This Sacred Life: Engaging creation as the embodiment of God's Love - with guest Norman Wirzba

Way Stations | Conversations Along the Journey

Drawing on his recent books, This Sacred Life (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Agrarian Spirit (Notre Dame Press,2022), eco-theologian/philosopher Norman Wirzba discusses Christian faith, hope and love in the Anthropocene. An.thro.po.cene: denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

*Watch as a vodcast on YouTube HERE...

Show Notes:

Website:

www.normanwirzba.com

Article:

Can We Live in a World Without A Sabbath: Rethinking the Human in the Anthropocene

Books:

This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community and the Land (Notre Dame Press, 2022)

Song:

In Praise of Decay (Steve Bell/Malcolm Guite)

Quotables from Podcast:

“Everything that comes out of creation is beloved by God. And that's a game changer, because you're not now stuck by yourself, wondering, is God going to find me or is he going to be angry with me? Because you're immersed in this whole world of creation that God has always, only ever loved... and you're the effect of that love.”

“Robin Wall Kimmerer says this beautifully in one of her books, Braiding Sweetgrass, she says people actually need to feel the land as a place of blessing, the land as a place that nurtures your body and doesn't just nurture your body, but loves and welcomes your presence in the world.”

“Your life isn't just some big accident...it's part of a larger world which is beautiful and fragrant and sometimes delicious.”

“The desire to control the world, have mastery over the world...what that actually does is it destroys the possibility of having a relationship with the world.”

“We call it the Anthropocene because human beings (Greek: Anthropos), through their developed economies, their agricultural practices, their technological innovation—what they have done now is they've really taken control of the world, meaning that there isn't an ecosystem process, a bio, geophysical, chemical process that isn't affected by human power, human technology.”

“Human engineering, has made it possible for us to do all kinds of interventions in plant and animal life so that where you look—from the cell, all the way to the atmosphere and everywhere in between¬¬¬–we can't talk about something being natural anymore because the whole concept of nature has been super seeded by this power of human beings to re-engineer, remake the world in ways that are satisfying to them.”

“What's important is to recognize that human beings have learned to exercise the kind of power that now will determine the future of the whole planet in all of its life forms.”

“This power has somehow gone renegade and is now become a force that threatens to actually undo the human race? When you think about the amount of climate refugee migration there's going to be, I mean, there's just so many things coming down the road that are truly frightening because we're talking about food insecurity, civil instability, all kinds of things.”

“If we're going to talk about anything that relates to a genuinely human life, we have to understand that human life is always rooted life because we need nurture from the ground... literally.”

“A tremendous spiritual awakening happens when you realize that you're not some isolated bit cut off from the world, but you're actually deeply enmeshed or entangled within the world.”

“We're rooted beings, enmeshed beings, meaning that the world we live in always depends upon us being connected in visceral ways. Not just in optional voluntary ways, but in visceral ways with the lives of plants and animals and insects and bugs and microbes and soil processes, hydrological cycles, atmospheric processes. All of it is absolutely crucial to our bodies being able to do what we do.”

“Whenever we see a living being, another person, we don't just see that person. We see a whole world that is making that person that being possible.”

“What's going to make it possible for people to still live, in a way that honors the dignity of persons and places, is if we can figure out how to love persons and places and love ourselves and see the beauty in a world that even as it's being marred and destroyed or degraded, it's still worth cherishing.”

“Instead of asking ‘what gives you hope?’ ask, ‘what are you prepared to love?’ Because If we can figure out what we're going to love and then learn how to activate that love within each other, then we can face whatever bad stuff is going to come in a way that we couldn't if we were alone or just totally despairing about the world.”

“Learn to nurture the place that nurtures you. That's the fundamental agrarian commitment.”

“An agrarian is going to ask, ‘How do we learn to love where we are?’ Because when we love where we are, we also love all the beings that make their home there. And we can't live a good life, we can't live a hopeful life if we feel that the places that make our living possible are either being mined or degraded or abandoned.”

“So, an agrarian spirit is really about how do we develop the kinds of spiritual practices or exercises that will draw us more closely into life with each other in life, with our places, through our places, so that what we see is, instead of an escape from the world, a deeper immersion into the world, so that we can see how where we are is a place of blessing, but also a place that calls us to certain kinds of responsibilities of care and respect.”

“We've commodified land, we've commodified creatures, plants, animals, but also workers, so that every place, every creature, including human workers or units of production, that's how we see them.”

“From a Christian point of view, or a spiritual point of view, we could never say that another human being, or another creature, is simply a unit of production, because from a theological or a scriptural point of view, the first thing to say about you or about any place is: you are the embodiment of God's love.”

“[The agrarian spirit is]a way of coming to see the world not as a commodity, but as a gift. A gift that is sacred because it's the embodied expression of a loving, divine intention; that its goodness is part of it being from the beginning.”

We have to think about how to grow our food in a way that honors the life of the food, the life of the animals, the life of the agricultural worker? How are we going to source energy that doesn't depend upon massive pollution, or the blowing up of mountains to get their coal? And how are we going to make clothing in a way that honors cotton, for instance, or flax or whatever elements you use to make the things that you wear?

“If we have in mind the question, How can we honor the life that makes our living possible?, we're going to do a much better job living together. We'll find that we are much happier. We're much healthier people. It's not to say there won't be sadness or that there won't be tragedy because there will. But at least we're going to be living in a world that we perceived to be worthy of our effort, worthy of our cherishing.”

“It’s not enough to reduce the work we need to do to personal virtue or vice. It's not about us saying, okay, I'm going to be vegan or I'm going to change my light bulbs or I'm going to get Fairtrade coffee...if that's enough. We do have to talk about systems. We’ve got to talk about built environments. How are we going to put in better economies that will enable people to do the right thing? We need to do all those things. But I think what agrarian spirit is saying is that we're not going to be able to do those things apart from certain kinds of practices in which we, first of all, come to feel our entanglement within the lives of others and see that entanglement not as a restriction on our freedom, but as an ability to nurture a fullness of life that we couldn't have had alone.”

“This is where we're songwriters and music can play such an important role because, you know, music is about listening. It's about hearing other notes going through other notes, and notes coming together in particular sorts of ways to create something harmonious and symphonic and beautiful. And what I really would love is to see that people could imagine their bodies, not just as physical lumps moving around other lumps, but as a kind of acoustical phenomenon in which you can hear the vibrations of the world vibrating through your own body, whether through your singing or through your activism that you feel that it's not just you anymore, that you are, in your embodied living and acting, giving voice to a world much greater, much bigger, much more complex than yourself.”

“People are at their happiest when they feel that they're in the flow of what's happening... I describe creativity as our participation, our improvisational participation, in the world's unfolding of itself. And, you know, we can give lots of variations on that theme because we can be participating in the unfolding of a family's life, or in a neighborhood’s life, or a farm field’s life, or a classroom's life. I mean, all these ways of entering into the flow are available to us. And when we give ourselves to what's potentially there, beauties are waiting there to be uncovered.”