Wise Words III: Thomas Berry

[NOTE: Go here for a brief explanation of what this series of posts is about].

And now for Thomas Berry. From The Dream of the Earth:

"We have before us the question not simply of physical survival, but of survival in a human mode of being, survival and development into intelligent, affectionate, imaginative persons thoroughly enjoying the universe about us, living in profound communion with one another and with some significant capacities to express ourselves in our literature and creative arts."

"This description of personal grandeur may seem an exxageration, a romantic view of human possibilities. Yet this is the basis on which the human venture has been sustained from its very beginning! Our difficulty is that we are just emerging from a technological entrancement. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowist confines it has experiences since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement."

"The human community is passing from its stage of childhood into its adult stage of life. We must assume adult responsibilities."

I recommend this book to all members of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens (Latin: "wise man"). We need to hear and carefully reflect on these words.   

The Dream of the Earth

It's Friday, and it seems like an appropriate time to share (finally) some Thomas Berry. Berry (1914-2009), who was a Catholic priest, cultural historian, ecotheologian, cosmologist, geologian, and deep ecology advocate, is the author of the seminal work, The Dream of the Earth. This amazing treatise, first published by the Sierra Club in 1988, provides an intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity. 

Such a fantastic universe, with its great spiraling galaxies, its supernovas, our solar system, and this priviledged planet Earth. All this is held together in the vast curvature of space, poised so precisely in holding all things together in the one embrace and yet so lightly that the creative expansion of the universe might continue into the future. We ourselves, with our distinctive capacities for reflexive thinking, are the most recent wonder of the universe, a special mode of reflecting this larger curvature of the universe itself. If in recent centuries we have sought to collapse this larger creative curve within the horizons of our own limited being, we must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world about us. The greater curvature of the universe and of the planet Earth must govern the curvature of our own being. In the coincidence of these three curves lies the way into a creative future.

- From the Introduction, The Dream of the Earth

This book is a foundational volume of the ecological canon. Timely words for troubled times. Highly, highly recommended. [NOTE: Just so you know, today is my birthday].