BBC Wildlife Magazine and Meditation

Unbelievably chuffed to be number 27 in the top 50 power list for  conservation heroes in this month's BBC Wildlife Magazine.  Very flattered indeed.  I think this wildlife dedicated magazine is a great read these days.  It had a facelift a while ago and became far more focussed and energetic. Really interesting articles (and I'm not just saying that!)

I spent the morning giving a talk to the Bristol Christian Meditation Group, part of a worldwide movement to promote meditation from any faith or from non.  They were interested in how faith could play a part in promoting a greater awareness of our relationship with nature.  The audience were lovely, engaged and asked some searching questions.

I gave the talk a strange title - Being a Christian and a Mammal. For too long Christianity (and many other faiths) has put humanity aside from nature, regarding people as floating, spiritual beings that are removed from the nitty gritty, mess and joy of the natural world.  The common approach is that the earth is a resource that supports us, not an integral part of what we are.  I wanted to stress our mammalian nature, place us in a evolutionary context, look at what drivers shaped the way we look, act and interact with the world around us.  How we evolved an upright stance, developed forward looking vision, why we developed complex language, how we formed social groups and the consequences of that.  The tribalism, gossip, group sizes that we adopt - all driven by our evolution and the pressures we responded to in nature.  I also wanted to point out how much of the earth is hidden from our senses as we developed our complex brains.  How we miss so much of what is happening around us, the colour spectrums we can't see, the vibrations we can't feel, the electrical fields we can't detect and the sounds outside our hearing.

Is it important to think of ourselves as mammalian as well as spiritual?  Or is this intellectualising and only useful for middle England chatter?  I think it is important to look into our deep-time roots and think about our long history on earth.  Because if we regard ourselves as separate from all that out there then we will have a relationship that is based on difference, not connection. We will have an intellectual relationship.  It also leads to a kind of paternalism towards the natural world and the extraordinary creatures we live alongside.  Too often the religious approach is either utilitarian or overly sentimental.  We are told to look for God is in the beauty of a butterfly or flower, or in the majesty of a mountain.  But what about God in the ebola virus or malarial parasite?  In the Nepalese earthquake?  If God is only in the appealing things then when disaster strikes or a snake bites or a child dies of malaria, we don't know how to process it.

It was a good morning, thanks to the organisers for asking me.

Mystical Matter

From Reflections of a Curlew

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and philosopher who had interests similar to my own - geology, paleontology and earth sciences. According to Wiki he took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He had a huge vision for the creation and evolution of the Cosmos which got him into trouble with the Vatican but has recently been bought to the fore again. He is now greatly acclaimed as a visionary and as having profound things to say about God and our role in the natural world.

I need to get to know his work a lot better. Thanks to my Jesuit friend Chris Boles who runs the Lauriston Jesuit Centre, for reminding me of this:

HYMN TO MATTER

‘Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.

‘Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.

‘Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

‘Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.

‘Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.

‘Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists.

‘Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

‘I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured — a mass of brute forces and base appetites — but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature.

‘You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality for existence and transformation wherein the predestined substance germinates and grows.

‘I acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all converge on the way of the spirit.

‘I acclaim you as the melodious fountain of water whence spring the souls of men and as the limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new Jerusalem.

‘I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay moulded and infused with life by the incarnate Word.

‘Sometimes, thinking they are responding to your irresistible appeal, men will hurl themselves for love of you into the exterior abyss of selfish pleasure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection or by an echo.

‘This I now understand.

‘If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must, having first established contact with the totality of all that lives and moves here below, come little by little to feel that the individual shapes of all we have laid hold on are melting away in our hands, until finally we are at grips with the single essence of all subsistencies and all unions.

‘If we are ever to possess you, having taken you rapturously in our arms, we must then go on to sublimate you through sorrow.

‘Your realm comprises those serene heights where saints think to avoid you — but where your flesh is so transparent and so agile as to be no longer distinguishable from spirit.

‘Raise me up then, matter, to those heights, through struggle and separation and death; raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me in perfect chastity to embrace the universe.’

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ
Jersey, 8th August 1919

Shifting Plates and "Where was God?"

Over the Christmas break I watched again Mark Dowd's "Tsunami - Where Was God?" on Channel 4, a sensitive and wide ranging documentary on differing religious responses to the Tsunami in 2004.

In trying to come to terms with a belief in a God that could let such disasters happen Mark tried to question a Muslim geologist about the geological need for massive earthquakes that can cause tidal waves that then create so much suffering. He repeatedly asked the same question in different forms - is there an alternative design for the earth that God could have come up with that didn't require such violent outbursts that kill thousands? Is it possible, as a geologist, to think of an earth that is designed in such a way that negates earthquakes and volcanoes? If God created the earth and all that goes with it, why build into the system earthquakes that can wipe out thousands at one stroke? But no matter how he asked this question the same answer came back - the earth is designed so that catastrophes like this happen to force us to see our sin and teach us about our wrong ways - teach us a lesson.

Many, including myself, find this attitude hard to understand, but Mark's question is deep and profound because it goes right to the heart of what we are.

In short, the answer to Mark's question is no, there doesn't seem to be an alternative design - as far as we can tell one of the major reasons why there is life on this planet is because of the movement of the earth's tectonic plates.

(For those who need a geology brush up on what plate tectonics means there are many youtube videos and wiki type sites - but basically the earth's surface is made up of rigid plates that "float" on a hot fluid like mantle causing the plates the grind, crunch, slide over and under each other creating earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain chains, deep ocean ridges, island chains etc).

If we didn't have plate tectonics to recycle the earth's crust, bring new material to the surface, release gases into the atmosphere, build mountain chains and form deep basins that could be filled with water then the great diversity of life would not be present and could not have evolved. Everything about our shifting, changing planet creates niches and opportunities for life to take hold. It also forces change, driving species evolution and adaptation. Stability does not create burgeoning life - change, and often violent change, does.

Fascinating isn't it that pure energy on a scale we can barely imagine, is constantly at work in this astonishing universe, and on this particular planet in this little solar system, that phenomenal energy heaves around slabs of crust and creates the right conditions for life. But life doesn't come cheap and easy, it comes as a result of great forces and instability - life is a resilience born out of fragility that we see all around us in the natural world.

Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee describes the role of plate tectonics and the maintenance of life, it is a wonderful and insightful book that lays out the scientific reasons why life is so uncommon, "maybe we really are alone" says the strap line. And perhaps so because no other planet in this solar system has tectonic movement - and no life that we know of.

It is a pointer to the fact that God didn't design the universe for our comfort and prosperity; deeply embedded into its very fabric is energy that produces creativity and destruction, violence and quiescence, burgeoning and collapsing. For me this has nothing to do with teaching anybody any lessons and has everything to do with a God that defies our imagination and leaves us gasping with incomprehension at the audacity of a creator who has set in motion something so spectacular.

And we humans have to fit in where we can and recognise with humility what we are - beadlets of life born out of resilience and evolutionary drive - and with a capacity for greatness. We have to accept that a cooling earth will crack and shake, that volcanoes will erupt, that meteorites will bombard, that continents will shift, and we humbly acknowledge that is what it is to be a human on planet earth, with all its tragedy and horror as well as beauty and magnificence.

For nearly all our evolutionary history humans have been fighters for survival against changing climates, natural disasters, ferocious predators that want to eat us and against other creatures that vie for our resources. For all our hunter/gatherer existence (99% of the time we have been fully modern humans) we would have been only too aware of the fragility of life and the forces for good or ill that were a natural part of life on earth. Today most in the comfortable West are fed, warm and housed with little understanding of the earth we live on - but we still have the instincts to fight for survival - the adrenalin to fight or flee, the fear of the dark and of spiders and snakes, and the desire to understand forces beyond our control. And this legacy leaves us with a body that is ready for action but too often with too little to do - we find ourselves being warriors without a war. And therein lies many of our problems I suspect.

So Mark - thanks for a fascinating programme but the horror of the tsunami is not retribution for sin, it is a painful demonstration of the real place we humans have on this cooling, dynamic earth - and a reminder that not everything is arranged for us. The alternative scenario is a very boring creationist model where God waves a wand and ping! all is as it appears now - and then we run into real trouble when we try to understand disaster, because only a God of retribution could make a beautiful earth turn round and bite.

And thank you for a question that brings to the surface so much we rarely discuss about the very nature of humans and life on earth.