The Seer and the Seen
On first listening, the opening meditation on Dear Little Flower couldn’t be more different than our readings this morning. Yet if we look deeper, beneath the surface, there runs a life-giving thread. It is a link I am exploring personally so please bear with me as we dive in.
The lens through which we view the world affects our vision – what we see, how we see, and consequently our relationship with the world. There are many lenses we look through, some are obvious – some are so subtle we don’t notice them until others or life experience point them out. Religion, culture, language, race – to name a few are lenses that frame our understanding of who we are, what we see, what we value, what we call sacred.
A recent educational opportunity provided such an experience for me. I attended, via zoom, one of the VIU Elder College Saturday Speaker Series on the First Nations of Vancouver Island. The event I attended was titled: What Lies Behind the Treasure. The presenter was Haa’yuups from Port Alberni. The writeup read:
“Take a deeper look at the inspiration behind and beyond Pacific Northwest Coast Art. Explore what is behind the objects and belief systems at the roots of the ceremonies. A knowledge keeper, Haa'yuups portrays a view of the world where people see themselves as part of a whole.”
Haa’yuups did make some reference to the history of West Coast Native Art. However, he mainly focused on Western culture alienation from the indigenous world view of the interconnectedness of all beings, resulting in indigenous art being presented in isolation with no reference to this larger view. The labelling of art pieces in museums focuses on who donated the piece, not on the people who created the art, why they created it, nor what the art meant to them.
Through Haa’yuups’ talk I realized two things. First I had never really questioned how the presentation of indigenous art reflects our world view. Secondly, more deeply, how alienating Residential Schools truly were; children lost not only their language, culture, identity but also their inherent belief that all being is interconnect and related. He reflected on how the Truth and Reconciliation process was flawed because reconciliation means talk between two parties who respect each other. The dictionary also defines reconciliation as the action of making one view or belief compatible with another. My hope is that our western world view learns to respect the indigenous world view and in doing so we relearn in our Christian faith that all creation is connected. Christ came to redeem not just humans but all creation.
In our liturgical cycle we are coming to the end of proper time, the second last before Advent. The readings hint of end times, unrest, weariness, perseverance, and hope. Isaiah, through prophetic imagery and imagination prophesises a new vision, a new heaven, a new earth – where the wolf lies down with the lamb. A new understanding where all creation is reconciled in peace and harmony. We feel these tugs and feelings today. The Climate Crisis accentuates our need for a new way of being, a cultural shift in our relationship to the earth, to human and non-human beings, a shift in our values. We are living in an era of transition, a hinge point in history:
Some of the terminology being used is:
• the sixth extinction, the anthropocentric period where humans see themselves as the central element of the universe
• the Great Transition: The world is in a period of great transition: the end of this present era and beginning of the next. This is no mere turning of the calendar. It is an epochal change of biblical proportions. Nearly everyone can sense it to one degree or another. The world is disturbed. The planet is groaning.
• The Great Turning: the essential adventure of our time: a shift from the industrial growth society to a life -sustaining civilization requiring a profound shift in our perception of reality—and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive awareness and spiritual awakening.
• The Great Work: Thomas Berry - to understand that we are all depend on one another, nothing thrives unless we all thrive.
The Climate Change Crisis is calling us to change how we look through the lens of our western culture, our faith. It is bigger than any one particular issue, it under girts all the issues of our times: racism, colonialism, environmental, theological, cultural, economic.
In our meditation of the little flower the seer asks the flower: What would you have me know? Did you notice the transition from the seer thanking the flower for being what it was, thanking the flower for the delight it is, for the joy it gives the seer to and only then the awareness to ask the question: What would you have me know? What can I learn from you? Acknowledgement of life, thanking, respecting, learning. It is a lesson for all engagement in life, for the basis of creating relationship and reconciliation.
Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, a prolific writer and speaker, writes: “we look for Spirit in every stone and blade of grass, in everything. We are part of something so much larger, so much grander. God’s grace abounds. At the centre he encourages students in the Franciscan mystical practice of respectful gazing:
“The word “respect” means “to look at a second time”: Re-speculate. Re-spect. Our first gaze at anything is always utilitarian, and it almost totally takes over after a while. We tend to think, “What’s in it for me? What can I get out of it? How can I make money from it? Does this make me look good? Will this give me pleasure?” If we don't recognize the narrowness and the emptiness of that gaze, it will keep us forever at the center of a very small world. Mystics like St. Francis see an equivalence between the seer and the seen. They grant respect to all that is outside of themselves. They allow it to speak. “
At one of the Franciscan conferences, Fr. Richard said, ‘we sent some of the attendees down to the Rio Grande. We said, “We want you to find one particular object, not the whole landscape, but one leaf, one twig, one lizard, and grant it respect. Talk to it.” And then, even more daringly, in that state of respect, we asked them to let it talk back. I’m sure that was difficult for educated people. They were probably afraid someone would see them or hear them.’
This experience brought people to tears as they finally discovered the “univocity of being,” and the power of respect. Univocity of being is the idea that words describing the properties of God mean the same thing as when they apply to people or things. It is associated with the doctrines of the Scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus. Scotus believed we could speak “with one voice” (univocity) of the being of waters, plants, animals, humans, angels, and God. God is One (Deuteronomy 6:4), and thus reality is also one (Ephesians 4:3–5). All participate in The Story of Being.
Roar tells us it has to begin from our side. If we maintain our radical egocentricity, then it’s all about us—what we like, what we want, what we think is important. When we can grant respect to seemingly unimportant things, little things, particular things, when we find ourselves giving thanks for one little violet, when we can say, “I’ll bet no human eye will ever look at you except me. And I want to thank God for you, and I want to thank you for simply being you and for allowing me to delight in your purple color” or whatever it might be. Suddenly, our world rearranges because when we can grant respect to one thing, that respect universalizes to all things.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at State University of New York College, member of the Potawatomi Nation, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass (2014) helps people see from an indigenous perspective that all of nature is imbued with being, with personhood, and deserves respect. In Speaking of Nature: Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world, she reflects on the Potawatomi world view:
“Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as we are all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t.” She writes, “ I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees……It’s no wonder that our language was forbidden. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of western thinking----that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those who my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources…
Ecopsychologists have suggested that our conceptions of self as inherently separate from the natural world have negative outcomes on the wellbeing of humans and ecosystems. Perhaps these words [kin, ki] can be medicine for them both so that every time we speak of the living world, we breathe out respect and inhale kinship, turning the very atmosphere into a medium of relatedness.” [Orion 2017]
Was our Christian theology always so dethatched from the natural world? Karen Armstrong, in her latest book Sacred Nature, points to the late Middle Ages when theologians in Oxford, Bologna, and Paris began devising a new theology that separated God and nature. Our task now she writes is to redeem the natural world. “We should learn to align ourselves with it emotionally and realise our affinity with and utter dependency upon it. We must make a deliberate effort to look beneath the surface of nature and experience sacrality for ourselves…we must learn to see nature more intimately, and this requires imagination…but we cannot confine our love to the natural world: it must be extended to our fellow human beings.”
God the Seer, the creator, sees the undeniable value of all creatures, rejoices and delights in all creation. God loves each being for what it is. Theological reflection should never merely focus on God and human souls, but attend to God, humans, and the created universe. In the ecological motif, the created world is beloved by God for its own sake, not merely as a stage for human drama. We are the seen and the seer. Debra Rienstra writes in her book Refugia Faith, “our task now, as people who claim the Christian faith, is to draw on the resources we have, lean into the Scripture’s ecological motif, and listen harder to those voices who can help us repair our alienation and gain anew a humble sense of our interconnectedness, with each other and with the more-than-human world.”