Sophiawakens for July 10, 2023

Carving in Egyptian Temple

If we want to understand the deep roots of our present environmental and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit, the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and shamanic experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspect of the God-head and the Divine Ground…. The monotheism of the three Patriarchal religions has led to the situation today where the Earth is no longer viewed as sacred and we are confronted with the catastrophic effects of the loss of the Divine Feminine. (Anne Baring, pioneer of the Divine Feminine in our time, speaking on “Madonna Rises”, Ubiquity University, ZOOM program, August, 2020.)

Listening to this morning’s news on CBC Radio, Canada’s National Broadcaster, two stories caught my ear. The first was a report on the ice melting at a speeded-up rate in Antarctica, with a reference to the past month as the hottest June ever recorded “on Planet Earth”. My spirits rose. This was the first weather-related event I’ve ever heard spoken about as affecting our entire home planet. Have we finally understood we all share only one fragile, achingly beautiful, planetary home? That momentary euphoria was quickly replaced by news of yet another serious threat to the planet. With the justification of creating new technologies to offset planetary warming, mining companies are seeking freedom to pierce the deep seabed of the Pacific Ocean to access nickel and other minerals …

My body responded with a visceral knowing that this is wrong…

As out of control forest fires continue to ravage vast hectares of Canada’s forests, threatening air quality across North America, as rain creates flooding in the US East Coast putting nine million people under flood alert, we shake our heads and blame “Climate change.” Yet the “deep roots” that Anne Baring spoke of need to be understood if we are to survive as a species on Planet Earth. An Indigenous voice I heard on CBC Radio spoke of the real cause of the forest fire crisis in BC as a result of the forestry practices of “Clear cutting”….. Has no one warned us of this looming catastrophe?

Two years ago, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that we are sleepwalking our way into the destruction of our planet. For years David Suzuki on “The Nature of Things” has been telling us that what we do to our planet we do to ourselves. As early as 1988, eco-theologian Thomas Berry wrote: “Through human presence the forests of the earth are destroyed, fertile soils becomes toxic, and then wash away in the rain or blow away in the wind. Mountains of human-derived waste grow ever higher. Wetlands are filled in. Each year approximately ten thousand species disappear forever.”

Berry was clear that what was needed was “not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or some modification in our system of social or economic controls” but something far greater: “a radical change in our mode of consciousness. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human.” Berry’s words pierce our bubble of hope in new technologies to solve our problems: “(W)e are just emerging from a technological entrancement. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase.”

Winter Solstice at Newgrange , Ireland

Though we imagine humanity in our time to be vastly superior to earlier cultures, Berry noted, “Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to the celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement.” In their celebrations of the seasons, of the earth’s natural rhythms, in creating spiritual centers “where the meeting of the divine, the natural and the human could take place”, our ancestors showed us how to live in partnership with our planet, not as its enemies and despoilers.

“What we need, what we are ultimately groping toward, is the sensitivity required to understand and respond to the psychic energies deep in the very structure of reality itself…This is the ultimate lesson in physics, biology, and all the sciences, as it is the ultimate wisdom of tribal peoples and the fundamental teaching of the great civilizations.”

Berry advised that we need to maintain “our intimate presence to the functioning of the earth community and to the emergent processes of the universe itself…. (t)he present situation is so extreme that we need to get beyond our existing cultural formation, back to the primary tendencies of our nature itself…”

Ecotheologian Thomas Berry

Thomas Berry, who died in 2009, did not leave us without hope: “(W) e are not left simply to our own rational contrivances. We are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us through the spontaneities within our own beings….the universe is revealing itself to us in a special manner just now. Also the planet Earth and the life communities of the earth are speaking to us through the deepest elements of our nature.” (quotes from Thomas Berry in The Dream of the Earth: Our Way to the Future, Sierra Club, 1988, contained in the Foreword to The Dreamer of the Earth, Inner Traditions, Rochester Vermont, 2011, edited by Ervin Laszlo and Allan Combs)

Elinor Gadon, in her book, The Once and Future Goddess, as Anne Baring would later do, places at the heart of our present ecological crisis the loss of the wisdom of earlier cultures. In her closing chapter, “The Promise of the Goddess: The Healing of our Culture” Gadon writes: “The taming of the Goddess under patriarchy led to the gradual erosion of sexuality, the cyclical regenerative powers of the cosmos…. The promised healing is that in honoring all that lives –women, the earth, its manifold creatures—we will no longer need to control, oppress, despoil our planet, to make war.

“We cannot—would not—wish to return to some golden prehistoric age, but in reclaiming our lost heritage we can build upon the values encoded in the prehistoric survivals. We do not have to look outside ourselves, outside our planet. What is needed is not new discoveries or technologies—only the willingness to change, to open up our hearts and honor what we already are.” (The Once and Future Goddess by Elinor Gadon, Harper Collins, New York, 1989)