In preparation for the last module, I spent time asking myself about the introduction question sent to us: What is a sacred place for me? Even as I was walking to Ammerdown, I still didn’t have a satisfactory answer. I could think of plenty of places I love and appreciate, places that have taken my breath away, places that I have found truly wonder-full. But none of them individually held that higher level of significance I felt was a requisite for sacredness.
At first, that thought made me sad. It made me wonder if I felt no real sense of connection to a specific physical place because of how nomadic I have been and my family has been for generations. I then wondered at the sense of entitlement I have had toward the earth, assuming that where there is land, there is an invitation to inhabit it. (This is one of the areas where I have been/am exploring reconciliation with the earth: deconstructing past beliefs about humans being the crowning achievement of creation with authority over it, and exploring then human as one element of an ecosystem.)
But then I thought about how each of these places, and this entire planet, has sustained me and my deep gratitude for that. I thought about how the earth holds me, feeds me, comforts me, gives me shelter. How I have come from it and how I will return to it.
This type of relationship with the earth made me think of my own mother, and the cycles of being held by her, first in her womb and then in her arms, and then in her illness, the reversal of that as I held her on the opposite end of life. Since her death, I have often felt a mothering spirit when I am under large trees. There’s something about their branches arching over me, their roots stretching into a strong network underneath me, that makes me feel safe and secure and in the presence of great peace and wisdom. I wondered if perhaps these are my sacred places.
My theology of earth is not well-developed. I am exploring and questioning many ideas. But one thing that has been true for me, is that in a long season of rejecting any belief in God or the spiritual, it was always the natural world that drew me back.
There is a small poem that I copied down on a bit of card years ago that I have carried with me, literally and metaphorically, in many moments of questioning and doubt. (I can’t find the original author now, unfortunately.) It says:
So I asked the whole universe about god and it answered back, “I am not he, but he made me.”
For me, this really encompasses my view towards the sacred nature of earth and the universe of which we are a part – it is sacred because it points me to things above in ways that words, and questions, and answers can not.
3 comments
Katrine, it is so wonderful to hear what you walked with on your pilgrimage to Ammerdown and the classic conundrum of coming out with more questions than answers…maybe that will the way for the whole Journey of Hope course?
I’m curious about your question because the entitlement of belonging is also behind eco-nationalism where people feel really close to a particular place but thereby feel entitled to exclude other people from that place. How could an all-encompassing sense of sacred earth – one which has reciprocity, service and love at its centre – be the answer to our climate crisis?
While we were walking around the room considering deep ecology I also had a sense of how humans have always historically looked at the skies and feared destruction – the cuban missile crisis, the ancient Greek Gods who could destroy our harvests – does reverence and fear always go hand in hand for our collective human imagination? I am feeling very tiny in the deep time of human kind at the moment, in a way which is both comforting and detaching.
There is another quote by Wendell Berry: ‘there are only sacred and desecrated places’ which strikes me. How can we make our waterways sacred again so that people do not drop litter into them? How can we make malls sacred places where people connect to the people who made the clothes they are connected to?
Looking forward to more big conversations together soon!
Bridget
I have never been nomadic – my father still lives in the house in which I grew up; but I never felt as though I had a home emotionally. For me, home is not bricks and mortar (although that does help to keep the rain off, of course), it is when I am with people with whom there is an equality, a sense of acceptance and purpose and a mutual nurture; it is when I am in community or with my ‘tribe’. Similarly, although I can think of a number of places that feel sacred to me, that sanctity is something I generally find amongst people and many of those places are associated with memories of those people: Prague, where I found acceptance and companionship on my first orchestra tour, aged 18; my current church, which accepted me back after a long tour through several denominations and which continues to nurture and challenge me.
The one place that I have truly found home and a sacred place is, in fact, within myself. Once I can block out distraction and invite God in, I find myself accepted, nurtured, valued, free to express myself and challenged too. Similarly, I find home in the Sacraments (my love of Eucharistic adoration is very Anglo-Catholic, but where else can one sit in relative silence amongst others doing the same, have a visual focus on the Divine, be removed from almost all distractions and freely express whatever is on one’s heart?). I particularly love confession – once I remind myself that God knows not only everything that I am about to bring to Him but WHY I did it, what would help me not to repeat my mistakes and how to gently push me towards greater relationship with Him, I am free to open my heart to His mercy, to take counsel from His priest and to be forgiven. All I have to do to find this sacred place is to put aside the fear of what I am about to say, remembering that He knows already and that I am afraid only of admitting my shortcomings to myself!
My theology of the earth must, therefore, recognise that everywhere is sacred since God created it and enters into it whenever one of us asks Him to be within us. Having felt that release of confession and absolution, I must also advocate for people of faith to call individuals and corporations to account for the damage that they are doing to the earth, to show them the true consequences of their actions and to ask them to be truly contrite in order that they may re-establish their relationship with our planet and try to do better in the future – God already knows and is willing to forgive and help them; they need only admit it to themselves and wish to make progress and our sacred planet will be given a little more life with each change that they make.
Many denominations have a pro-life stance, borne out of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or the Jewish ‘Pikuach Nefesh’ (do not harm a soul). Personally, I espouse these only up to the point where they cause more harm (for example, an unborn child that has no chance of living outside the womb or a pregnancy that would likely kill or significantly harm the mother both fall into an area where conscience and not legalism is the more appropriate guide for me). What, I wonder, would be the result of applying some of these principles more broadly? What if we were to consider damaging our planet without good reason or mitigation (i.e. felling an acre of trees in order to provide solar or wind energy farms or taking an unneccesary flight but offsetting the carbon it generates) as a form of killing? In fact, destroying the very means of sustaining life on earth a little at a time probably should be equated to killing, as should exploiting workers in order to make greater profit. The only difference here is that we are collectively responsible for the corpses here and no individual or corporation can be directly blamed, so there is no outcry.
Thanks for sharing this Katrine. I think many of us in the modern world live de-placed nomadic lives, and I am interested in how this plays into ecological crisis, and particularly in how modern educational systems lead us away from places of belonging. I have moved a lot, and feel this sense of displacement. My husband and I called our house “Nomads’ Rest”. Simone Weil wrote that “rootedness in a place is “the most important and least recognised need of the human soul” (1971, p.43) and Stephen Gould, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love” (1991, p.14). So, how do we all – often as nomads – nurture our connection with our sacred Mother Earth in the way that you describe? Your journey is infinitely hopeful. Thank you.