[Oe List ...] from A Tribute to Thomas Berry

[John Cock]

Page 110, "A Tribute to Thomas Berry"

What Shall I Call This Man? by Herman Greene

"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper" -Edmund Burke
What shall I call this man with whom I have wrestled for years.
guide, friend, icon, saint, philosopher, seer, historian, teacher, poet,
sage, gentle-man, antagonist? I have been gripped by this man. I am reminded
of the hymn line, "O love that will not let me go."

At first it was just a handwritten note at the top of a paper: "Eastertide
1981." My pastor, Finley Schaef, Park Slope (Brooklyn) United Methodist
Church, had copied an unpublished paper by Thomas Berry called "The
Spirituality of the Earth," and given it to us to study. Here was the
lightning
flash by which I was bolted to attention:

The subject we are concerned with is the Spirituality of the Earth. By this
I do not mean a spirituality that is directed toward an appreciation of
the Earth. I speak of the Earth as subject, not as object.

My life would never be the same.

In this paper Thomas wrote of a dominant religious spirituality based
on redemption and a secular science that answered all of the questions that
really concerned our everyday lives and our imaginations. We didn't find
in our liturgies and scriptures the meaning of the stars or even diseases,
rather we read about scientific explanations. Yet, this science had no
interior
or numinous dimension. What we needed was an integral human
presence to Earth's processes, a creation-based spirituality by which we
could be whole again.

I fought/befriended Thomas from the beginning. "Yes, BUT!"
I was fortunate to be present when Thomas came and spoke at our "hot
little church in Brooklyn." The church wasn't big, but we had many social
agitators in our midst. I remember Thomas talking about the failure of our
enterprise, and this was in the early 1980s. I don't remember many of his
actual words, but I do remember him sweeping his hand across his body
and saying, "They couldn't build this again." What he meant was that the
modern mode of development would run out of resources or cause much
destruction to ecosystems. A human world had been built in such a way
that it could not be sustained, and it could not be rebuilt when it began
to deteriorate.

Yes, BUT!

I also remember him talking about edges. "Life always begins at the
edges," he said. "In a pond, the place where new life begins is at the
edges."
He told stories about people like John and Nancy Todd with their "living
machines" who had begun a new way of development, at the edges.

Yes, BUT!

I carried that paper, the "Spirituality of the Earth" with me and it
sustained
me for years, that along with Nikos Kazantzakis's Saviors of God.
Kazantzakis wrote about the "crimson line" of evolution that ascends
against a crushing descending current. "[Earth] sucks at the Universe and
wants to pass it through its body-thin as a thread-to turn it into a flower,
fruit, seed." Kazantzakis called on us to "save God," the one who ever
ascends, and to love the Earth.the struggle. I heard this too in Thomas
who called us away from "this basic rejection of Earth in its existing
form,"
our attempts to subdue it and transform it with our scientific technologies
and the effort to escape the discipline of Earthly experience, to the
radical
participation in creation-based dynamics.

I was young then, and I had a young family. I didn't feel I could do
much outside of my very demanding legal work and my home, and then
my home fell apart. I was divorced and alone. I went to see Thomas speak
whenever I could, which was only a few times, and I clung to "The
Spirituality
of the Earth." It wasn't just a paper, it was all around me and it was hope.
At a low point in my early legal career, I journeyed to visit my two boys
where they were living for a semester with my ex-wife in Costa Rica. I took
with me the recently published Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry. We
went to the beach at Jaco on the Pacific side of the country. There I read
this book, and then I knew my calling. This was my life's work, though I
did not then have the name "the Great Work." It was the recession of 1990.
When I returned from Costa Rica to New York, I lost my job. The Great
Work had begun.

Since then, I guess it has been a matter of understanding this material
better and learning how to live in two different worlds-the world
of the ecozoic vision and the world of how I live my daily life. I have
learned not to call this a contradiction. An earlier community in which I
had participated, the Ecumenical Institute, had given me a way to describe
this."living in between the no longer and the not yet." Or I could use
Kazantzakis' line, "living to bring about the ascent in the midst of the
crushing descent." It is where I am. It is where we are.

In 1992 I returned to my home state, North Carolina, and moved to
Raleigh. I wanted no more of big law firms and business. I wanted peace,
I wanted to live my values. I knew that Jim Berry, Thomas' brother, lived
in Raleigh, but I didn't know where. It was two years before I would meet
"big Jim." Jim was big in size, but I don't simply mean big that way. Jim
was big in heart, a force. I joined Jim's Center for Reflection on the
Second
Law and came back into touch with those who knew and lived Thomas
Berry's words. It was at this time that The Universe Story was published,
and, after reading it, I began to read physics, biology, ecology, books on
religion and science, and so forth.

And I began to dream of "The Thomas Berry Society." By this time I
knew that Thomas also was from North Carolina because he had moved
to Greensboro to live. I began to see him, first rarely and later regularly.
I
wrote to Thomas in 1996 about forming a "Thomas Berry Society." "No,"
he said, "do not form a Thomas Berry Society!" "Well," I asked, "what
about 'The Ecozoic Society'?" "No," he said, "the ecozoic society is
something
much bigger than some little group in Chapel Hill."

Thomas has had to hold me back so many times. "Don't push the river,"
he would tell me. He has regularly trimmed my expectations of what I
could do to represent him. And in the last two years we have been through
a painful period of arguing about "ontology vs. process." Don't ask me.
At the same time, I would like to think Thomas has been something
like a spiritual and intellectual father to me, and in the same vein, I have
been his son. We have met and talked. Ours were not always joyful social
events. Yes, there were the "oh my's," and the times of laughing, but always
there has been a fierce dialogue. I would ask my toughest questions to him.
I wanted to know, wanted to know, wanted to know. And he always came
back with profound answers, some of which I disagreed with, and if I did
I told him so.

And so we would have these ardent discussions, month after month
after month now for almost fourteen years.

I still want to go to Thomas and say "BUT!" and yet there is so much
more of "YES, YES, YES."

Yes, I have heard you Thomas. Yes, you have turned my life on end. Yes,
you have gripped me with your insight and vision. Yes, you have shaped
my life's work.

Yes, Thomas.I love you. I believe you are one of the most important
people of our time and that your legacy will shape the human community
and Earth for ages to come.

I am so glad we met.