Getting Green with Sophia, Bruce Sanguin

Getting Green with Sophia

Bruce Sanguin

Part of the 2007 Lenten Noon Series

Thanks Harold for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon and for your prescience in making ecology and the Christian faith the focus of your noon-hour talks. This is the most critical conversation to have at this point in our collective history. And, congratulations to David Dranchuk, and others in the Anglican diocese, for your leadership in the greening of the church. David is doing a fabulous job in Vancouver helping congregations to go green with ecological audits and the like. My church, Canadian Memorial, has just undergone such an audit and we are retrofitting our entire facility to reduce our carbon footprint. We’re also starting a congregational carbon reduction program. After we have done this ourselves, we want to find ways to invite other congregations to start their own ecological program. I believe the church can be at the forefront of a global movement to heal our planet.

David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis were on CBC Ideas last week talking about this movement. It’s inspiring to hear them speak of the power of the grass roots movement to shape public policy. Look at this recent ecological flip flop in our political leadership. They are responding! I received an email recently celebrating that because of a petition with 150,000 signatories, the G8 have decided to make climate change their top priority for the upcoming June meeting! The time is now for the church to join this wave of ecological concern that is sweeping the Western World. The ecological agenda needs to be right up there at the top of our mission agenda. (In 88 we didn’t keep it on the agenda.)

Joanna Macy started her work to help people overcome their psychic numbing to what was happening to the world 25 years ago, when she was 50. She sees this ecological movement happening on three fronts, simultaneously.   With the

1. Eco-warriors – these are the David Suzukis and Al Gores of the world.

2. Eco-innovators – these are the green entrepreneurs who are developing the     technology for an ecological age.

3. Eco-consciousness raisers – these are the ones who are helping us think about our identity as human beings in relation to the planet and the universe itself – one thinks of Sallie McFague, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and Matthew Fox (at least he’s an Anglican!)

I wrote my book to contribute to this last category of raising eco-consciousness. But why Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos for the title? The short answer is that my publisher told me this was the title! I’m new to this whole publishing business and I’m finding out where my power lies and where it doesn’t lie.

In truth, I like the title. Darwin is synonymous with evolution. So I start with evolution as a scientific fact. You know, we haven’t really come to terms with the evolutionary principle in our theology and spirituality. Darwin also represents science and in the book I create a dialogue between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the sciences of physics, chaos theory, systems theory and the new biology.

Divinity doesn’t typically show up right next to Darwin. But I believe that evolution is totally compatible with the divine. The Sufi poet, Hafiz, said the whole universe is “the Secret One slowly growing a body?” I like that. I can see evolution as the slow unfolding of Spirit in the realm of time and space. Can you? What a difference that would make if we all related to the planet that way.

Dance of the Cosmos? Well, it’s a great alliteration for one thing! But I was inspired by the fourth century Greek theologian John Damascene, who came up with the word perechoresis to describe the relationship between the three members of the Trinity. It means something like the revolution of a wheel, an encircling of each around the others. Perichorueo is closely related. It means “to dance around”.) I like to play with the idea that the whole universe is a manifestation of the sacred dance of the Trinity. It’s all a sacred dance – of the inner and outer, of matter and spirit, of heart and mind. Barbara Ehrenreich has just written a wonderful book, Dancing In the Streets, about the subversive nature of ecstatic dance. One of the effects this kind of dancing has on participants is that it helps them to feel one, with the cosmos and with each other. It breaks down false distinctions. The church banned dance actually because you couldn’t tell the difference between the priests and the peasants when they really got into it! So, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to dance way more, and that what matters as a species is learning to dance in step with the rhythms of the cosmos.

When did we stop dancing? Last spring we invited Mat Fox to come to Vancouver to lead a workshop. He began by teaching us a spiral dance. We learned very simple steps, which enabled us to free our minds and be the dance. The experience was surprisingly powerful. I felt involved in an archetypal movement, synchronizing my movements with the movements of the universe itself. In fact, the large-scale structure of the universe and of our own solar system reveals this spiral motion, this dance of the cosmos. I think we should dance our way into our ecological ethic. We need to feel our connection with the earth, to learn the steps to our cosmic dance. Then, we don’t so much manage creation as step into the rhythms of the dance of creation. We’ve forgotten the dance and as a result we are stomping all over our beautiful planet. Throwing her completely out of balance

So, that’s the title – lots behind a title sometimes!

Shall we open up the book now? Let’s explore it through the ancient four-fold spiritual pathway that Matthew Fox brings forward in Creation Spirituality -the paths of Via Positiva, Via Negativa, Via Creativa and Via Transformativa.



Positiva - Awe

In Positiva, awe and wonder are the predominant sentiments. Think, for a moment about your own experiences of awe. When’s the last time you gave yourself the gift of time to take in the wonder of being alive on the planet earth? I remember walking with my daughter when she was two years old. It took an hour to walk a block. Every twig and blade of grass and insect was a show-stopper. How do we regain the wonder of a two-year old?

I just spent a couple of weeks in Mexico, with nothing to do but walk the beach, listen to the song birds at dawn, swim in the ocean, enjoy the warm breezes, and that bright yellow orb in the sky that apparently emerges from time to time in other parts of the world. I gave myself the gift of time and whenever I do that the miracle of being alive on the planet earth sneaks through into conscious awareness.

            I had an amazing experience during my internship in ministry. I was twenty-seven years old and full of anxiety about being smart enough, caring enough, competent enough to be a minister. I thought if I could just figure it out all out in my head before I was sent to my first congregation, I’d be OK. My internship was in Milton, Ontario.

On lunch break one day, eating an egg salad sandwich in the Acorn Café, I read a deceptively simple poem by Jere Pramuk.

            This sunset…

            This smile…

            This word you are writing…

            This pain you are feeling…

            The question you are asking…

            This omelette you are cooking…

            The meaning of life

            is the tear of joy

            shed at the

            sight of

            the

            well-cooked omelette.

            The moment I finished reading it, I was completely transported into another realm. I don’t recall finishing the sandwich. I don’t even remember paying my bill, although I must have because nobody chased after me. It was as though an invisible force lifted me out of my chair and carried me down Main Street.

            Everything happened in slow motion. A man sitting on the porch in his rocking chair became a source of enormous delight as I passed by. I do mean “passed by,” for the strangest thing about this experience was that I had no sense of moving my legs, no sense of my feet touching the ground. Eventually, I ended up in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of town, at dusk, looking out at a field of wheat blowing gently in the wind. It was as though someone had peeled back a layer of reality to reveal the invisible radiance of what lay behind and within all creation. I was suffused with love and overwhelmed by the beauty of what lay before my eyes.         And then I got in the way. My mind wanted to hold on and control this experience. I prayed “God, don’t let this end. Let me have it for just a few minutes longer.” Ironically, the prayer itself broke the spell. Have you ever seen the light of spirit illuminating creation around you? I know others have too. It’s a radical gift to even for a moment be able to see, really see, the magnificence of life.

            The experience that began in the Acorn Café has been foundational for my spirituality. Ever since that moment, whenever I become obsessed with trying to discover the meaning of life in a purely intellectual way, I think of the well-cooked omelette. I open my eyes to the radiant miracle of life. On good days, my intellectual curiosity is supplemented by a condition the mystics call awe.



            Isaiah, the Jewish prophet, had his own mystical experience “in the year King Uzziah died.” A curtain was pulled back on ordinary reality, which causes him to boldly proclaim, “I saw the Lord” (Isaiah 6:1). And then this: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of your glory.”

            It’s interesting that although Isaiah finds himself in the presence of angels and seraphs, it’s the whole earth that he experiences as being “full of God’s glory.” (In a similar way, in movies such as Michael and City of Angels the angels always want the assignment that takes them to earth, because they miss sensuality; they miss the sheer pleasure of physicality, and the beauty of the planet.) In any case, in the biblical story, Isaiah is apprehended by awe.

            This is what Sabbath is about, isn’t it. Designating time each week when we agree to relinquish our fascination with what we’ve done and can do, and simply rest in the magnificence of the gifts we’ve been given, and there’s no greater gift than the planet itself.

Via Negativa – Lament

Abraham Joshua Heschel has written, “forfeit awe and the world becomes a marketplace”. The capacity for awe may just be the defining characteristic of the human being. Yet we have indeed forfeited this capacity. In the path of negativa we “dare the dark”. We enter into our collective lament at the cost of losing our birthright of wonder. In the last three hundred years, called variously The Industrial Age, the Age of Reason, Scientific Rationalism, or simply the Modern Period, we have been living under a spell of what sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment”. When you lose the capacity for awe, you can look out at a forest and see only linear feet of lumber. You can pay $10,000 to shoot a majestic mountain sheep, to hang on the wall to show your buddies. When the planet and her creatures are stripped of any intrinsic sacredness, they end up being commodities to meet our economic and entertainment ends.

            Ten years after my experience in the Acorn Café and wheat field in Milton, my wife, Ann, and I travelled to Narragansett, Rhode Island, for a week-long silent retreat. One afternoon I noticed on the bookshelf a slim volume entitled The Universe Is a Green Dragon, by Brian Swimme, a mathematical physicist and cosmologist. Reading the book proved every bit as powerful an experience as my conversion to the Christian faith. Swimme never mentioned God or Spirit. Rather, he talked about the “heart” of the universe, and about what the universe is doing. He wrote about how the universe had taken 14 billion years to arrive at the human being. Through us, the universe had become conscious of itself. I “got it” that I was the universe in human form. I was what the planet was doing, on retreat, in Rhode Island. My identity consists not so much in being a creature living on Earth, but in being a creature of the earth. I was a centre of Earth consciousness, a particular form of the earth called Bruce.



            Brian Swimme’s telling of the story was like a sacred initiation into a cosmos I had been living in, but as an alien. I felt like an adopted child who had only now discovered his biological parents as an adult. I discovered that I had cosmological brothers and sisters, and grandparents I never knew. Pieces of my life started to fit together. I discovered things about myself I should have known, but didn’t. Earth is my mother, the sun my father. My grandmother star went supernova to birth us. We all came from an originating fire, a great flaring forth 14 billion years ago. This felt connection gave me a sense a profound sense of belonging in the universe.



            How strange that I didn’t know this story of the developing universe as my own. I knew bits of it as told in biology, astronomy, and chemistry classes. But my teachers told it to me as empirical science, not integrated as a sacred story. My education was not an initiation into the mysteries of my cosmic family. It was a barrage of isolated facts that I had to learn to pass a test. Walt Whitman captures this experience in his poem Leaves of Grass. [i]

When I hear the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured

with much applause in the lecture room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising, and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

            Reducing science to a list of facts has left entire generations to wander off and stare at the stars in an attempt to recapture an innate connection. Actually, I didn’t do a lot of star gazing. What was the point? I had learned that the stars were balls of gas floating aimlessly through space. I couldn’t understand why you would want to learn their names. What had they to do with me?



            How strange, as well, that in seminary there were no courses on the story of the universe as a sacred story of Spirit’s unfolding. Saint Paul’s references to a Christ of cosmic proportions were essentially ignored. If Brian Swimme, a mathematical physicist, could talk about the universe having a “heart,” why the reluctance on the part of Christian theologians to involve Spirit in the story of its unfolding? I had been living in a state of disenchantment.

Exile

From the Biblical point of view, the state of disenchantment is captured in the story of exile. The Biblical meta-narrative of exile refers to the historical experience of the Jews being captured and carried off by the conquering Babylonian empire to a foreign land in 597 BCE. There, they experience the loneliness of being strangers in a strange land. They actually lost their capacity to sing their sacred music so profound was there sense of alienation. Currently, global warming is occupying our attention and appropriately so. But nothing for me captures the state of alienation as profoundly as species extinction. Will our capacity to sing the Lord’s song also disappear as our planetary kin disappear?

Extinction as a Story of Exile

God created every living creature and every winged bird and saw that it was good. God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let birds multiply upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:21–22)

            Subsequent generations may look back on our age as the period of extinction, when biological diversity itself was wiped out. Legendary biologist E. O. Wilson notes the stark statistics: if habitat conversion continues at present rates, half the species on the planet will be gone by the end of our century. Climate change alone will wipe out one quarter of the species. The rate of extinction has increased 100-fold since the arrival of human beings. That number is expected to increase 1000 times in the next three decades. “If this rise continues unabated, the cost to humanity, in wealth, environmental security, and quality of life, will be catastrophic.” [1] We are entering what he calls the Eremozoic Era – The Age of Loneliness. (20 minutes)



            Wilson helps us to remember the causes of extinction by using the acronym HIPPO, the order of the letters corresponding with their rank in terms of destructiveness. [1]

H         habitat loss

I           invasive species

P          pollution (including global warming)

P          human overpopulation (a root cause of the first three)

O         over harvesting (hunting, fishing, gathering)

                Here we are in Victoria, living by this incredible ocean. The last time I took the ferry to the island I was fortunate enough to see a pod of orcas playing along the shore. Everyone on the ferry went out on deck to fall silent, take photos, ooh and awe before this magnificent sight. There are Orca Whales in the ocean, these unspeakably beautiful creatures. And there are thousands of different kinds of fish living in the seas – Thomas Aquinas pondered why there was so much biological diversity and came to the conclusion that it required all of this planetary diversity to express the fullness of God’s glory. But here’s what we know about our ocean kin:

            A team of marine scientists have recently completed the most comprehensive research to date on the state of the 7800 species of seafood available today. [1] They have concluded that if we continue to fish at the same rate for the next 50 years as we have for the past 50 years, 100 percent of these species will be collapsed.

            We must break the spell of the narrative of the disenchanted cosmos. If animals are divine modes of presence, then extinction is not only biocide, the death of life, it is also deicide, the death of Spirit, a 21st-century crucifixion of planetary proportions. The destruction of these creatures is made possible because we lack the sensibility and sensitivity to see them as manifestations of Spirit. The story of extinction is a story of exile on an absolute scale – oblivion.

“An absence of a sense of the sacred is the basic flaw in many of our efforts at ecologically or environmentally adjusting our human presence to the natural world. It has been said, ‘We will not save what we do not love.’ It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.” Thomas Berry.

Via Creativa – The Sophia Tradition

            In Creativa, we garner the resources in our tradition to lift us up out of despair and find hope where it may found. In doing research for the book, I met the divine Sophia. Sophia, is the feminine personification of divine Wisdom. She rose up off of the pages of Scripture demanding to be taken seriously – finally. I found her to be so delightful, so passionate, so creation-affirming, and yes, so Christ-like that I devote a chapter to Her whom the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon calls “irresistible”.

            She appears first in Proverbs declaring:

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago… Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth; when there were no depths I was brought forth. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he created everything, I was there like a master worker [or a little child]. I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race… (Proverbs 8:22–31)

            She is “able to do all things”; she is the “fashioner all things”; she “orders all things well” (Wisdom of Solomon 8:1). Sophia knows all things, and therefore is able to teach in every field of knowledge. As Creator, she knows intimately “the structure of the world, and the activity of the elements; the beginning, end, and middle of times, the alternations of solstices, changes of seasons, cycles of the years, constellations of stars, natures of animals, the powers of spirits, varieties of plants, virtues of roots…” (7:17–22). All knowledge of science, mathematics, cosmology, and biology is revealed by her to those who seek her.





Sophia has 21 characteristics, three times the perfect number seven, indicating her identification with God.

There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and subtle. (Wisdom of Solomon 7:22–23)

            In chapter 10 of the Wisdom of Solomon, the story of Israel’s salvation history is told as the activity of Sophia, rather than of Yahweh, the Lord. She redeems Adam from his sin, and gives him strength. Cain dies because, after his murder of Abel, he turns away from her. She saves the world from the fruits of his violence, steering Noah through the flood on a “paltry piece of wood.” She is involved in the confusion of languages at Babel. She calls Abraham, and was with him when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac. She rescues Lot; she was with Jacob in his flight from his brother Esau, straightening Jacob out with wisdom, and showing him the “Kingdom of God.” She stick-handled Joseph through his brothers’ murderous plot, and made him great. Finally, it is Sophia who delivers the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Sophia plays the role of God in this passage!



            The book of Baruch adds one more important detail: “She appeared on earth and lives with humankind” (3:37). Early Christian commentators regarded this as an allusion to the incarnation of Christ. Others connect this sentence to the following one in which the author affirms that “She is the book of the commandments of God” (3:38 – 4:1).



            Many scholars affirm, that for all intents and purposes, Sophia is a feminine personification of God’s own being. Not merely the feminine aspect of God, she is rather Goddess. Her Spirit is God’s Spirit. She creates, redeems, and possesses all knowledge. She is the principle of good order and government among all leaders and nations. She is the Torah. She is God. Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, wrote this about Her.

“There is in all visible things

an invisible fecundity,

a dimmed light,

a meek namelessness,

a hidden wholeness.

This mysterious Unity and Integrity

is Wisdom, the Mother of all…



            Obviously no image can fully capture the nature of the divine, male or female. Yet, I must tell you, that I liked Sophia a lot more than I liked Yahweh. She is just so positive. She doesn’t suffers fools gladly, don’t get me wrong, but She always seems to be in a good mood, which is more than you can say for Yahweh. She sees her role as friend-maker. What’s not to like? She actually delights in creation. The problem with humanity, according to Sophia, is not that we’re irredeemably bad. Rather, we’re foolish. We’ve forgotten who we are, lost our way, and have become arrogant. But Sophia she is willing to solve this problem. With food and wine, no less! She loves a banquet, a glass of merlot, a blazing fire, and then begins the wisdom teaching, for all who have ears to hear.

            But even more than this, I became convinced along with many other scholars that Jesus understood himself to be Her child – he was fundamentally a teacher of Sophia’s wisdom. She’s been suppressed for a couple of thousand years – the DaVinci Code got this much right – but when you read the Newer Testament through the lens of the Sophia tradition, it’s pretty clear that Jesus was taking up the work of Sophia, and the writers of the gospels along with Paul knew it. (Take a look at this hand-out.)

            Many scholars agree with Elizabeth Johnson, author of She Who Is, that “Jesus Christ is the human being Sophia became.”

            A male God has had His way in the last 4000 years or so in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I’d like to give Sophia a crack at cleaning up the mess we’re in. I just think that what we’re lacking is wisdom. We don’t know our story.   We have two stories to help us back to the heart of God: the story found in Scripture and the story of creation itself. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is ready, willing and able to teach us both.



Transformativa – Enacting Wisdom Upon the Earth

When we get the story right, it’s so much easier to change the way we live. Transformativa addresses the question how, then, shall we live upon the earth?

And more particularly, how then shall we be the church in an ecological age? Here’s Dostoyevsky’s advice on that:

Love all Creation,

The whole of it and every grain of sand

Love every leaf

Every ray of God’s light

Love the animals

Love the plants

Love everything

If you love everything

You will perceive

The divine mystery in things

And once you have perceived it

You will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly

More and more everyday

And you will at last come to love the whole world

With an abiding universal love

We need to fall back in love with creation, as the very embodiment of the divine. As we become re-enchanted, our attitude shifts from one of arrogant domination to humble reverence. And as all our wisdom literature tells us, awe is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom, Sophia, reveals herself as the intelligence at the heart of the cosmos, in every twig and blade of grass.

In her book, Biomimicry, Janine Benyus points out the irony of how we use “pond scum” as a metaphor for the lowest life form possible. Yet, our brightest scientists are not yet able to come even close to being able to figure out how pond scum converts solar energy into food. There is a species of cutter ant that has been making an antibiotic and carrying it around on their backs to protect them from disease for 50 million years. Humans have just “discovered” it. To fall in love with creation is to realize that it possesses an intelligence and creativity that may just be able to save us from destruction.

William McDonough is an eco-innovator. He’s an architectural engineer, but applies the principles of biomimicry – mimicking earth’s processes in our design, engineering, and the ways we organize our communities. He works with corporate clients bringing to each project one simple natural principle - waste equals food. Nature leaves no waste that isn’t food for the biosystem. He sees no reason why industry can’t follow the same principle. And he’s making it happen!

            Here’s my point. Contrary to what Richard Dawkins ,the biologist who wrote The God Delusion, and others are putting out there, there is a holy intelligence at the heart of the cosmos – her name is Wisdom and if we approach the earth and her creatures with humility She will reveal Herself to us and show us how to live with one another and with the other-than-human ones. She is the “hidden wholeness” at work from the Great Flaring Forth through to the formation of galaxies, supernovas, our solar system, and the great evolutionary march of life upon the planet earth.

            Can we make our Eucharistic liturgies Wisdom meals? I believe that this is what Jesus was doing when he called together people for a meal. Dom Crossan, New Testament scholar, points out that eating meals together was an intentional strategy that Jesus used for enacting the Kingdom of God. The meal was an enactment of right relations with God, self, neighbour and I would add, the earth. He got a reputation as a drunkard and a sinner, because of his penchant, like Sophia, for these wisdom meals. Can we incorporate into our Great Thanksgiving Prayer the Great Story of Creation as sacred revelation? Can we help our people to see that when they take the bread and the wine they are taking into their very beings, Wisdom Herself, as known in and through Jesus of Nazareth, who was anointed by Sophia to be the Christ? When we come with humility to the table, Sophia is delighted to receive us. She has an opening to do her work of helping us befriend each other, and the planet itself.

An ecological ethic must flow from a transformed identity – what St. Paul calls “the renewing of our minds”. When we get it that we don’t just live on the planet, we are manifestations of the planet, we will gain the psychic energy required for this Great Work. Furthermore the planet has an innate and holy intelligence – Sophia – that we can turn to for wisdom.

We don’t just exist within an enormous and ever-expanding cosmos; we are concentrated amalgams of this 14 billion year old universe. All the dynamics of the universe are gathered up in us. We are the self-reflective presence of the universe. When we get the story right, we will take our proper place in it, not as masters of the universe, but as members of the earth community.

The story of evolution is not a godless tale told by an idiot. It is the unfolding story of Spirit in the realm of space and time. St. Paul intuited “the whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” (Romans 8:19). Creation is waiting, in other words, for us to show up. Showing up is a big part what the churches mission needs to be about in the 21^st century. It is a fine and holy calling.