EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUALITY, by Dave Burwasser

There are three overlapping topics here that get onto each other's plates so much, it's hard to talk about just one: Earth Centered spirituality; Paganism as practiced by Unitarian Universalist Pagans; and ecofeminism. We'll be sort of wandering around the territory this morning. One axis of differentiation that might be helpful: Paganism is the most liturgical of the three; ecofeminism, the least.

The Earth is worthy, Nature is worthy, in the Earth Centered view, in and of and for itself. Not because it is useful for humans, not even because it is necssary for human survival, but worthy in and of itself.

By contrast, there is a movement called Christian Environmentalism for whom Earth is sacred because its Creator is sacred. Christian Environmentalism has a short hierarchy: God, humans, and Nature. Humans responsible to God for their stewardship of Nature, like corporate middle managers responsible to the executives for how they deal with the factory floor.

In Paganism, Nature is sacred originally, not derivatively. The Pagan image of the Source of all things is process of giving birth, not the process of uttering a Word. It's quite evident from the iconography of early civilizations and of the prehistoric past -- what we gather of it -- that the first miracle to register with the religious circuits of the human mind, was a woman giving birth to a baby. Pagans seek to recapture that image of the Divine.

Ecofeminists maintain that the ultimate source of exploitation of the Earth, and exploitation of Women, are the same: Patriarchal religion. That's worth pondering in the present situation. Christians pumping oil out of Saudi Arabia, Moslems putting women into sacks in Saudi Arabia: Two manifestations of the same thing.

One scientific insight that came out of the Twentieth Century was the Gaia Hypothesis, a view of the planet Earth as alive. Not just as the home of life, but as alive itself. Because of the intricate feedback loops that keep the Earth friendly for life, loops that pass between living and non-living portions of the planet without being searched at the border. For example, the cycle of carbon dioxide that gets taken out of the air biologically and invested in seashells on the ocean floor; and after the seashells are swallowed up in tectonic plate subduction, the carbon dioxide come back into the air by way of volcanoes, and returns to the biosphere.

If the Earth is alive we can have a relationship with it. Relationships with non-human living things are an old story. I have one with my cat; my wife has one with her garden. To the Earth-Centered spirit, one's relationship with the Earth is central. One thing that marks off Pagans is that, in that relationship, they refer to the Earth as She, not "it"; and they don't just listen to Her, they talk to Her.

Paganism is much less about belief than about celebration. Pagan holidays differ from the holidays of the "major" religions because the Pagan celebration is of that time of the year because it is that time of the year; not because it is the anniversary of some great man's birth, death, enlightenment or resurrection. The Pagans will have a sacred story about that time of year, with a cast of sacred characters, but it will be about how that time of year came to exist -- Demeter and her daughter, Baldur and the arrow.

Earth Centered Spirituality does not have this intense dualism about the body and the spirit.

Let me break in here with an acknowledgement that I am doing a lot of this in terms of what my subject is not. That's not the optimal way to approach any subject. But some of these distinctions have to start with what we are familiar with, and move away from it, sometimes to something very similar but basically quite different. To bring that out in the half hour allotted to me, I have to point out what the new topic is not.

For example, a Pagan, a Christian Environmentalist and a secular Green could work together designing a municipal recycling program, and only their similarities evident. To see what they are, you need the contrasts; you need to see what they are not.

I make this point because I don't want to give the impressions that Pagans are Pagans because of what Paganism is not. Some Pagan start out in Paganism because they are not Christians. That's OK as a place to start, but if you don't grow from there into a concept of being a Pagan because of what you are, you'll be defined by someone else's spirituality and not your own.

OK, we don't have this intense dualism about the body and the spirit. We don't say that, if the spirit is good, the body must be bad, must be a trap for the spirit and poison it. We see the body and the spirit as nurturing one another.

Sexuality is sacred in Paganism, not just permitted when licensed. It is a symbol of Creation. The erotic is a symbol of devotion to the Deities -- which it was for some Christian mystics in the Middle Ages, but that got quickly pushed to the margins. Sex is such a powerful force that religion, which is our bridge to the higher powers, much either sanctify or demonize it. If you don't think Christianity demonizes sex, look at the institutional lineup when any question involving sexuality becomes political: Abortion. Homosexuality. Presidential peccadillos. Sex education. Pornography. Where are the churches lined up? Yes, UUism is an exception: one that illustrates the rule.

Ironically, especially in this light, Paganism is arguably the most conservative religious force in the world today, if by conservative we mean looking to the past for something better.

New religious movements in the United States form denominations: Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Pentacostals. Every effort to form a Pagan denomination has plateaued and stalled. By far the most numerous Pagan institution of worship is the coven, up to a baker's dozen participants. And there are probably as many Pagan solitaries as coveners. We are spiritual villagers, if not hermits.

Probably the one feature most responsible for the growth of Paganism since 1960 is the Goddess, the female tense of the Divine, absent for so long in the three great Abrahamic religions. Another blast from the past, hand in glove with the image of Creation as birth, rather than command. It also correlates with the difference between sanctified and demonized sexuality: Patriarchal religion identifies Woman with sexuality and with the Earth, and suppresses all of them. Paganism sanctifies them.

Still another recovery from the past is the idea of the dead as still being part of the community. It's reasonable; the dead remain in our minds and our hearts. The reason I took on the task of arranging Samhain, the commonest Pagan holiday for the dead, into a Unitarian Universalist service was because of this hole in UU liturgy. We are good about dying, good about death, good about the immediately dead at the memorial service. But people retain their ties with the dead long after the memorial service, into a time when the need isn't always for grief counselling any more; it's simply about our relationship with the dead. The service being done in the next hour is one attempt to fill this empty space.

Shamanism is also a strong element in contemporary Paganism. There's a put-down term in Paganism, "fluffy-bunny Pagan". Last week there was a discussion on one of the UU email lists I'm on, started by someone who wanted to know who that was. My contribution was: "someone whose intent is not to dig down into the grief, rage and terror that sputter in everyone's internal cauldron, face it, and learn to tap its power; not to find out what their [spiritual] identity really is and realize it." End quote. My point here is that I do not become a religious oddball among Pagans by talking like that. I was articulating Pagan norms, and was so acknowledged.

Now: What about the Gods? Isn't polytheism something from the past that UUs might just want to leave there?

Imagine a man in a boat -- a small boat, sail powered and manually navigated -- crossing the sea. To survive, that man must be alert to what the sea is doing at the moment, and also to patterns: The implications of what the sea is doing now for what it will be doing an hour hence or half a day hence. And if we put him on the sea 4,000 years ago he has no idea of hydrodynamics or meteorology.

Now, this man's brain is not adapted as an organ to sort out those patterns; it is not the brain of a dolphin or an otter. Evolutionarily, he has no business being on the sea at all. But there he is.

What he does have is the brain of a social mammal. Social animals are those whose major resource for survival is others of their kind. He's a primate, a highly social family, and as a human being he's in one of the most intensely social species of the lot. So what he does have, his gift from evolution, is a brain highly adapted to transacting with others of his own kind, not only conversation but discerning mood, intent and future actions.

If he approaches the patterns of the sea as the whims and temperaments of a huge, powerful being somewhat like himself, he's projecting a fiction onto the sea, but he's using the neural circuitry of his brain in the mode for which it evolved. If he survives his passage and compares impressions with other sailors, they are on their way to inventing Poseidon, and Poseidon is a very useful invention for sailors in that civilization.

Now, we actually still have a little bit of this: The stock market is jittery; consumer confidence is down. We still have few Major Arcana in our cultural deck.

In order to be useful, this has to be polytheistic. The forest is not the sea; the mountain is not the desert. Monotheism destroys this useful aspect; Abraham's Lord, Peter's Saviour and Mohammed's Allah are projections onto the Universe at large, not any of its structured parts.

Everyone transacts with his or her environment. For some, that transaction works best if it is conversational. Monotheism does provide its range of conversations; polytheism offers a rich variety. To those for whom it is adaptive, it is appropriate.

To those for whom it is maladaptive, it is inappropriate; for which reason Lisette and I do not compose polytheistic services for the Fellowship.

Another gift from the past that some might hold up to question is spells. Rituals intended to work change by the application of will. Do we really need to revive something with no content?

I vividly remember the medical emergency that popped up on Nixon's first public trip to China. A journalist accompanying the entourage -- one of the Alsop brothers -- had an attack of appendicitis, and it had to come out. I've had my appendix out, so I had a certain empathy. The hospital in Beijing offered him the choice of standard Western general anaesthesia, and acupuncture; he agreed to try acupuncture. His account of having his appendix removed without anaesthetic, but festooned with silver needles being twirled by tiny motors, was published nationwide.

After that, the magazines I scanned for a living suddenly were full of articles about endorphins and enkephalins, hormones the brain produces to manage pain.

Years later, the Journal of the AMA published an article debunking the practice of therapeutic touch. Problem was, the experiment tested the wrong part of the hand. If I claimed to be able to identify the engraved portrait on a coin with a fingertip, you wouldn't test it by pressing a dime against the back of my hand. Yet JAMA rushed into print with a "test" of therapeutic touch containing the same methodological flaw.

They tell us science is free of dogma, but I observe that scientists are not. I'll believe that there's nothing to this borderline stuff when I see them investigating even the claims of Chinese peasants, and not waiting for the testimony of a renowned reporter; when I see them running honest experiments, and not re-framing the phenomenon to assure failure. And this was my attitude back when I was a Humanist, before I became Pagan.

But the existence of spellcasting just as a social phenomenon, produces some interesting questions of ethics. If it's unethical to discover the contents of a rival corporation's files by planting a bug or breaking and entering, is it ethical to do it by reading tea leaves? If it's immoral to give someone a date rape drug, is it moral to cast a love spell on that person?

Of course, there is an out, an interpretation of spellcasting that its effect is on the person casting the spell, that it unleashes untapped personal powers of a very mundane nature. The effect of casting a spell being that I just quit getting in my own way.

So the person trying magickal industrial espionage can say, "I'm attuning myself to look at what's really in front of me when I read my competitor's press releases and annual reports. They always disclose more than they want to; the trick is to read not just between the lines but beneath the surface, and I'm preparing myself to do that." The love conjuror can say, "I will draw love to me, not by subverting another's will but by making myself more attractive. When a potential love interest enters the room I will quit disappearing into the wallpaper and instead make myself noticed."

But this doesn't make the ethical questions go away. One Halloween I read an alternative-newspaper interview with a real live Witch. She said, "A dream is a message from your unconscious to your conscious mind. A ritual is a message going the other way."

In that construction, to cast a spell is to try to modify who you are. And the ethical questions re-surface as, "What kind of person are you striving to become?"

And that puts this stuff on a par with all the other religions that are better known. When you cut away all the particulars, the question at the bottom of all the other questions is, "What kind of person are you striving to become?"

Time for questions now.

Copyright ©2001 by David Burwasser