 |
|||||
 |
|||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
Prophet and poet, Thomas Berry has written a 'must read book ' for both teachers and students. While we think that all the books we review are helpful and important, there are only a few that are essential reading for everyone. "The Great Work" is one of those essential books.
With a voice like that of the Hebrew prophets, Berry calls on us to reassume the individual and collective "great work" that is offered at this particular historical moment. "History is governed by these overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a People (1)." For Berry, the current great work is for us collectively to move into positive relationship with the Earth. "The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans can be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial way (3)." For us to make these changes, to hear the call, and to rise to the challenges and to the promises of the "Great Work" requires a reorientation of our thinking. In short, he is calling for nothing less than a transformation of consciousness. It is much of our current worldview that is the biggest problem. "The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans. The other-than-human modes of being are seen as having no rights. They have reality and value only through their use by the human (4)."
Thomas Berry, in his attempt to make us see the flaws in much of our automatic thinking keeps repeating over and over again a simple and profound truth: "In every phase of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives we are profoundly dependent on this larger context of the surrounding world. There is no inner life without outer experience. The tragedy in the elimination of the primordial forests is not the economic but the soul-loss that is involved. For we are depriving our imagination, our emotions, and even our intellect of that overwhelming experience communicated by the wilderness. For children to live only in contact with concrete and steel and wires and wheels and machines and computers and plastics, to seldom experience any primordial reality or even see the stars at night, is a soul depravation that diminishes the deepest of their human experiences (82)." In short, our outer world and our inner world cannot be separated. To think they can be is foolish and eventually dangerous.
Structurally, "The Great Work" moves readers from a vivid view of the planet as a whole to a focused study of the United States. Berry looks at historical American attitudes toward the land and the natural world, and then he begins to focus on the social institutions that, while they are the historical and current source of the ecological problem, yet could carry part of the answer. "The insuperable difficulty inhibiting any intimate rapport with this continent or its people was this European-derived anthropocentrism. Such orientation of Western consciousness has its fourfold origin in the Greek cultural tradition, the biblical-Christian religious tradition, the English political-legal tradition, and the economic tradition associated with the new vigor of the merchant class. In religion, culture, politics, and economics there existed with the settlers a discontinuity of the human with the natural world. The human, transcendent to the natural world, was the assumed ruler of the land (45)."
Several chapters are then spent discussing the failures of education, politics, religion, and economics to address the ecological problem. For teachers, the chapter on education is chilling. Many of us already are in the struggle to untangle education from the forces that would turn its purpose to solely that of vocational and corporate education. Add to this the compartmentalization and fragmentation of learning, and a privileging of a type of abstract and disembodied knowledge, and we can all clearly see the deep problems the educational system has. Yet, Thomas Berry sees that education can also be part of the solution. Education is the natural place to begin to institute the changes in consciousness that are so necessary. "Here I propose that the universities need to teach the story of the universe as this is now available to us. For the universe story is our own story. We cannot know ourselves in any adequate manner except through an account of the transformations of the universe and of the planet Earth through which we came into being. This new story of the universe is our personal story as well as our community story (83)." I would argue that this new focus needs to be the curriculum agenda for elementary and secondary schools as well.
After whe shows us the ecological problems and their social and institutional interconnections, Berry points to a number of possible solutions. In this process of reorienting our vision and creating language for that vision he suggests four central images and symbols that could guide us in the process of the Great Work. He identifies these as (1) The Journey, (2) the Great Mother, (3) The Cosmic Tree, (4) the cycle of Death/Rebirth. Poetically, yet with great precision, he tells us of the centrality of the journey image of the cosmos for our times. " This story, as told in its galactic expansion, its Earth formation, its life emergence, and its self-reflexive consciousness, fulfills in our times the role of the mythic accounts that existed in earlier times, when human awareness was dominated by a spatial mode of consciousness. We have moved from cosmos to cosmogenesis, from the mandala journey toward the center of an abiding world to the irreversible journey of the universe itself, as the primary sacred journey. This journey of the universe is the journey of each individual being in the universe. So this story of the great journey is an exciting story that gives our macrophase identity with the larger dimensions of meaning that we need. To identify the microphase of our being with the macrophase mode of our being is the quintessence of human fulfillment (164)." With each of the other three images, "The Great Mother," "The Cosmic Tree," and "the cycle of Death and Rebirth," Berry spells out why he thinks they are so central to a new vision.
But, it is not only in images that Berry thinks we can draw on strength to create a new vision. He draws on traditions, communities of memory, that could be sources of wisdom. He suggests that we need to draw on (1) the wisdom of indigenous traditions, (2) the wisdom of women, (3) the classical traditions, and (4) the wisdom of science. From the wisdom of the indigenous traditions we have to learn of an "intimacy with and participation in the functioning of the natural world (177)." "The wisdom of women is to join the knowing of the body to that of mind, to join soul to spirit, intuition to reasoning, feeling consciousness to intellectual analysis, intimacy to detachment, subjective presence to objective distance. When these functions become separated in carrying out the human project then the way into the future is to being them together (180)." The classical wisdom, by which he means the religious traditions both East and West, "is based on revelatory experiences of a spiritual realm both transcendent to and imminent in the visible world around us and in the capacity of humans to participate in that world to achieve the fullness of their own mode of being (185)." And finally, the wisdom of science, "as this exists in the Western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, lies in its discovery that the universe has come into being by a sequence of evolutionary transformations over an immense period of time. Through these transformation episodes the universe has passed from a lesser to a greater complexity in structure and from a lesser to a greater mode of consciousness. We might say that the universe, in the phenomenal order, is self-emergent, self-sustaining, and self-fulfilling.
Thomas Berry has sent out the call for all of us to take up the essential "Great Work." Our task is to answer thoughtfully, creatively, and fully. Make the "Great Work" a priority on your reading list.
review @2000 Tom Collins and RSiSS
return to Religion and Ecology resources
