Thursday, October 08, 2009
connecting the dots continued...with thanks to Thomas Berry
mythic power of the industrial vision
technological entrancement
resulting in deep cultural pathology
because it is anthropocentric.
anthropocentrism resents any demands imposed upon it
so that the natural world is transformed into total subservience
since then so much energy has gone into redemptive rather than creative energy.
why the Babaylan is needed for these times:
"In a country such as the Philippines, which is being devastated, where the rain forests are being eliminated, the soil eroded, the mangrove swamps destroyed, the coral reefs blasted, the streams polluted, there is a primary need to strengthen the mystique of the land. If a mystique of the land existed in some instinctive manner in the past, it is no longer sufficient. Beyond the country's political and economic needs, and possible a prior condition for any sustainable political structure of functional economy, is the need for a mystique of the land such as is supplied by the nature poets, essayists, and artists; for educators and religious teachers with a sense of the islands as revelation of the divine; for lawyers with a sense of the inherent rights of natural beings. The mythic dimension, the sacred aspect of the Philippines, is needed if anything significant is to be done to remedy the devastation already present and to activate a program of renewal. Only in a viable natural world can there be a viable human world." (33, The Dream of the Earth).
Thomas Berry wrote this book in 1988. I am reading it twenty years later and a part of me is angered by this lateness and by the fact that I am not in the Philippines as I read this. And yet by the very paradox of my absence, I am drawn to this calling to return the evocation of a mystique of the Land.
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