chapter12

An Ecology of Devotion

A Personal Exploration of Reverence for Life

EarthLight Magazine, Issue 49, Summer 2003

www.earthlight.org

by Dennis Rivers

(Revised 1/1/2004)

Somewhere in his essays about the ecological crises of our time, I

remember Wendell Berry writing “What we do not love, we will not save.”

One of the many possible implications that I draw from his statement is

that the eco-spiritual life is breath-like:

the more we want to reach out to

nurture the web of life (and save our

own species along the way), the more

deeply we will need to journey into our

own hearts to connect with love’s

sustaining energy.

Although Planet Earth needs love

the way a person lost in the desert

needs water, love cannot be summoned

by a simple act of will. Love, in my

experience, is not like an object

already in our possession, that we

could give if we chose to do so. Love

seems to me much more like a garden

that will eventually bear fruit if cultivated in a spirit of apprenticeship,

taking the time to learn about each tree and plant.

In this essay I will explore a five-fold vision of what might be called

an ecology of devotion: a way of seeing how our various loves, concerns,

gratitudes, adorations and celebrations are all part of a larger organic

unity.

These many loves and concerns call to us, often in a chaotic din,

urging us forward in many directions, appealing to us at many levels:

friends need comfort, a new baby is born, the forests are dying, the

dolphins are beaching, millions of land mines wait silently for human or

Pilgrim Marion C. Honors

animal footstep. Where and how shall we turn toward life and begin (or

continue) the labors of “mending the world,” the Tikkun Olam of Jewish

tradition, which would also constitute the mending of our own broken

hearts? As I have experienced the web of life being threatened by the

explosive mix of greed, fear and technology, I have been challenged to

find inside myself a love stronger than all fears, a deeper reverence for

life that could be my compass through the chaos of a world unraveling.

Over the past year, in dialogue with a community of supportive

friends called Turn Toward Life, I have been exploring a kind of mental

rosary of our various loves and devotions, reverences that span the

spectrum from gratitude to care to adoration. Like a garland with five

flowers arranged in a circle, this five-fold rosary holds the various loves

that struggle to be born in me. Here is how I see them, and how I will

discuss them in the pages that follow:

reverence for the life that lives within us,

reverence for the life that unfolds between us,

reverence for the life that surrounds and sustains us,

reverence for all the life of the future,

reverence for the source of all life

1. Reverence for the life that lives within us.

The closest life for which we can have reverence is the life that lives

within us, our breathing, moving seeing, hearing, tasting, hoping, loving,

yearning, and reaching; all the direct experiences of being alive, and those

moments, often out in nature, when we suddenly feel good about being

alive. I remember as a child the thrill, the infinite, bodily well-being, of

running down a long beach near my house.

The Universe has labored mightily that we might breathe, and see the

light of morning. The calcium, carbon and iron that support these

processes were made in the hearts of ancient stars. The caloric energy

that lets us run is compressed starlight, the light of the sun conveyed to us

from leaf to corn and wheat through countless hands.

I have never felt more alive in my life than when I have been in love.

For most of my life I took these feelings as revelations about the person

with whom I was in love. Only in recent years have I begun to realize that

these feeling were also saying something to me about my capacity to love,

inviting me to get more acquainted with my own heart, with this intense

aliveness. How is it that compressed starlight found this way of

expressing itself? At times in my life I have complained bitterly to the

Universe that love was not more evident in life. At some point the gestalt

shifted and I suddenly realized how extraordinary it was that a universe

composed mostly of rock and gas could have given birth to any experience

of love, anywhere. And even more extraordinary was the fact that I was a

carrier of this capacity, however clumsily I might carry it.

Our seemingly mundane existence, looked at from this angle, is a

miracle of mind-boggling proportions. However ordinary or unworthy we

may feel, we are nonetheless recipients of this galactic grace. Coming to

understand how much we have received, beyond any measure of earning

(for who could earn sunlight, or a billion years of evolution), sets the

stage for us to give something back to life out of the fullness of gratitude,

delight and awe. We are the Milky Way with arms and legs, eyes and ears,

and hearts yearning to love. What will we create with the creative energy

that the Universe has poured into us?

2. Reverence for the life that lives between us

There is a paradox at the heart of human unfolding: We can only love

others to the degree that we are capable of loving ourselves. But, on the

other hand, we are not born loving ourselves; we develop self-love by

internalizing the love of all those who have loved us. As infants, we do not

make our own food; neither do we make our own love.

Later in life, having been given the template, we may become

bestowers of kindness; having been fed, we will feel the rightness of

feeding others; having been nurtured by someone along the way, we will

find a way to nurture others.

Like day and night, summer and winter, the nature that lives and

breathes through us is full of polarities. I come into the fullness of MY

personal being in relation to many YOUs. To cherish life at a deeper level

is to accept this web of interwovenness, of land and sea, yes… of lake and

forest, yes…but also, of you and me! This fragile human co-arising is as

much a part of nature as spiderweb, wildebeest or waterfall.

The life that emerges between us… The partnership of bodies brings

forth new bodies. The partnership of minds, brings forth new minds.

Hearts joined in love invite everyone to love more. “Love one another,”

Jesus said, “as I have loved you,” not only counseling his followers but

also describing the path love travels down the generations, if we let it,

because we let it. So also do hatred and oppression travel down the

generations.

And how beyond the circle of our human lives, one well might ask, is

this related to ecology and reverence for life? In more ways than one

would imagine. Perhaps the most dramatic link is that our human

conflicts are having catastrophic

impacts on other species. Driven

by greed and unskilled in sharing,

human beings are emptying the sea

of fish and emptying the mountains

of trees. Elephants in the jungles

and forests of Indochina step on

land mines just as people do. Our

fears of our enemies, and their

fears of us, have left the world

awash in nuclear waste, which

damages the gene-pools of human

and animal alike. Ultimately, as

Wendell Berry observes, we treat

the natural world with the same love

or disregard that we bestow on one

another.

To cherish the web of life, to protect life, it is now clear that we must

necessarily face the shadow side of our own temperaments and our own

cultures, the life that unfolds between us. For it is we humans, moved by

The Kiss Constantin Brancusi

various greeds and fears in relation to one another, who make and use

these technologies of contamination and death.

The extremity of our predicament -- that we are destroying our own

life-support system as we drive many species over the brink of extinction

-- draws us toward the life that lives between us, not only as a source of

despair, but also as a source of hope. Just as it is true that two together

can carry a larger object than either would be able to carry alone, it is also

true that in the company of supportive friends we can bear sorrows that

are more than one heart can contain. I have become deeply convinced that

creating an ecologically sustainable civilization will require creating a

web of emotionally sustaining friendships, full of gratitude, listening and

celebration. Gandhi would say start with yourself, be the change you want

to see. A more intimate way of expressing this might be to say, embody

the love, gratitude and compassion you want to promote.

3. Reverence for the life that surrounds and sustains us

This is the dimension of reverence for life that is most familiar to us,

having been lived and expressed so beautifully by such eco-advocates as

Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, John Muir, Matthew

Fox, Joanna Macy and Thomas Berry. Along with being great lovers of

nature, these guiding lights were and are great students of nature.

A path of devotion in relation to the web of life around us is

something more than just having a well of good feelings toward all

creatures great and small, although that would be a great place to start.

Feelings arise out of understandings. The more we understand about the

history of each bite of food we take, the more likely we are to be filled

with awe and gratitude. The more we know of fruit trees, the more each

peach feels like a miracle. But if all of this is true, and the path toward a

respectful partnership with the rest of nature is so straightforward, why is

the world still falling apart. What is the problem? What follows is one

approach to an answer.

Early in the twentieth century, the philosopher Martin Buber

introduced what may be one of the most important distinctions in the

history of human thought. Buber proposed that human beings do not have

a sense of “I” in isolation. Rather, we have a sense of “I” in relation to

someone or something. When we relate to another person as having

experiences, feelings and purposes in the same way we do, we have an “I-

Thou” sense of self. We strive to acknowledge the other person as an end

in themselves, not merely as a means to the satisfaction of our own needs

or desires. When we relate to an object that we experience as having no

will, desire or consciousness of its own, we have an “I-It” sense of

ourselves in relation to that object. We see the object as material for our

use, as is often the case in relation to wood, food, oil, the ground that

bears food, and members of ethnic groups other than our own. Buber

acknowledged that we could not survive

without using at least some of the objects

in our world to sustain our lives. But he

felt that we become truly human only when

we are able to grant humanness to others,

are able to feel others as worthy of our

care and not just see others as sources of

care, food, resources, power, status, etc. A

healthy person would shift back and forth

as appropriate, not treating a chair as if it

were a person, but also not treating a

person as if he or she were a chair.

The decades that followed the

publication of Buber’s book, I and Thou,

developed the “I-Thou” and “I-It” ideas in

two important ways. Within the field of

human development, significant thinkers

concluded that the ability to value other

people as ends in themselves, distinct from

oneself and yet worthy of care, was one of

the central features of mature human

development. And in the field of psychotherapy, there was a related

realization that the inability to feel the personhood of others, as a

consequence of severely disturbed early relationships, was one of the

major character disorders of our era (including the “narcissistic

personality”). People suffering from narcissistic personality disorder

experience an inflated sense of entitlement in which everyone and

Life Lila-Hog

everything are reduced to the status of furniture to be used at will. (Think

of a mountain with all the trees cut down.)

I have given this extended introduction to Buber’s ideas about the “I-

Thou” and “I-It” ways of being a person because they describe the central

area of problems for people in societies experiencing runaway

industrialization. Runaway industrialization turns every person, plant and

animal on Planet Earth into a heap of inert raw material, into

psychologically dead stuff, all the better to plan for how it may all be used

for the only source of purpose and value left in the world: profits in

capitalist societies, the triumph of the state in totalitarian ones. This is

the “I-It” sense of self writ large across the world, leaving behind a trail of

clear-cut mountains and flooded lowlands. Capitalism, communism and

totalitarianism agree deeply on one thing: living nature is really just dead

stuff in motion, therefore we may do with it whatever we please.

Fractal Mark King

The problem with this view is that, from a Buberian perspective, in

“deadening” or de-personalizing the world in order to use it for our ends,

we have deadened and depersonalized ourselves. We harden ourselves to

not feel the pain of whomever and whatever we use, exploit and/or

consume. And once having thus hardened, deadened and depersonalized

ourselves, no amount of cars and refrigerators and 60-inch television sets

can ever make us happy. We may not even feel the ecological cliff toward

which we are racing.

In his book, The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry describes how

interwoven our personal development is with the web of life on Planet

Earth. To grow up in a world that includes whales and tigers and elephants

is to have evoked in oneself a very specific sense of beauty and majesty.

When those creatures are gone, that specific sense will be gone, and the

personhood of humanity will be radically diminished.

Seeing the no-win nature of the “I-It” path can be a shock, but can also

free us to explore more sustainable and fulfilling ways of living. There

are two sides to this realization: a warning and a promise. The warning is

that whatever we inflict upon the world around us we inflict upon

ourselves in a variety of ways. The promise, full of transformational

possibilities, is also two-fold:

the more value, beauty, depth of experience and purpose that we

recognize and nurture in the world around us, the more of these we

will be able to recognize and nurture in ourselves and in one

another.

And the converse,

the more value, beauty, depth of experience and purpose that we

recognize and nurture in one another, the more of these we will be

able to recognize and nurture in the larger web of life around us.

Start where you are; the path is wherever you are standing.

4. Reverence for all the life of the future

Like a pregnant woman big with child, the web of life today holds all

future generations of life on Earth. Life blossoms forth through an

endless spiral of eternal pregnancy, birthgiving, nurturing, coming

together (of earth and seed, of egg and sperm) to begin again, and dying

away to make way for the new.

Into this steady progression of ebbs and flows something new has

entered, something that holds both promise and peril. In recent eras of

evolution, evolution itself has begun to evolve, evolving from adaptation

to adaptability, from the perfectly adapted claw to the hand and brain that

can learn many new ways of holding many new things, and the evolution of

temperaments inclined to love one’s offspring and teach them these new

ways of holding.

We humans are not alone in this development; we share this evolution

toward learning and creativity with many species, especially our primate

brothers and sisters, chimpanzees, gorillas and bobonos. And we are far

from fully understanding the intelligence of creatures quite different from

us, such as dolphins and bee colonies. But we have gone further on this

path of open adaptability, as far as we know, than any other species, and

therefore our freedom and capacity to make catastrophic mistakes is

much greater than that of any other species. No other creature, for

example, leaves behind leaking piles of radioactive waste, slowly

destroying the genetic integrity of all life as the radioactive contaminants

circulate more and more widely through the biosphere.

“Pregnant Woman” Sigrid Herr

Because we alone have developed the power to destroy all life, we

alone are challenged to love all creatures intensely enough to want to save

them, to love all creatures intensely enough to be willing to restrain our

own appetites, to understand our own hatred and greeds. That, I submit to

you, is a very intense devotion, a trans-formational gratitude, and,

paradoxically, in this era of technological might, that all-embracing love

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has become the assignment of every human heart. As the cosmologist

Brian Swimme has noted, from the point of view of species extinction our

present era is the worst time in the last 65 million years. Without some

deep transformation, it is not clear how life on Earth will continue. If

there are going to be living plants and birds and fish and human beings in

the future, it will be because we work to protect the seeds of their

existence today, and the land and water that will make their lives possible.

It will be because we open our hearts to love them now.

5. Reverence for the source of all life

In this exploration of reverence for life, I have deliberately shifted

among a family of related words: love, reverence, devotion, gratitude,

respect, service, celebration, nurture, protection, adoration. Other times

and cultures would add such words as agape, bhakti, karuna and caritas.

I used this wide variety of words out of my feeling that reverence for life

is larger and more complex than any one word would suggest. I am deeply

convinced, for example, that when we reach toward the source of all life,

we are also reaching toward the ultimate source of love, because love is

the core of our aliveness. In a fertile arc of self-referentiality, our

capacity to love life is something that life itself is exploring and

developing!

As children it is very difficult for us to imagine how we might have

come out of our parents’ bodies. Later we understand that, but struggle to

bring into focus the way our personalities emerged from the matrix of

personalities surrounding us when we were young. Eventually, we face the

deepest mystery of all: how all of us, the family of life together, are

continuously emerging out of the womb of an endlessly pregnant

Universe. In the galactic unfolding of life, the life webs and planets that

may survive are those who learn to love and nurture the ongoing miracle

of their own co-emergence!

As our reverence for life deepens, it often deepens to include that

something (or someone) larger than us, of which our lives are felt to be a

creative and loving expression. The influence of science over the last few

centuries has been to rule out such feelings of connectedness to

something larger, because the science of that era could only look down

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the scale of connectedness at what were our “parts” and how those “parts”

were hitched together. The emerging science looks both up and down and

asks: what larger system enfolds this element (you and me), and how does

this element function in relation to that larger system? Parts imply

wholes, as your hand implies every bit of the rest of you, raising the

extraordinary questions of what we together imply and what life implies.

We may never be able to fully grasp the larger system that enfolds us,

but we have many hints and many suggestive analogies. Consider the fern

in your garden. The tiniest part of a fern leaf bears the shape of the entire

fern branch. When we turn to nature, we find that there are many such

“fractal” examples, from trees to rivers to blood vessels, in which the very

small mirrors the shape and function of the very large. So it is much more

thinkable today than it was half a century ago, for us to feel that the

noblest impulses in us express a larger nobility that enfolds us.

Spiral Galaxy Image Courtesy NASA

In my own life my sense of “the larger something of which I am a

part” has been deeply influenced by the teaching, affirmed by many faiths

using different vocabularies, that “God is love, and whoever dwells in love,

dwells in God and God in them” -- a truly fractal mysticism. For me, this

teaching of lovingkindness, and the people who have embodied this

lovingkindness, complete the spiral ecology of devotion.

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In reaching toward the infinite,

I am brought back to my own heart,

to the life that lives within me as love,

to the life that reaches toward people and plants and animals as

caring,

to the life in us capable of cherishing the presence in the now of all

future generations,

to the life in you and me that intuits

and celebrates the presence in us

of a life and love greater than our own.

________________________________________________________

Dennis Rivers lives, writes, and teaches in Santa Barbara, California.

Dennis is one of the founding participants in Turn Toward Life, an eco-

spiritual, anti-nuclear affinity group and community without walls

dedicated to exploring reverence for life as a spiritual path. This essay

appears in the Summer, 2003, issue of EarthLight Magazine

(

www.earthlight.org) and is part of Turning Toward Life, a free web book

about reverence for life as a spiritual path. To read the book, please visit

the www.turntowardlife.org web site. Dennis’s various books and essays

are available free of charge in the Library section of