It would be a busy semester even without the carnage of the old-new presidential regime, tearing at the foundations of our world. But somehow I'm managing to keep things on track, generating welcoming learning communities in which students are making friends and engaging challenging ideas - part of "carrying on" as resistance to chaos and paralysis. As I stagger to the end of the week I'm particularly pleased with the way I was able to end the last two.
The week had started with reading some classic texts in "Religion and Ecology": Lynn White's field-creating 1967 essay on the religious origins of the ecological crisis, and one of the texts he refers to, the creation narrative in Genesis 1 - home of the "dominion clause" which, White argues, in western Christianity formed the uniquely anthropocentric civilization despoiling our planet.
Then, in "After Religion," came the travails of secularism, an embattled ideal in need of challenging and perhaps also championing. Heady stuff; I might share some of the class's ideas with you next week.
Let me say a little more about the second session of "Religion and Ecology." Following up on Genesis 1 we read the alternate (actually older) creation narrative of Genesis 2, then contrasted both with the cosmology of the Skywoman story with which Robin Wall Kimmerer starts Braiding Sweetgrass. Despite glaring differences, there was no relation - let along community - recognized among the human and other than human in either Genesis. Then we rubbed it in more with a reading of Genesis 3 - the banishment from Eden - and a reread of Kimmerer's words about the fateful encounter of the "offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve," which we read two weeks ago.
On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
We'd read this together before; now we get it, the class said! We turned then to Kimmerer's "grammar of animacy," the urgent need to learn to recognize all the other than human peoples around us, who offer us wisdom and relation - which might start with the use of a new pronoun, ki.
All of this, amazingly, we did in 75 minutes, and class is 100. For the balance of class I led the group in a Thich Nhat Hanh-inspired silent group walking meditation around the block. I'd promised them both a field trip and meditation, and this wasn't what they were expecting, so I thought I might as well throw ki into it too. Mind your walking slo-o-o-owly, I said, and connect with the other than human kin along the way. We'll take 20 minutes, and I'll make sure we finish on time by setting my timer for 15 minutes: you can silence your phones. At 15 minutes the class had settled a little restlessly into the ultra-slow pace I'd set (from the rear) and we'd reached only halfway around the block! It felt like crazy speeding up returning to the normal pace which delivered us back at school at exactly 3:40. That was amazing, said one student, perhaps a little insincerely. The amazing thing, I responded, is that you could do this around any block, any time.
I stuck the landing for the James' Varieties class today, too. We had a friendly and wide-ranging discussion of the "sick soul," and the profound sense of the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world which James argues some of these "religious pessimist" are "congenitally fated" to dwell on. This class professes to be more "healthy-minded" than others I've guided through this book, and many thought the agonies of the sick souls overwrought. "Don't ruin it for it for everyone," responded one in half-jest to Tolstoy's account of the bottom falling out of his outwardly successful life.
But James wants us to face the fact that anyone's life could come unmoored due to forces beyond our control. So in the class' last minutes I had someone read aloud the text James put in a footnote to the chapter's final paragraph, a terrifying account of a group walking at night (presumably in India) whose leader was suddenly dragged away by a tiger. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim's bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, ‘Ho hai!’ involuntarily reëchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds. The shell-shocked survivors found themselves on the ground, we heard, initially unable to move for fright, and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heard from us. Eventually, still stunned, they were able to sprint to safety, but were surely tiger-haunted for the rest of their days. How's that for the precarity of good fortune?
Class was in its final minute. "Ho hai," I said. "See you next week."
I'm pleased with the elegance of these class endings, but really I'm happy that in this fourth week of the semester the class communities feel like they have become enough of a reality that I can throw such disconcerting things at them in parting. They know we'll be together again next week. And, I hope, they feel - from the precise timing of the class finales - that I can be trusted to keep these spaces safe for abiding with the big, hard questions together.
