Psalm 36:5-6

Today is the annual Blessing of the Animals. This holiday has taken on many forms and is incorporated throughout many traditions, but it was started by St. Francis of Assisi, who had a deep connection with the wild and with non-human animals. For those unfamiliar, St. Francis was the son of a wealthy Catholic family in Assisi. He was sent to war, yet quit and returned home early with a drastically different outlook on life. He refused to kill and began questioning everything. He spent time living in the wild with the animals and swore that they taught him things. He publicly renounced all material possessions. The rest of his life would be dominated by feral, simplistic solidarity with the peasants and animals- the human and non-human ‘beasts’ of Assisi.

There is not a lot of space for ritual within our culture, and since most religious traditions are products of our culture, there doesn’t seem to be lot of room for ritual within our churches either. Catholics and Episcopals still celebrate the Blessing of the Animals, yet the Protestant denial of the material has led most Christian churches to stay away from valuing the ‘things of this world.’ Most Protestant churches, especially evangelical ones, tend to be stripped of statues, art, candles, incense, or anything else material. ‘Scripture only’ and ‘faith alone’ doctrines have led to a rejection of anything that might aid the process of spiritual development for fear that it would do the opposite and become an idol or a replacement for that which only God can be. Yet this radicalism has led to a spiritual philosophy void of meaning, where the advice of pastors become, “Just leave it to God,” or “Just read your bible.” Ritual was central to the Jewish tradition. Jesus did not challenge ritual, but the attempt of the religious authorities to strip ritual of it’s proper meaning. When he turned the water into wine, he was doing something very profound. The water at a Jewish wedding was most likely used to wash, which was not primarily a sanitary concern, but a purity ritual. It’s my belief that Jesus intentionally took the water away and turned it into wine to challenge the religious leader’s idea of purity. He turned it instead into a wine, which is a drink commonly shared with friends and families during celebrations, bringing life and spirit to the occasion.

Why are we so afraid of ritual? Much of the Christian movement was forwarded by Paul, who was very obviously influenced by the Platonic philosophy of his day. The denial of the material in favor of the existential can be traced back to Plato. According to his philosophy, the material was only an abstraction of the Real. This was also the birth of the myth of progress. The present is simply a step in the process of reaching a higher goal. The real and the present is denied, and eventually feared. Ideas of heaven and hell stem from this Platonic view in which the future is valued above the present, the goal is what matters, the prize lies ahead. Yet this type of thinking has devastating effects on both the human psyche and the earth. It leaves room for the popular evangelical notion that soul-saving is more important that physical well-being. We are afraid to focus on the present and to value the material because we are taught to believe that such things are less important than what they theoretically ‘represent’. Being told to not say the rosary and being told to ‘invest in your future’ both stem from the same destructive philosophies.

We have to look critically at how this philosophy unconsciously effects our worldview. It is my hope that we can move from a place of fear to one of freedom in regards to the material world. By ‘material world’ I don’t mean the accumulation of ’stuff’ that plagues capitalist society, but a valuing of the real, tangible things around us that inspire us to live and to love. The sunset, the smell of lavender, the tranquility if trees, the flow of rivers, the wild animals that teach us lessons just as they did St. Francis- these are very spiritual things, very real things that are our brothers and sisters and our allies in connecting with the divine.

But now ask the animals and let them teach you;
the birds of the air, and let them tell you.
Or speak to the earth and let it teach you.

Job 12:7-8

BUY NOTHING CHRISTMAS

Buy Nothing Christmas is a Mennonite-run campaign that stems from the Buy Nothing Day campaign of Adbusters magazine. Buy Nothing Day challenges the consumerism of Black Friday by asking people to buy nothing the whole day. Inspired by this challenge, a group of Canadian Mennonites decided to take it even further by asking people of faith and conscience to make no Christmas-related purchases throughout the whole season, addressing both the over-consumption of our culture and the fact that Santa gets more attention than Jesus these days. Instead they advocate making your own presents or offering gifts of time. The website is full of beautiful ideas to fill the holiday season with true joy, the kind that comes from family and friends, not stuff.

Jeremiah 6:16

I just returned from the Gathering Around the Unhewn Stone, an event that took place this last weekend in Philadelphia. The purpose of the gathering was to explore the connections between Anarcho-Primitivism and Christianity. Ched Myers was the main speaker, leading us all through a crash course in biblical primitivism. There is so much I could write about, but I know that in this space I can only scratch the surface. Many secular and religious scholars alike are beginning to read the Hebrew-Christian bible from an archeological/historical perspective. Instead of reading the stories as metaphors or “lessons of old,” many are starting to take them more seriously and view them as factual. The Paradise of Eden is then understood not as fable of moral decline, but as a historical recollection of a time when human animals lived in balance with the earth. As ecological disaster ripens, it becomes fascinating to read these stories through this lens. As we look at it more closely, the bible begins to read like a manual of Anarcho-Primitivism. Of course that term wasn’t around back then, but the principles are so similar that it is incredible. For those unfamiliar, Anarcho-Primitivism is a form of anarchism that takes it’s critique of society all the way back to origins, citing civilization as the culprit of our current crisis. This brand of thinking values indigenous cultures and earth-based people groups as teachers and elders who hold wisdom long forgotten (or violently silenced). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors laid out for us a way of being that is truly sustainable. It was the norm forever, until the rise of agriculture, which changed the landscape of things and paved the way for civilization. As the towers rose and power centralized, most people got the short end of the stick. This is the context in which the Hebrew-Christian tradition developed. “We remember the fish which we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic”. Numbers 11:5.

The origins story of Genesis 1-11 is less about where we came from and more about where we went wrong… historically. Our primordial state of constant communion with Creator and creation was taken away as we ‘fell’ into civilization. Eating from the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ represents our thirst for power, our longing to be like god and to be the creator and manufacturer of our own destinies. This thirst of ours was wet as we began domesticating plants and animals, using them for our purposes instead of trusting that God (or the earth) would provide. Yet our thirst was not satisfied, so we built towers to the heavens, symbols of all we could accomplish. Yet even as we thought we could reach past the heavens, God was still looking down on us… “Come, let us make a city and a tower, that the top may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. 5 Yet the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of Adam were building.” The curse for our greed was that we would have to work the land (agriculture) and that women would have pain in childbirth (the number of children women had, as well as the pain entailed, severely increased after humans became sedentary).

This cosmic tale of the fall reads like a tragedy, and as the curtain closes in Genesis 11 and reopens in Genesis 12, the elders of our faith appear on stage and receive the call that spurs on the Hebrew-Christian tradition: Abraham and family are told to leave the city and go into the wilderness. Later in the tale, as Moses leads all of Abraham’s descendants out of the slavery of the city and into the wilderness, they receive from Creator what is to be the guiding principles of their tribe:

¹⁶ This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Each one is to gather as much as he needs. Take an omer ^{(about 2 quarts)} for each person you have in your tent.’ ”

¹⁷ The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. ¹⁸ And when they measured it by the omer, he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little. Each one gathered as much as he needed.

¹⁹ Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.”

²³ He said to them, “This is what the LORD commanded: ‘Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.’ ”

-Exodus 16

These commandments are guidelines that hunter-gatherer tribes have followed forever. They represent a way of harmony and balance, a way that we have fallen far away from. Ched Myers calls this ‘Sabbath Economics’ and has written extensively on it.

Gather daily, (16)

don’t gather extra or store anything, (18)

make sure it circulates and doesn’t just sit and go to waste, (19)

limit your activity (sabbath). (23)

As we look for a way out of this mess we have created, we have to look this far back, all the way to our origins. This is the only way to develop a truly radical critique of society. Progress is a lie. I think we are all aware of that by now. Perhaps the first step is to reconnect with the land and with wildness, yet we can’t stop there. We have to rethink not only our way of being, but our way of organizing society. The Anarcho-Primitivist critique is a powerful alley in this process, and seems to be a fast growing movement among Christians. And it’s amazing to discover that the bible, of all things, has so much to teach us about this!

Here is a really good report back from the gathering by Nekeisha of Jesus Radicals. For more info on the intersection of Anarchism and Christianity, check out In The Land of the Living.

I am the newest contributor to the YAR blog, and as is the custom here, I was asked to introduced myself. I won’t bore you with my life story. I’ll keep it short and relevant.

My life is a complex journey, as all of ours tend to be in this day and age. I am a suburban southern kid who was raised during the corporate take over my once rural town. I watched the wild playground of my youth become paved and replaced with shopping malls. All the tree forts and hideouts we built as kids were replaced one-by-one with ‘real’ shelters, housing wealthy neighbors with well-manicured lawns. The whole infrastructure of my town shifted, and slowly, so did the income level and mindset of my family. The innocence of my youth was not only interrupted by all the normal challenges of adolescence, but also the rising consciousness of suburbia, consumerism, wealth, competition… capitalism.

For years I have been trying to forget what I know and remember what life was like before the corporate takeover of my town and my mind. Isn’t this the journey we are all on, trying to reconnect with our primal selves, our young innocence, our wide-eyed hope? This search has brought me so many places, literally and figuratively. I am currently living in Chicago, the third largest city in the country. I hate it. It’s a big concrete jungle, devoid of anything wild or natural. What keeps me here is the community house that I live in. But as the winter moves in, I will be moving out and navigating back to Florida, where I grew up.  I thrive in wild spaces, under stars, below trees. Though, I will say that as a student of herbal medicine, I love seeing tough healing plants rising between the cracks of abandoned factories. It gives me a glimpse of the coming kingdom of god. “A tree shall sprout in the middle of the city, and it’s leaves shall bring healing.” Revelation 22:2

I am 25. I am an anarchist, and I have been connected with a Mennonite congregation in Florida for about 3 years. I guess that means I qualify to write on this blog, but it is also what has attracted me to this blog and what probably keeps us all stopping by to check out the latest posts. I am excited to join a community of writers and readers that share such a rare common vision. I rebelled against my christian roots for a long time, finding them inconsistent with my radical political leanings. By 20, I was the only Democrat in my evangelical congregation and by 22 I was so far left that I couldn’t accept a faith that didn’t ask the hard questions about poverty and inequality. My rebellion was the appropriate response to any religion that would leave Lazarus in the streets. In time the quiet nudging of god drew me to the positive spirituality of a Mennonite church where I found community and an renewed faith. This wasn’t until after years of paying my dues in other temples, experimenting with other faith traditions, and discovering hidden beauties of all the revelations of god. What draws me to Christianity is it’s emphasis on community and it’s roots in resistance. As we journey on together as young radicals with a vision of a radical church, let’s not forget that most learning is a matter of remembering. Our primal selves, our humble faith and our simple ways of existing, these are things rooted deep within ourselves. The answers are not out there somewhere, they are inside all of us. This blog is a small step towards that discovery and I am glad to be here.

‘Rusty