I hope you dance

In revising the syllabus for "After Religion" at mid-semester I decided to add a week on "nature spirituality." It took the place of an envisioned discussion of "religious fictions" which would have looked at books like Left Behind and The Shack, televised Mahabharatas in India, Journey to the West movies, and the various imaginings of the afterlife in Pixar movies. These would have been fun, too, but, given students' interests (as I've been able to glean them through the double-filter of zoom and lecture distance) it seemed more important to address the frontiers of spirituality beyond inherited religious traditions, rather than creativity within them. 

"Nature spirituality" is an awkward phrase. I found it in the title of Bron Taylor's Dark Green Religion: Nature Religion and the Planetary Future (2009), a book which argued that we're witnessing the appearance of a new religion based in experiences of the sacredness of nature. (I gave students a radio interview about the book to listen to.) The force behind the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture and editor of the landmark Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor draws on fieldwork with radical environmentalists, official and off-the-record reports from scientists, surfers, the spirituality of Disney movies and much else, with special attention to Thoreau and Darwin. He sees "Animist" and "Gaian" forms of this new religion, each appearing in a "spiritual" form (believing in otherworldly, divine, supernatural intelligences), and a "naturalistic" form (which finds enough in what the senses and the natural sciences offer us). Taylor's sympathies lie with the naturalistic, which he thinks will prevail as more people discover the spiritual sustenance offered by them - who needs the word of ancient seers and exalted gurus when you can taste and see the sacred for yourself?

As I thought about other things I might want students to taste - the subject is at least as vast as Taylor's 2000-page Encyclopedia - I decided to talk about "religious naturalism," especially as articulated by Carol Wayne White in conversation with emergence theory and African American history. But as I pondered emergence I decided it might also be fun to spend a little time on the question if we are "religious by nature," a question I provocatively put this way: "Were we religious before we were human?" It's a trippy question.

While a highlight would be the delirious argument of Ursula Goodenough and Terrence Deacon (among the sources Carol Wayne White discusses) that the elements of most of our religious inklings are shared with other life forms, many quite widely, I felt I had also to introduce discussions about the spirituality some have claimed to witness in our closest kin. So we watched chimpanzees at Gombe and Jane Goodall's assertion that their unusual behavior around a waterfall must be expressions of "awe and wonder."  

I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are. They can't analyze it. They don't talk about it. They can't describe what they feel. You get the feeling that it's all locked up inside them, and the only way they can express it is through this fantastic rhythmic dance. 

Other scholars go even farther; I gave the class an article by another primatologist, Barbara King, who surveys some of them but thinks even Goodall goes too far, using human terms where we have no business using them. The "locked up inside them" language is challenging, along with Goodall's claimed ability to unlock it - is it really there? why should she be able to understand it? why should human language be able to describe it? But it is interesting at least to consider whether human beings, too, might have experiences which we can't describe, which we can at best express in other ways. I mean: of course we do - and the history of "religion" is replete with it.

Perhaps other life forms on this planet, maybe many of them in many different ways, are - yes! - spiritual but not religious! Pace Taylor, this really isn't a new thought, and even supposedly otherworld-addled monotheists have been known to entertain it. In New Seeds of Contemplation Thomas Merton eloquently proposed that "A tree gives glory to God by being a tree." And in the Quran we hear:

 

I mentioned this early in my lecture, but returned to the soaring of birds at the end, with mesmerizing footage of the murmurations of starlings shot by Jan Van IJken. Part of it can be seen here - please watch it, it'll blow you away. (If you're not sure what a murmuration is, there's one in the title slide above.) Can we even presume to be able to describe what is going on there, the sacred mysteries of which we are a fumbling part? The starlings' indescribable grace makes even the most fluid of human calligraphy, melody and dance seem halting. But maybe it can help us feel how much might be locked up inside us, waiting to rejoin the fantastic rhythmic dance of creation.