INTRODUCTION:
CELEBRATING PASSIONATE VOICES FOR THE EARTH
--SPEAKERS/ACTIVIST/SONGWRITERS/POETS--
AND
THE SACREDNESS* OF ALL LIFE

"Living ever more intensely and passionately in an ever more intense world... 'The desire for an other life is that life already'."-Raoul Vaneigem

"We mostly are scribes maintaining the order of the day. We mostly are appreciated by and paid for by people who like it the way it is, who do not sense our exile and resist discerning it, who do not yearn for a home coming because we have fooled ourselves into thinking this present arrangement is our home".
-Walter Brueggemann

"There is no inner world without the outer world."-Thomas Berry ..."The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap." -Novalis"

...today's great crisis is not economic, political or religious, but a crisis of affect, of the capacity to feel a connection with others...Our mission is to celebrate the greatness of Creation and connect it again to the Core where it came from and to where it will go."-Leonardo Boff

"In our totality we are born of the Earth. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived... If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves"-Thomas Berry

"We seek a renewed stirring of love for the earth. We plead that what we are capable of doing to it is often what we ought not to do. We urge that all people now determine that an untrammeled wildness shall remain here to testify that this generation had love for the next. We would celebrate a new renaissance. The old one found a way to exploit. The new one has discovered the Earth's limits. Knowing them, we may learn anew what compassion and beauty are, and pause to listen to the Earth's music." -DAVID BROWER"
  (About Picture)

...the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious...More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one." -LYNN WHITE

"...scientific analysis points, curiously, toward the need for a quasi-religious transformation of contemporary cultures."- PAUL EHRLICH

"The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning". -MERCEA ELIADE

"The global warming debate isn't really about science or economics at all. It's actually a question of theology.-RANDALL AMSTER, J.D, Ph.D.

“Change won’t come without religions because they are the touchstone of people’s deepest motivations,” - LAWRENCE SULLIVAN

[We are in a] "theological crisis...We have listened to a false gospel that we continue to live out in our daily habits—a gospel that proclaims that God cares for the salvation of humans only and that our human calling is to exploit Earth for our own ends alone. This false gospel still finds its proud preachers and continues to capture its adherents among emboldened political leaders and policy makers."--NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES Theological Statement on the Environment (2005) --Co-Signers and Drafters: BILL Mc KIBBEN, JOHN COBB, SALLIE Mc FAGUE...

"If we had a different feeling toward nature, we would have different feelings for the wholeness and holi-ness of life. Not having this contributes to our loss of everything sacramental--because if the whole universe is not seen sacramentally, the partial sacraments die off." -PAUL TILLICH

"If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as out side and against things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefor not entitled to moral or ethical consideration...The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks".-GREGORY BATESON

"This breakaway from the mythic life which linked our species to the natural world, began when the early Hebrews rejected the nature/process stories and rites of their pagan contemporaries for the myth of a single god who, outside the world, reached into his creation, willfully deranging its rhythms, acting arbitrarily, making life a kind of novel, a history". -PAUL SHEPARD

"European civilization's neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist beyond, or outside of, the bodily world- some historians and philosophers have concluded that the Jewish and Christian traditions with there other- worldly God are primarily responsible for civilizations negligent attitude towards the environing earth... Along line of recent philosophers, stretching from Friedrich Nietzche down to the present, have attempted to demonstrate that Plato's philosophical derogation of the sensible and changing forms of the world--his claim that these were mere simulacra *of the eternal and pure ideas existing in a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world-- contributed profoundly to civilizations distrust of bodily and sensorial experience, and to our consequent estrangement from earthly world around us". [*a shadowy likeness; deceptive substitute.] -David Abram

"There is a sense in which a pre-digested theory of god is an impertinence. It is an enterprise that has done far more harm than good— a kind of high-end, high-status tribalism. Strictly, primordial, consequent, willing, history-making, world crushing, and self-involuted gods do prevail in nature, but I suggest that they do so in ways that would disappoint many who seek some serious ontological thickness for these conceptions. Yet an aesthetic appreciation of, say, protean goddesses and gods can enhance the imaginative life, as Santayana reminds us. Who is to say? A more pervasive impertinence, as I have noted, is to aggressively state what can or cannot be in nature, or what is genuinely knowable and what not. Query and wonder serve us well and keep us from those power-driven concrescences that sadly continue to drive the many philosophical tribes. An ecstatic naturalist will, where humanly possible, move past and through any tribalism that blocks access to those uncountable prospects that open up endlessly throughout the infinite orders of the world and that can, sometimes, open out on a vista where one can even look down, yes, with fear and trembling, into the workshop of the potencies."-Richard S. Corrington's ecstatic naturalism

"If there is one truth more than any other, which life and thought have made us admit, against our prejudices, and even against our will, it is that there is little hope of saving civilization or religion except by the return of contemplatives to the land." -VINCIENT McNABB, O.P.

"A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself." -EDWARD ABBEY

"It is time to embrace the cosmic and planetary context within which our life story and the story of all life unfolds. We belong to a reality greater than ourselves, and it is within that enlarged context that we will rediscover the benign and generic mystery within which everything is endowed with purpose and meaning".-DIARMUID O' MURCHU

"We mostly are scribes maintaining the order of the day. We mostly are appreciated by and paid for by people who like it the way it is, who do not sense our exile and resist discerning it, who do not yearn for a home coming because we have fooled ourselves into thinking this present arrangement is our home". -WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

"Over one man necessity stands in the shape of his passions, over another as the habit of hearing and obeying, over a third as a logical conscience, over a fourth as caprice and a mischievous pleasure in escapades. These four will, however, seek the freedom of their will precisely where each of them is most firmly fettered: it is as if the silkworm sought the freedom of its will in spinning. How does this happen? Evidently because each considers himself most free where his feeling of living is greatest". - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“We live in a world structured by illegitimate hierarchies and based on a domination/subordination dynamic. For those of us with unearned privilege, the rewards for ignoring this conclusion are whatever status and money we can squeeze out of the system, while the cost of capitulation to power is a surrender of some essential part of our humanity...”-ROBERT JENSEN

"...[E]volution in the Paleolithic age meant the development of creativity—the distinctive trait of the human species...But during the Neolithic, the osmotic relationship to nature loosened progressively, as intensive agriculture became based on looting and the exploitation of natural resources. It was also then that religion surfaced as an institution, society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began, of contempt for women, and of priests and kings with their stream of wars, destitution, and violence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival, jouissance to the animal predation that the appropriation economy confiscates, transcends, and spiritualizes. In this sense market civilization is indeed a regression in which technical progress supersedes human progress"-RAOUL VANEIGEM

"Perhaps a new revelatory experience is taking place, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the earth process. Humanity has not participated in such a vision since shamanic times, but in such a renewal lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire planet...we must reach back to where our genetic coding connects with the species codings of the entire earth community. Only then can we overcome the limitations of the anthropocentrism that binds us".-THOMAS BERRY

"This scientific view [Gaia] is perfectly consistent with seeing nature as conscious and intelligent, in fact, suggests that strongly. Alternatively, we can choose to identify all of self-creating nature with the concept of Creator or God, thus ending the split between science and religion......a Hopi Elder, tells us that 'We are the Ones we have been waiting for.' We -- not some imagined rescuing Savior -- are the only ones who can turn disaster into opportunity; we are the ones who can understand our interconnectedness in the great web of life and our power to honor it, treat it as sacred, cease damaging it, restore it. Will we understand that in time?."-ELISABETH SAHTOURIS (Earthdance, p57)

"This is why I think animism doesn't appeal to most people. They want to be saved or enlightened. Religion is self centered, not relationship centered. In the Western world religion has come to mean personal growth. Not worshipping the Gods, not honoring the others we share the world with, not bowing in gratitude....When you know that you belong to the land - not some fantasy landscape but land you actually live within - alienation and isolation leave you. The world is no longer a trap of temptations to be punished in life after life till you "get it right" nor is it a battlefield of good versus evil, where you dodge landmines until you're saved and get to Heaven, never to return".-MARCUS R. McCOY (BIOREGIONAL ANIMISM)

"The break with patriarchal values is final. We are moving toward the end of the exploitation of nature, of work, of trade, of predation, of separation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt, of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizing of money, of power, of hierarchy, of contempt for and fear of women, of the misleading of children, of intellectual dominion, of military and police despotism, of religions, of ideologies, of repression and the deadly resolutions of psychic tensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life. We have to reground ourselves in order to rebuild—on human foundations—a world that has been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult of the commodity."-RAUOL VANEIGEM

"The divine prevails as an order within nature—the question always is, in what respects, in what ways, and in which modalities? Every discipline, should it have an interest, gets a crack at god. That being so, we can let go of Napoleonic ideas like: only cognitive psychology can get at the real so-called god; or only the self-disclosive history of religions can trace the (evolving?) contour of god; or only spirit-filled group ecstasies can, in a way, be god; or only an existential analytic can disclose the thrown-clearing of the anxious self as it passes from the shock of non-being into the elusive light of Being; or only a psychoanalytic analysis of primary and secondary narcissism, the childhood omnipotence of thought (Freud’s “explanation” for telepathy), and the oceanic feeling of the maternal (Freud via Kristeva but both surpassed by Otto Rank), or only a publicly verified born-again experience (James’s twice born) has any chance at getting at the majesty of god. Actually, there is nothing wrong with this tower of Babel, for how else could nature and the “divine” complex even “hope” to be rendered available to personal and communal query?"-Robert S. Corrington

THE DIVINE INTELLIGENCE OF NATURE AND IT'S COUNSEL OF WISDOM

"It is time to embrace the cosmic and planetary context within which our life story and the story of all life unfolds. We belong to a reality greater than ourselves, and it is within that enlarged context that we will rediscover the benign and generic mystery within which everything is endowed with purpose and meaning".-DIARMUID O' MURCHU

"Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself."-MARTIN BUBER

"...every living creature is a word of God and a book about God."–MEISTER ECKHART

"It is not God who will save us, it is we who will save God--by battling by creating and by transmuting matter into spirit". -Nikos Kazantzakis

Yes! We are Created in the Image of God, we have been "thought up" by Creation...We are ..."The Dream of the Earth" (THOMAS BERRY). To be in the World is to be within the infinite Mind of God : "Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself".-(MARTIN BUBER)

" THE ECSTATIC MOMENT: NATURE NATURING / BEING BECOMING "

"Nature naturing" represents the vastness of nature which gives birth to "nature natured" (i.e. the multiple orders and complexes of the world). Nature naturing is not only the origin of everything else, but a destination as well, a “not-yet” (Heidegger). The ontological difference between the two dimensions of nature is, for ecstatic naturalism, held open by an abyss, which a person must confront in order to gain meaning of the world....[N]aturalism becomes ecstatic when it courageously and oftimes joyously becomes open to the self-othering potencies emergent from nature naturing (the underconscious of nature).-Robert S. Corrington-ECSTATIC NATURALISM

EarthHeart.org
Was Born on Christmas Eve 2009
IN MEMORY OF: Maureen Eve (1947-1980) and Emily Eva Cudak (1929-1968)

©EarthHeart.org / EarthSongSanctuary.org           Updated: April 30, 2012 10:40 AM