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June
A Tribute to Thomas Berry
Father Thomas Berry, a member of the Passionist
order,
died June 1, 2009 at the age of 94.
The author of eight books and countless essays,
Berry liked to be known as a cultural historian and
“Earth scholar.”
The Dream of the Earth, published in
1998, fundamentally changed the entire conversation
about environmentalism and eco-psychology.
One of the best-selling books in the entire
history of the Sierra Club, The Dream of the
Earth brought forward the core worldviews and
understanding of indigenous cultures.
This book inspired an entire generation of new
environmental activists with a more complex and
heart-centered approach to the Earth and all
creatures and energy systems of the universe.
His book stands with Silent Spring as a
bright light and foundational legacy for the
environmental movement and eco-psychologists.
Although he published later works, The Great
Work: Our Way into the Future, published in
1999 provides “the other bookend” to the
seminal vision of The Dream of the Earth.
In The Great Work, Berry lays out a clear
challenge for current and future environmental
activists and an overarching mandate for the next
century. Our overall task, according to Berry, is
to repair the wide-ranging damage to the Earth
created by what world renowned mythology Mircae
Eliade described as “the fall into the
modernity.”
Berry clearly understood and amplified what
Eliade meant when he said” The fall into
modernity is the single most catastrophic event to
ever afflict the human spirit.”
In The Great Work Berry tells us that the
four threads that will help us recover and heal
ourselves and the Earth from the pervasive damage
of the Industrial Revolution and come together to
weave the fabric of our future are
First, indigenous worldview
Second, women’s consciousness and love of the
earth
Third, the gifts and intellectual clarity provided
by modern science and
Fourth, the wisdom of the classical religious and
spiritual traditions.
Here is a memorial tribute from his niece, Ann
Berry Somers:
“Thomas understood the great value of human
reasoning as expressed in the scientific endeavor,
but at the same time he also understood, and helped
me understand, that reasoning alone does not reveal
all that is real. The sacred nature of the universe
is real, not something added on to the physical.
Not only is it real, but it is the deepest aspect
of reality.
Reasoning alone will not give us what is needed
for finding our way into the future. For this, we
need the knowledge only accessible to us through
other means such as the direct human experience of
love, passion, enchantment, joy and terror. It is
the role of artists, poets, and musicians, not
scientists, to help us explore this type of
knowledge.
The Great Story
The moon was shining over the bay
And Thomas asked the moon “What should I
say?”
The moon answered “Tell them my
story”
He asked the wind “What should I
say?”
The wind answered “Tell them my
story”
He posed the question to the red oak, “What
should I say” and
The answer was the same “Tell them my story.
Tell them the mountain story, the human story, the
river story, the sacred story. Tell them the Great
Story.”
Thomas told The Great Story as the moon,
wind, and oak entreated him to. It is the story of
the Great Self and the small self. A story which
bears telling and retelling as if life itself
depend on it.
The Great Story weaves our lives into a
fabric of a narrative larger and more important
than ourselves. It is both an old story and a new
story. It is new in that important details have
been revealed by science, such as the depth of
time, the nature the energy transformations, and
how new forms emerge from other forms.
The story is old because the most fundamental
part of the story emerged spontaneously as an
original impulse of humanity, sung and danced by
the earliest musicians and hunters and artists at
the dawn of human consciousness, offering a way to
apprehend and know our own being.
Thomas knew the story of the moon and the rivers
and the earth and the humans were all the same
story. And that the deep pathology of our time is
to consider our story to be different from that of
the others.
One of the consequences of such thinking is that
we begin to think our future will be different from
that of the old forest or the salamanders, wetlands
and meadows. Such thinking dissolves into absurdity
when one is conscious of The Great
Story.
The Great Self
During our meetings, I enjoyed challenging
Thomas and often tried being provocative, sometimes
because I had a question and sometimes just to see
what he would say. He seemed to enjoy this and
greeted my questions with good humor. For example,
when he would talk about a Universe full of
meaning, I would ask: “Well, what does it
mean?” He would laugh and say, ah, that is a
good topic for us today!
He would go on to describe the universe as the
Great Self and ourselves as the small self.
“Every being has these two dimensions: its
universal dimension and its individual dimension.
Where the meaning or value is, is in the attraction
between the Great Self and the small self.
The satisfaction we experience when we lay down
in the forest, see a turtle nest on a beach, or
become mesmerized watching the flow of the river
– these are tangible encounters with the Great
Self, the source of our inspiration, and the
dimension where we experience fulfillment. It is
the same with music, or building a house. The
different components don’t make sense by
themselves; the parts only make sense
together.”
Thomas also understood death as integral to the
process of life and existence. When asked about his
views on death in an interview, Thomas responded
“We are born of others; we survive through
others; we die into others. It is part of a total
process, a community process, which is what the
universe is.
It is the world of the living - of birth, life,
death. I think of it like a symphony,” he
said: “There’s nothing that happens in
time that does not have an eternal dimension. That
is, like music, it is played through a sequence of
notes or a sequence of time, but must be understood
outside time. It must be understood
simultaneously.”
“The first note and the last note have to
be understood as the simultaneous experience of
melody. And so the whole universe, in a certain
sense, is played through in sequence but it also
exists outside this sequence.”
“So we are as old as the universe and as
big as the universe. That is our Great Self. We
survive [death] in our Great
Self.”
The future and our capacity to find our way: As
regards the future, it may be useful to consider
that recovering our awareness of the universe as a
communion of subjects – not a collection of
objects – is available to each one of us as
our minds awaken to a world of wonder, our
imaginations to a world of beauty, and our emotions
to a world of intimacy.
We all have the capacity for acknowledging and
working toward the larger fulfillment of the
community which is the Great Self and fostering the
relationship between the Great Self to the small
self.
For within this awakening is a new spirituality
– one that Thomas says “requires no
prophet or priest or saint” though the
teachings of the prophets, gurus, sages and
philosophers - are immensely important --- and to
that we would add the teachings of Thomas Berry.
The new spirituality is guided by the Great
Self.
So the symphony that was Thomas Berry has come
to its natural end and today we commend him to The
Great Self.”
©2010, Forrest
Craver
* * *
Man becomes great exactly in the degree to which
he works for the welfare
of his fellow man. - Mahatma Gandhi
Forrest
Craver has been doing men’s work for more than
20 years. He was senior interviewer for Wingspan:
Journal of the Male Spirit for many years. He has
led or co-led more than 40 retreats or workshops
for men including The Mankind Project, Men in
Recovery, and regional clergy retreats for United
Methodist and ELCA denominations. He is a lawyer
and a nationally recognized fundraising consultant
for nonprofit groups. He is the author of a short
book of Spiritual Poetry entitled “This Well
Has No Bottom” and is finishing a book about
intergenerational breakthrough approaches for boys
and men in American culture. His websites are
cravercreativeservices.com/and
transitioncolorado.ning.com/profile/forrestcraver
or eMail.He
lives and works in the Denver metro
area.
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