By Any Other Name
In a culture so materialistic it misses out on what matters about the things it is so desperate to own, language can bring us closer to real love for the material world.
By Marie Glancy O’Shea
Matter (n.) c. 1200, materie … directly from Latin materia “substance from which something is made,” also “hard inner wood of a tree.” According to de Vaan and Watkins, this is from mater “origin, source, mother” (see mother (n.1)).
– etymonline.com
In Western culture, broadly speaking, to be a person of faith is to be—or to strive to be—less materialistic than others. Those “worldly” others draw meaning and satisfaction primarily from that which can be sensed. And to live thus immersed in a world of sense necessarily jeopardizes faith, because the good and the beautiful of the physical world compete directly with what is good and beautiful spiritually. In Cardinal Newman’s words, “full meals, soft raiment, a well-furnished home, the pleasures of sense, the feeling of security, the consciousness of wealth—these, and the like, if we are not careful, choke up all the avenues of the soul, through which the light and breath of heaven might come to us.”
It’s significant that the etymological link between matter (or material) and mother came to my attention via Alan Watts, the 20th-century writer and speaker known for helping the West see its own absurdities through an outside lens. He mentions it in a lecture titled “Education for Non-Entity,” where he argues that “never was there a culture so completely un-materialistic” as that of the United States. This is no compliment, coming from Watts. Americans—representing as we do the culmination of Western tendencies—“hate” material, and are bent on “converting it as fast as possible to junk and poison gas. We are not people who love time (which is one of the measurements of material) and space (which is another), we want to abolish it. We want to get as fast as possible from one place to another; to get rid of space and to get rid of time.”
We are, in other words, a people determinedly chasing limitlessness, infinity, some ideal freedom, but in the most secular sense. We do it not out of aspiration toward unity with God; we strive and pursue just because we can. We do it to see how far we can go. That hubris must be where the charge of “materialism” comes from: We are deep in our furrow of industry, oblivious to the call of the transcendent. But Watts is persuasive in his contention that “materialism” is a poor name for our afflictions.
In Sanskrit, the root for “mother” is related to the concept of measurement and that which can be bound or limited. This has obvious resonance with the connection in English between mother and the realm of the material (or finite). Materialism, as Watts presents it, is a life of connection. If a farmer, you understand and interact with the animals, plants, and soil; if a carpenter, you are immersed in your relationship with the wood. Whatever your calling, rooting existence in material things will lead to greater harmony within your family because it honors the natural circuitry of nature with creatures, and creatures with one another. In the West we are all severed cords, frayed ends.
We are children trying to escape our mother.
But even the language of love is an inert, saggy thing when applied to God and Creation.
Because the Church was raised from its infancy in Europe, Christianity and the West are inosculated entities; it is impossible, in many instances, to say where one ends and the other begins. Still, parsing what is essential to our theology and what is a matter of happenstance seems as though it would be one of the great priorities for Christians interested in forging vibrant, dynamic faith communities to see us into the future. We should be responsive to the layers of consciousness humanity has developed over the last few decades and centuries—the historical consciousness, for example, or the linguistic.
To take an obvious example of enhanced historical consciousness: We are better equipped now than we once were to understand the stupendous impact Constantine’s conversion to Christianity had on the way the religion was carried on and lived out in the centuries following. To a people oppressed by a world power, Christ preached a turning away from might, wealth, and status—from vengeance, malice, greed. Almost three centuries later, a Roman emperor made it the official religion of a massive civilization defined by control and dominance. Conversion surely changed Constantine, but probably not as much as his conversion changed the Church.
Intimately tied to historical factors is language. So much of how we see the world and attribute value comes down to the words and syntax we use, the construction of meaning through expression, following conventions that have evolved among populations over generations. This role of language in constructing our reality is something we have only gradually become collectively aware of. And, in only the past six decades or so, many have developed another awareness: of the dire consequences we face for maltreating the Earth. Recent as it is, this ecological layer of consciousness appears to be, for a significant number of my contemporaries, dominant. It preoccupies them, keeps them up at night, informs important decisions.
I share concern for the Earth, but often it seems my feeling is remote or mediated compared to the visceral distress of some. I wonder if the difference comes down to my Christian habits of mind. In many spiritual traditions globally, the spiritual and the material are one. Divine presence in the world is recounted and understood less as that of a creator who built the thing than as a spirit running through it, manifesting in different, changeable forms. There is no gap to be spanned, no rupture to be mended between that which matters most to me (my relationship with the Divine) and the Earth I live on. I embrace them together without even noticing.
As a Christian, meanwhile, I conceptualize a Creator who made the world out of nothing—who is, by definition, greater than the Creation I see around me and, by the same token, distinct from it. I rejoice in that God. But I must confess, I find the language that ensues from the subject–object cleavage has a deadening effect. I don’t covet the belief system of the pagan, but in her total focus on the manifestations of nature, she has access to delights that I hear referred to, in the Psalms, Genesis, Isaiah, but can’t seem to absorb into my core.
Illustrative of this difference is the language in two books I read in tandem while mulling this essay. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants was a surprise bestseller, published in 2013 by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson this year released Come, Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth, a series of meditations the aim of which is “to open up an angle of vision so that when anyone says the word ‘God,’ a picture of the changing Earth enfolded with divine affection reflexively comes into view.” Johnson references Kimmerer in one chapter on nature as our neighbor, noting, “There is much to learn here from Indigenous Peoples.”
I share Johnson’s conviction that “the God-Earth relationship… is underdeveloped in the Christian imagination.” But as much as I laud the import of her work, in many cases her formulations seem inadequate to the job of shifting my cognition the way Johnson says she has set out to do. Christian understanding “needs to bring forward the truth that the living God created an entire community of creation and is passionately in love with the whole shebang,” she writes. Yes! But even the language of love is an inert, saggy thing when applied to God and Creation. I myself love spring, its dogwood pinks, its lilac breath. “Love” is able to encompass my paltry capacities, maybe. But to say, “God loves the Earth”? How can this put-upon word be called into meaningful service as a descriptor for ineffable grandeur?
This is to say nothing of the conundrum we face in trying to square the term with nature’s destructive and rapacious elements: the dead eyes of the predator, the dark tower of the tornado, the stealthy spread of the pathogen. As Johnson concedes, “The ambling character of life’s evolutionary emergence over billions of years, which entails genuinely chancy occurrences and the enormity of suffering and extinction, is hard to reconcile with a simplistic idea of God the Creator at work.” It is equally hard to reconcile with the concept of God loving the Earth, as we would construe those words.
Kimmerer’s book is quite different in tone; she is not a theologian but a botanist, with a poet’s sensibility. Sweetgrass is, she has said, “an invitation to reciprocity,” and paints the Earth and its parts—not only plants and animals, but stones and minerals too—as persons. In the language of her ancestors, a man-made thing like a table is an “it,” but all of nature partakes in life and has a claim to respect. In her people’s origin myth Skywoman, a parallel to Eve, came to Earth last of all the creatures, and was taught and assisted by those others. The emphasis is on a necessary human humility; as the new kids, we still have much to learn. Kimmerer speaks of “gifts of the Earth” that merit our generosity in return.
I need to be careful here. Christianity isn’t animism. The Judeo-Christian tradition is predicated on an origin story in which God stands clearly above nature, and which explicitly sets the human species apart from the beasts of the wild. Kimmerer’s radically unfamiliar paradigms electrify me, as they have so many of her readers; they shake me out of accustomed thinking in the way I have wanted to be shaken, and make me awake to the beautiful possibilities our relationship with the natural world has always held. But at a certain point, switching out signifiers changes what is signified so much that it no longer makes sense to call yourself a follower of Christ.
Nonetheless, I poke around at these formulations. I remind myself that God is bigger than any single conceptual model and can withstand my childish tinkering, especially if it’s done in the interest of trying to slap myself awake to His reality.
So I rethink, for example, indefinite pronouns. What if I hope that “someone,” rather than “something,” comes to my bird feeder? How much can we experiment with our language around “Mother Earth” while remaining within the embrace of Mother Church, or the Virgin mother?
If the natural world is alive with God’s divinity, if “all the trees of the forest sing for joy,” might it not—should it not—contain secrets of His greatness beyond all expectations?
It’s both a question of language and of material weight. At Mass one Sunday not long ago, I heard the pastor speak of the Holy Spirit as the breath that runs through creation. I was suddenly cast back to reading the Irish myth of Deirdre in novel form when I was a teenager. The characters used terms of endearment translated directly from the Irish: mo cuisle (my pulse); mo croí (my heart). I found these terms arresting. My beloved, they proclaimed, is as close to me as the blood that runs through my veins, or the organ in my chest that sends it coursing.
I realized that using such phrases had a profound emotional and perceptual effect, so much so that if I brought to mind a friend who had been irritating me and directed the words towards her—mo cuisle, my pulse—irritation turned to tenderness. Such is the inestimable value of fresh words: they leave a piquant trail through a winterscape of cliché. Maybe knowing it was the language of my ancestors was a factor. I suspect that the fundamentally material, bodily nature of the idiom amplified its efficacy too.
We are physical creatures: hearts that break, guts that warn us, ears that tingle, feet that itch. No one should know this better than humans participating in the Eucharist. Eucharist, from the Greek eukharistos, “grateful.” Gratitude and communion are words for the elevated feeling our bonds engender. But words are quick to wither on the vine, while the Flesh and Blood that become our own are material truths. Their life and realness is eternal and inarguable.
Christians have this magnificent sacrament to renew, over and over again, our connection with Christ. But what do we have that performs this function for our union with the grass beneath our feet, the birds singing in the morning, the stones shimmering in the brook? If we are both lucky and wise, we go walking in the woods. We feel renewed. Our children marvel at a shapely twig and we are filled like a cup by their wonder. But we go to Church and probably don’t think of the woods at all. The circuit is not complete.
I think of a scene in Anne of Green Gables where the poetically-minded orphan Anne, asked to pray by her prospective new guardian Marilla, describes her ideal form of worship: “I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep, woods, and I’d look up… into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.” Staunch Presbyterian Marilla is alarmed. Anne’s feeling for the sublime makes no impression; the only salient fact is her woeful lack of formal religious instruction. She is “next door to a perfect heathen,” her only remove from this status being her ability to rattle off certain phrases of catechism.
Church holidays, as we know, often integrate pagan symbols; conversions were smoothed over with syncretism. Is it possible any practices rooted in the wild ancestry of humanity could be similarly folded into our faith—or rather, intentionally examined, reframed, consecrated? The strange art of divining comes to mind—alternately called dowsing, but I am enchanted by the former word. For centuries, people have used “divining rods”—sticks, particularly of hazel—to locate sources of water underground. The practice is based on an understanding that forces in the natural world communicate with each other; that minerals in the wood “speak” to minerals below, and the wood moves toward the water. Intriguingly, a human (one thought to have the gift of divining) must hold the rod for the process to work. Far from being at odds with nature, here humans are an essential component of its circuitry.
Divine (verb), from Old French deviner, from Latin divinare “foresee, foretell, predict,” from divinus “of a god.” Church teaching condemns fortune-telling insofar as it involves a mortal who purports to borrow God’s omniscience by godless means. It will surprise no one that divining was linked to witchcraft in centuries past. But what if the power the mortal attunes to through the rod is God’s indeed? If the natural world is alive with God’s divinity, if “all the trees of the forest sing for joy,” might it not—should it not—contain secrets of His greatness beyond all expectations?
I endorse and carry within me, as my wealth, the concept of a personal relationship with the Divine.
As Johnson reminds us, the Bible describes a God in personal relationship with creation. This is why I’m Christian: I endorse and carry within me, as my wealth, the concept of a personal relationship with the Divine. A divinity that manifests as all the forms of the natural world is not the same thing as a God with whom I have this personal relationship. And I don’t want to worship a tree! But as soon as I place God on a non-spatial plane and read Johnson’s description of a Creator who “undergirds, enfolds, and bears up the natural world,” I am perceiving myself, God, and the tree as a triangle with only theoretical lines of connection. The unity is not sensory, nor does it feel anywhere near complete.
Of course it is not complete, because we severed ourselves from nature; in the Garden, our sin made us different. Yet we remain in a place of paradox: We are flawed and limited, yet also one with God. And the thing that mends our rift with God and one another is the thing that strains at the seams of that threadbare little word, love. After all my postulating, it seems too obvious to realize it is the cure for our alienation from nature too.
Of all famous pieces of Christian writing, perhaps the one that best answers my longing is Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.” In its sweet words, I hear echoes of my youngest child when he is gripped, as he frequently is, with a paroxysm of affection: “I love my mommy and my daddy, my sisters and my brother…” Francis, like this, looks around him at the heavens and the waters, and cries out in joy over his fellows:
Praised be You, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
And fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,
by which You cherish all that You have made.
Praised be You my Lord through Sister Water,
So useful, humble, precious and pure.
Praised be You my Lord through Brother Fire,
through whom You light the night and he is beautiful
and playful and robust and strong.
Praised be You my Lord through our Sister,
Mother Earth
who sustains and governs us,
producing varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs…
Canticle: a song. Johnson borrows a quote from Herbert McCabe that God is “not like a sculptor who makes a statue and leaves it alone, but like a singer who keeps her song in existence at all times.” In this metaphor, if I sit with it long enough, I see the possibility of transformed perception. We are sung, but as a symphony, and we are in inextricable relationship with all the other sung notes, whether we see it or not.
Poetry returns us to our senses and emotions.
The title of Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si: On the Care of Our Common Home, is taken from the words of the saint’s canticle. In its pages, the Pope calls St. Francis “the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically.” The encyclical was of great importance, and such treatises are necessary to changing attitudes and policies at the level of whole populations.
But on the level of the individual, the words with most value are poetry. Saying “we ought to be better stewards” mutes any real sense of relationship in the situation, locates our responsibility in the bloodless realm of moral imperatives. Poetry returns us to our senses and emotions. If we are to rethink the habits formed through centuries during which Christianity was synonymous with Empire, if we are to learn a different way of relating to other humans and other non-human creatures, we need, as individuals, two things: time in the fields and forests, and language that surprises us.
We can get that language, in part, through non-Christian sources. Kimmerer’s writing is so lyrical that reading her prose could count as one strategy toward building the kind of awareness we need. Her accounts contain other small strategies by which we might tie our lives to the “brothers and sisters” Francis saw in nature: plant two trees to represent the life promised by marriage; learn to identify the moons of the year by what the animals and plants are doing under their light.
We need to wake up—be outdoors, letting the birds serenade us and quiet our minds. God was not in the storm, the Book of Kings tells us, but He was in the whisper.
Marilynne Robinson has written that money has value only in that it satisfies “a need to know how value is discovered, or created, or conveyed, or preserved. It is human nature to want to know this. But, whatever else we might say about human nature, we can say it aligns most inexactly with the universe.”
Like Watts, she is pointing to the sad alienation of humans from their natural home. In this sense, Cardinal Newman is mistaken to lump the “consciousness of wealth” in with “the pleasures of sense” as things that sever us from the light of God: Wealth is an abstraction where the pleasures of sense are not. The pleasures of the senses may even help us toward greater alignment with the universe.
But in another way, Newman and Alan Watts were making the same argument—as is Robinson—as is Kimmerer giving voice to the values of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It is this: We are drugging ourselves. It’s not sensory pleasures per se that Cardinal Newman is worried about; it is their ability to lull us into a numbed stupor “if we are not careful.” We can be industrious and pleasure-denying as rats on a wheel, per Watts, and the result is, on some level, the same: We are focused on the abstraction and missing the moment.
We need to wake up—be outdoors, letting the birds serenade us and quiet our minds. God was not in the storm, the Book of Kings tells us, but He was in the whisper.
And He let Adam name things. For Judeo-Christians, elevation of the human species over the rest of creation is foundational. But so is language. If God let us name them once, maybe we are within our rights to revisit the names we gave them, the language we decided on to describe them. Since our naming determines what they mean to us, maybe it is time to make all things new.
All photos from Unsplash
Marie Glancy O’Shea is a writer and editor who has covered culture, finance, and travel for publications including America, The Columbia Journalism Review, and CNN.com. She has written, co-written, and adapted several plays for Manhattan’s New Stage Theatre Company, and is the recipient of an Individual Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and children.
