THE ECOZOIC, ULTIMATE COMMUNION, AND THE SPIRIT OF AN AGE
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk now 94 years old, says that mysticism is the experience of ultimate communion—the experience that hidden behind the apparent brokenness of life there is something that connects everything in goodness. This experience comes to us and goes. It is negated in our everyday experience, and then it comes again. Mysticism is the experience of the unseen order of things.[1]
We can be more or less open to mystical experiences. They are not something we can seek after and find, rather they come to us unexpectedly. Faith is the conviction that these experiences reveal the truth about life despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The experience of the ecozoic is a mystical experience—an experience of ultimate communion. We who have experienced it cannot give exact words to it. The questions arise whether the ecozoic is just one of many kinds of contemporary mystical experiences or whether it has a special meaning for our time.
The word ecozoic was coined by Thomas Berry and he and others around him articulated its meaning.[2] There have been other expressions of the meaning of ecozoic without using the word, such as in the poems of Mary Oliver; yet I think Berry’s version is of great importance. He said that the ecozoic is a new revelation of spirit for our time. And he said it is more than a revelation of a private experience; it is a revelation of what we might understand as the potentially transformative spiritual base of an ecological age for an emerging planetary civilization.
While the sense of ultimate communion in the ecozoic is akin to the mystical experiences described in classical humanistic and religious traditions and in Indigenous traditions, the ecozoic experience is not the same as those. A new spiritual awakening occurs when it arises in the midst of a historical period and speaks to the issues of that time. There are many accounts of these awakenings and the ecozoic has the potential to give rise to, or is already giving rise to, such an awakening. The revelation of the ecozoic arises from the strengths of our present urban, scientific, secular, industrial, economic, globalized age, such as from the understandings given by science, cultural anthropology, the history of religions, cultural and civilizational history, the struggles for social justice and freedom from oppression, and renewed openness to communion and intimacy with the more-than-human world. And the revelation of the ecozoic addresses the divisions, devastations, and suicidal, ecocidal, and colonial inclinations of the current age.
A new civilization, that is to say a new mode of human presence on Earth, is grounded in a spiritual understanding that gives life to the new civilization. The spirit of a civilization is a sense of ultimate communion as described above; and it is also a vision of the beloved community that is possible by reason of this communion. The spirit, thus, is both a sense of the sacred and a zest for the possibilities of the future. In the latter sense, this spirit is an attunement to and an evocation of new realities and new possibilities.
The vision of the beloved community for the ecozoic is that of Earth community. The ecozoic is a call and guide to moving from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism and in the broadest sense to cosmocentrism—a new understanding of the role of the human in the Earth community and the cosmos. It is a vision of reciprocity, sharing, kinship, communion, diversity, and rich subjectivity of humans and other-kind.
The ecozoic is something beyond the word ecozoic itself. If the ecozoic is a new revelation for our time, it is to some degree shared universally in contemporary experience whether identified by the word ecozoic or not. We who understand the word use it to remind ourselves to be open to its manifestations and remember its importance.
In terms of the meaning of the ecozoic for our time, it has much in common with what the Dao has meant for the Chinese. The Dao (or Tao, sometimes translated into English as the “way”) is not a name for a thing but for “the underlying natural order of the universe whose ultimate essence is difficult to [describe] due to it being non-conceptual yet evident in one’s being of aliveness. The [Dao]is ‘eternally nameless’ . . . to be distinguished from its manifestation in countless named things.”[3] While the Dao is one, it is also proper to say that the Dao is the 10,000 things. The Dao is both timeless and historical. It is the originator of all things and it is the Mother of all things. To be effective is to follow the Dao.
Similarly, the ecozoic points to the underlying natural order of things, and it is also the 10,000 named things that manifest this order. As did the Dao for the Chinese, the ecozoic has a civilizational imperative and calls for a new order of things. The ecozoic has meaning for all of the economic, political, and cultural processes of humans.
One aspect of the ecozoic is that we are, as Bruno Latour would say, Earthbound (we have nowhere else to live than Earth), and another is that we are, as Thomas Berry would say, Earthlings (we are born of Earth and its vital and spiritual processes and are one with them). Humans are awakening to these awarenesses in a postmodern way. Modernity gave us a dead Earth of matter (objects) in motion to be manipulated for human benefit. The ecozoic gives us the scientific, technical, and social heritage of modernity but with an awareness of the Earth as being alive, interrelated, and full of diversity and subjectivity. Modernity was a culture of death to overcome the hardships of Earthly life. The ecozoic is a culture of life in celebration of the gifts of existence.
There is, it would seem, no one particular religious or civilizational heritage that can bring into being the new ecological planetary civilization. Only an awakening to the grandeur of existence and the precarious, preciousness of our living Earth can do this. Awakening to the vision of the beloved community as Earth community calls us to realize the possibility of ecological civilization not just once but over and over again.
Today people speak approvingly of being woke, which means being alert to injustice in society, especially being alert to racism. Being woke in the ecozoic sense extends being woke to being alert to injustice in the Earth community, especially to being alert to speciesism (anthropocentrism). We must become integral with the Earth community and with the human community as a part of that larger community. Our human future depends on this. The future of all life on Earth depends on this.
In conclusion, the ecozoic is the postmodern revelation for our time. It can be expressed in 10,000 ways . . . indeed it is the 10,000 ways and the 10,000 things and the 10,000 relationships and dynamics.
It is beautiful—it is the sense of ultimate communion.
[1] Brother David also says that mystical experience, spiritual experience, and peak experience all essentially have the same meaning. They may be experienced through religion, yet they occur in many other ways as well.
[2] See, for example, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, “The Ecozoic Era,” in The Universe Story (1992), 241-61. Swimme and Berry give a mythic vision of a coming period of mutually enhancing relations among humans and the larger Earth Community. This article describes the ecozoic as a mystical experience of the ultimate communion of things. This can be thought of as experience of the possibilities of the coming Ecozoic era prior to its realization.
[3] Wikipedia contributors, “Tao,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tao&oldid=956125894 (accessed July 26, 2020)