Seed Creatures

Blogpost #2

by Jonathan Sigrist, Rachel DeBoer, Patrick Hurlburt, and Yuliya Rae

In post-Enlightenment Western Christianity, patriarchal and anthropocentric frameworks press believers to dismiss their embodied Earthly concerns in favor of the promise of a transcendental, otherworldly eternity. To reject Earth and Creation, however, involves a fundamental rejection of one’s own being. We grow in terms of embodiment and of spirituality not by divorcing ourselves from Creation but by drawing closer to it, which requires a reorientation of our culturally-taught narratives of capitalist competition into an ethic of inclusion, mutuality, and sustainability.

The theologian Sallie McFague describes Creation as the body of God, not in the Monistic sense that God is the world, but that God panentheistically interpenetrates every aspect of the created world (McFague, 1993). In a treatise on cyborg spirituality, theologian Agnes M. Brazal similarly situates the spirit of God as something reflected in all of Creation, “whether in humans, animals, non-sentient beings, or human-made technologies” (Brazal, 2014). Again, we see that everything flows from Creation, so even that which humans create must necessarily also contain the Spirit of God that is inhabiting all created things.

With this in mind, the aim of drawing transcendently closer to God must be reoriented: rather than rising above the physical realm, we are called to move into greater closeness with Creation. Digging further into this idea, we are confronted with the question of imago Dei, the image of God which Genesis identifies in humanity. To fully express the divine semblance that is within us, we must embrace our embodiment in Creation, just as God’s embodiment is expressed both throughout Creation and in Jesus’ incarnation as a being of biological origin (Diefelt, 2017).

Human beings have never been separable from the Earth. In the Genesis account, God creates the first human out of ground which had been created prior, establishing humanity as explicitly drawn from the Creation substance. Scientifically, every human being can be identified as the result of biological processes that reshape a constantly recycled accumulation of matter that was blasted from primordial supernovas (Tucker & Swimme, 2016). Over the course of one’s life, their cells are constantly recycled and replenished by the material they consume, defining human beings as processes continually embodying Creation. As modern food production becomes increasingly unethical (Shiva, 2016), our desecration of the soil can be characterized as an assault on the substances which will later make up our bodies, a sort of pre-traumatizing of bodies-to-become. Through our violation of the planet, humans have enfolded themselves in deepening cycles of self-reinforcing trauma: pre-traumatizing ourselves through the violation of the food that makes up our fundamental substance, making ourselves secondary trauma victims by our perpetration of abuses against Nature, and pressing ourselves toward the brink of a final traumatic event — annihilation through climate catastrophe.

In order to begin disrupting these patterns of abuse to move instead towards our anointed positions in the created order, we would do well to consider the patterns that define the natural world. Evolutionary processes over millennia have shaped the Earth into a series of diverse ecosystems of remarkable efficiency, all of which rely on the complex interplay of numerous plants, animals, environments, and climates. This interplay involves reciprocity on both a micro and macro scale, with many plants relying on animals to spread their seeds, while those same animals rely on the plants for their own sustenance and survival. Even predatory animals rely on the diverse ecosystems they inhabit for the maintenance and continued thriving of their habitats (McFague, 2016).

Through these patterns of mutuality, natural ecosystems have been able to adapt throughout history, even in the face of immense adversity. Western capitalist systems, however, reject mutual beneficiality in favor of escalating consumption and in the process have sabotaged many of the systems of sustainability embedded in the natural world. Modern economies such as the United States squander close to 40% of the food they grow and nearly 60% of the energy they produce, and the industrial processes involved in the production of these wasted resources are driving the planet to the threshold of disaster (LaDuke, 2016). When we turn away from industrial practices and focus our efforts on mirroring Nature in creating sustainable ecologies for growth, we are able to develop permacultures that exceed industrial farms in efficiency per acre while drastically reducing waste and long term damage to the underlying environment (Scott, 1999). Perhaps more importantly, when we meet the Earth with kindness and work to follow its rhythms, we are able to begin reclaiming our place in the sacred world and reconnect with the spirituality that pervades it.

Bibliography

Brazal A. M. “A Cyborg Spirituality and Its Theo-Anthropological Foundation. In Brazal A. M. Abraham K., eds. Feminist Cyberethics in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014.

Diefelt, W. “And G*d Saw That It Was Good — Imago Dei and Its Challenge to Climate Justice.” In Kim, G. J., & Koster, H. P., eds. Planetary solidarity: Global women’s voices on Christian doctrine and climate justice. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.

LaDuke, W. “In the Time of the Sacred Places.” In Vaughan-Lee, L., ed., Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. (2nd ed.) Point Reyes Station, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2016.

McFague, Sallie. “Reimagining the Triune God for a Time of Global Climate Change.” In Kim, G. J., & Koster, and H. P., eds. Planetary solidarity: Global women’s voices on Christian doctrine and climate justice. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.

McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Scott, J. C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

Shiva, V. “Annadana: The Gift of Food.” In Vaughan-Lee, L., ed., Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. (2nd ed.). Point Reyes Station, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2016.

Tucker, M. E. & Swimme, B. T. “The Next Transition: The Evolution of Humanity’s Role in the Universe.” In Vaughan-Lee, L., ed., Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. (2nd ed.). Point Reyes Station, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2016.