Growing up in fundamentalist congregations and camps, I often heard that sacred texts such as the Bible take priority over the awe-filled ways of Nature. Why? Because, I was taught, Nature does not show us the way of salvation. This was what I heard in many religious classrooms of Civilization.
But today I see it the other way around. In fact, Nature or Creation is a far older text and conveys truth and spirit essential for the salvation of life now under threat from Civilization’s technology, systems, and human choices. As science shows strongly, we cannot save ourselves if we do not save Nature. The healing of our wounded Earth and the healing of our wounded souls happens together or not at all. Wes Jackson, lover of prairie lands, regenerative farming, and the founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, says, “We cannot save our souls unless we save our soils.”
The classrooms of Nature are where we learn how to save our planet, her people, and her unfathomable evolution of species. For some perspective, consider the following timeline:
From 6 to 2 million years ago — emergence of 15 or more species of humans
10,000 BCE — emergence of early agriculture and settlements amid continuing lifestyles strongly connected with Nature’s seasons, bio-regions, and sustenance.
10,000 BCE to 1,000 BCE — the Neolithic Period appeared at different times in different parts of the world. It was marked by the development of newer tools and increasing complexity in cities, governance, and trade, as well as conflicts.
1800s CE — emergence of industrialization and industrial agriculture and a heating planet. Human population grew from 1 billion to nearly 8 billion today.
Before Civilization, humans evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans. (“Introduction to Human Evolution,” Smithsonian’s Human Origins)
Civilization’s Paradox—Improving Lives, Wounding Lives
The civilizing of humans and all of Nature did not develop in an orderly sequence. Its emergence varied in different parts of the world. Even its definition lacks uniformity. But, in general, Civilization happened as people became settlers, forming farms and towns. That farming and towns evolved concurrently was necessary because agriculture was, and still is, necessary to feed people who directed their work into the emerging specialization of products and roles. Among people living close to the land and seasons, there were fewer roles and more generalists. No matter how we define Civilization, I want to emphasize that in civilizing we experience greater and greater separation from the land and thus Nature herself. A deep, deep wound happens when humans separate from land and Nature. By that wound we invariably come to see ourselves as outside and over Nature in a dominant position. The priority of the teachings of Creation is lost. Written texts, whatever sacred authority is attributed to them, become elevated as conveyors of the truth we need.
The Huge Role of Classrooms of Creation in the Exodus from Imperial Civilization
It’s interesting to me that the Bible also gives priority to the teachings of Creation over Civilization. The biblical book of Exodus is renown in this regard. Likely the oldest written biblical text, the story continues to be celebrated to this day in the Passover and by many revolutionary movements. This core text in the Bible tells of the challenging transition we continue to need as humans, namely, to leave the ways of imperial domination over life and find the way many of us have lost, the way in which we connect with Nature and her community of life. Consider the following eleven moments in the biblical Exodus story that put humans in classrooms with Nature. There they learned to live a life-sustaining worldview greatly different from Egypt’s imperial worldview.
[Photo by Andrés Dallimonti on Unsplash]
Moses, after killing an Egyptian slave-master, fled for his life. He went to a wilderness 300 miles from his upbringing in Pharaoh’s palace and where he was trained in the ways of empire. He was stripped of that training and reconnected with Nature as a herder of flocks.
After years in the wilderness, Moses saw a bush on fire. Remarkably the flames did not go out in this phenomenon of Nature. Instead a voice spoke to him from the flames and called him to return to Egypt to liberate his sisters and brothers whose cries of suffering the voice had heard. In a dramatic revelation, the voice identified itself as YHWH, the “One who is,” “Isness,” “Being.” It happened in Nature’s classroom.
Back in Egypt, Moses began organizing the people for their liberation from the excruciating injustice of empire’s slave labor. He had to persuade Pharaoh to release the slaves. Working with Nature and the “One who is” revealed to him in the flaming bush, Moses brought upon the land of Egypt a series of ten plagues, most of which were inflicted through Nature. Nature persisted until she became a liberator of slaves.
Once released by Pharaoh, the people of Israel had a harrowing, dramatic exodus into the wilderness. They escaped the chase of Pharaoh’s army and its advanced technologies by which Pharaoh assured coercion and domination of Egyptians and others.
Once in the wilderness, the people were free of empire, but still had empire-think in their minds when it came to food, water, and living together in a topography they didn’t know. The wilderness proved to be a vast classroom in which they learned to live by an entirely different Nature-based paradigm.
Nature, the “One who is” promised, would supply food on a daily basis as the people learned to live in a sharing, cooperative, life-sustaining economy. They learned the sufficiency of gathering only their share. Nature trained them to think in terms of enough for all instead of getting all they could get personally. There was no accumulation of wealth or economic hierarchy and power.
One day a week they focused on relationships with Nature and their human community. It was a day of rebalancing with Nature and pondering her ways more deeply.
Day and night the people sensed divine presence and guidance through a wilderness where they did not know the trade routes, oases, or landmarks. A pillar of fire was with them at night and a pillar of cloud by day. Fire and cloud guided them on the route to take.
Construction of a tabernacle that became the centerpiece of devotion in the wilderness boggles our minds. Without entering into a morass of debate, points of significance include: (1) construction and furnishings took some materials from imperial Egypt and repurposed them in a OneEarth structure, (2) it was, unlike temples, impermanent in that it was erected, taken down for “travel,” and reconstructed, (3) the cloud inhabiting the tabernacle was the shekinah cloud of YHWH’s glory, a feminine presence.
When they arrived at the holy mountain of Horeb (Sinai), long a sacred site, YHWH’s Presence was known to all through Nature’s powers of thunder, lightening, and heavy clouds on the mountain. Awe and reverence were moods of the people. The setting was far beyond what any imperial temple offered.
Ten special instructions came to them on that mountain via Moses, the spokesperson for the “One who is.” YHWH began the instructions by asking for their worship above all other gods and promised faithful Presence to them. Then the instructions continued with essentials for living in relationship with one another and all life. This was one of the many important lessons in the classroom of Nature.
Gradually, the time and multiple experiences in wilderness or OneEarth living reshaped the minds and lives of the people. They recognized the “One who is” as present with them. They trusted that the sacred was inherent in all of Nature. They were leaving behind the imperial thinking of hierarchical structures that privileged some with control and wealth. Instead, they were putting into practice a social structure of solidarity in shared, cooperative community of life.
Or were they?
When Moses was high on Sinai so long that they feared he’d never return, they implored his brother Aaron to help them construct a sculpture of a calf, modeled, perhaps, on the Egyptian fertility bull god Apis. Though across the region bulls represented strength as well as fertility. The people danced around their new god until Moses came down from Sinai and angrily destroyed it.
And so the story of the people of Israel has continued to this day. The great story of exodus and liberation from MultiEarth, imperial control that imposed slavery and suffering became central to the Jewish culture and religious calendar. And yet, today, the imperial state of Israel imposes on Palestinians the ruthless control of empire.
Nonetheless, each year in the Passover, participants are invited to see not only the liberation from the empire paradigm in the past, but also contemporary liberations that are underway or yearned for. And the exodus story goes far beyond the parameters of Jewish culture and faith. It has grounded many revolutions from Civilization’s empires for many people ever since. It continues to make explicit the divine power in certain kinds of revolution.
From that story on, the people of Israel ostensibly shape life around it. Though in truth many would later turn to the model of empire themselves and continue to do so to this day with the current imperial, ruthless domination of the Palestinian people.
In today’s global cascading ecological crises, the Nature-based story of Exodus shows a way where there often seems to be no way. What can be learned in the classrooms with Nature gives life for all. It is more just and also in line with what Jesus would call the kingdom of God. The final meal Jesus had with his disciples remembered the liberation from the civilization of Egypt and also the entry into the kingdom of God. So, from the worldview of Nature, I affirm with First Peoples and many, many others: there is a way of life, Nature’s way, when it seems there is no way.
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