Yet again I find myself being drawn into an argument about God, having to challenge the stock argument that God and all such things that make life worth living – meaning, value, purpose, the good - are ‘human constructions’, everything is ‘socially constructed’, and that ‘created gods’ are ‘no longer tenable’ in an ‘educated’ world. We need to ‘grow up’ and ‘take charge’ of the planet. I shall be fair to my friends and critics who makes these arguments, and agree on the need for human beings to assume responsibility, and elsewhere in my work I address the social and political implications of such responsibility at the individual, collective and institutional level – the mediations that must take place if we are to act well for right reasons. ‘Created gods’ remind us of the goodness of the earth if the only concession made to those who believe in the existence of God. Well, read Genesis, God made the earth, and as He made the earth, at each stage, he stopped and said it was ‘good’. It was ‘very good’.
I want to address this question by thinking long and hard on the words of Eamon Duffy in Faith of Our Fathers, and offering some reflections on the insights offered in this passage. This passage reveals that a lot of the problems of rational argument and social organisation are actually non-problems, wrongly formulated and incapable of any kind of resolution at the level they are raised. And it draws us to avoid argumentation and disputation, it draws us into something deeper, not so much action organised and engineered from outside the world, but a practice within our communities of life and lived experience.
‘… the forces that give warmth and worth to our existence have power in the dark places, even in death. And I knew I had to choose, between the bleak valueless world of the Outsider, and the world of human significance, where love and forgiveness and celebration were possibilities.
I do not have much recollection of the process by which I made my choice; except that, when it dawned on me that I had made it, it seemed not so much a choice as a gift. As I sat after Communion one Sunday, simply looking at the people walking up to the altar, I was quietly overwhelmed with an overflowing sense of companionship, of gratitude, of joy and, oddly, of pity. My mind filled up, quite literally filled up, with a single verse of the Psalms (26: 8):
Lord, how I love the beauty of your house, … and the place where your glory dwells ….
There was no miraculous conviction. Perplexities and pain remained. I had and I have fewer certainties than before, and there are many areas of the faith that I gratefully and whole-heartedly accept which are opaque to me, like the idea of life after death. But now that I know that faith is a direction, not a state of mind; states of mind change and veer about, but we can hold a direction. It is not in its essence a set of beliefs about anything, though it involves such beliefs. It is a loving and grateful openness to the gift of being. The difference between a believer and a non-believer is not that the believer has one more item in his mind, in his universe. It is that the believer is convinced that reality is to be trusted, that in spite of appearances the world is very good. When we respond to that good, we are not responding to something that we have invented, or projected. Meaning is not at our beck and call, and neither is reality. When we try to talk about that reality we find ourselves talking to it, not in philosophy but in adoration, for it is inescapably Personal, and most luminously itself in the life and death of Jesus. Christians are those who find in that life and death an abounding fountain of joy and hope and life; who affirm and are content to affirm what he affirmed about God, because they find in that affirmation a realism which does justice to life in all its horror and all its glory.
Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers
We trust that the world is good, and we act accordingly, giving thanks for the gift of being. There is no need of proof, and rational argumentation is a talking about and to reality, a talking at reality that implies a separation and distance from that reality. It is that estrangement that leads to pretensions of possession, control and improvement through the manipulation of the world as some objective valueless datum. That is no solution to our problem; that is our problem.
There is a Persian proverb that says that when we get to the Gates of Heaven, God will ask of us just the one question: ‘What did you do with the land that I gave you?’
I like Isaiah 66: 1:
‘This is what the LORD says: "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?’
Let’s understand this right – there is NO dualism of earth and heaven, earth as something of little account compared to heaven, the two realms are connected in an incarnate spirituality. For that reason, we do not abandon the world, and we do not succumb to climate fatigue or doom or despair, whatever the facts of the situation, ‘for God so loved the world He gave His only son’ (John 3:16). ‘Take charge’ and ‘take control?’ Those questions of building a home, a resting place, housing the sacred, are all about responsibility and stewardship, that is part of the whole package, not something we have suddenly invented in our brainy brilliance. In his book Whole Earth Discipline, planetary engineer Stewart Brand begins by asserting: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ That would seem to be a moral question. But the central thrust of Brand’s argument is clear, he deifies scientific knowledge and, most of all, technical know-how, dismissing morality as irrelevant. ‘Grub first, then ethics’, as he quotes Brecht. How about, if we had ethics in the first place, there would always be enough to go around, nature’s plenitude, providence, provides for all. The Creation is ‘good’ after all, it is very good. How did it become so improved as to become niggardly, an external threat to be mastered by technique and ingenuity?
God needs a partner. That is us. If we want to talk evolution, then evolution is always a co-evolution. Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls it ‘the great partnership.’ I remember a joke from a couple of years ago, there is a man sat on a cloud asking God where he was when all this war and poverty and destruction was happening on earth. ‘Funny’, replies God, ‘I was about to ask you the same question.’ The point is, we are responsible, always were, it is not a new call to make at all. The biggest question of all is one to ask for the moderns: why have we allowed ourselves to transfer our responsibility to other forces, technology, scientific advance, ‘economic growth’, state power …?
Brand argues that since we have become as gods we had better get used to being good at it. Does he reserve divine status for scientists and technicians alone or are the rest of us included in that ‘we’? I have my doubts. I have no time for yet another rehash of the ‘men as gods’ delusion, that’s the biggest myth of all. In fact, it isn’t a myth in the true meaning of the word, a mythos bringing us to deeper truths about life beyond the obvious facts, it is a plain delusion. We are created in the image of God, like God, but not identical. Be tempted by the promise of God-like power, aspire to the power of God, slide over from likeness to identity, and you will horizontalize the vertical and seek eternal life, immortality and infinity on a planet of mortal men and women and finite resources. That road leads to madness and Hell on Earth.
I’ve covered this ground many times before, and have no wish to do it again. Try the 900 pages of Of Gods and Gaia on the Books page.
Here, I want to challenge this notion of ‘taking charge’ and ‘taking control’. And I want to challenge the dismissive tone with respect to ‘created gods’ as an untenable myth in an educated age. I suggest that cleverness is not the same as wisdom, and that education is related to many more things that technical expertise and certification.
You talk of all your scientific knowledge and technical know-how, and all the things ‘we’ can do with them. Well, we have been ‘doing’ with them. If this alone was the solution, then we would not have a problem. What are these problems you are proposing to solving? Climate change and global warming? How did it come to this? Look at all these things and ask with John Ruskin: ‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?' (John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. I p 270).
The ‘death of God’ was the easy part; the difficult part that confronts us now is that, in suppressing the religious instinct, denying its legitimacy, closing your ears to the cosmic yearning for meaning, the theological assumptions attendant upon God did not go away, they became unmoored, and came to be attached to the world of ‘things’, the worldly powers of money, institutions, technologies and tools of all kinds, the new idols serviced by state priests, bureaucrats of knowledge. Who is this ‘we’ that will be taking charge? A ‘we’ of ‘us’ in the know, in possession of technical expertise and power, instrumentalising the world and order the ‘them’ that constitute the ‘uneducated.’ That’s not a ‘we’ that I recognise, we have no need of environmental philosopher-kings. If politics and life was all about ‘Truth’ as some technical designation, then philosopher-kings will do fine. But the temper of politics and life is judicious, Aristotle was right. Our responsibility lies in our judgement, our ability to judge right and wrong with respect to the truth of the world. The world, the ‘real world’, is good, it is already good, it does not need to be made ‘better’. This engineering approach of ‘taking charge’ and ‘take control’ savours more than a little of a rescue squad, using exactly the same mentalities that brought the world to this mess in the first place.
We need to take care of the planet, not take control of it. Taking control is too closely connected to taking possession, bringing us back to the divisive, instrumental relationships that have estranged us from each other and from the earth as our common home. “As stewards of God’s creation, we are called to make the earth a beautiful garden for the human family,” Pope Francis has said. “When we destroy our forests, ravage our soil and pollute our seas, we betray that noble calling.” “You are called to care for creation not only as responsible citizens, but also as followers of Christ!”
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/01/18/pope_francis_failing_to_care_for_environment_is_a_betrayal_of_god.html)
There is moral knowledge as well as scientific knowledge, and that is something we are all born with, which we have innately, which we learn to use, the implicit philosophy. Any ‘we’ worthy of the name is constituted on that basis. And that is what stewardships ethics enjoins us to use in exercising creation care.
That’s precisely what stewardship is all about. So we need no lessons on ‘responsibility’ from planetary engineers who want to take charge and take control. We need to respect and preserve the health of the earth, its ecosystems, all the creatures on it. Genesis 2: 15 puts us in the garden and tells us to work and keep it. We don’t need to be told, in hectoring tones, that ‘it is time for Man to grow up’ and abandon ‘created gods’ and ‘untenable myths’, whilst being presented with a ‘men as gods’ planetary engineering as the solution. It is that switch from a humble respect and reverence for God’s creation to a deification of our own powers and their ability to manipulate and transform the earth as human gods that has brought us to here, self-made man unravelling in his self-made world and still trusting to his powers to deliver on his grand schemes and ambitions for progress.
The fact is, we ‘grew up’ in this sense of technical power a long time ago. That’s what Nietzsche meant when he pronounced ‘the death of God’ back in the 1880s. He meant the loss of that moral grounding and overarching framework of good and evil by which we oriented ourselves. Our moral terms within modernity are empty, they are detached from the practices that gave content and force to them. That is precisely what Alasdair MacIntyre writes about when he says that modern conflicts between different value positions are irreconcileable, incommensurable, just assertion and counter-assertion with no common reference point available by which we can evaluate claims and resolve issues. We live under the shadow of Max Weber, who wrote of ‘the disenchantment of the world’, by which he meant that with scientific advance, we rejected the idea of a creator God, stripped the world of value, meaning and purpose. Genesis has God look at the world and say it is ‘good’. Modern mechanistic science looked at the world and declared it to be objectively valueless. Any value it has, any meaning we find, is one that we impose or project upon it. But ultimately such imposition is self-defeating. What are the grounds of a self-legislating reason? Reason. This argument is self-refuting, untenable, hence the collapse into subjectivism, relativism, nihilism.
In the German, Weber’s term ‘disenchantment’ means ‘dis-godded’, by which is meant the stripping of the world of its value, of the goodness that is said to be there in Genesis. It is at this point that we took charge, we took control. We don’t need to be told to do it now as the solution of our problems, it has already been done and is in large part why we have these problems. Where does value lie? In us, the valuers? Or in the world we value? We have not seen the world as objectively true, good and beautiful but instead have emphasised 'imposure' over 'disclosure'; we thought we could prove truth through praxis, through creative human agency alone, because we are all advanced and educated, with all the knowledge and know-how that any species could ever need at our finger tips - and still we get this 'men as gods' delusion of Stewart Brand and the planetary engineers and managers. That's a myth that certainly isn't tenable. There are other ways of exercising responsibility, individual and collective. We can follow people such as Stuart Kauffman and Owen Flanagan, scientist philosophers who once more see meaning and purpose within the endlessly creative universe. Slowly but surely, we are getting back to the idea that there is purpose at work in the world. Our livelier intellects are getting back to an understanding most men and women took for granted way back when, the truth that we live in an objectively valuable world.
The stewardship I know does indeed enjoin us to exercise care and compassion and responsibility, use our reason and our tools and our abilities. I do challenge this idea of taking charge, though. It savours too much of this word 'control', a word I used to use quite a lot, but which I now question. What does control actually mean in an interdependent, interrelational world. The demand for ‘control’ sounds like a neurotic need born of possessive, divisive, exploitative relationships.
And we will be taking charge of who or what? Just who is this 'we'? I see a biological 'we'. I see a moral ‘we’. There's a long way to go before we get a political 'we'. I agree that there is a need for concerted and comprehensive action. But this political ‘we’, if it is not to be an abstract imposition by an ‘educated’ elite above, needs to be constituted by participatory structures and intermediary associations below, with power residing and used at its most appropriate and effective levels of competence and most comprehensible levels of representation. Clusters of cooperators extended to marginalise free riders or, better still, encourage them into cooperate. I agree. Lots of social and institutional mediation required to deliver a multi-layered, multi-sectoral society arranged according to purpose. And any 'charging' that occurs in this system flows from the bottom upwards, empowering, equipping and legitimising the action above required.
Anyhow ... the myths we lived by ... it's overstretched ideas we need to guard against, which come in all shapes and sizes. They are a menace in politics. The dismissal of mythos in favour of logos has left us all grown up, but in danger of being made orphans of our technology. But agree very much with the call for responsibility. I’d just say, it’s not a new message. That was always the message I got from my religious upbringing … it ain't us backward folk who have been guilty of ransacking the planet in the name of progress. Now, how did the old 'angelic doctor' sum it all up ... virtuous action and sufficiency of goods within right relationships ... Achieve that old wisdom from St Thomas Aquinas, and you will have the direction right.
Martin Luther King jr said that ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ The quote derives from Unitarian minister Theodore Parker and his sermon titled ‘Of Justice and the Conscience’ in ‘Ten Sermons of Religion’:
‘Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.’
That’s an inherent purpose giving direction. Without purpose, you will lack direction. Belief or non-belief in this respect is irrelevant, and science/philosophy/religion all organise themselves around this symmetry/harmony/balance/justice at the core of the real world. I call it attunement. Direction with purpose is what matters, not aims which replace these with speed, and take us nowhere very quickly indeed. It is about living our lives in accordance with ‘the appetite for joy that pervades all creation’, to quote Thomas Hardy. Deuteronomy writes of 'rejoicing in all the good the Lord your God has given you'. ‘Act well and rejoice’ (Bene agere ac laetari) is at the heart of Spinoza’s God/Nature, Deus sive Natura. ‘There cannot be too much joy; it is always good.’ (E Pt IV Prop XLII). And the earth is good. And acting in tune with the good earth will bring joy. But to flourish well as human beings at home on earth requires stewardship, Creation Care as Pope Francis calls it.
I’ll not be bullied and hectored into acting by shrill voices pointing to doom and disaster and demanding action. ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’ (Nietzsche). And Creation has all the time it needs to put wrong things right. I want to know what forces induced us to diminish and discard the 'why' questions of life in favour of an action-packed practically orientated concern with the 'how' of things, with no concern for direction and purpose. Unless we answer that question, our technics will continue to misfire, no matter how sophisticated they are, and no matter how strenuous the efforts we make. I'm all for action, I just don't want to be a part of someone's project to save the world by rendering it totally instrumentalised and ordered by Reason.
‘There is no wealth but life’ Ruskin wrote in Unto this Last. ‘Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of other’ (Ruskin Unto this Last, Essay IV).
Do we need to be given instruction in all of this? Do we need to be educated about all this? My question is, from where does the education come? Marx was on the right lines here when he wrote that the educator must also be educated. He had in mind that if circumstances shape human beings, then human beings, through their actions, shape circumstances. Let’s see this as an interaction. Instead of a praxis that imposes a truth and value and a goodness on the world, let’s see us as part of a creative unfolding of a truth, value and goodness that is inherent in the world, a truth, value and goodness that we, as parts of that world, share. In such a way, we avoid having to be educators from above and outside a process of a lived experience in tune with the world. I return to the notion of stewardship here. When Alasdair Macintyre writes of ‘communities of practice’, he is emphasising that moral terms and principles cease to be empty when they are tied to practices within the form or forms of the common life. In other words, education is a self-education on the part of those who live the good life rather than theorise about it, imposing and instrumentalising it from the outside. The lessons are delivered from within the community of practice, not by some philosopher king/planetary engineer/educated bureaucrat of knowledge on the outside.
So what does this mean? It means that when we hear calls for action, and particularly those calls which insist in the loudest of voices that it is time to act NOW!!! In capital letters, we should be cautious. I know that the people who are being told to ‘grow up’ and abandon their ‘created gods’ are all grown up indeed and already acting. Had the world been practising the stewardship these people have been practising all along, we would not now stand in need of an environmental rescue squad of planetary engineers educating us into the need for concerted action from above.
So I question notions of ‘taking charge’ and ‘taking control’, and I certainly reject such notions when they are pushed in the most vociferous of terms. Plato’s ghost continues to haunt us here. Plato struggled with the attempt to bridge the divide between contemplation and action. Faith without deeds is empty, says the text. I agree. And Plato knew the need for politics and application and implementation. But he feared the extent to which truth and goodness could become compromised in an all too human world of political murk and bias and social interests. Crossing the divide from contemplation to action remains a real challenge. The ancient Greeks were big on connecting theoretical reason - scientific knowledge of the world, the world of fact – with practical reason – the world of ethics and politics, including economics, the social world in which everyday human life proceeds. We know reality not just by contemplating it passively, but by acting within and upon it, generating knowledge of the world. But …. the wise have always insisted that the true, the good and the beautiful are qualities of the world as it is gifted to us, it is not for us to impose or project value upon the world through practice, but to recognise in our actions that the real world is already a fine place to be. I’m working on a theory that is between disclosure and imposure, between a passive contemplation of a fixed and timeless reality and an active engineering through practice of a brave new world. Human beings are creative agents at work within a creative universe – but this does not entail a constructivist ethic in which human beings are the producers of value, truth and goodness. We are co-operators. And that creative agency on our part is part of the world, not apart from it, it is part of the purpose, meaning and direction that is in the world as something objectively valuable.
So where does ‘taking charge’ and ‘taking control’ fit in the relation between contemplation and action? Simple answer is that they don’t, not without serious qualification and redefinition as a responsibility and stewardship built into every level of our social relations and arrangements. The ‘control’ as such is generated from within. Instead of control, we should recognise that we live in an interdependent and interrelational world which we share with others and should instead open up to that world, play our part in it rather than seek to possess parts of it, protect those parts from others, from which comes the insecurity and the neurotic need to control, from which come the rescue squads to educate and instruct us from the outside.
Is contemplation a passive waiting? No. It is a form of action. We do best to avoid false dualisms here, setting contemplation against action as passivity against activism. I shall have to return to this issue of disclosure and imposure later, I cannot do it justice here. But disclosure, based on the idea of a pre-established or pre-ordained harmony, does not necessarily mean inactivity and passivity, as though there is nothing for human beings to do but wait on unfolding circumstances. Human agency is a creative part of that unfolding, as parts of the creative universe. I develop this view against the notion of an imposure in which human beings impose or project truth, value and meaning upon the world. When I hear that God, like technology and everything else you care to mention in the human world, is a ‘human construction’ or ‘social construction’, I immediately think that this is correct but only as far as it goes – which isn’t very far at all. We have known since ever that God is beyond our conceptual grasp but that we have only the blunt instruments of our words to try to express the ineffable. The deficiencies in that presentation are deficiencies of concepts and language. To say that ‘God’ is a ‘human construction’ is simply tautological …. It is saying that a concept is a concept. It misses what those writing about God have been trying to say in recognition of linguistic limitations.
But I shall leave that irresolvable (non) problem aside, I want to come to the right approach, finding the moral arc of the universe, finding purpose and direction and going with them. In other words, religion is not an intellectual proposition, it is an ethos, a practice, something we do, a way of life, a knack that doesn’t always have rational explanation or justification. That’s why debates like the above are tedious, they are irresolvable and irrelevant, they are beside the point.
And the point is … what is it to act well? Act well and rejoice, says Spinoza. That appetite for joy is inherent in creation, and we share in that joy when we play our part in the world. Whilst the contemplation/disclosure I am arguing for would seem to be the very antithesis of action, in actual fact it is not. It is opposed to a certain kind of action, an action that is organised and imposed from outside the joyful creativity of the world. That kind of tooled up action instrumentalises the world, and the people, renders them passive clients of the ‘educators’ from above, and cuts us off from the self-educating processes that comes from within the world and our communities of practices. This is the grammar of life. We are born with that moral grammar, and are educated into it within our relations to others and to the world.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is through the Taoist concept of Wu Wei. This means ‘non-doing’, which is not at all the same thing as ‘doing nothing’. It means that whatever needs to be done, will be done in its natural course, and whatever is left undone is not worth doing. In other words, it refers to a natural action, an action so natural that it is done almost unconsciously, without excessive thought, instruction, struggle, effort. If something requires such extreme organisation and instruction and effort, we need to ask precisely what goals we are pursuing, and whether they are worth pursuing when they are so far out of our natural reach. Such solutions reproduce the mentalities and modalities that generated the problems in the first place, they are on the same inhuman and unnatural scale, a cure that is as likely to kill you as the disease. In contrast, wu-wei entails the cultivation of qualities within us so that the actions we undertake are in tune with the flow of life. That’s the direction I was talking about, the purpose that is at work in a world that is true, good and beautiful, a world that doesn’t need to be taken control of and made ‘better’, because it is already, in Leibniz’ phrase, the best of all possible worlds. We act by playing our part within it, sharing in the appetite for joy that pervades all Creation (Hardy), hence Spinoza’s ‘act well and rejoice.’
Understanding this, the demand for ‘control’ and ‘taking charge’ clearly comes from faulty relationships in the human world, faulty relationships to each other and to the world, generating problems of such scale that ‘we’ (who?) have to make strenuous efforts in trying to effect solutions. Rather than a solution, such an approach is a continuation, on an ever higher scale, of the same imposure of truth and value that brought us to this impasse. Not control in this sense, but an opening up to the world, an embrace of its direction and purpose, a contemplation/disclosure/natural doing that fosters and sustains a genuine action. And this is precisely what is entailed in the old notion of stewardship, a humility towards the world and a recognition that we are a part of a bigger picture.
I am mindful of the words of Victor Frankl:
‘Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.’
Victor Frankl, 1992 Preface to Man’s Search for Meaning
Don’t aim at control, don’t aim at making the world better, don’t aim at instructing and educating the public and corralling them into making strenuous efforts for changing the world! Put aside your aims and find your true purpose.
My response to those who continue to claim that God is a human construction is clear and direct – man may be the measurer of all things, but he isn’t the measure of all things. Our conceptual tools go only so far, but no further. And there is a further. How real do you want it? How much reality can you bear?
‘This was the very purpose of creation that each unique, individual being should participate in its own way in the divine Being, should realize its eternal 'idea' in God, should 'become' God by participation, God expressing himself through that unique being.’
(Bede Griffiths)
Letting go of the need for control is actually an empowerment through being drawn into relation with others in the world, going beyond the possessive relations that separate people from each other. Like ‘men as gods’, the idea that we can control and engineer solutions from above is a delusion. We need to understand precisely why this neurotic need for control arises in the first place. It arises from not appreciating the purpose and direction at the heart of the creative universe, from a lack of attunement with this universe, from the pretence that it is human beings who invest the world with any value and meaning it has, the view that the world is objectively valueless and hence to be used and exploited in any way that human beings choose. Genesis has God looking at the world He created and declaring it ‘good’. Our planetary planners and engineers and managers look at the world and consider it not good enough, intervene to improve it, and then demand control in order to deal with the consequences of a world that gets worse the more that it is made better. There is no need. The world is good. Indeed, it is ‘very good’ (Genesis 1: 31). And it true and it is beautiful. It doesn’t need to be any better than it is, it is us who need to be as good as that with which we have been gifted. ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’ That’s ‘the real world’. What we know of it and how we know it is a matter of human concepts and constructions. Any deficiencies are deficiencies of our tools. We need to improve those in order to know reality better. But we don’t need to make that reality anything other than it is, just play our natural and creative part in unfolding what it is. And what it is is true, good and beautiful.
Act well and rejoice, says Spinoza. ‘Rejoice in all the good that the LORD your God has given to you’ says Deuteronomy (26:11). Trust the moral arc of the universe, find purpose and direction, cleave to them, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well (Julian of Norwich).
A friend of mine, writer and environmentalist David Backes, biographer of Sigurd Olson, told me that ‘Be still and know that I am God’ was probably Sigurd Olson’s ‘single most favorite verse of scripture’. It is easy to understand why it could appeal to environmentalists, philosophers, the faithful, frankly anyone who is concerned with be-ing as life’s imperative/God’s gift. I'll show you why (thanks to John Boylan for this).
'God is Our Refuge and Strength,
‘He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two; He burns the chariots with fire. "Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”’
- Psalm 46:9-10
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.
In fine.
Just be.
I take this to be contemplation as true action, a natural action that is within our natural reach, and not requiring strenuous efforts and histrionic instructions in order to execute. As I wrote earlier, it savours a great deal of the Daoist principle of wu-wei, the non-action in which anything worth doing gets done. All that there is is the dancer and the dance, and if we take our true place in the participatory universe in which we live, we will unable to tell them apart, and there will be no need to, we'll all be playing our proper part within the whole. Those in attunement with the way will act in a natural and uncontrived way, achieving success and happiness without strenuous effort. Actions come to be aligned to the flow of life.
So when the call for action comes, I am reminded of the wisdom of contemplation/disclosure as a natural action within natural reach, no overextension of aims and ambitions, ideas and tools, just a getting in tune with the world that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us - attunement as harmony.
Now, isn't that responsibility? Isn't that stewardship? Isn't that growing up to play our part in the earth's community of life? That is wealth as life and as being, free from the neurotic need to exercise control. Save the planet? God save us from planetary controllers!