Thought for the week: ‘We need to stop buying and selling what is sacred.’
Alison Leonard reads the ‘tree of poetry’
We have been on holiday in the part of north Wales most associated with the poet R S Thomas, the Llŷn Peninsula, so I’ve been returning with pleasure to his work. Leafing through his Later Poems, I came across one called ‘Publicity Inc’. It begins with an address to God: ‘Homo sapiens to the Creator: Greetings’, and continues: ‘You refer to the fading away / of our prayers. May we suggest / you try listening on the inter-galactic / channel?’ This was written before the widespread use of the internet. It’s amazing to think of crusty old R S Thomas as technically prescient. All his life he worshipped and wrestled with a monotheistic God, while worshipping the soil and soul of rural Wales. Worshipping, too, ‘the tree of poetry / that is eternity’.
For many years I have been linking my Quaker worship with pagan spirituality and ritual. A decade ago I helped to run courses at Woodbrooke that teased out the spiritual threads linking the pagan path with Quaker spirituality. It wasn’t easy: our Quaker origins are so profoundly Christian, and even the word ‘pagan’ can sound threatening after two thousand years of bad publicity. But gradually it became clear that a pagan perspective, minding and revering the Earth’s ways, would be helpful when the Earth is under threat from both technical and political directions, and from the widespread failure of the human imagination.
The visionary novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk, imagines a country in which people are enabled, even encouraged, to worship whatever God or Goddess they choose. But they unite as a community around a reverence for the ‘four sacred things’. These are earth, air, fire, and water; the fifth sacred thing is Spirit.
What do they mean by ‘sacred’? It’s simple. What is sacred may not be bought or sold.
Imagine that! You may not buy, or sell: water; land; energy; air. What are the three most bought and sold commodities under contemporary capitalism? Land; energy; and, increasingly, water. You can bet the capitalist has tried to sell air, too – bottled, or canned.
We need to stop buying and selling what is sacred. Remember Jesus cleansing the temple of the profane? That profanity was nothing about sexuality, despite the Christian obsession with sex; the profanity was confusing the commercial with the sacred.
We need a revolution in our way of being, and for that we need an opening of our imagination. The climate strikers and Extinction Rebellion are leading the way. Beginning on 20 September, and continuing through the autumn, there will be actions challenging us to do our part and stop the rush to climate catastrophe. To recognise the sacred in the soil, in the air, in the fire, in the streams and lakes and seas, is the beginning of an imaginative revolution that will enable us to turn around – which is what ‘revolution’ means – and change our ways.
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