Frog watching photographer watching frog

The Judeo-Christian tradition lifts up nature as the creation of a loving and just God who cares about what happens to God’s Creation.  In the Christian tradition we humans and all creatures are an integral part of this dynamic, dancing creation in which we live.  We share with other creatures this inter-subjective creative adventure we call life.  Listening and being listened to, watching and being watched, fearing and being feared, loving and being loved, destroying and being destroyed.

Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian, noticed this I-Thou dance of life, and noticed that we fall out of the dance when we treat others–people, nature and other creatures–as “its.”  An I-Thou interaction is very different from an I-It interaction where the other is treated as an object.  The I-It mentality is an exquisitely subtle thing.  An extreme case: I treat nature as an “it” when I fill in the wetlands, burying all it’s vibrant life because my awareness is only focused on my image of the wetlands and my own goal for it.  When I look at trees and see only timber (what trees are for me), then I have “it-ized” them, reducing them, and myself, to a mere caricature, an idol.  When I relate to my image of others, and not to them, I have danced into the I-It world.

Butterfly gazing, Ashfield, MA

On the other hand, when I treat nature and others as “thous,” I am automatically in a relationship that involves an ethical dimension.  Can I treat these others like I want to be treated?  This ethical dimension was lost when we American humans wiped out the passenger pigeons and the buffalo.  And it is lost when we burn up fossil fuels so quickly that we change the earth’s weather; when we net so many fish and plow up so much of the ocean floor with our fishing vessels that we create huge dead zones all around the planet; and when we grow food with so many pesticides and fertilizers that we ruin our soil and our waterways.  When we treat others as “thous,” we recognize that they are aware of us, as much as we are aware of them.  Just as we are adjusting to the presence of the other, the other is adjusting to us.  And now there is the possibility of learning from one another.  The frogs, trees, clouds and birds are, in a way, giving themselves to me, and I can learn from them.  Their mere presence is an act of generosity.

But what does an I-Thou way of farming and fishing look like?   Many pre-modern, indigenous peoples knew how to do this, over many tens of thousands of years.  And now we must re-learn those skills.

Co-op Power, western Massachusetts

One small step toward a more I-Thou sustainable way of using energy for transportation and heating occurred recently here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts.  A group of people involved in a non-profit Co-op movement decided to create a community owned business that would recycle cooking oil to fuel vehicles and to heat homes.

A few weeks ago, on August 3, 2010, I attended an exciting event, the ground-breaking of a new bio-diesel plant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.  Our family is a member of Co-op Power, a local, Pioneer Valley non-profit organization that seeks to bring sustainable energy and local food production to our area.  Their website, www.cooppower.coop, states that Co-op Power is “a multi-class, multi-racial movement for a sustainable and just energy future.”  Co-op Power is a member-owned cooperative founded in 2005 to create community-owned renewable energy across the Northeast.  With 375 members, Co-op Power applied $135,000 of its $300,000 member equity coffers towards the development of this biodiesel project and received another $1 million of support from 24 investors.  Our family happily took savings out of the stock market to join this investors’ group.

This kind of project is where spirituality, organization, cooperation, political clout and money get integrated for the good.

Lynn Benander & Larry Union

The two key leaders in this new venture were Lynn Benander (chief executive officer of Co-op Power and board chairwoman for Northeast Biodiesel LLC), and Larry Union, (CEO of Northeast Biodiesel).

Also attending the ceremonies:

Dwayne Breger, MA Renewables

Bill Martin (left) & Stan Rosenberg (right)

Dwayne Breger, Director of the Renewable and Alternative Energy Development Division at the MA Dept. of Energy Resources. Bill Martin, Greenfield Mayor and Stan Rosenberg, MA State Senator.

John Eichholz

Christian Lagier

John Eichholz, General Manager of the Franklin Community Coop. Christian Lagier, Co-op Power Chair.

Frank Stiebel

Jill Stein (left) & Larry Union with wife

Frank Stiebel, President of Steibel Eltron Company. Several candidates for political office who support alternative energy projects, including Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for MA governor, leaning in on the left.  That’s Larry Union in the middle hugging his wife, with Stan Rosenberg on the right.

Bio-diesel plant supporters

And then, all the Co-op members and investors who took turn with the shovels.

Thank you!

cobwebs in the mind

As a friend of mine, Bob Forman of the Forge Institute recently wrote in an email, “disillusionment may be the path.”  Perhaps the path of disillusionment is like breathing in and breathing out: with every in-breath I take in some illusion from the outer world and from the memory storehouse of my inner world.  And with every out-breath, I let go illusions.   But this is hard work, and really impossible.  Still, intention greases our spiritual wheels:  Can I intend and make the effort to let the illusions–my opinions, my grudges, my cynicism, my worldview and even my hopes for specific outcomes–go?  Who would I be without my illusions?  Can anybody live entirely in truth, without any illusions?  My guess is that there is no such pure state.  But intention can be pure and I can be committed to the truth.  Disillusionment can be disorienting and feel horrible, but there’s an up-side.  Once we’re through the initial pain and dizziness of “who am I now?” we might feel like we’re walking out of a dark wood into a beautiful open field.  Refreshing. Open heart, open mind.  Dropping my huge sack full of opinions and seeing for the first time that it felt like a bag of heavy armor.  Perhaps, for the first time, I can glimpse the fundamental universal values of goodness, love, truth and beauty as pervasive realities, even in the midst of suffering.

But living with an open heart and mind can leave one quite vulnerable, and, some would say, naïve.  So, letting go of illusion also requires a practice of discernment.  When I live with an open heart and mind, I trust existence and I trust God, but I don’t trust everyone.  I am able to discern more quickly who is trustworthy, and what situations are trustworthy.  I can be aware of situations where I might not be trustworthy.  Discernment is the key practice.  It is like a continuous inner beacon that throws its light upon trustworthy people, places and situations and then invites me to make contact with them in creative, mutually respectful ways.   Living without illusions allows me to see the goodness in people and situations that might not be apparent.  I become more and more able to see and to listen to others without judgments that are based in my personal reactions, and I can trust others to the extent that they are trustworthy, even while knowing their weaknesses, and mine.  Can I trust that love, truth, goodness and beauty are real (not illusions), even when I don’t actually experience their full reality?  Going forward without illusions is like stepping off the edge of a cliff, from the apparently solid ground of my illusions, opinions and judgments to the open air where only the wings of trust hold me up.  We have been disillusioned by many religious and spiritual teachers, but we still need good spiritual teachings (there are some! They are like navigational tools for discernment as we fly into the Unknown.  I think of D.H. Lawrence’s lovely poem:

So I put my hand out further, a little further

and I felt that which was not I,

it verily was not I,

it was the unknown.

Ha, I was a blaze leaping up!

I was a tiger bursting into sunlight.

I was greedy, I was made for the unknown.

I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb,

starved from a life of always devouring myself,

now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand

stretching out

and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the

unknown unknown.

If disillusionment is the path, then it is a path of continuous discernment, moment to moment.   When I fall off the wagon I become self-pitying, cynical and curmudgeonly.  I’m like a child who thrashes on the floor shouting, I don’t care. . . .I want my illusions!  They’re mine!”  But in the end, the child is lonely.  I’ve always been heartened by the guidance of Meister Eckhart, the medieval Dominican mystic.  I used to lead retreats about Eckhart and his spiritual worldview was mine.  I was fused with him.  But then, when my wife and I lost a newborn, prematurely born daughter, Eckhart’s counsel didn’t make sense, and I became disillusioned with him and his guidance.  Now, we’re just good close friends, without the romantic illusions.  And I love what Eckhart says about time and about how we perceive reality: we grow old in time, but we’re always young in eternity.

Eckhart borrowed from some ancient Greek understandings of perception when he said that in order to see certain qualities in this world one must BE those qualities.  When I AM just, I will perceive justice correctly. . . .when I AM love, I will perceive it correctly. . . .when I AM truth, I will perceive it correctly.   Maybe I like this approach to handling disillusionment because it offers me some control.  I can’t control the world or others, but I can control how I receive, filter, manage, perceive and integrate my relationship to the world.  I can control who I am in relationship (because one is always in relationship).  If I want to find love, truth, goodness and beauty, I choose the path of becoming those qualities.  If I don’t find those qualities in others, then my disillusionment can at least teach me to become the qualities that I seek and long for.  Probably, in this life, illusions arise continuously in the mind and heart.  But can I choose a path whereby I continuously intend to shed illusions of self and others and with each out-breath, intend to be the qualities that I seek?

It’s a koan, a question to carry without leaping too quickly to the answer.

here's looking at you

In the late 1980’s and early 90’s, when I was a theology student at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, I studied and prayed with the works of Meister Eckhart, a medieval Dominican monk.  His fundamental teaching, that we participate in the life of Christ via the process and practice of detachment, has enlivened my spiritual life and brought hope, peace and creativity in its wake.  Eckhart’s teaching is entirely consistent with an even older Christian tradition called the apophatic way, or the way of “negative” (not in the sense of bad) theology.  God is present to us always, but always in a way that is beyond our thoughts, feelings, images and sensations.  Whatever we think about God is NOT God.  God is always greater.  We can enter an ever-fresh arena of God’s presence by continually letting go of our ideas, thoughts and images of reality and of God.  Eckhart named this process, in his native German language, Gelassenheit.  I like the sound of it.

But I have also struggled with Eckhart’s vision because he seems to suggest that the person of Jesus and Jesus’s way of being with his family and friends in such a loving, interpersonal way, is just another idea or image to let go.  For me, God shows up in Gelassenheit, but also in a pervasive sense of “I-Thou-ness.”  Yes, I can sit on a cushion in silent meditation and detach from my “sticky” thoughts, stories, worries, anticipations, memories, and so on.  But even there, I have an intuitive sense that I sit in the presence of a greater Presence who is beyond my understanding, beyond any particular characterization of a particular “who.”  When images of people or other living beings pass through my awareness, they participate and bring to life some of the varied forms that this Presence can take.

Ashfield Swallow

How does this I-Thou-ness show up?  The other day, a frog and I stared at each other for the longest time, and I wondered at how we were looking at each other.  I could look at the frog as an object, but that view didn’t seem complete.  The frog, with its own subjective world and way of making contact with an Other, was looking at and evaluating me.  Or was he/she simply being with me?  We know that we can empathize with other people, take their perspective or walk a mile in their shoes, but can we also do this with frogs?  How about with snakes, butterflies, and newborn red-wing blackbirds?  This is who I saw in some beaver ponds in Ashfield, MA in May, 2010.  Say hi.

Empathy is a complicated transaction, because to do it right we need to let go (Gelassenheit) our short-hand image of the other and try to see the world through his or her eyes.  What is it like to be that being who is over there, looking at me?  And, of course, one needs to do this without losing touch with one’s own perspective.  Doing empathy right is a finely nuanced skill; and also a spiritual practice because one must let go of one’s habitual ego-centered approach to reality.  Jesus practiced empathy.  He demonstrated and announced the core goodness of recognizing and then loving the Other.  He loved God as an Other, and loved others as others.  And, of course, as a Jew, his spiritual vision was fed by the streams of I-Thou’ing that permeate the Hebrew scriptures, especially the Psalms: “. . . .Where can I go from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?  If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

Eckhart never explored this I-Thou dimension and how it might be related to the practice of Gelassenheit.  But I have always been interested in this topic because when I was a child growing up in a alcoholic environment, I clung to the Jesus who loved “the least of these” and the children.  When my German Lutheran grandma taught me to pray, her Jesus entered into my subconscious as a Someone who loved me, cared what I did with my life, and inspired me to love others.   So, in spite of my great enthusiasm for Meister Ekchart, I’ve always wondered, what about this I-Thou dimension.  When our newborn daughter, Rebecca, died in 1992, I devoted one chapter to my little disagreement with Eckhart.  I imagined him to be alive now and willing to engage with me on the relationship of I-Thou to Gelassenheit, so the chapter reads like the transcript of a conversation.

Rebecca cover

Today, this conversation has appeared again, in my dialogue with Robert K.C. Forman, founder of the Forge Institute, an international organization that brings together spiritual leaders from many disparate traditions.  Bob practices T.M. meditation, a form of meditation that resonates with the Gelassenheit of Eckhart.  Indeed, one of the books about Eckhart that came to my attention in 1993, “Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian,” was written by Bob in 1991.  After reading his fine book I met him, and we’ve been friends since.   Now, after years of fun as a participant in Bob’s Forge Institute, I am pleased to be in conversation with him about this I-Thou dimension in spirituality.