Terratheism: A Brief Exultation
The religious convictions I share with you this morning arise out of my life as a farmer. I am in love with my land, my fields, my soil, my vegetables, my weeds. The land is a member of my family. What I share with you today arises from my feelings. The feeling of black soil, moist, warmed by the May sun, alive with earthworms and insects and smelling of minerals and rain. The feeling of the first warm April morning, damp, the smell of thunder in the air, the light diffuse and yellow. The flavor of young spinach; you pull back the row cover, and there’s that instant of trapped hot air, now released and rushing past you, the living green of the spinach leaf, the delicate sweetness of it, from a plant that can live outdoors all winter.
Because human civilization has now learned to control so much of life’s contingencies, we know now from experience that change can still cause suffering, yes, but change can also be progressive. Our scientific powers, our technological powers, our democratic insights, make us now responsible for the kind of change we humans experience. What kind of change do we hope for? Of course we want more love, more benevolence, less suffering; we humans have always wanted these things. How can we inspire ourselves to extend benevolence, to reduce suffering? The old religions offer us a supernatural escape; do the hard work of kindness on earth, they say, and when you are done you can go to heaven, or nirvana, or absorption into God, and find joy. We are not inspired by such escapism today; we know that we must find our joy here in this world, in the only world there is.
Terratheism brings God to us, to our life here in this world. Terratheism tells us that God is an intimate of ours, a strange and challenging and, yes, even disturbing, intimate, but an intimate bringing beauty and inspiration and meaning and perhaps, at times, even friendship. Terratheism is a path to God, for God, too, lives in this world, and loves, and suffers, and feels. God, too, has a body. We can touch God’s body, play with and within God’s body, and bring God knowingly into our lives.
Terratheism teaches that we find our joy in life by feeling God’s enjoyment of the world as a part of our own enjoyment. How does God feel about this? That is the Terratheistic question. How are we to know God’s feelings? Have I returned to supernaturalism? To feel God’s feelings, we must play in the world even as we work in the world. And we must play in the world because in the life processes and in the life history of our world, Earth, we experience the record of how God and the innocent creatures have been intimate together. This is the land; the land is the story of how God and the creatures have loved one another, and do love one another.
Human civilization is the long, slow, wandering, endeavor to find a vision of growth and progress, and then to embody it. Humanity will find this vision in the land; it has always been there, waiting, for our intelligence to fall in love with it. That time is now. That time is now because humanity is now the dominant ecological force on the Earth. Now humanity must choose the Earth, must freely embrace her body as the vision of civilized beauty, or Earth will die and God be greatly silenced.
Where will the children play, so the old song goes. Where will they? Where will you play? Shall you make money all your days, and reproduce, and call that the measure of your life? The stars do not rejoice at the number of coins, neither do they count your children. Nor shall you find rest in heaven. But your kindness, your intimacy, your loyalty to the world; these things the universe cherishes now and everlastingly, and uses again and again to improve the beauty of the cosmos. Listen to the land, and you will know intimacy, you will know beauty, and you will know how to weave kindness into the world.
It is the human destiny to spread kindness throughout Earth’s ecosystems, and throughout the cosmos. Kindness is the unique ecological contribution of intelligence. Kindness means reaching for intimacy and not merely reproductive success. Life-long, monogamous romance is the great human expression of this ideal. Such intimacy requires courage, courage to surrender pleasure, courage to surrender happiness, courage to surrender youth.
It is the task of religion to make humans fearless. The beauty of Earth gives courage; in that beauty we will find the feeling of meaning, we will feel ourselves as so important to the universe, that we can discipline reproductive fulfillments for the sake of a wider and more compassionate love. Kindness and intimacy are the fruits of courage; courage is the acceptance of suffering as meaningful. Courage is not the letting-go of attachments, but the feeling of meaning in the suffering caused by attachments. The feeling of meaning is the feeling of courage.