I often wonder what it would be like if we dared to love this life -- the fragile and the vulnerable, the endangered, daring to be humble before the magnitude of our beginnings, daring to learn our species into a stubborn and pliant wonder, until reverence shines in all that we do -- until we live an economics of reverence -- until it permeates education, development and health care, homes and relationship, arts and agriculture -- a reverence for life, for planetary, social and personal wholeness. This is our purpose now. May we do it well, with thoroughness and love.
~ from THROUGH THE MOONS OF AUGUST by Carolyn McDade
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
The earth is a living, conscious being. In
company with cultures of many different
times and places we name these things as
sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether
we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and
the body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts
of a Creator, or as symbols of the
interconnected systems that sustain life, we
know that nothing can live without them...
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in
which nourishment, sustenance, habitat,
knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive.
To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will,
our courage, our silences, and our voices. To
this we dedicate our lives.
Religious truths have not been expressed throughout time as mathematical formulas, but in art, music, dance, drama, poetry, stories, and active rituals.
The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.
Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and the body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them... All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
