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The torrent of words our class free-associated with "ecology" on Tuesday furnished the platform for today's discussion of the promise of religious naturalism. I'm always warning against the false closure offered by definitions, and often solicit such whiteboards full of terms from students, parsing what we come up with together for richer, perhaps conflicting understandings hidden behind apparently self-explanatory terms. These give a sense of finality, too, though - many students take pictures of the sprawl on the board, but I'd be surprised if anyone ever looked at them again.
I'm trying to do more with them "Religion and Ecology." A few weeks ago, we generated a spray of words around "religion" initially strikingly unconnected by the texts we'd been discussing at the end of one class, and in the next I had students read through them again and select among them to write out working definitions of their own.
This time, I also reproduced the word cloud on a handout. The instructions were to go through the whole list and circle each word which seemed applicable to "nature," and then go through them all again and underline each which seemed to relate to "human." It was an attempt to shoot the moon on the self-defeating question "what is the human relationship to nature?" - self-defeating because the very formulation presents the two as unrelated, separable. This proved a little unwieldy in practice - despite my instructions most went through weighing each word for leaning one way or the other - but it led to a fruitful discussion. Shouldn't every underlined word also have been circled? Some of the more negative, or more conceptual things seemed to some students only "human," but aren't we part of nature? And if so, aren't even our most irritating and ecologically destructive traits natural? This seems obviously true in general but sticks in the craw when you have to make it particular through all these terms.
Students kept wanting to absolve nature of responsibility through claims that "only humans" were one way or the other, at first negative but then more general: self-aware, language-using, tool-using, aware of death, cultural... I pushed back each time, pointing to recent findings in animal and even plant studies and then asking, again and again, "does it matter if it's not only us?"
Religious naturalism is in one sense the view that everything human is, of course, natural, and so, of course, must the world of our religions be. Even the most elaborate conceptions of a supernatural reality are natural phenomena! My accounts of religious naturalism usually stop there. (It's plenty!) But in the context of today's evocation of the wisdom and play, the grieving and language, the art and awareness of our other-than-human kin, I experienced in a new way what might count as religious about this view. Are not religious feelings like awe, wonder, humility, participation, gratitude ... appropriate responses to it?
What about vocation? We may not be the only ones to be/do XYZ; put differently, there may be more than the human way of being/doing XYZ. Thinking we should be defined by what we alone are or can do replicates the biblical idea that we are not part of nature but made in the image of something beyond it. (There are analogs in other traditions.) But even if there were things exclusive to us, why should they be the most important thing about us? What if we understood our ways of being and doing as part of the unfolding creativity of what Carol Wayne White calls "myriad nature"? What if we were and did them with this understanding, one voice in a glorious cosmic chorus?
But today was also a Thursday, and since this iteration of "Religion and Ecology" focuses on "Buddhist perspectives," that means we ended with a meditation. Today's was a "metta" meditation led by Sharon Salzberg, which quietly widens the circle of care (may ___ be free from danger, ... be happy, ... be healthy, ...live with ease) from the self to humans known and less well known and then to "all beings." At the end I invited the students to flip over our handout and spend five minutes writing whatever came to mind. The concentrated silence was lovely.
When we gather again next week we'll see what this all added up to.
