What is a geologian? We have some idea about a theologian -- theou (God) and logos (word) add up to someone who speaks about, or reflects upon God. But a geologian? Thomas Berry was a theologian who was also deeply committed to living respectfully on and with this planet Earth. He wrote some key books on the subject and he coined the term geologian. Perhaps his best-known book is Dream of the Earth.
Berry died earlier this month at the venerable age of 94 having offered a voice for the Earth for decades before environmentalism or ecotheology became popular. Berry was a Passionist priest of the Roman Catholic church. He got himself into hot water with authorities and was looked upon with suspicion by conservative Protestants because he criticized what he viewed as an over-emphasis on personal salvation to the detriment of care and concern for all living beings.
He was an American who had a Canadian connection. He spent his summers in a Passionist centre on the shore of Lake Erie here in Ontario. I spent a week at this centre years ago. He also made a documentary with David Suzuki and cosmologist Brian Swimme. Berry reflected on his experience as an eleven-year-old which shaped a love for living things as subjects rather than objects:
“The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky. … This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple … that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion.”
As we come to the Summer Solstice it seems appropriate to remember and reflect upon Thomas Berry's legacy. Any thoughts or comments?
3 comments:
I like Thomas Berry's idea of "Everything tells the story of the universe" The birds, the trees, us, the earth. "The universe is a communion of subjects,not a collection of objects." A great statement. A
documentary on his book " The Universe Story" is coming out in 2010 called "Journey of the Universe. Looking forward to it.
I believe this is where religion originally comes from. Not from the hope of an afterlife or how to explain suffering. I think it is from the awe one feels when looking upon the earth's natural wonders.
I remember working in the garden last year, and watching as the dark clouds rolled in. It was much needed rain; and as I watched it fall, I felt a song welling up inside me, "O beautiful Gaia!" My experience is that the soul needs to worship the creator of such wonders.
These are excerpts from a story I wrote several years ago. It's about the land my husband grew up on. Hope it's not too long. My version of the universe telling its story.
I feel the sense of an intruder watching, like a stalker watches a woman. Is there really no-one there? From the school house window I see the long grass of the back field swaying, rhythmic and hypnotizing, like primitive breath inhaling and exhaling over the ancient vegetation. I have so often felt cheated by this piece of land, of its hold on this family. I have felt left out of its history, assigned to the realm of invader. I have had to forgive it, to force understanding to grow between it and myself.
It took perhaps hundreds of years for the miracle of the back field to exist, for that first migrated seed to arrive and sprout. A single seed hatching a single blade of grass, was by some helpful hand granted the ability to ceaselessly replicate itself into the cherished meadow Kevin’s mother has looked out at everyday for nearly sixty years. Every spring the wild strawberries, the daisies, the Queen Anne’s Lace, and the fiddle heads that grow by the swamp keep coming back. Every fall the grass grows tall and golden. In winter the snow rises up like islands out of oceans. The land keeps persisting, supporting, feeding, transfiguring life, right down to the bumblebees and aphids that seem like thistles to us in the heat. We’ve given up maintaining the vegetable garden. With so much of the family gone the work became too heavy. Kevin and I too caught up in our own home. All ready I am thinking about the place in the past tense. Still, the land would be willing to feed us for another year, if we’d just drop the seeds into the ground.
Even in the thickest night just think a daytime memory and light will manifest. In my mind I see Richard, then I see the grass hidden under quilts of snow. Richard pulls the twins, still babies, on the antique sleigh he found at an auction. He has put his own work socks on the twins’ hands and half way up their arms, which we all, young and old, find wildly funny. The blades of the old sleigh carve out a river through glaciers over grass buried so far down that it is a shock to think of it coming back to life each year for the boys to run on. I can almost see small tufts of grass poking through the cracks of future asphalt. Grass has an amazing capacity for survival.
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