Crashing Our Starship Religion

Nurturers of the Real #8, and Sabbath II

This is, or was to be, the eighth and last part of an essay series which takes as its inspiration something Wendell Berry said in The Unsettling of America: “Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real.” Resounding in the background, too, as if across an empty canyon where our hearts used to be, was Vine Deloria's rhetorical question to the sunset of the West: “Can the white man's religion make one final effort to be real?” That’s still my question, too.

"Quai des Etoiles" (Quay of the Stars) by Pascal Blanché

The original ark, Earth, does not move.

—Edmund Husserl

In the first dream I can remember, the whole living universe was gone.

The Earth was gone, the trees were gone.

The sky was a single color—the transparent obsidian of outer space—and was cloudless, airless, sunless, starless, windless, and birdless, and everything in it was gone.

I was standing on a vast satellite dish made of concrete. It was like a giant seashell on the shores of a waveless, saltless, and soundless black ocean of lightless nothing, a monumental construction with the same circumference as the rim of the sky, and still pointing upward, like a satellite dish would be, as if still listening for something—as if still listening for a god who went away, like a broken temple.

And suddenly on the far horizon, tiny, mirage-like wobbling blurs of vaguely human light appeared, that I knew, in the fleeting omniscience of the dream, were my father and my sister, their distant voices warbling to one another across the emptiness of space like little birds.

I was four, maybe five. Even then my little heart knew, mythologically, what the Machine felt like, what the Machine really was—or at least what it was doing to us. Even then my little heart would have recognized what Jacques Ellul was lamenting when he lamented that

The human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe....Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. (The Technological Society)

—even then I felt that, even in the so-called real world, it’s as if the whole universe—the one our bodies belong to—is gone, and we see each other now as if through a haze of a vaguely human-shaped, iridescent and unstable distant light.

That’s how I was going to begin this last essay in the series.

I was going to say how I love the Earth, how I love Earth’s gravity, Earth’s pollen-scented wind.

And I was going to say how I love Earth’s animal senses of unimaginable billions of years splashing in an ocean of green needles of pine trees shining in the blue air, and black ants and quartz rocks in the intelligent dust of red clay, and cobalt bluejays swooping through the ripples of their own primal screaming, the iridescent flash of dragonfly wings and white blossoms floating in the dogwood trees above walls of pink azalea bushes poised, mid-explosion, in the brightness of the sun.

When the transcendentalist of the American wilds, John Muir, says

White water lilies with rootstocks deep and safe in mud, still send up every summer a Milky Way of starry, fragrant flowers around a thousand lakes, and many a tuft of wild grass waves its panicles on mossy rocks, beyond reach of trampling feet, in company with saxifrages, bluebells, and ferns.

—this ‘inner space’ of Earth is more than enough outer space for me, I was going to say: Let our flowers be the stars. Let us watch the distant stars of heaven, sitting up to our chins in the flowers of Earth, or taking our ‘spacewalks’ across our own blooming cosmos down here below:

Late one evening I stepped out of my little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling with stars…[And] behind them all stream the great river of light with its several tributaries. Yet the Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies...and these paddies were all filled with water. (David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous)

“The surface of these pools, by day,” Abram says, “reflected perfectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright green tips of new rice.” But now at night, they perfectly reflected the stars and the Milky Way, so that he seemed to be both above and below the sky, “at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting,” as

Between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot.

—the essay was going to be about the usual stuff like that; you know the places I love to go to in my thoughts.

I have no desire to leave Earth behind, either mystically or technologically. And I don’t share the sense, that I know a lot of people share, that our future as men and women of Earth depends on the fierceness of our determination to go elsewhere.

“One world at a time,” that’s what I was going to say—no new planets, no higher dimensions, until we’ve learned to live in the one we’ve got.

And I was going to allude once again to prophetic Hebrew utopianism, which was always about the life of the Holy One descending to this world, not us ascending into another:

For behold, I create renewed skies

and a renewed Earth.

The former things will not be remembered

or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I am creating.

For behold, I am creating Jerusalem for rejoicing,

and her people for joy.

Then I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

and be glad in My people.

No longer will the voice of weeping

or the voice of crying be heard in her.

No longer will there be in it an infant

who lives but a few days,

or an old man who does not fill out his days.

For the youth will die at a hundred years,

But one who misses the mark of a hundred must be accursed.

They will build houses and inhabit them.

They will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

They will not build and another inhabit,

nor plant and another eat.

For like the days of a tree,

so will be the days of My people,

and My chosen ones will long enjoy

the work of their hands. (Is. 65:17-25)

—I was going to say that, even at their most dreamy, the Hebrew prophets bowed before the hardcore realism of life on Earth as we know it, here and now—as even here, in Yeshayahu’s vision of a renewed skies above a renewed Earth, the usual earthly things are still what life on Earth is about: Building houses, and living in them. Planting vineyards, and eating and drinking their fruit. Loving and bearing children, who, in the renewed Earth, won’t die as newborns anymore, but they won’t live forever, either—the sands of time will keep falling down the hourglass, for reasons that, if the Creator only knows them, everything will be well in the end: This is the way he made things.

Lewis Mumford, in his epochal Myth of the Machine, says that our technological longing for higher worlds is a flower blooming entirely from this one:

Man’s life would be profoundly different if mammals and plants had not evolved together, if trees and grasses had not taken possession of the surface of the Earth, if flowering plants and plumed birds, tumbling clouds and vivid sunsets, towering mountains, boundless oceans, starry skies had not captivated his imagination and awakened his mind. Neither the moon nor a rocket capsule bears the slightest resemblance to the environment in which man actually thought and throve. Would man have ever dreamed of flight in a world destitute of flying creatures?

And it’s not difficult to see that our mystical longing for higher worlds is one and the same earthly flower: “We are dwelling in a hollow of the Earth,” says Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo,

And fancy that we are on the surface; and the air we call the heaven, in which we imagine that the stars move. But the fact is, that owing to our feebleness and sluggishness we are prevented from reaching the surface of the air: for if any man could arrive at the exterior limit, or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then like a fish who puts his head out of the water and sees this world, he would see a world beyond.

—Plato’s mysticism is the mysticism of the birds and fish. As the scintillating, sunlit and blurry, warbling, gurgling surface of the water is the highest heaven imaginable for those who swim the paths of the sea, so the blue dome was once only the highest heaven imaginable to us, but there is an even higher heaven—what we now call by its desecrated name, outer space—which we can reach by splashing through the surface of the highest blue heaven now visible to us, the stratosphere, trapped inside these bodies of ours, which now obstruct our vision of reality:

He who has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the whole body...who, if not he, is likely to attain to the knowledge of true being? ...What is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?...The soul gathering and collecting herself into herself from all sides out of the body, the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life...the release of the soul from the chains of the body?

—Let the material body fade away, in other words, like the blue air at sunset, which, when it dissipates in the death of the sun, reveals the higher stars beyond. Become a truer human, meaning with fewer attachments to the human body. Finally see the truth, if you can bear it, with spiritual eyes liberated from the blue cataracts of a merely earthly vision.

But such thoughts are only possible for the animals of Earth to think, and it is only possible for them to think those thoughts on this earthly planet—if all thought is metaphorical, as has been said, then all thought is biological, also, and there’s no escape.

And there need not be. We’re not “trapped” here; this is where we live. The One who said, “Look closely at the lilies of the field, how they grow—at the birds of the air, also, for they trust the heavenly Father for everything,” came to Earth to be here with us, and also the lilies, and the birds, at peace with it all, walking with us “in the cool of the day,” as if it were still Eden—which, for him, it still was.

And for us who follow Him, it still can be, too.

—That’s what this last essay was going to be about, somehow. And somehow I was going to say that this essay series, I think, has been about Christianity’s steady absorption into itself of alien and alienating technologies, which make this real Earth of ours—of the Holy One, who created it—seem less and less real, the most recent high point of which, in my mind, was the almost universal fallback non-solution of staying isolated at home and watching liturgies on digital screens during the relatively minor troubles of 2020.

That, generally speaking, the virtual consumption of our religion from the infinite distance of a disembodied internet was all we could imagine as a solution to a crisis that will most definitely pale in comparison to what we’ve got coming in the years just ahead, means perhaps the space ark of the Church is colder, more intellectually and artistically inert, than we usually like to imagine.

But if so, it’s still possible (so to speak) to crashland it into the Earth, and walk away from the wreckage (leaving it there, as a monument), and begin relearning our own planet with fresh eyes and ears, as if we’re the aliens this time—which is what we’ve made of ourselves, and can just admit it, so we can on keep moving into our earthly future.

—That’s what I wanted to say, I just didn’t know how.

I think it will take me another twenty or thirty essays or so, which I’ve been busy dreaming of, and hope one day to share.

But for now I’m pausing billing on this substack, and taking another break from publishing—I’m a slow, slow, slow writer, and have zero sense for hustling my craft anyway, and I’ve been losing paying subscribers for many months longer than I was ever gaining any, and it’s time to move on.

And I am moving on: I’ve passed my road test and physical, and I’m off to UPS boot camp, to learn how to wear the brown and perform the scientific miracle of delivering two hundred packages in less than a single spin of the Earth.

And it will be months before I get into the flowstate of it all and figure out how to fit writing into that new picture (or publishing, rather—I’ll always be writing, I can’t not write—but it will be back to little poems here and there, in little, precious snatches of solitary quiet).

While billing is paused, you yearly subscribers will have your year frozen. Monthly subscribers, no more monthly bills for the time being. If and when I figure out a new, sustainable way of publishing on substack in the new life, I’ll unpause and the years of yearly subscribers will resume, and the monthly cycle, and the essays.

But if in a few months I decide there isn’t a realistic way to carry on here (in a consistent and transaction-worthy way), then I’ll turn off billing altogether, and prorated refunds for yearly subscribers—for whatever part of your year you didn’t get—will be automatically issued (substack has this all built in.)

Either way, my hope is eventually to make everything I write here freely accessible to all, and only ask for voluntary donations. I kind of wish I had started out doing it that way! But, I tried what I tried—and I want all of you paying subscribers that I have deeply, deeply, deeply appreciated your support, and always will.

THANK YOU.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And do stick around, at least as a free subscriber—I do have a couple collaborations with other writers in the works, which, God willing will appear here before too long.

Also: Don’t forget the Northwest Estuary Conference, Encountering Face to Face—and let me know if you’re going, so we can be sure to meet up.

And my little book is still available, from me, in the US—I’ve got 190 copies left, so please tell your friends and gobble ‘em up: ORDER SUNLILIES. I think this will be my last self-published printing.

(And if you’re in Canada or somewhere reasonably close to here, just email or direct message me about buying copies, if you want—I’ll figure out what shipping will be for you, and let you know, it’s no big deal.)

peace and love in Messiah always,

-graham

Nurturers 8 Crashing Our Starship Religion

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