if you are “sacred” then… (pt2)
As I was saying…We consider our lives to be sacred, and we rebel at the thought that we are property.
Accepting these truths, we can arrive at the conclusion that nature is sacred without having to look backwards in history; and this is how.
Theology: Our bodies, and everything human beings have ever known, felt and created, are natural; from a purely theological perspective, we can have no spirit, much less any awareness of spirit except in the context that we are in, as living, mortal, embodied beings. Another way of stating the same theological fact: without physical birth, there can be no spiritual rebirth; for, without biological life, there is no life, spiritual or otherwise, knowable or experience-able by us. Life is sacred, it has to be, because without it, nothing “human”—including religion and our passage through the cosmos—is.
Science: ecology reports that our bodies are not isolated from the environment; our bodies are the environment. From the minerals and chemicals that make up our flesh, to the bacteria that live inside our bodies cooperatively assisting our vital functions, to the other bodies (ie, food) we ingest, to the water that starts in clouds and ends up being 60% of who we are, to the air that is the sky that we can’t stop drawing into ourselves and expelling back into the sky, to the absolute dependence we have on the sun and the winds and the currents to produce a climate that our body can thrive in, we are the environment. It is not a background. It is us. Anything we have done to separate ourselves from it seems to cause illness, and cannot last; the use of anti-bacterial lotions increases the virulence of the targeted bacteria, for goodness sake!
Economy: reviewing the history of our industrial capitalist economy, we find such disparate writers as Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreeing on one principle. Economies are invented to serve and benefit those that invent them. Our economy was invented around 1776, when Smith published On the Wealth of Nations, James Watts patented the steam engine, and our Declaration if Independence was signed. That wasn’t very long ago (8 generations), but today we are locked into industrial capitalism the same way the passengers on the Titanic were stuck on that ship. You might think that, even if our economy isn’t the best, at least we are not slaves. However, by a historical accretion of myriad laws and practices, we are “property” of the state (and the state cannot be disentangled from the economy). The most obvious proofs of this are: we have social security #s, must pay taxes, and are not permitted to resist arrest, even if we think we are being arrested unjustly. By being a “citizen” we permit the state/economy to possess us.
As I said earlier, we rebel against the thought that we are “property”—first because our national history, at least our popular version of it, tells us that we are “free.” That’s what the Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars were (supposed to have been) fought for! Secondly, our theologies and our science grate against the idea that we are “property.”
I wish I could say you and I aren’t “property,” but when it comes to being a citizen of the USA, we are.
At the same time, I assure you; you aren’t “property.” Property is legal fiction, necessary as the keystone principle of the USA’s Constitution, and of industrial capitalism, but a fiction nevertheless. It is as real as “real estate.”
Have you ever noticed that creatures unversed in the ways of the Constitution, you know, birds and butterflies and squirrels and cats and dogs, don’t recognize “property boundaries”? The bios does not recognize the constructions of the human mind. It is one of the fatal flaws of our culture that we have created an economy that is predicated on idea that bios obeys our commands, and correlatively that nature can be dominated and controlled.
We live in double world, one invented by us that is sometimes sustainable for a short period of geological time, and one actual that our invented world depends on always for everything. I think here of this wise passage from Matthew:
In the world of money, nature is not sacred; it is property. In the world of money, we are property, and we treat ourselves and others as such—very meanly. In the world of money, it is claimed as dogma that US citizens have achieved “highest standard of living ever known,” In the world of money, the Oil Crusades are a necessary undertaking, absolutely vital to “national security.”
In the other world that predates, is and post-dates ours, you are not property; you are the consummation of ineffable cosmic events that together are described under the titles of religion and science. In this world not of money, this world of the great parents, you are sacred.
And you know it. Your life is a miracle, a blessed event, a cause for great joy and celebration; and as your life is, so are all our lives; and as all our lives are sustained and dependent upon nature, so is nature sacred.
The key to adapting to the post-cheap-oil era is this attitude, a way of viewing and valuing ourselves that can at this point barely be articulated, and that requires many new words and inventions.
Prepare yourself, for the government is not going to.
Consider yourself sacred, and your world and your ways will change—
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