I.
Religion is about feelings. Religion, I will assert right now, is the skill of feeling enthusiastic about life no matter what. It is the antedote to depression and dullness and fear.
It is the whole point of terratheism, to bring enthusiasm to life, for life. It is the whole point of terratheism, to sustain that enthusiasm amid accomplishment and failure, happiness and pain. Life usually brings both, and both can kill our zest for life.
Courage sustains our love for life. For terratheism, courage is the fundamental human habit. Courage means the choice to embrace life fully. Life is a wilderness; it is like the land. There is order there, and beauty, but it is an order and a beauty including suffering. That is what wilderness means; it is not a chaos, but the inclusion of failure and pain into order and beauty. This is the meaning of Thoreau’s statement, that “in wildness is the salvation of the world.”
It is the task, it is the meaning, of intelligence to embrace all of reality. Intelligence dispenses with the limitations of instinct, and seeks Goddess fully and completely. Intelligence means seduction by the Goddess, to want all of her. It is the meaning of being human, to be seduced by reality.
It is courageous to be so seduced. It is courageous because to embrace reality means to give up safety and tranquility and reproduction as final goals. Courage means to give the self into the service of everything, into the service of wildness. This wildness we best understand through the land. So the acquisition of our full humanity requires bringing the land into ourselves, feeling it, giving ourselves up to it. Without the land, we cannot be human.
We must never forget that the Earth is a womb world, a manifestation of Goddess’ fertility. Earth, and all worlds like her, reveal how Goddess is the source of all being, how Goddess births things into being. Without this knowledge, without Earth, how can we be homo sapiens sapiens?
Terratheism breaks from the old religions when it calls us to embrace wild reality. The old religions reject reality, and seek meaning in a supernatural realm devoid of suffering. They represent this supernatural realm in the guise of a superhuman figure. The superhuman figure shows us an ideal never be reached except in the supernatural realm. Terratheism is different. Terratheism embraces all of reality, for reality is the body of Goddess. Terratheism finds meaning in the fullness of reality, in that capacity of reality to weave both joy and pain into beauty. The land is one great representation of this remorseless work of Goddess by which joy and sorrow both make their contribution and receive their worth.
II.
Growing up Catholic, I learned that there were mysteries – the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ, the Holy Trinity – that marked the limit of human reason. Go no further! – that was the message. This is the religion of the little god. For Terratheism, human reason exists to prompt our wonder, to seduce our hearts to fall in love with all of reality. Armed with reason we will expand our experience into the undiscovered country. Like passionate lovers, we will fearlessly explore the body of Goddess, and discover her more fully.
So let me tell you a story from Oaxaca, in the southern part of Mexico, where I just spent a few days. To go to Oaxaca during El Dia de la Muerte – the Day of the Dead – is to remember that you have a body, and to revel in it. The sensuality of the place seduces, and you cannot resist it because there is no escape. The aromas of street food, the lilt of the Spanish spoken there, the swirling religiosity of the Zapoteca culture and Spanish Catholicism, issuing in vast candlelit ornate cathedrals that a lifetime of study could not reveal completely, or gigantic temple ruins built 2000 years ago, the endless streets of colored buildings, the desperate poor who ply the outdoor cafes, forcing you to pay attention, the 12 different mole sauces, devils and monks dancing manically to the mariachi band outside the church past midnight, all the children up and running about with firecrackers. You cannot go there and remain the same person; the place will get inside of you and replace the notes that make the music of your heart. That’s what seduction means; it means something changes you, and there is a tinge of force to the issue.
In the United States, I am a vegan. Mostly, I eat rice and nuts and a lot of vegetables, and coffee. I love eating that way. But in Oaxaca, I ate chicken and beef and goat and cheese and corn, and coffee. And to drink Oaxaca coffee, is to enter the mystical. I’m writing like this about food, about people, about a place, because what happened to me in Oaxaca was religious. My experiences in Oaxaca were religious experiences. I expanded my experiences, I embraced the reality of the place, and it took me, and it changed me. That’s the seduction of reality.
We are called by our human reason to expand our hearts and minds, to feel wonder towards all of the world. Instinctively, we are animals, and we instinctively wonder at those parts of the world that help secure the reproduction of our genetic lineage. This is the animal way. It is way filled with love, with beauty, with skill, with suffering. But it is not rational. Like the Catholics nuns that scold those who would question the Holy Trinity, the way of the animal put brakes on our experiences, and says, “go no further, for here there be no grandchildren.” Our reason is the insistent feeling that wonder should never stop, that the whole world is worthy of our engagement, that our enthusiasm should be cosmic.
To call nature pretty or peaceful is not wrong, but incomplete. It is to confine the world within the drawing room sentiments of a bourgeoisie culture. Terratheism is a radical religion. Radicalism is the refusal to confine the world within the inherited viewpoints. It means the return to raw reality. Raw reality is not peaceful, pretty, or nice; seducers never are. When a religious radical says “I have had a religious experience,” what she means is, “I have been seduced by the world.” Terratheism is one form of such radical religion, and the terratheist says, “I have been seduced by Goddess.”
To speak of seduction by the world, is to make a claim about the nature of reality. What kind of metaphysics am I here advocating? It is movingly said by a poet, by ee cummings, who always felt the very being of things. This was a man who knew seduction, on both sides of it. In this love poem ee cummings expresses the nature of what it means to be something, and it matters that the poem is a love poem.
..i carry your heart with me (.i carry it in
.my heart) .i am never without it (anywhere
.i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
.by only me is your doing,my darling)
.i fear
.no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet).i want
.no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
.and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
.and whatever a sun will always sing is you
.here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(.here is the root of the root ad bud of the bud
.and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
.higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
.and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
.i carry your heart (.i carry it in my heart)
In the poem ee cummings claims that what it means to be something, is to carry another in one’s own heart. Stripped of the metaphorical allusions, we have the metaphysical claim that to be something now, in the present moment, means to carry the past inside of one’s present existence. We cannot but help to carry the past in our hearts, for it is out of what the past has left us that we can construct ourselves anew. That to embrace others is how we become ourselves, is the secret that nobody knows.
What makes this poem read by best men at weddings, rather than by professors of ontology in dusty offices, is the notion that we should carry in our hearts not merely what serves our instincts, but what will utterly transform us, a whole other person, let the chips fall where they may. Here we pass from the seduction that satisfies instinct to the seduction of the soul. Here we have courage, the choice to open oneself to the whole of another. That’s why I feel that romantic love is so important; the decision to commit is often the most significant religious act we ever do.
And it becomes more significant, more religious, the longer you stick at it. It is easy to fall in love; that’s the seduction of instinct. It is work to stay in love. Such work is rational work, the choice to open yourself up beyond selfish values. And the feeling of this kind of work, the work of reason opening us up, is courage opening up our souls to a deeper wonder in another person, more painful, more breathtaking. Reason is courage and wonder working together, two feeling tones merging into one sentiment like the notes of a melody.
Another way to put the metaphysical point is, we begin to be by being seduced. And this emergence into being through the seduction of the past, means that to be anything at all is to be enthusiastic about something. To be means to be in love. Romantic love causes many problems, but within its turbulent waters lie the mysteries of existence. Religion means to have a romantic relationship with the world. To feel romantic about reality is rational, is courageous, is civilized. In this way, with this attitude of fearless enthusiasm and tender wonder for the world, we honor Goddess whose feelings shake the universe, we honor the universe of creatures called into being by Goddess, we honor our homeworld Earth, and its own community of life.