ELEMENTALS

I wrote this back in 2013. Considering the push back on the environment, and just about everything decent that has been done in the last century or so reposting this seemed appropriate.

The veils between the physical and spiritual worlds seemed thinner in the past. There was a time when it was easier to believe that there were spirits in the rocks, the trees, the streams. A vision of the world that’s still often dismissed as “Nature Worship” by mainstream society.

I don’t believe that the old Celts worshipped Nature as I understand word, but they were much more in touch with the world, seen and unseen, around them. This immersion in the spirit world seems to have persisted longest on the fringes of Europe. In Ireland, where Rome’s writ never ran. Or in the highlands and islands of Scotland beyond Hadrian’s Wall. Even the people of Wales held onto most of their independence until the thirteenth century and the invasions of England’s Edward I.

I’m not even sure that the Celtic concept of creation or creator is the same as the world view I grew up with. They certainly have enough different words to work with. And heck, maybe it doesn’t really matter unless you’re trying to learn how to speak one of these jaw breakers of a language.

The word often used in Irish for creator, Duileamh (always capitalized and pronounced dool-yev) doesn’t have the root word for create. It doesn’t have the root word for God, or the Almighty, or Supreme Being; all those words our world view equates with a supernatural Creator.

This difficult, for us, to pin down word can mean “being in the elements,” or “one who is in the elements” or “one who is the elements.” To make it even more interesting the root duil can also mean desire, hope, fondness or expectation. They’re all related, I guess, maybe…….oh heck I’ll take their word for it. Try asking Who is fond of What? Who desires What? Careful, the next thing you know you just might decide that Creator and Creation are caught in a web of desire, hope, and fondness that we aren’t used to facing in our world view of the sacred confined to a few hours on a certain day and tucked in the closet the rest of the time.

The highlanders of Scotland used to bless each other in a way that turns the way we treat each other and the world around us on its head.

“The love and affection of the moon be yours.

The love and affection of the sun be yours.

The love and affection of the stars be yours.”

And work their way through all the things of nature around them until they end with

“The love and affection of all living things be yours.”

Adapted from Yearning for the wind.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange to feel a kinship with the sun. The sun feeds the plants, the plants feed the cows and the cows feed us. I guess you could say we carry a bit of sunshine with us through the day; and the night.

If we really believed that the local river had love and affection for us we might treat it like the irreplaceable creation that it is instead of as a sewer. If we could stretch our minds around the idea that the mountains and valleys might love us perhaps we’d think twice about carving off the top of a mountain to get at the coal and dumping the tailings in the valley below. If we truly felt the living web instead of seeing board feet when we look at an old growth forest maybe we’d be more careful as we harvest the trees we need. As it stands we don’t believe we have the love and affection of our fellow human beings much less the rest of the world and the creatures in it.

The elements of creation. “The Love and Affection of the Elements. The Pure Love of the Elements. The Being of the Elements. The One Who is the Elements.” Tom Cowan notes that the participants were trying to discuss these concepts at a workshop for Celtic Shamanism. One woman in the group wished our language had words like these. Another broke in with “Wouldn’t it be great if our culture had ideas like this.” Taken from Yearning for the Wind.

Just wouldn’t it though?

THE WORLD IS NOT SO LARGE

"The world is not so large, it is quite small. There are 27 species of birds on the endangered species list which live in Hawai'i and nest in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and if they develop the oil in that refuge, we will not have those birds. The world is quite small . . . Because [each act] is a pebble in a pond. Small pebble  large ripple." From an interview with Hawaiian lands activist Miilani Trask.

 That was back in the nineties. Endangered birds. Endangered fish. Endangered animals. Endangered rivers. Endangered oceans. Endangered lands and underground waters. Endangered children. Endangered women. Endangered men. A screaming planet. It's all one. Little pebbles. Big, big ripples.

THE WAR AGAINST THE POOR

Back in the eighties a minister, Jack Nicholas-Pallmeyer, wrote a little book titled The War Against the Poor-low intensity conflict and Christian faith. He focused on the conflict in Nicaragua. But what was happening in Nicaragua was mirrored in the rest of Central America. Takes a bit of reading. It is a book after all. Read it and weep. And for those of us old enough remember that almost no coverage that didn't come from Reagan administration spokesmen was in the so called free press of the time.

And some of those actions, techniques, whatever you want to call them are being played out on our borders and in our minority neighborhoods. No bombs or morters. Yet

A SHEPHERD'S LAST PLEA

Oscar Romero was archbishop of San Salvador for three years. They thought they were getting a conservative. He was middle aged. His health wasn't that good. They thought they were getting a pussy cat. They got a tiger. For three years he defended his people. Until the last sermon.

"Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your brother peasants...No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God. Now it is time for you to recover your consciences so that you first obey conscience rather than a sinful order...in the name of God, then, in the name of this suffering people, whose cries rise to the heavens, every day more tumultuously, I ask you, I beg, I order you in the name of Good: stop the repression."

 From the last sermon of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Preached just before Easter in March 1980. He gave this sermon knowing that he was risking his life. He was correct. He was murdered a few days later. During mass. Nearly forty years later no one is quite sure who was responsible although there are plenty of suspects.

Looking at the list of possible evangelical ministers, is there even one that would make such a call to the ICE, the Border patrol, TSA, or our military today.

THE APPARATUS OF OCCUPATION

"Whether the mask is labelled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus-the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontiers or the battlelines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be too subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others."

Simone Well i in the magazine Politics in 1945. Well was a French philosopher and activist during the thirties to the fifties.

The great majority of our population lives within one hundred miles of a national border or a coastline. Especially if you throw in the Great Lakes. When will that other army of occupation, the immigration service, move from asking everyone on a bus for their papers and demand that everyone show their papers?

OCCUPIED LIVES

Jackson Brown wrote this back in the eighties at the height of US support of the wars of repression in Latin America. Well the wars are fairly quiet, but we are still living with the fall out on our borders as the survivors try to get out of the killing zones.

And it isn't much better for citizens of color in too many sections of this country. There's no blood on the wire. There's no gun ships at the borders. Although there are probably drones. 

But read the histories of occupied Europe. Learn how the peoples of Latin America under the overt dictatorships lived from day to day. Stopped for little or no reason. Asked what you are doing when you are doing it in your own neighborhood. Even in your own house. Followed on your drive home and stopped for something as immaterial as a turn signal light not working. Unarmed citizens of color shot down because an occupier with a gun "feared for his life."

In too many parts of this country police are not functioning as police. They are an army of occupation.

LIVES IN THE BALANCE

I've been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war

And there's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs

On the radio talk shows and the T.V.
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends--
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can't take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

There's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can't even say the names

They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

JACKSON BROWN