we need, that our new science is telling us is our reality—that
without “nature,” we would not even be. But it is crucial that we see our relationship with trees not in a sentimental way. We are not just “tree huggers,” although a deeper appreciation for children’s instincts of trees and other animals as “daily companions” is a good beginning. Why, I wonder, are almost all good children’s books about animals? Is it because children “naturally” feel more com- fortable with “them” than with members of their own species? Whatever is the case, most of us lose that sense of identification with other life-forms (and our culture encourages putting aside such “childish” attitudes). We have to practice what Kaza calls developing a “mutually respectful relation with trees.” The crucial steps in this practice are as follows: 1. The first step is to recognize things as they are. A mountain is a mountain, a tree is a tree: this mountain, this tree. An aesthetic moment of appreciation for the other as having intrinsic worth and particular features is the first step. Compare it with God’s view in Gen- esis after making each creature and feature in nature that it is good—not good for you (a human being) or even for me (God) but just plain good. 2. A second step is to look more deeply into the lives of particular trees, trees as both vic- tims and shapers of human activities. Be specific: a good naturalist can spend pages de- scribing in deepest details the habits of a particular kind of tree (for instance, the nature writings of John Muir). 3. The third step is to address the tangle of tree-human relationships—stories of fear, killing, suffering, exploding into waves of “despair, greed, and helplessness.” Practice to deepen one’s attentive mind from the insights of evolution and oneself as having a body made of flesh, even as trees also have bodies (different from ours) made of living matter. 4. In the last step, all this should climax in a greater, deeper internal consciousness and appreciation of trees so that one will make better decisions regarding trees in a time of horrible devastation of our planet’s trees. The goal is a deeper conversation with trees, our “daily companions.” With the help of various readings from postmodern thinkers, we are trying to disorient and reori- ent ourselves in the world. Needless to say, this is an unsettling business. It doesn’t always feel good: as Morton says, “Consciousness sucks.” We are being asked to give up the comfortable, flat- tering picture of ourselves as at the center of the world and hence presumably in charge of things for a picture of ourselves in which we are not only decentered but among the most dependent and vulnerable of all creatures. On the other hand, this perspective and these practices open us to an alive world, full of other subjects with fascinating, diverse lives. At present, as the only subject, we live lonely lives in a seemingly dead world. We are being called to end living in a boring, consumer- oriented world, trading it in for a disorienting world, to be sure, but one interesting and alive, full of other subjects with intentions, practices, and gifts beyond any of our imaginings. We are being in- vited to really live in and with the rest of the world. Will we accept the invitation?
Three
Divine and Human Relational Ontology
Having accepted the shift from outside to inside, we must turn to what difference it makes to be inside in terms of the postmodern view of transcendence and immanence. It is the movement from the supernaturalism of the traditional understanding of God and the world to one where transcendence becomes radically immanental, specifically the world is seen as within God and God is incarnated in the world. To see transcendence become immanent in the world, we will look at wonder (Mary-Jane Rubenstein), adoration (Jean-Luc Nancy), and divine enticement (Karmen MacKendrick). We will end the chapter with a suggestion of what difference the inside view makes when we consider the issue of talking with trees (Stephanie Kaza). Overall, this chapter is a study of the many differences that occur when our location is inside nature rather than the modern outside view.
Wonder, Adoration, and Divine Enticement
From the challenging insights of Timothy Morton and Karen Barad on where we stand, we now turn to what we perceive, see, and hear from this new inside perspective. We will look briefly at the contributions of three postmodern thinkers who help turn our interest from supernaturalism to the wonder of earthly, human existence and to our responses of adoration and divine enticement. Until the last few decades, Western philosophy was principally focused on language, either the British variety of analyzing simple sentences of moral intention or the closed world of language (words refer to nothing apart from themselves). With the latter view, one could not talk about the world (and certainly not God), since language only referred to itself. However, there has been a turnabout in philosophy, especially European philosophy, and with some of these folks, wonder has returned. Hence what is going on in philosophy is of growing interest to theologians, with its concerns for both the beauty and the horror of existence. Philosophy has returned to its ancient partners—poetry and religion—and our next three authors move in this direction: Rubenstein and wonder, Nancy and adoration, and MacKendrick and divine enticement. Like Christian incarnationalism, this thinking focuses on the extraordinary as being located in the ordinary, not in spite of it or apart from it. This new spirituality is not about directing our attention to another world; rather, it is advising us to dig more deeply into this world. There is, therefore, a genuine opening for interpreting the doctrine of the incarnation more broadly—that is, not limiting it to one person, Jesus of Nazareth, but including the entire creation, human and beyond. The focus on the sacred in this world opens the doors for a kenotic theology where human beings work with God.
What Rubenstein, Nancy, and MacKendrick do is open the doors and windows of the world to encourage imaginative thinking about new metaphors and models of the relationship between God and the world. Each of these thinkers adds insight to the finite/infinite relationship. For all three of them, the self is only the self in relationship; hence togetherness is critical to the self, and in fact, the Buddhist terminology of dependent co-arising describes ontology more accurately for them than anything in Western philosophy. In other words, withness is the essence of existence. Therefore, kenosis, or self-sacrificial being, is the only existence there is—self-emptying love is not added to existence but defines it from the beginning. Here we see the connections with the life/death symbiotic pattern of evolution as well as the epitome of kenosis in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, the new worldview with its stress on interdependence is ideal for revising Christian theology in the direction of sacrifice and new life as the form of action that we
find everywhere in the natural world.
The primacy of touch oversight expresses the centrality of withness for these authors. In another place, I have described this primacy in the following way:
The first thing that mammals do with their newborns is to touch them. Animal mothers lick their young to form the bond necessary to their offspring’s life. . . . Human beings can exist without their other senses, but we could not exist without touch: unless we are touched and can touch, we have no way of knowing that we even do exist—where, for instance, I begin and end, what is me and not-me. . . . If our understanding of the self, of who we are in the scheme of things, were to begin with touch (as our experience of actual selves does) rather than sight, we would have a basically different sense of self. Abandoning the Western subject-object dualistic sense of self would reveal an ecological self, a relational self, a self that would not, could not exist apart from others. It would be a sense of self as relational and responsive. It would not be an individualistic self that decides to form relationships, but a responsive one that from its prenatal existence on is created by relationships. It would not be an abstract, rationalistic sense of self (I think, therefore I am), but a concrete, embodied sense of self (I am touched and touch, therefore I am).¹
However, ever since Plato, sight has been the privileged faculty in human epistemology. As a consequence, the Western focus on sight over touch has allowed our knowing to be done from a distance, without touching—in fact, we can actually hide while seeing and not allow others to see us. Sight is the most distant of all our faculties, even hearing demands a speaker and a spoken to. As Rubenstein writes, Thinking’s (un)work is to get in touch with this chaotic touch of the world—and not, it cannot be emphasized enough, to hold itself above the fray. For unlike vision, which always collapses a perceived otherness back into the gazing self, touch exposes the infinitely inappropriable alterity between and within all beings, preventing the self’s self-position. The world is nothing except the touch of all things. Rubenstein speaks of transimmanence, meaning the profound enfolding of the transcendent in the immanent. Thus the place of wonder (transcendence) is in the everyday (immanence). Rubenstein points to the strangeness of the everyday, which opens up for us both the shock and the terror as well as awe and care. Thus while modernity kills wonder in its focus on technology, wonder breaks through to new possibilities, both negative (shock and terror) and positive (awe and care). Thus the relational network of touch that is our world is also the opening to a double possibility—Shock unworks; awe makes sense.²
Hence Rubenstein’s main focus, given its reliance on touch, is on the ethical, not the ontological. As a good Jew, Rubenstein focuses not on belief in God but on love to the neighbor. The law of hospitality thus rules her reflections: she mentions saints as people who practice unconditioned hospitality, as epitomizing what she means by living the good life. She ends her book on learning how to breathe as the closest expression of withness or relationality: "Humanly speaking, air makes the self most properly itself; insofar as I breathe, I am no one else but me. At the same time, breathing opens the self essentially onto every other, taking in and releasing others and self and others-in-self-as-other at each moment. . . . With every exhalation, one sends oneself out into the lives of others, for better or worse. The last sentence of the book sums it up: Perhaps that is it, then: perhaps dwelling in wonder is merely a matter of learning to breathe."³
From Rubenstein’s wonder we move to Jean-Luc Nancy’s adoration, which is another attempt to move from a supernatural understanding of God to a view of transcendence as immanence. The form of spirit as it awakens is adoration—this quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein opens Nancy’s book and sums it up. It is a different step beyond Rubenstein’s wonder in that Nancy attempts to substitute adoration of this world for the supernatural God. This sentence says that spirit awakens not to adore God but simply to adore what is—that is, our world. Nancy deconstructs Christian doctrines by giving transcendence totally immanental meanings. In the final paragraph of the book, Nancy speaks of Augustine’s view of singing: he says it is to pray twice, and the second time it is simply a shout beyond all expectations—a hallelujah! salute from human beings and the chirping birds and thrumming cicadas: Or again, the world saluting itself, via all of ‘nature’ up to ‘mankind.’ It is a salute, a greeting, without salvation, without a god, without another world. As Nancy writes, Adoration: the movement and the joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world.⁴
We are considering various attempts to reimagine transcendence and immanence, especially as a critique of present-day supernatural views of God, and also to consider proposals that find transcendence in our world. Would Nancy’s position be just another form of atheism? One might think so from comments such as the following: There is no other world, no world beyond; Adoration consists in holding onto the nothing . . . of the opening; The world, our world. Open to nothing other than itself. Transcendent in its own immanence.⁵
And yet, and yet . . . what does one make of the following: "This existence makes sense or is sense and with it the whole world can make sense from ‘salut,’ from one to another. Do not the morning sun, the plant pushing out of the soil, address a ‘salut’ to us? Or the gaze of an animal?"⁶ The gaze of an animal—let us stop here and reflect on this. Nancy is asking us to relive those rare moments when one makes contact, real contact, with another species—that shocking, amazing experience of looking into the eyes of an animal and recognizing another subject, another living being with intentions and purposes. And furthermore, a plant pushing out of the soil is also, in its own way, a presence making itself felt. It is giving a salute, a greeting, if one can pay close enough attention and open one’s mind to an alive world. This is the uncanny effect of finding ourselves entangled with nature as an encounter with another living center of existence.
One of the most important insights from postmodernism is the expansion of our sense of agency, of who acts. It is summed up in the First Nations’ reference to all our relations, meaning all the life-forms in the world. It is an exercise in including more and more others within the parameters of our respect and moral concern, as subjects with agency who demand our attention and compassion. Nancy expresses it well: the love that is owed to every existent simply because of its intrinsic worth. In other words, love is justice, and love is a way of thinking; it is not merely a feeling. It is coming to the conclusion that nothing short of universal love is called for. From recognizing that something else really exists, that all life-forms have the right to the basics of existence, we have arrived at the impossible conclusion that there is no line of exclusion: all are welcome! Be careful what you pay attention to, with whom you lock eyes, with what/who you believe is a ‘subject.’ This is a cautionary tale: subjects do not always stay quiet or accept being considered as objects.
What is essential is this universal coexistence of all to all, the call and the response, the responsibility to respond each to each. How does this work out in terms of some central doctrines of Christianity? Evil consists in refusing to recognize that there is no singular I but only the we of life with others: we are ourselves the relation among all beings as we respond each to the other in self-giving love.⁷ Sin is the condition of humankind closed in upon itself. Thus touching each other,
sharing, greeting, caring for others: this is what is left. Nancy speaks of creation and salvation, the terms we used to reserve for what God did for us—now we do this for one another. But we are not alone: God is the with that empowers all this loving activity. Hence revelation, another Christian term, is not the revealing of some secret information but awakening to the presence of the world—the revelation is keeping the opening always open to the other. Moreover, the incarnation is flesh itself as sense—in other words, the body is the event of the spirit, or spirit does not hold itself outside the world, it opens in its midst.⁸ Thus also, the resurrection is not a second life but the vertical life (the heavenly life) as made fully horizontal (realized in our world).
Nancy’s interpretations of Christian doctrines are imaginative and engaging, but they ask a lot of us. Can we accept the substitution of this world for our former two worlds? He quotes a lovely passage from William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun, where the central character says, I believes (not in something but just believes). What could this mean? Not believing that a Messiah will come to save us but simply adoring the movement and joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world, which he compares to sexual ecstasy in the sense that it comes with the greatest shout of celebration that one could imagine: simply to be, to be here in all its beauty and horror, with the task of giving equality and justice to all.⁹ Simply to be, to be here. Are we up to it?
Karmen MacKendrick proposes something different from Rubenstein or Nancy and more positive: The world as the very sign of divine enticement.¹⁰ We have been looking at various postmodern strategies for relating transcendence and immanence, ways that avoid supernatural, two-world thinking. We began with Rubenstein’s call for us to wake up and stay awake to the wonders of this world, followed by Nancy’s claim that "‘God’ is a name for the relation among all beings—therefore, [a name] for the world in the strongest sense of the word."¹¹ Now we come to MacKendrick, who, along with Augustine, speaks of the world as the very sign of divine enticement. We can see a progression here from waking up to this world to seeing this world as the sign, sacrament, symbol of the divine. Transcendence has not disappeared (except in its supernatural interpretation), but it has become embedded, incarnated, in this world, and we are called upon to read these intimations of transcendence in the world.
MacKendrick sees in Augustine’s Confessions the form of paying attention that she supports. It is the classic Catholic, sacramental view where the world is rich with divine enticement in the form of all the loveliest things of this world. Augustine says, Yet in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God—the light and the voice and the fragrance and the food and embrace in the soul, when that light shines upon my soul which no place can contain, that voice sounds which no time can take from me, I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I love in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder. This is that I love, when I love my God.¹² The world in its beauty calls out the name of its Creator, not in a simple or direct way, but through signs, which are seductive. From this network of signs, we get a sense of the divine as within and around the world: a sense of a call, a pull, that does not draw us out of the world but leads us more fully into it. Augustine’s theology is significant because it sees the divine in the entangled complex that is the world. God ‘dwells’ in the world precisely as the perpetual invitation of and to our questions, our exploration, our delight.¹³ The Word becomes flesh, not just mere words, and hence theology becomes seductive epistemology, a kind of knowing that embraces even food and sex. The Augustinian world of signs is not a sterile, intellectual, spiritual, narrow world but the fullest, ripest, richest, most seductive one imaginable. MacKendrick claims that the implication of reading the world as written by God is that the world reader is pulled by the reversible draw of divine desire.¹⁴ God proposes; we respond. The
power of this understanding of the God-world relation is that it believes in a God who is constantly inviting us, through each and every particular of the world (the lowliest slug included), to wake up, pay attention, and read God in the world—because God is in the world, or better still, the world is within God.
We have come quite a distance since Morton’s claim that we human beings are inside the world to MacKendrick’s claim, along with Augustine, that the world is within God. We have left the supernatural, dualistic world of modernism, trading it in for one world that is a sign of God. However, postmodernism is not just a return to the sacramentalism of Augustine. As a matter of fact, there are other postmoderns, influenced by quantum theory, who propose more radical embeddedness of the human being in the world than our sources have so far suggested.
Talking with Trees
If we accept our new standpoint as inside nature, along with all the other elements of nature, then we should feel closer to trees—in fact, close enough so we could talk with them. If this does not strike you as absurd (or childish), then you have already made a big leap into the knowing and doing that is typical of postmodernism. There are several fine practitioners of this position: I would recommend to you the writings of both Richard Nelson (The Island Within) and Jane Bennett (Thoreau’s Nature). After careful attention to Timothy Morton’s insistence that the ecological thought is not about humans versus nature but about the radical interdependence of all forms of life, including the human form, as well as Karen Barad’s undermining all dualisms, including subject versus object, perhaps now we can talk with trees without blushing. We have been focusing on the conceptual part of the new worldview; can we now ask, What does it feel like? Can we, for instance, imagine a biocracy as the proper form of planetary government that gives trees, mountains, birds, and even slugs rights to live and to flourish? Can we really include all others? Whose world is it, anyway?
One of the most important insights we have noted in postmodernism is its insistence that the world is alive. Therefore, we have to make a radical change. We can no longer assume that the world is composed of us, the one living subject, with everything else objects for our use. Now we must realize that the world is composed of many subjects with whom we relate in different ways. Part of coming to awareness of the relational quality of all life is to learn different techniques of being in relation with these many Others. One of the most important changes is to feel differently about them.
Stephanie Kaza, in her book The Attentive Heart, suggests that we practice a Zen form of meditation in which one’s primary orientation to a tree is not as a symbol or resource but as a Thou (as Martin Buber would put it). This means that a tree can be seen as one party in an I-Thou relationship, not to speak about trees, but to speak with and to these Others. How can this occur without slipping into some sort of romantic consumerism, where in Morton’s critique, we consume these Others into our own orbit or ego?
Kaza calls the needed practice just sitting, being present with a tree as Other. Her stand toward trees is evident in the grammatical structure of the first sentence in her book: The first tree to make my acquaintance as a child was the large-canopied apple tree in my backyard.¹⁵ Notice that the tree initiates the relationship—the tree makes her acquaintance. She also speaks of trees as her daily companions. She finds that over the years, her students have come to see that the environment is everything. It is not just where we live; it is the very reason we are alive.¹⁶
This is the transformation that we need, that our new science is telling us is our reality—that
without nature, we would not even be. But it is crucial that we see our relationship with trees not in a sentimental way. We are not just tree huggers, although a deeper appreciation for children’s instincts of trees and other animals as daily companions is a good beginning. Why, I wonder, are almost all good children’s books about animals? Is it because children naturally feel more comfortable with them than with members of their own species? Whatever is the case, most of us lose that sense of identification with other life-forms (and our culture encourages putting aside such childish attitudes). We have to practice what Kaza calls developing a mutually respectful relation with trees. The crucial steps in this practice are as follows:
1. The first step is to recognize things as they are. A mountain is a mountain, a tree is a tree: this mountain, this tree. An aesthetic moment of appreciation for the other as having intrinsic worth and particular features is the first step. Compare it with God’s view in Genesis after making each creature and feature in nature that it is good—not good for you (a human being) or even for me (God) but just plain good.
2. A second step is to look more deeply into the lives of particular trees, trees as both victims and shapers of human activities. Be specific: a good naturalist can spend pages describing in deepest details the habits of a particular kind of tree (for instance, the nature writings of John Muir).
3. The third step is to address the tangle of tree-human relationships—stories of fear, killing, suffering, exploding into waves of despair, greed, and helplessness. Practice to deepen one’s attentive mind from the insights of evolution and oneself as having a body made of flesh, even as trees also have bodies (different from ours) made of living matter.
4. In the last step, all this should climax in a greater, deeper internal consciousness and appreciation of trees so that one will make better decisions regarding trees in a time of horrible devastation of our planet’s trees. The goal is a deeper conversation with trees, our daily companions.
With the help of various readings from postmodern thinkers, we are trying to disorient and reorient ourselves in the world. Needless to say, this is an unsettling business. It doesn’t always feel good: as Morton says, Consciousness sucks. We are being asked to give up the comfortable, flattering picture of ourselves as at the center of the world and hence presumably in charge of things for a picture of ourselves in which we are not only decentered but among the most dependent and vulnerable of all creatures. On the other hand, this perspective and these practices open us to an alive world, full of other subjects with fascinating, diverse lives. At present, as the only subject, we live lonely lives in a seemingly dead world. We are being called to end living in a boring, consumer-oriented world, trading it in for a disorienting world, to be sure, but one interesting and alive, full of other subjects with intentions, practices, and gifts beyond any of our imaginings. We are being invited to really live in and with the rest of the world. Will we accept the invitation?
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