Seeing Nature Differently
In season seven of the podcast Learning How to See, Brian McLaren and guests explore how different ways of relating to nature can inspire new approaches to reality. McLaren begins:
We see the natural world from different vantage points. For example, a real estate developer might look at a beautiful landscape and think, “Wow, we could make a road, build some housing, and dam this creek. We could create an incredible housing development with a lake. It would be worth a fortune.” A paper manufacturer sees a forested mountainside and thinks about how much lumber and paper he could make from those trees and how much return on investment he could get for leasing that mountainside. Meanwhile, an angler would see in that view a trout stream coming down the mountainside that he’d like to protect. An ecologist might see an endangered species of fish that needs to be preserved. A theologian, depending on his or her background, might see theological justifications for selling that land to the real estate developer or manufacturer, or for preserving it with the angler and ecologist.
Every tree, every meadow, every stream, every wave rolling in on the beach … each of us sees them with different vision. We bring our own different backgrounds, perspectives, needs, interests, desires, and problems to whatever we see. [1]
McLaren uses the language of friendship and respect to describe his own relationship with nature:
Every night we have a little herd of iguanas on our roof, including about a five-foot-long iguana that we’ve nicknamed T-Rex—he’s big, male, and a bright orange color. He’s gotten used to me and I’ve gotten used to him. Of course, if I were to get too close, he would whack me with his tail. But we have a respectful relationship, similarly with a gopher tortoise that has dug its burrow outside my front sidewalk, and some burrowing owls that live in the neighborhood.
I have to respect their space. To me, this kind of respecting of space is a part of friendship. We have a term for people who don’t respect boundaries: We call them narcissists. They’re always impeding and crossing boundaries to take advantage of us. We humans tend to have a narcissistic relationship with our fellow creatures, but there’s an option for generous friendship that creates a kind of reverence, respect, and enjoyment.
I think this is one of our real struggles with the natural world, of which we are a part. We’re so used to being in control of things that when the natural world demands legitimate respect from us, we think it’s being hostile. This is part of our current life curriculum as human beings—to learn appropriate respect after centuries and centuries of domination. It’s parallel to what people with privilege need to learn—whether it’s white privilege, male privilege, or the privilege of the rich. Privileged people are so used to acting in domineering ways that when you ask them to show proper respect, they feel they’re being deprived or persecuted. But this respect is something we need and it’s a matter of survival right now for us to learn it.
John 20:19-31
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
Flourishing Is Mutual
If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the “Sun” of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry
Reflecting on the abundant Juneberries she has been gifted from a nearby tree, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer considers the gift economy of natural processes:
This pail of Juneberries represents hundreds of gift exchanges that led up to my blue-stained fingers: the Maples who gave their leaves to the soil, the countless invertebrates and microbes who exchanged nutrients and energy to build the humus in which a Serviceberry seed could take root, the Cedar Waxwing who dropped the seed, the sun, the rain, the early spring flies who pollinated the flowers, the farmer who wielded the shovel to tenderly settle the seedlings. They are all parts of the gift exchange by which everyone gets what they need.
Many Indigenous Peoples, including my Anishinaabe relatives and my Haudenosaunee neighbors, inherit what is known as “a culture of gratitude,” where lifeways are organized around recognition and responsibility for earthly gifts, both ceremonial and pragmatic. Our oldest teaching stories remind us that failure to show gratitude dishonors the gift and brings serious consequences.
Receiving gifts naturally leads to gratitude and ongoing generosity:
Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more…. Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyper-consumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver…
If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? I could return the gift with a direct response, like weeding or bringing water or offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. I could make habitat for the solitary bees that fertilized those fruits. Or maybe I could take indirect action, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, speaking at a public hearing on land use, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity. I could reduce my carbon footprint, vote on the side of healthy land, advocate for farmland preservation, change my diet, hang my laundry in the sunshine. We live in a time when every choice matters.
Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. Can we imagine a human economy with a currency which emulates the flow from Mother Earth? A currency of gifts?
After the Worst Has Happened
by Stephanie Duncan Smith
from Even After Everything
Holy Week holds the highest of highs and lowest of lows on the spectrum of human emotion. It holds shouts of hosanna, the hope of the people, the conspiring of political powers, breaking bread among friends, blood money, midnight prayers, the final exhale of God as it gives way to earthquakes, and the — and then, two of the most beautiful words I know — it holds stones rolled back, death denied, the undoing of entropy.
After so much has happened, we need a way to shake off all that adrenaline and signal to our bodies that we are safe now. I have come to see the Paschal cycle as its own stress cycle, and we need a way to complete it.
Completing our stress cycle is a sacred act. This is the very invitation I see pulsing at the heart of the most beautiful benediction I know, when the resurrected Christ appeared to his friends and said, “Peace be with you.”
After everything, these are the four words that hold the world. Peace is the only power capable of breaking the brutal hold of fight, flight, freeze. Peace is the bear hug, the belly laugh, the huge, sweeping exhale capable of ushering our bodies from shock into divine shelter.
Only one who has experienced death can speak this peace honestly, and as such, the peace of Christ is a peace that will never overpromise, a peace we can trust with the full weight of our being. This peace is a person whose voice has cracked, whose memory holds complex trauma, and whose body bears scars, and his promise is not safety, but presence: Love is with us through the Paschal cycle, the stress cycle, the circle of time and all it might hold.
Peace be with you implies a parallel benediction: Vigilance be released from you. In receiving Christ’s peace, we are freed to release our high-alert adrenaline and our cortisol-pumping crisis response. In the light of the resurrection, our nervous system can close its stress loop. We can let all that pent-up tension give way to the exhale of relief, and even laughter.
Listen closely: Can you hear the laughter of the holy? Eastertide is vibrating with the sonic joy of the Trinity, and you are invited to join the full-throated laughter of God. Yes, the scars are real, but so are the endorphins rushing through your vital systems now as you share in the divine joke.
Maybe Holy Week can be for us a space to name our lions: all that we have endured, all the shock it has brought to our vital systems. This is witnessed and validated by a God who suffers with us, in the solidarity of radical empathy.
And maybe Eastertide can be for us the practice of exhale: releasing all that has held us in high alert, so the body and soul might indeed receive the peace of Christ.
