By Beatrice Bruteau pt.3 : You Are All Brethren

[Guest guest]

Today we have the Gaia Hypothesis, put forward by James Love-lock and

Lynn Margolis, which proposes that " the entire range of living matter

on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be

regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of

manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and

endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent

parts. " [6] Elisabet Sahtouris has picked up this idea and developed

it with the theme that " the Earth is a live planet rather than a

planet with life upon it. " 7 She calls us to understand ourselves

as " living beings within a larger living being, in the same sense

that our cells are part of each of us. " [8]

 

If we can do that, the resulting sense of unity, of the planet, of

the Whole, will naturally give rise to universal compassion. None of

us really hates our own flesh, as St. Paul says (Eph. 5:29); and when

we begin to find that the tentacles of our flesh are profoundly

intertwined with those of other beings--begin to consecrate a larger

domain when we say " This is my body " --then feeling-together,

compassion, will naturally grow. " Love your neighbor as your self "

takes on a new and more realistic meaning as the boundaries of our

self become more and more indefinite and entangled with those of all

other beings. This is what can come from enlightenment in the

apophatic moment, says Keiji Nishitani:

 

.. . . the standpoint from which one sees oneself in others and loves

one's neighbor as oneself means that the self is at the home-ground

of every other in the " nothingness " of the self, and that every other

is at the home-ground of the self in that same nothingness. Only when

these two are one--in a relationship of circuminsessional

interpenetration-does this standpoint come about.[9]

 

I have added the italics to circuminsessional interpenetration to

call attention to the Trinitarian imagery. It is a great phrase and I

take it to mean (at least approximately) the same reality I have been

pointing to here with " perichoresis, " and elsewhere with " subject-

subject coinherence, " and the " I-I relation. " [10]

 

Meanwhile, Nishitani goes on to say that " if this is what loving

one's fellow man as oneself is, it follows that the field where that

love obtains . . . must be a field of Love toward all living beings,

and even toward all things. " [11] " Our " life is obviously a matter of

indefinitely expanded sharings through the Earth community.

Everyone's life is this way, all of us living by one

another. " Greater love has no one than this: that one lay down one's

life for one's friends " (John 15:13). Is this not the fundamental

principle of the Eucharistic Planet? And it has now become the

fundamental principle of what we may call " ecological awareness, "

that is, awareness of the basic interrelatedness of all beings.

 

Ecology began as a scale of understanding biological relationships:

besides the way cells and organs interrelate in the organism, and

besides the way individuals interrelate in the species, there is the

way species interrelate in a locality. Ecology has as its hallmark

the principle that no one species is the species from whose viewpoint

the whole is to be understood and appreciated. An ecological system

is not, for instance, " cattle and their environment. " An ecological

system has no privileged members, no single master. All members

interact with all others: the soil and water, the weather and

seasons, the bacteria, the various plants and animals, and all their

ever-changing activities, these constitute the ecological system of a

locality.

 

But now we can see into the matter more deeply. Beyond being the

regional scale of biological interrelationships, ecology can refer to

the moral " standing " of natural elements. Some years ago an attempt

was made to defend a grove of redwood trees in California against a

developer who proposed to make a parking lot on the land where they

were living. The case was brought to court but was rejected by the

judge on the grounds that the trees did not have " legal standing, "

meaning that they did not have any rights that could, be infringed by

another party. A deeper appreciation of our ecological situation

would recognize the moral, if not the legal, standing of all parties

to any ecological system, as well as the integrity of the system

itself. Living beings and even inanimate aspects of the planet would

be conceived as having some kind of " rights " to their own existence

and to protection in their own terms (as distinguished from

protection derived from their utility for human beings). The

definition of such rights--obviously a very difficult problem--and

the acknowledgement of the obligation to respect them would

constitute the basis of ecological morality.

 

And then we can do another thing with a deepened sense of ecology. We

can use it as a metaphor for human relations and for the development

of a planetary spirituality. The central theme in both these expanded

meanings would be the abandonment of the privileged status of any

particular party to the ecological system. Since no member of the

system is to be seen as the system's master, the motto of such a

deepened sense of ecology could well be " All of you are brethren "

(Matt 23:8). The basic moral virtue would be respect-the minimal

degree of self-giving love--accorded to every member.

 

The deeper sense of biological ecology holds that our obligation to

protect the environment is not based on our need or desire to

preserve things in good working order only for ourselves and our

descendants--so that our grandchildren will inherit unpolluted air,

water, and land, and will still be able to enjoy seeing a variety of

animals and plants. No, our obligation to protect the environment is

based on the rights of the creatures who compose the ecosystem to

their own lives, and on the value of cooperating with the natural

movement of the planet in terms of the good of the whole. Indeed, we

shouldn't even speak of " the environment, " because that implies a

privileged viewpoint, the viewpoint of the species

whose " environment " it is deemed to be; whereas we propose a

commitment to an ecological morality which abjures such privilege.

Instead of saying that we human beings are the only really valuable

or meaningful beings on the planet, and that everything else exists

as our support system, put here by a thoughtful Deity for our

convenience and pleasure, we seek a view in which all creatures

compose the whole system together, in which all are valuable and

significant. In such a view the living ecosystem is dependent on, and

must be respectful of, all of them. " You are brethren, all of you. "

 

An immediate conclusion from this proposed view is that when we

confront the question, " Am I my brother's [my sister's] keeper? " , the

answer has to be Yes--perhaps not an absolutely unequivocal Yes,

since part of " keeping " is precisely leaving others free-- but

definitely Yes. We must be committed to keeping--preserving,

protecting, benefitting-- the whole planet, with intelligent love,

humble reformability (for we don't know everything yet about how the

living planet works), and the realization that whatever we do is done

from inside the system and that the rest of the system is also acting

to keep us and to keep the planet.

 

But, we may ask, if I am to keep my brother--love my neighbor--who is

my brother? Willis Harman tells the story of talking with a Native

American leader about how white people have difficulty understanding

the Indian way of looking at the world. The Indian replied: " It's

easy. You only have to remember two things. One is, everything in the

universe is alive. The other is, we're all relatives! " [12] This

Native American leader had an illustrious ancestor-relative in the

person of Chief Seattle, whose famous answer to the U.S. President's

offer to buy tribal lands contains the words:

 

We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers

are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our

brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat

of the pony, and man, all belong to the same

family . . . . . . . . . . If we sell you our land, you must remember

that it is sacred . . . . . . . . . . . . . The rivers are our

brothers .... So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would

give any brother .... Will you teach your children what we have

taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the

earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

 

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the

earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

 

Shall we not admit that this is a good answer to the question, " Who

is my mother and my brothers? " Are not the rivers and the meadows,

the flowers and the ponies, among those " who do the will of our

Father in heaven, " and therefore are entitled to be considered

our " brother and sister and mother " ? (Matt. 12:48-50).

 

St. Francis of Assisi seems to have had this vision, expressed in

his " Canticle to the Sun. " Some people think that he was proposing an

alternative Christian view of nature and the position of humanity

within it. He was moving, I would say, to replace the " domination

paradigm " with the " communion paradigm, " seeing a larger

interpretation of the metaphor of the Christ-Vine than his tradition

had usually offered. He saw the Eucharistic Planet. He was able to

see it because he had first embraced humility and spiritual poverty--

emptiness, the apophatic way to the realization of the Absolute.

Coming out from that point of view again into creation, into the

resurrection of the body, he was able to see the Real Presence of the

Divine in everything and to know that " whatever you do to the least

of these my brethren, you do to me " (Matt. 25:40). " Whatever you do

to the web, you do to yourself. "

 

pt. 3 complete

 

......bob