Help us Dream a New Dream

OK, I’ll get off my theological jag, but one last thing. When Gerald Barney of the Millennium Institute of Arlington Virginia addressed the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, he issued the deepest challenge to religious leaders that I have yet heard: “We need you to help us acknowledge that our old dream has failed. We need you to help us dream a new dream – a dream that is not only true to ancient traditions, but also true to the revelations emerging from what we are learning about the Earth” (quoted in Ecotherapy: healing ourselves, healing the Earth, by Howard Clinebell, Augsburg Fortress, 1996, found in Haworth Press edition, p. 98). In essence, Barney is saying that insofar as religion has ever been successful at serving humanity, it is now clearly, not.

Although Barney gave a blanket critique aimed at the bulk of faith-based religious organizations, it is likely a gesture of exasperation. He evidenced this ‘failure’ by citing the multitude of faith-based interreligious hatred-fed wars, the faith groups that oppress women, anthropocentricism, many faiths’ ‘otherworldly’ focus, birth control opposition, and the rigid preservation of ancient traditions that thwarts healthy critique and vital change. “Many” he says, “Feel our faith traditions have become a very central part of the human problem.” (ibid.)

The reason for the crisis of religious failure is, at the root, alienation from the Earth and our “awareness of our organic connectedness with the planet’s marvelous network of living inspirited things.” (ibid, p. 100) Moreover, “Judaism and Christianity, by seeking to destroy ‘pagan’ animism and shamanism, weakened their ties with the earth and helped open the door to exploitation of nature by industrial society with indifference justified by humans’ species arrogance.’ (ibid.).

Even within the community of theologians, there is a ‘gnawing away’ and a growing challenge to some of our largely unchallenged religious dogma. This is possibly taking substantive bites from some of the destructive and toxic practices that appear so frequently in religions, especially where religion “maintain(s) magical rescue fantasies of being saved from the brink of the ecological abyss by God, or perhaps rescued by the power and omniscience of religious or political leaders onto whom godlike expectations are projected.” (ibid)

Here is a quick jibe at the ‘savior man/god’ cults that appeared in the centuries just preceding the birth of Christ. As history has it, there were a number of cults during those several-BC centuries that provided the readiness for Jesus’ success. A bedrock of thoughts, hopes and yearnings was already in place, such that this particular itinerant and well-educated rabbi was prepared to understand his role in the way he did. Moreover, he lived amidst a social climate that was also ready to accept and quickly spread the hope of a Christ savior-figure.

However, with a ‘true’ faith, the groundwork was thus also laid for the tragic decimation of the many natural, local nature and land-spirit indigenous spiritualities that lay in Christianity’s path.

There is a problem inherent in faith-based religious understanding. Faith is the maintenance of belief with no need for evidence, or even in spite of contradictory evidence. It is somewhat wishful to base religious belief on faith. It is kind of like saying, ‘it is true because I believe it is true.’ To base a spirituality on something other than faith means that we have to look closely at the world, and from what is right there in front of us, derive our spiritual understanding. Barney (above) is taking faith-based religions to task in light of the awareness of the incongruity of certain religious beliefs with the nature of the Earth as we are seeing it.

Faith doesn’t need observation. Just belief.

As opposed to a faith-based spirituality, we need a real-time, observer-based one. Look into the microcosm. Extend our vision as far as we can see into the universe. Look at the world around us. From these things, draw forth what is spiritual.

This is not simply a theological discussion. Our current ‘disconnect’ between some widespread religions and the health of the Earth and humanity, has generated an “urgent need to help generate a new earth-saving guiding vision or ethic for society. In retrospect, history may show that this re-visioning was the most vital single contribution of religious people of all faith groups in the global ecojustice crisis.” (ibid, p. 99)

That’s why we’re here, I think. That, at least in part, is what possibly draws many of us to our work in helping ourselves and others, reconnect with our Earth. I think its time to dream a new dream.