I find myself ready to rant this morning, in response to two things, both coming from the kind of drippy anemic liberal Christianity I’ve been a part of for years (okay, I’m still a part of it).
The first is a book exploring ancient practices of immersion in nature as practiced by monks and hermits. All well and good, and there’s a lot of food for thought there. But the author displays a few attitudes that I find curious and contradictory. First, he waxes dreamy over the notion that there was some untouched Edenic state when humans and all animals were vegetarians and expresses hope the one day, the lion and the lamb will once again lie down together. Then, a few chapters later, while picking up all the horrible plastic and other garbage littering the beaches and forests, he apologizes to all the “sinless” creatures, who would be living in perfect harmony, everything in balance, if only it wasn’t for the horrible humans fucking everything up.
My first thought was, wait, he knows these sinless creatures eat one another, right? That, absent humans, the lion wouldn’t actually lie down with the lamb but would rather rather rip it to shreds and lick the dripping blood from its lips? And that this predatory chain of creatures consuming and being consumed is part of what keeps this whole beautiful pristine ecosystem in balance? Yes, all our plastic and pollution is horrible, and we can talk about that and apologize to the birds for it, but let’s not forget that there’s an essential savagery that’s essential to the vital functioning of the natural world.
The second was a reflection by an Episcopalian writer on Christ the King Sunday, her conflict over the “problematic” nature of kingship and its glorification of “power over” others, and how really, she’d rather just get rid of the whole thing, but sadly it’s not her call (Thanks be to God). Here’s the thing about kingship: it is a very deep and ancient symbol that speaks to something important and sacred in the human psyche, and if we chucked it we’d be no different than the vicious and mindless iconoclasts of the Reformation, throwing precious art into bonfires because they decided it was “problematic.”
The essential problem with humanity is this: we are animals, with basic animal desires, for food and sex and safety. All animals have these drives and have various strategies for meeting them. Some stick to the seduction of bright plumage, enticing pheromonal scents, and sexy mating calls for reproduction, but some use compulsion and force, a lesson I learned one day while feeding what I thought were placid ducks on a pond. Some animals eat plants, but a good number of them eat other animals. Animals mostly want to be left alone, but if they sense a threat, they will lash out in violence to protect themselves. Humans are no different in this respect. We have all these drives within us, and these darker behaviors have been exhibited throughout human history.
What we do have that makes us very different is the ability to moralize over it and choose to make decisions that oppose these basic instincts. This is also known as “the knowledge of good and evil.” Once we ate the fruit (prolly a psychedelic mushroom or something similar), we could no longer be innocent animals, preying and being preyed upon, enjoying our carnal appetites and fighting for survival, but never worrying about what any of it meant or whether another world might be possible.
Once we were given (or developed, depending on how you want to look at it) the technology to rise above our natural state and dominate the natural world, we also needed wisdom to learn to use it without screwing everything up. Obviously, we’re still struggling with that last one. But like it or not, we seem to be the only species that has evolved the brain power, moral sensibility, and most importantly, physical capability to manipulate the natural world. Whales most definitely have the first, and most likely the second, but ultimately lack opposable thumbs.
I’m not saying that we’re “better than” other species, or that fungi, bacteria, and plants don’t have their own unique intelligence and methods for manipulating the environment. We all inhabit this wider ecosystem in a symbiotic dance.
But what I am saying is that as humans, we have a unique role in creation, with a “power-over” both ourselves and other creatures, whether we like it or not, and our task is not to abdicate that role or allow it to go to our heads, but to learn to use it wisely and well. And that’s what Christ the King is all about. He comes to show us how to use our power. It’s hard to learn that when we’re sitting around feeling resentful because we think someone else has more power that we do, or when we’re feeling guilty about the power we do have.
And yes, that means that sometimes we will have power over one another. We’ll have power over our kids, our elderly relatives, our employees, people who have less money, people we’re buying from, people we’re selling to, etc, etc. It’s common in lefty circles to proclaim “power-with, not power-over.” And yes, I get that they’re talking about oppressive, domineering power and not nurturing, steadying, loving power. The problem is that any power that flows through a system will be distributed unequally from time to time. And people who are angry at power became so afraid of this essential truth that they become afraid of power, period. Rather than learning to cultivate their own power wisely so that they might one day learn to wield it with others, they waste all their time trying to disempower others or else just give up.
In order to learn to use our power well, we have to acknowledge its capacity for harm and that we will make mistakes as we learn. We also have to acknowledge that, just like we see in “nature” (which is not something separate from us), things that might seem really unpleasant, like lions eating lambs, may perform a vital function that keeps the whole system in balance.
Denying our power, its ability to heal as well as to harm, is another version of the old tendency, endemic in Christianity as well as other religions, to deny our essential materiality. For Christians, Christ is the great integrator, the one who shows us that it is possible to both fully human, that is, fully animal; and fully divine, which is perhaps another way of saying fully cognizant of the whole and the need to work with love and for the good of all beings. In that way we learn to embrace the constraints and natural drives of our animal nature while also growing beyond, so they become a piece of, but not the entirety of our nature.
There’s a lot more I could say about the the history and symbolism of divine Kingship and this particular celebration, but I’ll have to leave that for another day. Happy Feast of Christ the King.
What if...and this is a weird one, but what if lions don't eat lambs except for in our world? What if 'red in tooth and claw' nature is something set in motion as a tool for learning to move on from separation, competition and, yes, control? What if, once humanity has moved on from exploitation, war, violence - then nature will change, too? I notice that nature laws are changeable - Rupert Sheldrake explains this very well in his theory of morphic resonance https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance
Then the lion will lie with the lamb.
I agree with what you say, btw, just spinning your thread further..or perhaps messing it all up like a kitten playing with a ball of yarn.