Limitless Belonging: The Hope of Apocalypse

The snowpack has melted into the earth, and the brook winding its course across the abbey, through forest and glen, has been resurrected from the drought of last summer and fall. The flow, burble, and constant rolling of the waters is a familiar comfort on the dark evenings when I stand under a shadow sky listening, simply listening for anything the land has to share.

The land, it turns out, has much to share. It’s morning and 200 wild geese take flight from the Burrington’s corn field across the road. And I don’t mean a gentle normal ascent; I mean a mad sudden whirling dervish of a tight circle in unison as goose throats filled with honks, grunts, barks and hisses, sounded an alert for the whole mountain. I was electrified and dancing, whooping in the cold yelling “fly, fly, fly!” like a mad March hare. Wait for it. Wait for it. There! A graceful arrow of a shape larger than any goose launching a broad arc around and then away from the flock, the patriarch bald eagle of the valley, stunning in design and in that moment singular in purpose. I don’t know if he was successful in the hunt that morning. I know he was four weeks earlier when our largest rooster Belobog, named for a golden god of light, was chosen to feed the eagle. A blood sacrifice beneath bill and talons, hooked and razor sharp designed to tear and constantly growing drenching the snow with blood. A sad moment but not one outside of the greater belonging of the community of life. Both a brutal and graceful action, an action of fact, an action of need devoid of animosity. In such an instance nature displays natural imperatives, evolution and rhythm, not power and a show of force. It is still within the web, the act of primal needful hunt is not deranged killing and madness, it is life affirming.

This is where we have lost the thread, lost the balance, stepped outside the dance to worship the god of destruction. We have wrecked our web. The season is changing in Iran too. Flowers are blooming in the mountains, and the desert is beginning to warm with breezes conjuring a Persian spring. I don’t know if it is possible to hear what the land has to share when the machines of war have decided to “unleash death and destruction from the sky all day long.” It is an evil and false thing to declare carpet bombing liberation. You cannot promise people freedom while you cut their throat. There is no true liberation without empathy. God would send us water through rain, while our leaders choose to rain fire. Never once do governments in the heat and bloodlust of war consider the environmental impacts of war. The loss of water is a death warrant signed. The targeted destruction of fields growing food is a decision to embrace evil.

There are no good guys in this current war – on any side, no righteous actors. Here there are only victims of countries wielding power, setting the world on fire. Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast reminds us that we were created for limitless belonging to God, and that means limitless belonging to all of the ecosystem, all people, animals, soil, trees, oceans, limitless belonging to all. What mad savageness chooses shattered skulls, burning cities, polluted waters, torture, and the destruction of hope while calling it “Operation Genesis?” Such designation in the context of war is demonic.

In the beginning it was the Spirit of God moving upon the waters. In the beginning there was limitless belonging. Even now the kingdom of God is within us, it’s right here while those in power promise Armageddon. We don’t need Armageddon, but we damn sure need apocalypse. And by that I mean our understanding of limitless belonging, our ability to live into that potential, may only arrive when we finally see that the center could not hold, and it is to the edges where we may rediscover our humanity – outside of the death grip of power and the noise of the machine, we may finally be able to hear what the land would share with us and come home to limitless belonging.

Originally published in the Bennington Banner