Dialogue can open us to a deeper collective inquiry into our own thinking processes and the nature of thought itself. It can also open us to our own inner wisdom as we inquire together into the heart of what matters to us.
Supporting One Another as We Learn to Foster New Relationships with Our Living Earth and Humankind
This portion of this Reader is on Ecozoic Wisdom Circles. There is a hymn by Harry Emerson Fosdick written in 1930 called “God of Grace and God of Glory.” The hymn is a prayer in which people pray for wisdom and courage. Here are words from the hymn that I often recall:
The other day I went for a walk with a friend in my town of fifty in Montana. “I’ve got to be back in an hour,” she said. “I’ve got bread rising.” That simple comment struck me. Time. How different it is when measured by the rising of bread. Organic time. When the soil is ready for planting or when it is time to harvest. Calving time. Sheep shearing time.
The biggest threat Gaia faces today is the seemingly unlimited power of corporations. Literally every challenge we face—from addressing and mitigating climate change to the degradation of ecosystems, and overdevelopment resulting in losses of open space, agricultural land, and forests—is connected to corporations that have more money and legal power than citizens.
I met Thomas Berry for the first time in the 1980s at a conference at the Chinook Learning Community on Whidbey Island in Washington State (now the Whidbey Institute). It was my first trip outside of New England and I had just started publishing my newsletter, Catalyst, which focused on community-based economics. My passion ultimately took me deeper into what I called Gaian Economics, and meeting Thomas played a key role in the evolution of my work.
“The human and the natural world will go into the future together or both will perish on the way!” This is the first sentence spoken by Thomas Berry during our novitiate training with the Passionist community.
Precious memories of childhood activities on our Iowa farm fill my inner storehouse: running through dawn’s dew-laden grasses, my hands in the black soil making mud pies in the grove, long hours of planting, weeding, and gathering produce in our vast garden, the chores of feeding oats to the chickens and tossing bundles of hay from the barn loft to the hungry cattle waiting below, summer evenings when I joined my seven siblings for hours of countless games before dark—a joyful time after the day’s work was done—nighthawks swooping above our heads and owls hooting their first hellos. I did not need religious language to assure me that I lived among a sacred community. I trusted my kinship with nature and did not need words to express that sacred rapport.
The circumstances and consequences of my interactions with Thomas Berry are so improbable that I hesitate to confine them to words. Recounting them to friends and colleagues—and now to readers unknown—is daunting. My attempt to do so here is not only in honor of the endearingly generous person we have been privileged to know and learn from, but also in service to that which he eloquently calls into shared awareness.
Thomas Berry has influenced so many of us in myriad ways. In my own life, Berry’s work has inspired my thinking about an “integral water ethic,” by which I mean the practice of cultivating love and compassion for water and learning to see water as a loving and compassionate member of the Earth community who nourishes all beings.
How difficult it was to bring myself to task and write just a glimpse of my connection to the work of Thomas Berry! It kept expanding and expanding! This “bit of verse” he wrote says it best for me.
In the mid-1980s a friend invited me to go to a lecture on a Saturday afternoon at a place called the Riverdale Center for Religious Research, which had been founded by Thomas Berry. I had not heard of it. We found our way north of Manhattan up to the Center high up on the bank of the Hudson River. We went several times to the monthly Saturday afternoon events that were held there. I only superficially understood what Thomas Berry was saying in those lectures, but I learned the name Brian Swimme, so I went to see his video series “Canticle to the Cosmos” when it was being shown at a church on Central Park West in New York City in the early 1990s.
I vividly remember my first encounter with Thomas Berry. In the spring of 1990 I was struggling to hold together my three passions—for being in nature, for spiritual fellowship, and for creative work. In reading The Dream of the Earth I had been deeply moved by Thomas’s ability to lyrically weave together the material and spiritual dimensions of life with a celebration of human creativity. Moving from the urban San Francisco Bay Area to rural North Carolina, I had been experiencing many encounters with animals in both the outer wild and the inner wild of dreams, and fervently holding the question of what it means when myths and fairy tales and Indigenous people all over the world say that animals speak to us. What does it mean that wild animals speak to us?
It is almost impossible to think about the legacy of Thomas and how to live it, or even any part of it, without seeing him standing before us with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and a new thought for us to play with. So, pouring myself, as it were, a glass of “tequila sunrise with salt around the rim,” and imagining him holding one himself and laughing, I am reminded that whatever he was talking about, he always spoke in the language of love.
I have recently been reading the biography of Thomas by Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim and Andrew Angyal. I was intrigued to see that his essay “The New Story” was published in 1978. A year prior to that as a college freshman in New Orleans, I received a large envelope in the mail from my “Uncle Brother” as we all called him. In it was a mimeograph copy of “The New Story” along with a note saying, “Here’s some of my propaganda.” I found the essay very inspiring indeed. I am writing this account over 40 years later. I want to highlight how my uncle’s life’s work has inspired my own.
On and around the date of the 10th anniversary of Thomas Berry’s death (June 1, 2009) over one hundred people gathered at Timberlake Earth Sanctuary, near Whitsett, North Carolina, and later at the Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain, near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This event was celebrated in many other places around the world as well. I personally have always given more significance to the date of his death than his birth date (November 9, 1914).
A Poem
A Poem