Patrick Jamieson, Victoria, BC

Sixty-one individuals gathered at Bethlehem Centre near Nanaimo to experience a multi media workshop on Celebrating Sacred Earth presented by Maureen Wild. She integrated teachings from five sources Remi De Roo, Thomas Berry, Teilhard de Chardin, Joanna Macy and Hildegard of Bingen between 10 am and 4 pm at the splendid rural lakeside setting.

Participants who came from throughout Vancouver Island and beyond were treated to musicians and a poetry writing exercise that pulled together the experience of immersion in the thoughts of five great teachers of sacred cosmology.

The event was by donation, including a buffet lunch and was sponsored by the Remi De Roo Institute, initiated by Pearl Gervais of Victoria who was Bishop De Roo’s co-teacher for more than three decades, editing and co-writing a number of his books.

De Roo grew up a Manitoba farm boy who never lost touch with his penchant for the natural world. As a progressive Bishop of Victoria, he hosted cosmologists Brian Swimme and other leading evolutionary teachers of cosmology and forward looking spirituality including Alexandra Kovats and Matthew Fox.

De Roo admitted there were times when he wished he had lived his life as a farmer, bringing his natural intellectual creativity to that field instead of the role as the most forward thinking Roman Catholic prelate in Canada. Story of his childhood experiment with crops from his chronicles, “At age twelve I pleaded with my parents for my own corner of the garden where I could experiment with growing new varieties of vegetables, the result was that I won first prize for a bunch of “core-less” carrots. I also managed to grow a new variety of sweet red rhubarb.”

Thomas Berry is perhaps the most renowned of Sacred Earth philosophers, a true pioneer in the field from the 1970s onward. As a teacher of Maureen Wild, she shared telling details of his importance in the emerging field of spirituality which is increasingly significant in the ecological crisis of our times. His book The Sacred Universe includes significant essays between 1972 and 2001, with the titles: “Traditional Relgion in the Modern World” (1972); “Religion in the Global Human Community” (1975); “Alienation” (1974); “Historical and Contemporary Spirituality” (1975); “The Spirituality of the Earth” (1979); “Religion in the Twenty First Century” (1979); “Religion in the Ecozoic Era” (1993); “The Gaia Hypothesis: Its Religious Implications” (1994); “The Cosmology of Religions” (1998); “An Ecologically Sensitive Spirituality” (1996); “The Universe as Divine Manifestation” (2001); “The Sacred Universe” (2001); The World of Wonder (2001). The evolution of his own thinking is apparent from the very titles. “The Divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world, listen to the stars in the heavens, the sun, the moon, to the meadows…everything has its own voice”

Behind the pioneer work of Thomas Berry and Johanna Macy is the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit Paleontologist whose groundbreaking work on evolution The Phenomenom of Man and The Divine Milieu were controversial in the extreme within the Roman Catholic worldview prior to The Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Teilhard died on Easter Sunday, 1955. Teilhard posited that evolution is ongoing and driven spiritually as evidenced by the increasingly obvious existence of the Noosphere, completing the atmosphere, biosphere and zoosphere of the scientific natural world. This sphere of guiding evolutionary consciousness charges the universe with an inner fire that breaks through in revelatory fashion as evolution fuels itself in the spiritual direction of what he called the Omega Point.

Joanna Macy was another one of Maureen Wild’s teachers, who like Thomas Berry nurtured early grounding experiences of nature into a life long search and teaching journey of scared cosmology. She like Berry caught fire with Teilhard’s vision at an early stage defining her life’s work. “You grow out of this living body of Earth…a place to be quiet, a place to disappear into a kind of shared presence: the being that was tree and me…When I sat very quiet, the play of light seemed to go right through my body, and my own breath was part of the maples murmuring. The maple my cloister…widening our identity to our Ecological Self.”

The earliest pioneer cosmologist, some eight centuries ago was Hildegard of Bigen, a German Benedictine Religious Abbess whose accomplishments as a mystic philosopher, musician, herbalist healer, and cosmologist continue to influence and inspire spiritual seekers to this day. Hildegard wrote “The ear is the eye of the soul. There is a kind of ‘cosmic circulation of Wisdom’ within which the elements of earth, air, Fire and Water have a ‘spiritual vocation’ to fulfill….The earth is at the same time mother. She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human…for contained in her are the seeds of all.

Complementing this videos and presentations was the songs and music of Leah Hokanson. As part of the audience participation process, the participants composed specially structured poems titled Pantoums from their own lived and reflected upon experience.

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