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Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
[Intro music plays]
Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hello and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz, and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings. A podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and an emerging new and yet ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with Earth.
All it takes is humility, deep listening and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth. The holy wild is, I suppose, my new name for God. I used to be uncomfortable trying to imagine what God is. It was this question that drew me into theological studies, and it drew me into seminary and into the church, actually.
But none of those affiliations really helped me in that quest. I knew even back in my evangelical days that God was not some old man with a long white beard who lives in the sky and decides to answer some prayers and not the others. So I just decided that God was a mystery and I left it at that. But to be honest, that, oh well, God's a mystery, never really sat right.
But now some 30 years later, I’ve still not answered that question, but the thing is, I no longer ask it. Understanding with my brain, the ontological noun identity of God is no longer relevant or important. What is important is that I have experienced this presence, this holiness, this energy that is love or God, and exists in and through all things, all things.
I've studied the sacred stories of the Christ tradition enough to feel pretty good about this perspective of the mystery. We're all trying to define something that's numinous, which inherently means it's mysterious and inarticulable, and at the same time throughout history, across all disciplines and all religions and all times,
I think people are tapping into some aspect of this holy energy, we'll just call love or God. And now I guess I would say that relationship with the divine or with God is obviously not limited to humans, but again obviously includes humans. Relationship with one another is at the core of all spirituality, no matter what religion.
The thing is, we humans have difficulty loving one another, just other humans, much less loving the rest of the holy and alive world. And humans can be so infuriatingly and horrifically violent and cruel, and that's especially disturbing when the most violent and cruel humans call themselves followers of Jesus.
Jesus who came to preach and live that message of love. This disconnect and this distortion and the doom that is unveiling itself every day in our news feeds and in our neighborhoods. It's infuriating and it's terrifying, and it's not separate from the ecological devastation that's slowly happening before our eyes as well.
So I bet all of us are asking this question, how do we live in love? With the holy and the wild, and with one another in these times of impending doom. So with that question in mind, today's episode is a conversation with someone I deeply respect and love, Brian McLaren. He's the author of many brilliant books, a former pastor and a podcaster now, and Dean of Faculty at the Center for Action and Contemplation.
He's called a public theologian, which is something I love because his theology is never academic and theoretical. It's always concern with how we live in love. I've been following the wisdom of Brian McLaren for many years, and he was kind enough to keynote our very first seminary of the Wild at Ghost Ranch in 2019.
His latest book, Life After Doom spells out the situation we all face right now. The resilience we need to stay in relationship with the land, with the holy and with one another no matter what happens.
[Transitional music plays]
Victoria: Welcoming our friend Brian McLaren here.
Brian: Hi everybody. Great to see you.
Victoria: Well, as we are settling in, we have a poem for us to hold onto on this Ash Wednesday. It's appropriate that today is Ash Wednesday and this poem is called On Courage. On Courage by Jeff Foster.
Courage is your willingness to not know, to speak your truth, to walk your path, to face ridicule and rejection, to keep going despite the voices in your head and the judgment of others.
And there are no guarantees that you will make it. Nobody can walk for you. You walk in radical aloneness, naked in the face of life. No protection, no crutches, no external authority, no ideology to save you, no promises anymore. Only the beating of the heart and the air in the lungs, and the thrill and terror of being utterly free and no longer numb, and a knowledge from deep within.
Oh, and the call of your ancestors and the ground holding you and the sun nourishing you and the fragrance of love everywhere and warm tears running down your cheeks, and this gorgeous vulnerability which makes you totally unbreakable.
Amen.
Welcoming our friend, Brian McLaren here.
Brian: Hi everybody. It’s great to see you.
Victoria: Brian, I am so grateful for your presence here today with us. I know that you're more busy than most people and yet you keep writing books that draw us deeper and deeper into relationship with what actually matters. So I'm really grateful you made time to be here with us here today.
Brian: Well, I'm honored to be invited.
Victoria: You know, everything you bring to the world is in the right timing and help us. It really does. If you look backwards on what you've published, you know, one after another, they meet us where we are in that moment. I remember back when I first met you at Ghost Ranch, it was our very first Seminary of the Wild, and you talked about, I remember this, you and I don't, and I don't remember a lot of things particularly, but this I remember. I remember you talked about there would come a time that we were approaching a time where there would could, you could no longer be neutral.
You could no longer have a neutral middle ground that people are gonna have to make a choice of moving to the left or to the right, essentially. And that's exactly what's happened. And so we're entering into this like authoritarian turn that our country chose or was kinda like bullied into, you know, and so we're in this time where there's a severance and an us versus them, like there never has been before.
So as we enter into, you know, it's like we're, we're past the times that even in the beginning of your book, how you go into, you know, there's all these different ways we can approach this time. It's almost like that time, even since you wrote that is over. So we're really excited about hearing on a deeper level of where we are today with this life after doom.
Wanna just share a little bit about why you felt it was important to write this now, even before we all actually felt it so viscerally?
Brian: Yeah. Well, I, I think all of you would understand you wouldn't be involved in this program if you weren't lovers of the earth. And anyone who is a lover of the earth and close to the earth sees her sufferings.
And I, you know, I, I was born in upstate New York. Way out in the country up a little town called Olean. You may have heard of Famous for two things, St. Bonaventure's University and the American Standard Toilet Company. But I think the toilet company went out of business. But it was beautiful place to grow up.
Little Creek beside our house. Every rock had fossils in it, you know, from some limestone age when shells were being imprinted in the fossils and I remember picking up the rocks and finding crayfish, you know, how they sort of menace with their, or protect themselves with their their pinchers and snakes and frogs and birds. It was just a great place to grow up.
Victoria: These are all the beings that have raised you
Brian: Exactly right. Exactly right. They were my started my education. That's right. I remember being a little boy along the side of my, the cement foundation of the house, peeling back the grass and finding little red Fs.
Any of you who've ever seen a red f. I remember thinking, gosh, if I traveled around the world you know, and could see something this amazing, I would feel lucky and it's right in my backyard. So, yeah, so that's been a huge part of my life. And as many of you know, I was a pastor for 24 years and began writing about changes in culture, changes that affect religion in general, christianity in particular. I started, you know, as a child, as a fundamentalist, then sort of graduated to being an evangelical, but I don't really think there's that much difference anymore in those terms. But back then I think there was a little more difference. So much so that becoming evangelical for me was becoming much more liberal and open.
The church I pastored was a sort of just a weird mix of different things of wonderful people, but there was a kind of a spirit of honesty. And while I was a pastor, I started writing books, and as you said, Victoria, I just feel I've tried to write about my own problems and the things that are bugging me or, or not working for me.
So when I left the pastorate in 2006, I got my first chance to just be a writer full time. I mean, I was still traveling a good bit for other speaking. But that year I wrote a book called Everything Must Change, which was a book about global crises. And I always say to people, I don't know if reading that book changed many people's lives, but writing it changed my life and I, I hope it had a, a good effect on people.
And from that point on in my writing, I have just been oriented around a couple of fundamental problems. And in my understanding, if the Christian faith or any other religion doesn't help us. If one of our top primary goals isn't to address these three, and really it adds a fourth problem, then what good are we?
Right? So first is the problem of the planet, the problem of overshoot that I talk about in this book as well. Second is the problem of peace. How do we build peace so that we aren't constantly having conflict and violence based on wealth, race, religion, region, social class, economic class, and so on. So planet peace and poverty and inequality.
How do we deal with the inequalities of wealth and poverty? And then of course, you would hope that our religious communities would help us address these three issues. And that leads us to the fourth problem to keep it of the letter P call it purpose, but you could also call it politics and religion.
That our politics and religion are perfectly designed and captured by other forces so that we aren't able, they don't help us deal with those first three problems. So that's a very long answer to what's behind the book.
Victoria: Well, it's, it's the latest book of your long book, which is all of these books that keep adding to each other.
And you know, it's just ironic. Everything must change. And now. We're watching everything change like in a hyper mode. That I'm pretty pessimistic honestly, about all this after years in the climate movement, but I didn't even anticipate that the collapse would be happening as quickly as it is.
Brian: You used the word authoritarianism a little while ago, and if folks are interested, I just revised a little ebook I wrote on authoritarianism.
It's on my website. It's just called Authoritarianism, Coming to a Society Near You. And I actually, in January of 2016, I called a couple of friends who were, one was a social psychologist, one was a kind of neurobiologist and one was a clinical psychologist. I said, Hey, if you guys find any literature that you feel is peer reviewed and you know, empirically based, that helps me understand what's going on with Trump, because it was just obvious how he was vanquishing every one of his opponents.
I said, I really, really appreciate it. Well, that got me on this long study of authoritarianism and the study of authoritarianism, as you can imagine, really blossomed after World War II. One of the people who was a leader in this was Bob Altemeyer. He's still alive and still writing as far as I know, unless something happened very recently.
And Bob Altemeyer came up with a profile he called the Authoritarian Follower, and he actually developed a series of instruments to help identify people if they would be authoritarian followers. And, and an authoritarian follower looks like everybody else until his or her stress level reaches a certain level.
These are the people who under stress, are the very first to wish that a strong man would come in and solve it. And in some ways, I think all of us are probably authoritarian personalities if the stress level gets high enough. But for some people, they're the first to trigger, and it seemed to be about 30% in every population that they studied.
Victoria: Interesting.
Brian: And if you think about that number, 30 to 33%. As a baseline and you think about American politics in the last couple years. But I was just in conversation with a very bright Korean woman a few days ago who was telling me about, you know, the, the recent imposition of martial law and then the removal of the president by the military and all that they're going through in Korea.
I mean, it sounded exactly the same and interestingly. The support for this budding authoritarian there was in the 30 or low 30% range, and what this, Bob Altemeyer's studies did, understanding his work, what it did for me is made me understand another danger of ecological overshoot, climate change and so on, because in a certain sense, we built a civilization on a climate and environmental system that was relatively stable. Well, the more that environmental system becomes stable, the more our economic and political and social systems become unstable, the more that happens, the more people want authoritarian solutions.
And the sad that sort of tragic thing about this is that when people choose authoritarians, they never choose people who solve their problems. They only choose people who feed off their resentment and fear. And I am not a silver linings person. Right. Like I, I think I'm naturally somewhat optimistic, but like you, I'm not, I don't feel better just 'cause someone can give me a happy anecdote.
Victoria: Right, right. Don't, don't make me feel better. I wanna be better. I want what? What's that?
Brian: That's right. Exactly. But anyhow, just to finish off this little discourse on authoritarians. There is a sense that when people choose an authoritarian, it will lead them to destruction. It will lead them to collapse, it'll lead them deeper into trouble.
And if you think about it as a kind of a, well, a little bit like the infinity loop that I had in the book. You think that when governments don't solve problems, they're just too complacent or too divided, they can't solve problems. Things get worse. When things get worse. People choose authoritarian leaders.
When people choose authoritarian leaders, they get even worse. So in a certain way, you could say authoritarianism is the fruit that you reap from sowing seeds of complacency when problems are growing. And what that's making me feel in a positive way, Victoria, is that we may be nearing a time when we can start to dream not going back to the old normal because the old normal will be destroyed.
We'll start dreaming. What would a new reality look like that we could begin dreaming of and planting the seeds of and when, if we knew that that day would be in five years? The only thing I could say is we're not ready for it. The work hasn't been done to sow the seeds that need to be sowed into society so that when the opportunity came, we would actually seize upon a better alternative. So that gives me this feeling of what our work, part of what our work to do is be beyond just surviving. Part of what our work to do is in these times.
Victoria: Well, and, and there's a cyclical nature to it, like the fourth turning or even the patterning instinct, even sapiens, you know, it's like there's something historians are aware of that there's a certain cycle that this goes through. And there, I don't know, when I started reading those books just this past year, there was some comfort in that, oddly enough. But that there, there, there's a bigger story going on and that, you know, it's like easy for us to say, oh, life, life is a pascal.
You know, the Pascal mystery is very, is in all things, you know, but when you're in the middle of that dying of that collapse. It just, it does feel like the end of the world and, you know, and so that's appropriate, that's how it feels when you're in that place. And so we can't, and we can't, you're also picking up that we can't rush it.
We can't skip steps. We can't just go to let's, let's elect somebody else magically who's gonna fix it all. You know, a better authoritarian is what we really need. And so it's like all of that has to collapse that thinking that another is going to solve our problems. And so I think like the pathway that you have outlined in your, in this recent book is the pathway.
I mean, it is, it's basically the Pascal mystery again, it's, you know, first we need to face reality what's actually happening. And so for some of us, I think even emotionally, for me, it took January 20th for it to actually really like deeply sink in and start to deal with this fast collapse and once you face that, and all of us are wrestling with, working with, how much news can we actually take in without shutting down, you know?
And it, my mom died a few days after Trump was elected. And so all of this is broiled in layers of grief for all of us in different ways. But that's the next stage of that letting go, that dissent, the grief. How do we grieve together like we don't even know in our culture. So we have to remember how to do that.
Then the, I love how you add like the, the ins where you start to ask those, you releasing the old ways that letting be, starting to imagine new ways, like you mentioned earlier, and then allowing in that resiliency, new ways to come. There's grief in that too. You know, it's not a one after another and, and then we actually, and then we actually are in that place, like you just said, of you call it setting free, stepping into those new ways no matter what happens.
No matter what happens. I think that's absolutely key and something you bring out in your whole book. It's, you know, it's that we can, even now in the grief stage, even now in the dizzy, I don't know what to do, stage can live in that new way. That is basically what all of our religions are based on. How do we actually live in love no matter what?
Essentially what your book is. There's your book.
Brian: That's right. Exactly right.
Victoria: But it's not just, it's, and it's interesting. It's not just your book. I mean, I guess that's how things happen. You know, it's like you are talking about, you know, this need for gathering together in small groups with your actual neighbors.
You know, we add onto that our actual neighbors that are more than human, you know, how do we bring them into the, these small groups, you know? Bayo Akomolafe talks about going into the cracks right now, going in, in the, in small groups, and Debra Reinstra, you know, talks about Refugia, these little places of life that, where life can continue to grow in that biodiversity, even in disasters.
The arcs of sanity that you and Margaret Wheatley talk about, like these, it's, it's happening in all these different ways. So how about you? Do you have a little local arc of sanity that you are meeting with your neighbors, or at least -Yeah. Talk a little about actually, what does this actually feel like to do this?
Brian: Yes. So I live in Florida, which some people have renamed DeSantis Stan. But it's, this is just a place with a whole lot of unsolved problems and, and in some ways because so many older people move here, we in many ways are especially obsessed with solving yesterday's problems and not maybe facing today's problems.
But I also live on the Gulf Coast, where the realities of climate change and sea level rise and so on are, I mean, they're very measurable here. So it's, we have this strange reality that I think most people watch Fox News and that puts them in one world and then they step out their door and they're in another reality, and somehow they're living with that cognitive dissonance.
I think the Fox News world seems real, and the real world seems virtual to them. But what's happens over the years is people find each other. So the little neighborhood I live in, you know those of us who would see things in a similar way, we have found each other, we know each other, and I volunteer with organization.
We do sea turtle monitoring and a lot of other environmental projects, and so all of us know each other. So you know that those kinds of little networks are super important. I'm also, I also have this incredible blessing, but I have decades of meeting people around the world who now also feel like we've seen the same vision together.
So I feel adequately connected and supported, but it, as you said before, even having the best relationships and support in the world doesn't mean it's easy. It just means it's not hard alone.
Victoria: Right. Interesting.
Brian: But I grew up, you know, I was born in the fifties, grew up in the fifties and early sixties. My earliest imagination was formed by the Cold War.
You know, I, I had what do they call it? You know,
Victoria: we went under our desks. Yeah. At school?
Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Did you do that too?
Victoria: Yeah.
Brian: Oh, wow. As if a desk would save you, you know, from a nuclear bomb. But I remember as a boy thinking, what would it be like to live in Russia? We heard that there were informants who would turn you in if you said anything against the government.
And then later in my life I was involved with refugees. And I remember talking with people who'd lived in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime and just one story after another. There'd been so many of these situations, and I remember wondering what would it be like to not be able to trust any of your neighbors?
But here's the thing. You can't trust your neighbors. Totally. You, you can't. And imagine for all of us who are white, we just realize we look at white people as trustworthy. But there's a whole lot of people who look, whenever they see a white face, they think those are the people you can't trust. Right? So I think we step back and we say.
It's not surprising that we can't trust people and that they've been sucked into systems of oppression that are harmful. It's not surprising. But what is surprising is when we find a few people, like in this circle, who we can trust, and that's something to be so grateful for. Jackson Browne said, when you have a real true friend somewhere, it somehow makes all the others easier to bear.
And I think that helps us if we lower our expectations.
Victoria: Well, and the chaos has only just begun, you know, the, the leveling up of the chaos and so. You hint at this too, that in a way it's, it's a helpful thing for grieving together, for processing, for working together to protect our little areas that we have some agency over.
And it's also eventually could actually be survival, you know, like literal survival. And so this is something that's urgently important. And we're, and we're, and I also love how you bring out in your book about. We're not doing this for the outcome. You know, like, like I'll say with my kids, you know, it's gonna be okay.
That's like our family thing of like, calm, calm down. It's gonna be okay. But okay doesn't mean the outcome is gonna be good. You know? In that sense, the okay means I love you no matter what. You're gonna be okay. So that's, that's a big, I think worldview switch. It's you and you talk about that too, like moving from, we actually can choose to walk out of the system like, you know that, that Ursula Le Guin story of walking out of, Those Who Walk Out of Omelas.
Basically we use that in this program to say what we're happy, we're privileged because of these, this child that is in the basement that is abused on purpose and that's why we're all able, that's basically what the story is. But then she ends the story saying, but some choose to walk out and so we can even, you talk about it, we can choose to walk out even when we're still in it.
Sort of like the Jesus saying of being in this world, but not of it, you know?
Brian: You know, if there is a definition of repentance, that's it. Repentance is saying, all my life, I've trusted this system. I've tried to make my place in. Survive in this system. I thought this is the right system and a good system.
All my life I've done this, oh crap, I've gotta rethink everything. And when we go through that process, then we find ourselves in this world, but not of it. Exactly. In that language. Yeah.
Victoria: Well, and it's, it's funny 'cause I feel like I'm using Jesus sayings and like Christian sayings that I've given up years ago, you know, that just were kind of triggering for a while actually.
And now it's like, oh, for the first time I'm actually starting to live this in a way that we talked about in the tierra
nueva or whatever we called that phase. You know, where it's like we are actually the privileged Pharisees, if anything, as western Christians in the 21st century. We may now actually get a chance to experience what our faith is really about.
Brian: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: In a really real way.
Brian: Yes. Well said. That's right.
[Transitional music plays]
Brian: And you know, in the book, the couple of chapters that I found such a breakthrough for me in the writing process was the chapters about rediscovering the Bible as indigenous literature. I've had the chance in recent months to do a good bit of preaching in churches where what I'm doing is in every sermon I'm taking a different passage and I'm trying to read it as an indigenous text.
And my gosh, every text changing I've engaged with has. It's just worked. And not only worked, but worked. Like, of course, this is what it was about all along, you know.
Victoria: How many times I've preached on this wrongly,
Brian: how did anybody ever convince us anything otherwise?
Victoria: I know, and there's a little bit of joy in that and I think, you know, it's like the whole spiritual journey is the holding the both, of both being unafraid or afraid anyway, but not looking away from the reality that is devastating.
And like you say too, and not being afraid to look at the beauty. To enjoy your family, to enjoy the trees that in the back still, you know, to really like balance both. That is the spiritual journey and that's gonna be called into practice in a way that we've never valued at such a deep level.
Brian: You mentioned earlier it being Ash Wednesday, and I was just thinking about this today.
I don't, I, I don't know the Hebrew term in Genesis that says you are from dust and to dust you shall return. But I have a suspicion that it might be a play on words, on Adam's name. And of course Adam means Child of red earth. Child of the soil, child of the Earth. I wonder if that's true. Somebody might know.
Could inform me if it, if it is. 'cause that's how Hebrew, Hebrew loves wordplay. Right? So you're Adam, right? Your name means child of red earth and to the red earth, you shall return. We interpret that as you're going to die, prepare for death. But what if that very phrase suggests not this threat of being killed for being who we are, but rather this reminder that we're part of the earth,
Victoria: we're part of it.
Brian: What if that's not bad news? That's actually a certain kind of consolation.
Victoria: Or just reality. It's like,
Brian: yeah, reality.
Victoria: It's like bringing us back into what is real. That even the dying part, you know, we, we die just like everything dies. Just like empires die. Just like gnats die. We have more time in, in this world than the gnats do, and less time than the trees do.
But even the trees, even the most ancient trees have a time. And it's just, I think, really that deep reckoning with our discomfort with discomfort, but discomfort with death. You know, we are being called to reckon with that, and there's something we're missing in the, in reality as well as in our own spiritual journeys, by wanting to skip over that part as quickly as possible.
Brian: I think in Life After Doom, I had one quote from a book that I was reading at the same time as writing the book called This Life by a, swedish philosopher, named Martin Hagglund and ,Martin Hagglund, what this book is about, this book is essentially saying people have thought that the idea of an afterlife is the solution to the problem of death, but he's basically saying, as a philosopher and an non-theistic philosopher, but saying, I actually see a whole lot of problems with the idea of an afterlife, and I think we might be better off, if we just took seriously what an incredible gift this life actually is.
You know, I'm sure people have all kinds of different opinions about the afterlife, but reading that book really deepened my sense of what, what, what you just said. We live longer than an at, less, longer than a tree. We're given a turn to have consciousness, to be aware, to be part of this.
We're given a turn and that turn has got a lot of challenges and we win some and lose some and so on, but, what a gift to be, to acknowledge that and, and it's funny, that resonates. I was just in a car ride the other day with a minister friend who's leading a small group reading through Ecclesiastes, and he asked me a couple things of my thinking on Ecclesiastes, which is a book in the Hebrew scriptures for anybody who's, you know, who's not familiar with it.
I said, well, the first thing is I wouldn't translate vanity of vanities, all is vanity as the main point. I would translate it, fleeting, fleeting, all is fleeting. That I think is a better translation of the Hebrew word, which means breath or exhalation. Everything's like breath. That doesn't mean it's meaningless, it just means it comes and it goes.
And that's part of what I think a wild spirituality, a, a wild theology, a wild church, a wild community gets the freedom to explore and integrate death more naturally into our lives. I, you know, my dad was a very pious, very sincere, wonderful human being, but very pious, evangelical Christian, and sincere and dedicated.
He had no doubts about his belief in the afterlife, but it was very interesting. When he reached the end, I realized his belief in the afterlife left him utterly unprepared for his own death. Being a medical doctor intensified that because I think, you know, this was something that he could solve.
It was a problem he could solve or avoid, but what a strange thing that pondering our mortality. Is one of the portals into appreciating our natality, the fact that we ever were born and that we get a turn to be alive.
Victoria: Amen. That's, so that's, that's it. It even that orientation can help and soften even the suffering, even the difficulties that are already befalling us and will continue to experience.
And when I was writing my first book, the Church of the Wild, I was reading Etty Hillesum again, and I go back to that quote all the time. I include it in my book, but I just wanted to read it again 'cause it's, it's like an extreme version of what we're possibly facing. But the way she processes it is remarkable.
But it is exactly what you're talking about. She says, I have looked our destruction, she's, and she says this from within Auschwitz. She's able to get out little notes underneath the, basically the barbed wire. She says, I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, straight in the eye and accepted it into my life, and my love of life has not been diminished.
The misery here is quite terrible, and yet she says late at night. When the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along to the barbed wire, and then time and again. It soars straight from my heart. I can't help it. It's just the way it is. Like some elementary force, the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.
Brian: Hmm. Amen. Amen. Yeah. What a gift.
Victoria: You end your book with a, kind of talking about your dream. Martin Luther King's dream. I love that. I never knew that, that the part that's so famous was something he spoke from his heart that wasn't in his notes, and I don't know if you, you don't need to repeat it exactly, but I think it's, it's something that I'm gonna invite all of us to really be able to articulate what is our dream?
What is our dream? What are we holding that our dream for the whole earth, that one day we'll be building a whole new earth. Do you wanna just, just share a little bit about what that dream is for you? 'cause it's just so, it's so beautiful and it really, really pulls the, it's, it's this, this kin-centric, this kin-centric orientation.
It's, it's built right on that.
Brian: Yeah. Well, I, the first thing I would wanna say, Victoria, is that I have no...
I have less interest than I ever had in the past of general abstractions. Right. But I'm deeply interested in the concreteness of our current situation. So when I imagine eight plus billion people living on this earth right now, and I imagine the economic systems we've created and and so on.
My dream for a human future is that whatever sufferings we go through and are about to go through, witnessing whatever collapses will collapse that in the middle of that, we would maybe gain some tiny insight into what Etty Hillesum knew that is what's at the kind of mystical and contemplative heart of all of our religious traditions, and that what would happen is we would discover that we actually could begin to imagine a different kind of world and you know.
Partly that's why John Lennon's song, I think resonated so much with people. A lot of religious people didn't like it because it started with, imagine there's no heaven. But maybe that, I mean, I just think good on you, John, for going right to the heart of the issue. The idea that we could escape this earth so that this earth doesn't matter.
That could be one of the deepest problems of our, our spirituality. So he tries to create. It's to say that we imagine. So here's what I would say in responding to your question. Let's say that we're on that downward slide. We might learn what we need to learn when we get down to here. I would have one dream for what that might be.
It might think it's going down to here. You know, that would be another dream. I might think it's going way, way down, and that would be another dream. But my dream in whatever scenario unfolds is that the human race would be able to be freed from the assumptions that keep us separate from the Earth and each other, so that we actually felt our deep connection and that we came to see God.
When we use that word God, we came to see it not as some far away being, controlling being in in the distance, but rather to be a presence that is inherent in the web of life itself. And in the fabric of space and time itself. And it's just a question of how much pain we need to go through to get us to that realization.
Victoria: Yeah. And to the point where we can, to start living that way now, like it is possible. It even in the midst of a authoritarian KGB kind of environment, worst case scenario kinds of things, it's still possible to hold onto that vision and to live into it.
Brian: And ironically. Releasing our illusion of control over things that we can't ultimately control maybe is what helps us seize more fully what we can control.
Victoria: Yeah. I say that every morning. It's like AA all over again. Right? What can I actually have control over today in my place with the people I have, am in relationship with, which is it's just kind of bringing it. It's like that we need this in a way we're unhappy with, with, we've been unhappy for, you know, our whole lifetimes of, we know the snags and the system, and the system itself has to end just as everything does.
And that's gonna be painful. And how do we love each other through that?
Brian: This is where salvation and liberation mean. If we imagine all of our individual identities have been fused with this economic, political, historic system that we call our current civilization, and we imagine ourselves somehow extracting ourselves from it, not that we can live above any kind of culture, but we understand that human beings are gifted with enough adaptability, neuroplasticity, if you will, that we are not our civilization. We actually could live in very, very different ways. I'm reading this is very, very nerdy, and I wouldn't have read this book if I hadn't sat down at a meal with someone who started telling me about it, and it became so enthralling that I decided to read it.
But it's a book by a, japanese Marxist economist named Kojin Karatani, and it is so interesting. He has spent his whole life, I think he's roughly my age, but he spent his whole life seeing the world as an economist, and he talks about a kind of conversion that he had as a Marxist, where he'd been taught to see the world in terms of modes of production, but modes of production.
Assume an industrial society. At some point in his career, he said, well, what about all the societies before being industrial? It's not like they were just doing nothing, waiting till they could finally become industrial. And so he did. He dared to argue with Marx and he said, instead of seeing the world, and he, and he actually says, Marx knew this too, but Marx focused because production was the way that his current economy was working.
But Karatani says, I'm making a break with Marx and I'm not seeing the world through modes of production, but through modes of exchange. And what he does is he says, if I look back in history, I see four kinds of exchange. The exchange of gifts in, in reciprocity. That's sort of how we work in families. We pool our resources, we do things for each other.
We don't issue bills and expect repayment. So it's this very basic, that every culture depends on at, at least in the family. And then exchange of domination and protection where some people dominate and offer protection and other people submit and offer service. It's a particular kind of exchange. And then third, capitalism where everybody becomes a free agent in a realm.
We don't lose reciprocity. We don't lose domination or protection, but a lot of our life takes place in this. We're all producers and consumers negotiating for the exchange of commodities. But then he says there's a fourth mode of exchange, and he's very concerned about this because he says, this third mode of exchange capitalism will destroy us.
It is destroying us. And he says there has to be a fourth. And when he talks about it, he says it's emerged a few times, mostly in religious settings, and he refers to the book of Acts. You know, they had all things in common and so on. So it's fascinating as this socialist economist is imagining a kind of new vision of a new mode of exchange where we live in the world and.
What's interesting to me about that is I, you know, for example, if you take the vision at the end of the Book of Revelation in the Bible of a New Heavens and a New Earth, which I don't think means a new universe, I think it means a new civilization. It has the tree of life in it evoking the earliest stage of development in the biblical story, but it's in a city evoking the more sophisticated way of life.
But the city has no organized religion, no temple, and it is dominated by trees. So it, here you have a eco civilization vision in the last few chapters of the Bible. I just think all that we can have is a vision because building the bridge from here to there always depends on where we are. So that's why I don't think anybody can be too much more specific than holding out the vision.
Victoria: Well, and the science fiction that you're writing now, it's like we have to start imagining this and we can only imagine what's in our own, you know, sort of experience. And so we need to be connected with people from completely different cultures, from, you know, people who are thinking differently from, you know, so it's like that is the way that we are going to open up.
So diversity is, no wonder, diversity is so scary to authoritarian. Because it is, it is from learning from people who are diversely different and, and more than human people, that we're gonna learn the, that we're gonna even not just learn, but be able to imagine beyond our limitations.
Brian: I don't think I quoted him in the book, maybe I did.
But Slavoj Zizek, you know, says it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And I think that captures, yeah. This sense that we're so, we are so enmeshed with a certain way
Victoria: we can't even see it.
Brian: And that's not to make us feel guilty, it's just to say that's part of a struggle.
And it usually, you know, if any of us have been in an unhealthy marriage, you can be in a marriage where you're so enmeshed that you can't ever imagine, can't even see it.
Or, or, and or work relationship or whatever. So it,
Victoria: or just overworking, you know?
Brian: Yeah, that's right.
Victoria: Yeah. And you talk, it's like that disentangling.
Like when, if you're grieving something that you would, you know, like I'm moving from the big house that I moved in with my mom to, it's gonna be a tiny place 'cause I'm moving back to the west coast to be near my daughter, which is so expensive. So it's like, how do I take all these things and reduce it to like 350 square feet?
You know? And so it's, it's forcing me one little thing, one book at a time, one sweater at a time. And the more emotional I get about something or get scared about something, the more it's sort of like, oh aha, this is me entangled in something that I've used to identify myself to. It's part of my identity.
And so, 'cause you say something like, if it's not, then you don't even, like in the 2008 housing crisis I was renting, it didn't affect me at all. You know? Like, I was not entangled in that. And so I think the more we recognize, oh, wow, this is a, you know, a trigger. I'm, I'm really upset about this part.
Well, what is that? And how do I disentangle myself from, from this in a way that I have am living more free and liberated?
Brian: Mm mm. Amen.
[Invitational sounds of nature fade in]
Victoria: Encounters with the holy wild happen when we are open to them. When we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart. Each week I offer an invitation to wander in the wildest places in your home with reverence to enter into the sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
For this week, I invite you to wander in your place with this question. How can I connect with others and become a sanctuary of sanity no matter what happens in our world? Ask the little groves of wildness on the edge lands. Those little slivers of wildness that have been ignored and overlooked and forgotten.
Maybe it's behind a Home Depot or something like that. There are these little spots of refugia, refuge, survivors, who are slowly rewilding. Once you find one of these places, what do you observe if you approach and listen deeply with reverence and curiosity? What might this place reveal to you about your own rewilding and the role you can play in creating a zone of refugia for those you are in relationship with?
The human and the more than human as we navigate a post doom spirituality.
Deb: My name is Deb Metzker. I'd like to share an experience that I had many, many years ago where my children were very young. I live in the state of Ohio and there's a nearby creek by our house, and we would take a daily walk to this creek. One year there was a family of fox, red tail fox that decided to build their den underneath a bridge where this creek ran through.
And every day we would go and we would stand and the fox children would watch my children and my children would watch the fox children. And this went on for the summer, but the impact that that summer had on my children was, it was huge. The people that they are today was formed in that seeing and being seen. That reciprocity that happens whenever you allow yourself to be seen as well as to actually see something in its natural way.
[Outro music plays]
Stephen: Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being, or a particular place that felt sacred? Maybe it's an everyday occurrence or something more mystical. Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation? If you have such a story, please record a voice memo on your phone in a quiet space with the microphone about six inches from your face while speaking softly.
If you're comfortable, share your name and where on earth you're speaking from. Please keep it no longer than five minutes and email the voice memo as an attachment to hello@wildspirituality.earth, putting sacred conversation in the subject line. We'd love to share your voice and your story in sacred conversation.
This has been another episode of the Holy Wild.
For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit wildspirituality.earth and please subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review. And share this episode with someone you know who is hearing the call of the Holy Wild
Music by Alec, Slater and Sandy from Inside the Silo at the farm, produced by Stephen Henning at Highline Sounds and hosted by Victoria Loorz.