Conversations with a Soul (23 page)

Some frontiers need to be carefully guarded for once invaded, something important is destroyed.

Today, the Dow Jones index rose by 75 points and investors and traders were jubilant; and today, over a hundred plants, trees, animals and insect species passed silently into extinction, and no one grieved.

Today the price of gasoline shot up above $4 a gallon and those who hold shares in oil companies broke out the champagne; and today greenhouse gasses raised the temperature of the earth by just a little, exactly as it did yesterday and the day before and the day before that.

Today we were assured that we can expect to maintain an annual growth rate of around 3% which is viewed as an excellent prospect for the year ahead; and today a cry went out from food kitchens, which formerly served only down and out adults, for help to purchase high chairs and booster seats to accommodate hungry children.

Today a meeting of the Board congratulated the Chief Executive Officer for his courage to cut jobs so as to boost profits, and they gave him a bonus which will amount to well over five million dollars; and today a single parent received a pink slip that will sap her hope and grind her ever deeper into poverty, the very thing that a job was going to prevent.

Today a man walked away with a severance package of tens of millions of dollars earned by packaging sub-prime loans; and today another man and his wife faced the terrible truth that all their savings have gone, soon to be followed by the house and they don’t have enough time left to start over again.

In some cultures the simple act of removing ones shoes serves as a reminder of frontiers exited and frontiers entered. The common dust and dirt of the roadside, the babble of voices raised in business, the sweat and toil to make a living gives way to the sanctuary of the home. Reflection and quiet conversation are the appropriate means of communication. Now you have entered a place which demands utmost respect and caution.

In Japanese culture a Torii (gate) reminds visitors that they are about to leave the common, profane world and enter the sacred area in which stands a shrine. Behaviour acceptable in the profane world may prove to be unacceptable as you move towards the shrine, and into the sphere of a sacred space.

Crossing a border sometimes calls for restraint.

Tinia
was the supreme sky god of the ancient culture of the Etruscans whose responsibility it was to watch over boundaries and to ensure that sacred boundaries were not violated. Tinia stood watch and brought retribution to any who ignored the limits set by consecrated frontiers. However, Tinia, and companions, are no match for Wall Street and the giant Corporations.

Thus it was that a conversation initiated and inspired by the kelp came to include a word about
perilous
frontiers. Moreover, the conversation was not just about
personal frontiers
but about those interdependent frontiers that relate to all of life.

The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as ‘the environment’ – that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding – dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought – that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbours here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.
⁶⁴

Implied by Wendell Berry; hinted at in the ancient dialogue between Eve and the Serpent, and retold in endless newspaper articles lies a tension. The tension is between two powerfully different ways of perceiving and engaging the world about us and each defines and determines how we cross certain critical frontiers:
Ownership and Stewardship.

Ownership is about the power of possession. It is a mind-set which assumes that, within legal limits, I am free to do as I like with my property. Stewardship, on the other hand, denies the claims of ownership and argues that we are simply agents that care for the creation with whom we enjoy a relationship of mutuality. We can never own anything and to try to do so is court the death of all living things.

Owners supported by the philosophy of Capitalism and protected by numerous laws, and legal practitioners, tend to focus on money, profit, returns. Stewards view life from the perspective of health, wholeness, caring for what needs to be protected for generations yet unborn.

Owners tend to rely on short term thinking; after all they will only live for a finite number of years, and it’s important to get as much as possible while you can. Stewards take a long-term view of all the living processes that come and interact with our lives which ought never to be sacrificed for short-term gains.

Ownership has to do with protecting, insulating, and keeping one’s resources safe from others. Stewardship is fundamentally concerned with sharing resources so that everyone is cared for and cared about.

The language of ownership enjoys clarity and objectivity. Balance sheets, stock market reports, share certificates, so many buckets of widgets, so many tons of this or that. Stewardship, on the other hand, enjoys no such clarity. Its most cherished values are frequently clouded in mystery and motivated by idealism.

Ownership regularly allows owners to be absent with no more responsibility than attending shareholders meetings, thereby escaping the, sometimes, ugly devastation caused by their pursuit of profits. Stewardship makes no such accommodation. Stewardship is about what men and women
believe
and daily practice in their engagement with the world.

As I write these words, four impish faces watch me; photographs of my grandsons and granddaughter. I desperately want them to inherit a world that is vibrantly alive and healthy; a world in which it is safe to drink the water and breathe the air; a world in which the oceans are healthy and its inhabitants safe from extinction, a world within which beauty belongs to everyone, not only the wealthy who can afford to live where sky and sea and land embrace each other.

I know that at the heart of creation there is a balance between birth and destruction, life and death, the yin and yang, present everywhere and rooted in all being, yet I fear that our addiction to acquire, whereby money justifies any course of action, and our hubris to control and dominate, has disturbed the balance and tipped us towards death. We cross borders without thought. Prophets have come to warn us of what is happening to our world through global warming; unfortunately their voices often go unheeded, dominated as we are by political and industrial leaders whose insouciant attitudes towards the frailty of life determines policy. The frontier announced by the kelp by which and through which the wonder of life is nurtured and preserved has become, once again, a matter of urgency.

Now it is up to us to use our democracy and our God-given ability to reason with one another about our future and make moral choices to change the policies and behaviours that would, if continued, leave a degraded, diminished, and hostile planet for our children and grandchildren – and for humankind. We must choose instead to make the 21st century a time of renewal. By seizing the opportunity that is bound up in this crisis, we can unleash the creativity, innovation, and inspiration that are just as much a part of our human birthright as our vulnerability to greed and pettiness. The choice is ours.
⁶⁵

As I gave myself to the moment, I became aware that the focus along that narrow margin, where sea and land embrace, this thin ribbon of sea and shore varying only by the rise and fall of ocean tides
is the place where birth and death embrace each other.
The world about us and the world within us are worlds defined by our response to borders and intersections and have implications that go way beyond the tiny span of our lived time. Here I
faced the kinds of questions that arise from deep within, from the territory of the Soul.

Soul questions have little to do with the exchange of information or data and everything to do with
recognition
. Soul questions lead us to recognize the powerful currents that ebb and swirl all about us. Soul questions invite us to look and see and begin to understand the founding energies that are rooted deep in our hidden psyche, and which work their way into our choices and behaviour. But Soul questions are dangerous. Once you listen to your Soul you stand a good chance of being plucked out; of crossing a boundary from which there is no way back, only a way forward.

Yet to view life from the perspective of frontiers explored and boundaries crossed is to be grasped by something very powerful. It is also to make friends with some powerful words, like
hope
and
choice
and
beauty
, which after all, patiently courted me morning after morning! After several months I came to understand!

Throughout my life beauty, more than any argument has persuaded me of the blessedness of this world. My mind, swarming with doubts, is often grasped and silenced by a wild orchid hiding in a moss-covered nook by the creek. And when I despair of understanding the horrific face of history, my spirit is unexpectedly lifted by the adamantine song of a wood thrush piped into my ear by a passing wind. When I am stripped of argument and doubt, of all the theology I have learned and unlearned, I am left with that strong sense of the connection between beauty and holiness that is central to Navajo religion. Some of this connection is conveyed by their prayer from the Night Way ceremony:

‘
In beauty may I walk.

All day long may I walk.

Through the returning seasons may I walk

Beautifully will I possess again.

Beautifully birds.

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.

With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.

With dew about my feet may I walk.

With beauty may I walk.

With beauty before me may I walk.

With beauty behind me may I walk.

With beauty above me may I walk.

With beauty all around me may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I

walk.

It is finished in beauty.

It is finished in beauty’.
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Early on, he particularly liked the French impressionists and Rembrandt’s use of light. Eventually he began to see that light was what he photographed, not objects. The objects merely were the vehicles for reflecting the light. If the light was good, you could always find something to photograph.
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