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Essay 12: An Ecology of Devotion by Dennis Rivers |
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10 -
has become the assignment of every human heart. As the cosmologist
Brian Swimme has noted, from the point of view of species extinction our
present era is the worst time in the last 65 million years. Without some
deep transformation, it is not clear how life on Earth will continue. If
there are going to be living plants and birds and fish and human beings in
the future, it will be because we work to protect the seeds of their
existence today, and the land and water that will make their lives possible.
It will be because we open our hearts to love them now.
5. Reverence for the source of all life
In this exploration of reverence for life, I have deliberately shifted
among a family of related words: love, reverence, devotion, gratitude,
respect, service, celebration, nurture, protection, adoration. Other times
and cultures would add such words as
agape
,
bhakti, karuna
and
caritas
.
I used this wide variety of words out of my feeling that reverence for life
is larger and more complex than any one word would suggest. I am deeply
convinced, for example, that when we reach toward the source of all life,
we are also reaching toward the ultimate source of love, because love is
the core of our aliveness. In a fertile arc of self-referentiality, our
capacity to love life is something that life itself is exploring and
developing!
As children it is very difficult for us to imagine how we might have
come out of our parents' bodies. Later we understand that, but struggle to
bring into focus the way our personalities emerged from the matrix of
personalities surrounding us when we were young. Eventually, we face the
deepest mystery of all: how all of us, the family of life together, are
continuously emerging out of the womb of an endlessly pregnant
Universe. In the galactic unfolding of life, the life webs and planets that
may survive are those who learn to love and nurture the ongoing miracle
of their own co-emergence!
As our reverence for life deepens, it often deepens to include that
something (or someone) larger than us, of which our lives are felt to be a
creative and loving expression. The influence of science over the last few
centuries has been to rule out such feelings of connectedness to
something larger, because the science of that era could only look
down
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