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Gaian Rants | ||||||||
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Our Gaian Ministry: Reclaiming Earth & Spirit “We must remember the chemical connections between our cells and the stars, between the beginning and now. We must remember and reactivate the primal consciousness of oneness between all living things. We must return to that time, in our genetic memory, in our dreams, when we were one species born to live together on Earth as her magic children.” -Barbara Mor | ||||||||
We are born into it, all of us, and some remember the time before the first forgetting — the complete and constant experiencing of Spirit. But by age five the soulful and physical sensation of Spirit’s imminence has usually started to give way to the reality the glaring television describes. Many of us become disillusioned with institutional religion, falling into a state of deep cynicism. But the feeling of bliss and connection still returns from time to time, always at special moments and in hallowed places: an interpenetration of all-inclusive Spirit and inspirited woman/man, at least temporarily overcoming the hegemony of our rational minds. On top our personal struggle for meaning, we live in a particularly trying age. Some believe we’re the last generations with a chance of initiating a human-engineered cure for this distressed planet. While we live in a culture of distraction, abstraction, and articulate denial, we can choose to be fully aware, engaged, and conscious. In times of personal or societal tribulation the majority of us turn at last to whatever we call “Spirit”— to that which outlasts its every form. If we look for this Spirit embodied in ourselves, in the songs of the birds and the wind on our cheeks, if we seek it in the Earth of which we are a part — we won’t have far to turn. The religiosity that matters (mater, matter, mother) is therefore both experiential, and now. It may also be that our multiracial tribal ancestors and many of the surviving primal peoples of today were right, and the only ultimately survivable religiosity is one that honors the sacred spirit embodied in the Earth and all of creation. We, and every other lifeform, are paying the price for our belief systems, for the transgressions of those with no belief in God at all, and of those positing Spirit outside rather than inside themselves, the only Heaven detached from this Earth. I give my life to teaching these truths, knowing full well that a future of artifice and ruin, or of diversity and sacrament, will be a direct outgrowth of our coveted beliefs. Much of what we are called on by Spirit to do conflicts with the modern edicts and reasoning we were brought up with. People tend to behave “righteously” while in church and do what they want on the days between. Think of the changes if we were to envision the entire planet as our church, with every day a Sabbath, every daily, natural process recognized as the miracles they truly are. What would it take for us to begin to consciously acknowledge every bite of food as a communion with inspirited life, recognizing the sin of failing to taste, failing to glorify? Are we capable like a native, like a child, like a saint— to experience the entire Earth as the Eucharist, as the body of wolf and flower, of beggar and mountain? Can we serve our greater selves, our experience of God, as sensitized participants instead of directors or even shepherds, plain participants in the liturgy of evolving creation? The answer is in place... and that place is Earth. For twenty years now I’ve inhabited a wildlife sanctuary in the Gila mountains, opening to the lessons of the land, becoming sensitized to its need and call. Under the auspices of The Earthen Spirituality Project we host seekers for personal quests, group retreats, and workshops on applied Earthen Spirituality... and we’ve come to think of it as our “Gaian Ministry.” Before the rise of modern religion, before the advent of technology, before toxic agribusiness and skyscrapers, these were the truths we humans of every race held to be self-evident: 1) However we know God, that God exists within us, and within all of creation. We are each an inseparable part of a dancing cell of that living planet body. All parts of that planet body are inspirited, with an intrinsic value and integrity of being worthy of our respect. 2) Our survival and well-being is utterly dependent on our practical and ritual demonstrations of that respect. 3) We serve the inspirited whole as celebrants and sensors, as the nerve endings of the Gaian body, conscious receptors channeling sensory input, communicating the anguish and jubilance of aware lives. 4) As aware, conscious members of the planet body, we must act on our innate responsibilities, our ability-to-respond. The fact is that the current degradation of our mental and physical environs is largely a product of how we each perceive, and thus act on the world around us. And in time we may come to realize that as conscious beings our own sacredness is conditional on, even dependent upon, our mindful ecological presence. We are not secular pilots of a dead Spaceship-Earth, nor have we been sentenced by God to a trial period on a disrupted Eden. We are blessed participants in the dance of embodied spirit. Singers. Dreamers. Praise-givers. Our rightful ministry is the one which inspires and invokes awareness, reconnection, prayer, and response. It offers everyone an opportunity for a Rite-of-Passage, opens the door and invites us into a sacred space. As from a birthing hut we rise, forever changed, re- formed into our original selves, revealed as responsible celebrants of miraculous life, agents of Godly/Gaian process, playmates and vehicles for omnipresent Spirit. I still speak to congregations and religious leaders about the practical results of the cosmologies we teach, and to activist groups about how essential it is for them to feel the inherently sacred nature of that which they would protect. I ask them all to remember their own childhood and adult experiences of those moments when the walls collapsed, when all things appeared connected by luminous threads of pulsing energy, when like St. Francis of Assisi or the enraptured John Muir— the Holy Spirit appeared to them in all things, and they knew all things through their love. In Gaian Ministry we plant our seeds, in the heart and in the Earth, regardless of the chances of fruit. The immediate results, as I’ve witnessed again and again, are Visions... And every aware minute, the glad recognition of the miraculous. Graphic: Jesse Wolf Hardin | ||||||||
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