From the Catholic Church comes the muffled sound of liturgy. Hearty singing wafts through the doors of the Anglican and Uniting Churches. In both places, young men stand at the door cradling their babies in their arms, catching the service while calming their children. Outside the Evangelical service, a group of youths play basketball amidst gales of laughter and vigourous shouting. Then I pass a group of Habitat Brisbane workers engaged in the eco-social worship of planting trees and pulling up weeds. But at the last place of worship something unusual is happening. Outside what appears to be a Chinese cultural or spiritual meeting place, an elderly gentleman is herding ducks. It seemed the pet ducks have been out for a walk to graze on the nature strip, and the duck wrangler is guiding them back home.
This brief excusion around the neighbourhood shows me that religion and spirituality come in all disguises. Some formal, some informal, but all sacred - from the secular to the spiritual, from the everyday and vernacular, to the traditional. It gives testament to the view that in contemporary religious practices, the sacred-profrane-mundane lie on a continuum in which the past distinctions of Durkheim and Eliade have blurred.
While religious ritual retains its liminal and communitas structure and function, rituals are enacted in different ways in different places among different groups of people (and animals). Online or offline, in the built environment in places of worship, or in natural places deemed sacred or special, religion is brimming with activity and vibrancy. But within the shifting status of religious practice, is the sacred diluted or expanded? What's your reaction to what's going on?
What is sacred?
The sacred is not something set apart (as it was defined by Durkheim), but is something inclusive of and interactive with the everyday. Sacred places, just as sacred buildings, are revered, respected, treasured and protected. The sacred reveals itself (as Eliade proposes) as an hierophany. It can move us, shape us, transform our attitudes and actions.
In the past I have questioned whether there are two sources of sacredness. One is intrinsic in nature experienced as an animating lifeforce connecting the ‘mysterious’ and ‘infinite complexities of the natural word’ (Metzner, 1995:61). This view is similarly defined by nature writer Barry Lopez (1986:228) who gives agency to the earth and nature saying, 'the land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can ever know'. In this visioning, nature is nuanced, profound, actived and perhaps, enspirited.
The other is more human-directed and suggests that a human connection to special places instils a sense of the sacred through the process of place-encounters that are meaningful, profound, and provide a source of purpose, knowledge and insight.
With this construction in mind, Barry Lopez offers an evocative image of the sacred. It was in the Arctic region of Alaska. He was so touched by the region's 'intense and concentrated beauty' that he would bow in homage to the resident birds and animals, while honouring 'the serene Arctic light that came over the land like breath, like breathing' (1986:xx). Here is something other - something beautiful, which demanded his reverence, respect and I would imagine, his care.
How we experience nature and the sacred is outlined by Lopez and other nature writers such as Terry Tempest Williams and Native American author and poet Linda Hogan as a kind of story telling process where nature imbeds its story into our psyche. The story signifies the inherent 'biophilic' relationship between humans and nature, including, says Lopez (1988:62-63), the elements or qualities of the land. He writes of two personal landscapes through which we experience the vital connection between people and nature:
'I think of two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see – not only the line and colour of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. … These are all elements of the land, and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. … The second landscape I think of is a kind of projection within a person of part of the exterior landscape. … [It is] deeply influenced by where on earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature – the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf are known. … The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by gene.'
Within this description, Lopez shows the qualitative and transformative process that takes place when we engage with the sacred in nature. According to forest researcher Herbert Schroeder (1992), nature has a spiritual value which is celebrated in art, literature and music, but rarely conveyed or acknowledged in resource management policy or development. Writing two decades ago about barriers to effective forest management, Schroeder maintained that the 'crisis in forest management may in part be due to a failure by the forestry profession to understand and respect the strong spiritual values that many people find associated with natural environments' (25).
But twenty years after this important observation, have natural and marine resource managers become any more aware of the need to comprehend the community's desires to protect and retain special places on land and water because of a spiritual connection to place? My view is not. Perhaps there is a limited awareness that certain natural places are considered sacred and special by large numers of people, so much so they do not want these places fracked, logged, mined, or tampered with. But no action in stakeholder engagement, community consultation or environmental reports, that the issues of sacredness and spirituality are important considerations for resource management.
This gap in understanding about the values of place - as spiritual or places of development, economic benefit, is often at the heart of environmental disputation. Whose values are deemed more important and by whom? On one hand values are associated with control and management of nature for economic profit, while on the other, values are focused on the richness of nature's beauty and its intrinsic worth which combines a mix of aesthetic, symbolic and sacred values.
Schroeder (1992:28) reveals that resource managers may view a community's opposition to resource management decision making is related to 'ignorance on the part of the public'. In contrast, he suggests that it is not people's lack of knowledge but their experiences of nature and sacred encounters in nature that uphold their anti-development stance. He says: 'From a spiritual viewpoint, nature represents an "other" to be loved and respected, rather than a physical and biological process to be controlled and manipulated for human benefit.'
Perhaps an understanding on the part of managers and developers of the significance of spirituality in nature as well as the importance of nature connecting in enhancing people's health and wellbeing, might go part way in the government and industry decision making to incorporate social and spiritual impact assessments when any earth-devastating changes are mooted.
Meanwhile, on my rounds in the neighbourhood, I'll keep a lookout for the beauty and the sacred in the many types of religious and spiritual experiences and rituals - those enshrined in sacred places of worship both indoors and out, and especially the elderly gentleman herding his ducks in the morning.
Almost home and I noticed a mist of dark grey wispy feathers floating in the air. Then some smaller Owl feathers collecting in the gutter. Owls sometimes symbolise death and the myriad feathers meant there was a problem, so I started looking for the body. I had been excited earlier as Owls had visited the area. But sad when I found the mangled and crow-picked carcass. I took the body home and burried it with a prayer under some fallen leaves.
Questions:
- What is your favourite place in nature?
- What do you experience there?
- Do you have a special place or environmental campaign that you are involved in?
- If you are religious, does your religion or place of worship have an environmental policy or action program?
- How do you envisage that nature is spiritual?
References:
Lopez B. 1986. Artic dreams. Imagination and desire in a northern landscape. New York: Bantam Books.
Lopez B. 1988. Crossing open ground.
London: Picador.
Metzner R. 1995. 'The psychopathology of human-nature relationship', in T. Roszak, ME Gomes and AD Kanner, Eds. Ecopsychology. Restoring the earth. Healing
the mind. San Francisco:
Sierra Club.
Schroeder HW. 1992. The spiritual aspect of nature: a perpective from depth psychology. Proceedings of Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium (p. 25-30), April 7-9, 1991, Saratoga Springs, NY.
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