In yesterday’s DM, I cited a striking passage from Safina’s book that stated that humans learned that whales are not a thing but, rather, neighbors living with us in the world.
Animals as neighbors, not just objects. That may constitute a genuine paradigm shift. Jesus saying “love your neighbor as yourself” surely applies both to how we treat humans and to how we treat animals.
Decades ago, on the Onondaga Reservation, Chief Oren Lyons addressed a gathering of tribes as follows:
We see it as our duty to speak as caretakers of the natural world. Government is a process of living together, the principle being that all life is equal, including the four-legged and winged things. The principle has been lost; the two-legged walks about thinking he is supreme with his man-made laws. But there are universal laws of all living things. We come here and we say they too have rights.
When Jesus commanded people to “love their neighbor as themselves,” did he say that all neighbors were necessarily two-legged ones?
Are we trusting animals and respecting them, their habitats and their needs, especially in this time of climate change?
Obviously, climate change itself is as much or more a threat to our animal neighbors as it is to our two-legged neighbors. To fight climate change is to fight on behalf of our grandchildren and great grandchildren—but also to fight on behalf of the descendants of other species as well.
It is a beautiful thing to come to realize how many species are busy creating successful communities—and for how long they have been at it. SO much longer than we humans who are so late on the scene and are stumbling and failing so profoundly.
Surely it is important that we meditate on the successes of these other species at the same time that we look around at our own failures. We have so much to learn and so little time to learn it in. We have vast amounts of information and knowledge, but so little wisdom. Greed often drives humans to commit great violence on other species. There are many stories of how whales deliberately attacked whaling ships when their companions were harpooned and left to die.
One observer commented “We are at a loss to assign a motive for a whale’s attack.” Really? Responds Safina:
That sentiment reflects a common and profound incapacity in our relationship with other animals. All the whales who ever attacked whaleboats or sank ships had just been harpooned or had just witnessed their companions under attack. Is it really difficult to see a pattern? Their motive: defense. Self-defense, defense of their group.
The fact is that
…sperm whales don’t bother each other, other sea creatures (except their food), or humans. People nowadays have learned that they can swim with them with no worry other than whether they’ll get good photos….Why a harpooned whale or a companion might occasionally mount an aggressive defense is not too hard to understand.
See Carl Safina. Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, pp. 76f.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion, p. 164.
Banner Image: A curious mother whale and calf pass peacefully by a whale-watching boat. Photo by Laurence Grayson on Flickr.
Do you gain insight and maybe some wisdom from holding up humanity’s often failed efforts at community to a mirror of communities that other species create?
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register
1 thought on ““Love thy Neighbor”—Stretching Our Appreciation of Community”
I’ve just begun reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “Braiding Sweetgrass.” In her opening creation story, she offers what, for me, is a stunning insight. With apologies for quoting so long a passage, I offer this from Kimmerer’s opening story:
“On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast. Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identify and orientation to the world. . . . One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”
A stunning insight that makes me wonder, ‘Has our creation story set Christians up for an adversarial relationship with the earth from the beginning?’