Category Archives: New Attitude to Nature

Indigenous Stories: The Song of the Universe

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Moriarty started with a Navajo story that told about the 2nd or 3rd day of the world. He called it the Great Creative Beginning. It is the story of the first man and first woman.

Moriarty told the story of the Buffalo Dance and the Buffalo song of the Blackfoot people of North America. It was the story of a buffalo and a beautiful young Blackfoot girl coming together and separating again. The Buffalo danced without damaging the grass. It seemed that the mountains were dancing with them as were the constellations dancing with them.  They actually did that. Hundreds of thousands of bison (not really buffalo) would converge on the land the hooves cut the soil and the excrement fertilized it and the land was reborn. Moriarty said this dance was this was the song of the universe. It was the song of which the earth and the stars are manifestations.

This story came to Moriarty in Connemara Ireland where all the land was in commonage. All the farmers sent their cattle to that land. All used it together in common.  As Professor Moriarty said about this Buffalo story,

“Unlike the Christian creation story where you feel a Berlin Wall between each day of creation, what this story speaks to me of is commonage consciousness. That there is one consciousness, one universal consciousness and it is there in buffalo, it is there in rocks, it is there in trees and there really are no fences between us.”

Moriarty says this story though it came from Indigenous people of North America, it  could have been told anywhere. It was told in Europe and then went to Eurasia where it went to Asia and then it went down across the Bering Straits and ended up in Blackfoot territory and it could be our creation story. This story has survived in this old consciousness and the only way to save the world and make something new as D. H. Lawrence said is to go back into that consciousness. These old levels of consciousness are still alive in us.  As Moriarty said,

“It is only in commonage consciousness that the earth can be saved. We have to take down the fences between us and animals. We have to take down the fences between us and stars. We have to acknowledge the oneness of consciousness that is in the universe.”

 

These are beautiful thoughts and they show how indigenous learning can teach us to walk beautifully in the world, which, of course, was Moriarty’s goal. He wanted to help us do that. I think he succeeded. Brilliantly. With the help of indigenous people.

Once Upon a Time Time

New Attitude to Nature, Travel

 

Moriarty reminded us in his YouTube lecture that all time is “once upon a time” time. Once we get into that time, we must let go of the common-sense world, the practical time. We must let go of Aristotle’s world of “A is A” and of non-contradictions. Then we can have a ginger bread house. These stories grow from the once upon a time time. He says “when we enter once upon a time time we are nearer the creative centre of the universe.’ According to the Aborigines of Australia we begin then walking in the creative dream time that is in the beginning.  Bruce Chatwin, a man who made a religion of traveling, in a wonderful book Songlines  talked about his time in Australia wandering with the aborigines. Bruce Chatwin said in his book Songlines, “yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”  I would put it this way, travel, particularly meandering travel,  helps us to understand that we are one with the universe. And that is magical time.

 

Once upon a time time is like Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Angus” where he wanders into a hazel wood because there was a fire inside his head and he caught a little silver trout with a berry on a string and it became a glimmering girl with an apple blossom on her head and faded through the brightening air and, he said, “I will find her again as she plucks the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun. The hazel wood is part of your own mind. As Moriarty himself said, he wanted to become aboriginal, or as my granddaughter once put, “aboreligional.” She made up that term but our family has adopted it.

 

As Professor Moriarty said, “It may be that the fairy stories of the world bring us closer to reality than Newton’s law of gravity.” Once we understand those stories we will be able to walk beautifully on the earth. Like Chatwin did and like the aborigines did.That is what the good professor sought.

Becoming Aboriginal

Bog Guy, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Ireland, New Attitude to Nature

 

What surprised me most when I listened to Professor John Moriarty decades after he left the University of Manitoba was that he  had engaged some of the same thoughts as I did.  Specifically, he like I, had encountered Indigenous thought and spirituality, something frankly in 1967 this  was not something I ever considered. What could we possibly learn from indigenous people I thought. I never heard anything of my professors suggest otherwise either.  We all missed out on a lot in other words. Thankfully, for Professor Moriarty and I we both encountered indigenous thought later. We smartened up.

Like D.H. Lawrence, Moriarty says he has learned a lot about coming down to earth from Native Americans.  Lawrence had challenged himself to “follow the trail of vanished Native Americans at the foot of the crucifix and take upon the primordial Indian obstinacy.”  Lawrence wanted to make a new day with them. Lawrence did that in Taos New Mexico.  Even though he had lots of fine contact with Native North Americans he eventually realized he was just another Pale Face.  This is what Lawrence wrote:

 

“I was born of no virgin of no Holy Ghost. I know these old men telling the tribal tales were my fathers. I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced, father far back in the resinous ages, but he like many old fathers with a changeling son, he would like to deny me, but I stand on the edge of their finite now, and they neither deny nor accept me. My way is my own of Great Father. I can’t cluster at the drum anymore.”

 

Moriarty says that like Lawrence he can’t deny he is a pale face and can’t cluster at the drum any more but he said when he came back to Connemara Ireland from Canada he couldn’t use Aristotle or Plato or other European thinkers to help him on that journey because he found Connemara to be cold and savage and the only way he could do that was to become aboriginal.

Now I must interject that I have been to Connemara and did not find it cold and savage, but admittedly I was there in summer. There was nothing cold and savage about it. One thing Moriarty learned from Canada was to face into the blizzard. That is what the buffalo do. They don’t run from the blizzard: they face it. They have the hairy face to do it too.

Moriarty said one day he was travelling among one the bogs of Connemara and he was in distress. So he fell down and asked the bog to heal him. He wanted the bog to suck out his “expensive European education”. It was not helping him there he thought. He realized his European head hurt the earth. His European head was doing damage to the earth. He did not want to continue like that. All of this also astonished me. After all I consider myself a bog guy. I don’t think I have blogged about that yet, but intend to. As well, I believe that the attitude to nature of Europeans and their descendants has been harmful to the earth, and we can learn a lot from indigenous people about learning a new attitude to nature.  I also believe bogs can do a lot to improve that.

Like me, Professor Moriarty wanted to start again in the bog. Shakespeare, whom he loved, as do I,  would not take him up but he found some old Native North American stories that helped him to get up again. He says some of those stories he learned from Indigenous people in Canada who took him back to the earth. He wanted to tell some of those stories. Some of those stories have helped me as well.

I will blog about them next.

Coming Down to the Bestial Floor

New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty compares coming down to the earth to God coming down on Christmas night to the bestial floor. He adds that on Ascension Thursday he was released from gravity. We can do that too he says. Then we have ascension grace. Moriarty says the best way to experience grace is to give in to gravity.  That is why he says he gives “thanks to gravity”.  That is why he wants to take “a space journey to the earth.” He had no interetw in going to outer space. He wanted to “come home to the earth.”  He really embodied a search for a new attitude to nature.  In that way, we might learn to walking beautifully on the earth

 

Into the Mystic

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

I am meandering back to that Irish professor of English literature I encountered at the University of Manitoba in 1967, John Moriarty . But first I want to consider another Irish poet. Van Morrison is one of my favourite singer/song writers. Here is part of a song of his that I greatly love:

 

Into the Mystic

 

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don’t have to fear it

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic

…

 

Professor John Moriarty in his wonderful lecture that I heard on You Tube after he died, admitted that paradise is lost, but it is only lost in our minds and our senses. In the 17th century we did enter this ‘nothing but universe,” as he called it, “but the day we take our shoes off our feet and walk on the ground of the world, and our eyes are open again, then we are back in our home in this stupendous earth… And if we could only open up to that again then we would never again misbehave on the earth.” Moriarty says we must take off our shoes and walk the earth knowing it is a great and sacred earth. This is what he meant by walking beautifully on the earth. That is what he wanted to do.

John Moriarty enlisted the help of 3 mystics to his cause. He said these are 3 people on whom we can rely absolutely and totally.

The first of these is a Rhineland mystic called Heinrich Suso, (Suso also spelled Seuse). He joined the Dominicans with whom he had a re-awakening. One day he walked into his chapel while he was suffering greatly and, as we know, suffering is often a door to grace and wisdom and enlightenment. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said there is no spiritual enlightenment without suffering. Suso talked about “heavenly lightnings passing and re-passing in the depths of his being.” Moriarty likens this to the northern aurora borealis of Canada, or Scotland or even sometimes Connemara,  where he lived in Ireland, after he left Winnipeg, and other places where great curtains of light can be experienced in the sky. He says besides cosmic auroras there are also “auroras of soul.” For example, if you walk into Chartres Cathedral in France that is what you experience there. The stained-glass windows you see there “are attempts to make manifest the heavenly light within and without,” he says. Suso experienced the hidden auroras of soul that are within him. These had occluded in him but eventually the eclipse was over and the auroras of soul were revealed and he could see these heavenly lightnings passing and re-passing in the depths of his being.

The second mystic Moriarty brings to our attention was Teresa of Ávila, OCD (born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada; 28 March 1515 – 4 or 15 October 1582), also called Saint Teresa of Jesus. One day she saw one of the highest of angels, one of the cherubins, beside her. The angel held a golden spear with a tip of fire that he plunged into her again and again. She experienced incredible pain and joy at the experience. That was called her trans-vibration in which she experienced a heavenly fire inside of her.

The third mystic Moriarty asks us to consider was Pascal. He was one of the great minds of Europe. In a waist coat of his after his death a servant of his discovered a tiny parchment that has come to be called the memorial of his night of fire.

Each of these 3 mystics experienced in some way the fire of God inside of them. Then says Moriarty, everything in the universe can also experience the same thing, the same light, the same fire.

It is import that we enfranchise women, but, says Moriarty, that is not enough:

 

“We must enfranchise the universe…the truth about the universe is really ecstasy. The truth of the universe is a boon of heavenly lightnings…the truth about it is a night of fire.”

 

From all of this Moriarty says,

“If only we could come back to the fact that we live in a stupendous universe, if only we could know that every bush is a burning bush, if only like Elvira Madigan we would come down from our tightropes to our tears and creeds and stand on the earth then we wouldn’t be harming the earth…then we wouldn’t want to go up in space.”

 

Then we would have a new attitude to nature. Then we would know that nature—the earth—is sacred.

Walk beautifully on the earth

Movies, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Professor John Moriarty was always on a religious quest. In the lecture I listened to after all these years, he said he wanted to walk beautifully on the earth!

 

Moriarty describes the earth this way:

 “The universe is a continuous manifestation of wonder biding over, wonder overflowing any container it could be in…The only space journey we should ever take should be to take us home to  the earth, the great and sacred earth.”

 

Moriarty then refers to a story in Exodus Chapter 3 where Moses encountered a burning bush in the desert of Sinai. The bush kept burning and burning. It should be consumed quickly because it is a dry bush in a desert but it keeps on burning. Then Moses hears a divine voice—the voice of God—who tells him to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stands is “holy ground.”

 

To this Moriarty adds,

“all ground is holy ground. You cannot be standing anywhere on earth and not be standing on holy ground. And every bush is a burning bush. Like any bush in Connemara… They are burning with green fire in the spring. They are burning with red fire in the autumn… It took someone like Van Gogh to show us that every tree is a green column of flame. Is green fire.”

 

Moriarty wants us, each one of us, to take off our shoes and experience holy ground. He also wants each of us to take off our shoes of European thinking. We must get rid of European creeds. We must be open to new experiences. We must “walk the earth with a barefoot heart and a barefoot brain.” Like Elvira Madigan we must have the courage to get off of what is safe and experience the new and the dangerous.  We must experience a year of thinking dangerously. No, we must experience a lifetime of thinking dangerously.  Safety is a trap that can deaden the heart and the mind that should be open to the new.

As Moriarty says, he does not want to be interrogated after his last day on earth and be asked if he ever set foot on the earth. To say no would be heart-breaking, for “setting foot on the earth is to set foot in paradise.” This is what I have been calling a new attitude to nature. An attitude filled with wonder. Not a desire to conquer it.

Like Henry David Thoreau, he does not want to admit on that last interrogation that he never lived at all. That would be a heart-breaking admission.

 

Courage to Walk the Sacred Earth

Movies, New Attitude to Nature

 

 

 

Moriarty said that in our century human beings have walked on the moon and like Neil Armstrong said it was a small step for man but a big step for mankind. Moriarty denies this. He says it was a very small step for humanity.

“To walk on the moon is no big deal…Have we walked on the moon because like Elvira Madigan we haven’t yet had the courage or the grace to step down and walk the sacred earth?

 

Moriarty says sometimes he stopped in at a house in Connemara where he lived in Ireland and saw children watching television. They were obsessed with other worlds that they saw. The characters in the films often had completely clean uniforms that didn’t smell of the barn or the heather or anything real. The children didn’t see the real wonder around them—Connemara. They were fed on ersatz wonder instead. Is that not even more true now in North America.  Children are obsessed with watching things on their phones or monitors. No one has time for real wonder any more. Pity that.

 

According to Professor Moriarty,

 “We need “to take a space journey to the earth…we would never want to set foot on Mars we would never want to set foot on any solar system inside or outside our galaxy.”

 

Is Moriarty right here?  Why does nature stop at earth? Is the moon not part of nature? How about Mars? How about the Milky way?

If you listen to astronauts speaking about their experiences in space it is far from prosaic. Maybe Moriarty was wrong on this point. I wish we could ask him, but that is too late. He is gone. He no longer walks the sacred earth with beauty. But we can. This is all part of releasing a new attitude to nature. That too is a sacred goal. That should be part of our religious quest in the modern age.

 

 

The Beauty of Elvira Madigan

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Movies, New Attitude to Nature

 

In Moriarty’s talk that someone recorded on YouTube so many years ago, the good professor Moriarty talked about Canada and the time he had spent there as a young university lecturer.  This was very interesting to me because it was the only time I ever heard him speak since he left Canada until I came across his lecture on YouTube.

First, unsurprisingly, he was astonished by the cold that came over the land after autumn. It was like nothing he had ever experienced in Ireland.  He said “you had to respect that cold.”  He loved Canada, but he longed for the clouds of Ireland.  He was burned by the pristine white snow on the ground and the deep blue skies. He wanted to have the protective clouds. His eyes were hungry for colour by spring. He was struck by the colours that a young female student in his class was wearing. He longed for such colours.  This is very much unlike my visit to Ireland when I yearned for the clouds to disappear and give me the sun and blue skies sprinkled with happy little clouds.

When he was in Canada, a student then said there was a film downtown in Winnipeg that he should see and Moriarty said, I am going to see that film because I don’t care what it is I just want to see the colours in the film. He said the film was called Elvira Madigan and it was a wonderful film. Amazingly I had also seen that little known-film that same winter! I remember it well. I was struck too by the beauty in the film embodied by the beauty of the young woman protagonist in the film. She was beautiful. Of course, I was a young lad much impressed by what I saw. The film was beautiful and I have never seen it again. I must see it again. I too long for the beauty.

Moriarty said he was entranced by the green fields in the film. I was entranced by the beauty of the woman. He did not remember much of the story other than that it was a love story. So too with me. That is all I remember, but I don’t remember the green fields I only remember the beautiful young woman.

Moriarty remembered more though than I did. He said a respectable bourgeois man, a middle-aged man, a married man, fell in love with Elvira and they went out into those green fields and tried to catch butterflies with their hands, but each time they tried to catch one it flew away. But the man had fallen in love profoundly without economic considerations. As Moriarty so eloquently put it:

“They are walking in the paradise that nature is, but also in the paradise of their love for each other. But they had their wing at existence anyways. Their love has given them the wings of existence that as Plato and Plotinus said we lost on the way down.”

 

That is what Moriarty wants to recapture. That is what he thinks we have lost in this world in which we can see only use and benefit. We can get that back through nature and we can get that back through love and if we don’t get it back, we will become so desperate that we will destroy nature or ourselves or both. Is that in fact what we are now doing? Moriarty clearly thought so. I tend to agree.

 Some of us watching that film might wonder what Elvira saw in the older man, the respectable man. He asks her what she, this gorgeous woman,  saw in him, and she said that before she met him she had the courage to walk on a tightrope above the ground as that was her occupation but, he gave her the courage to walk on the ground.

I think he meant that he gave her the courage to walk beautifully in nature. That is what Moriarty thought. So many of us lack that courage and that is a dreadful pity.

 

Open to Transcendence

New Attitude to Nature, reason

 

Professor Moriarty wished that Aristotle, that great philosopher of the western tradition who said that humans are the rational beings, should instead have said, “the human being is a being who can be consciously open to the transcendent.” As a result of this error, Moriarty believes our society has slid into serious decline. We made a fundamental serious mistake more than 2,000 years ago and are still paying a big price for it.  

 

Moriarty finds an image of this decline in the image of seals in the far north who always need to keep a hole open in the ice, because they can only stay under water for a short period of time or they will suffocate under the ice. Humans are like that. Humans need to keep a hole open for the transcendent to enter Humans who need to breathe the transcendent. And the problem we have, says Moriarty is that

 

“We don’t breathe transcendentally any more. We need these holes through which we breath sanctifying grace. As walruses and seals need to breathe oxygen, we need to breathe transcendentally. The transcendent is not just outside. It is also located inside us. But those holes have closed over and that is why we can continue to do desperate damage to the earth.”

 

We must be open to transcendence but not chained to it. If we fail to do that we have the wrong attitude to nature.  Karen Armstrong, a former nun who has written a glorious book called Sacred Nature might say that by failing to respect the sacrality of nature we have instead come to destroy nature.  I will comment on her book in the future. All in good time, as we meander towards it.

Let me just say that in my view understanding the sacrality of nature is what a new attitude to nature is all about. That and being open to transcendence. However, I don’t want to discount the importance of being a rational creature. In my view, both are essential. Reason is not the enemy of transcendence nor the sacrality of nature.

 

We need rebellion: a Tiananmen Square Moment

New Attitude to Nature, Rebel

 

Professor Moriarty said that we need a moment now like the moment in Beijing in Tiananmen Square where a man who had been shopping, stepped off the pavement and stood up to the line of tanks that were gathered to support the Communist regime and lifted his shopping bag and forced them to halt. We need to resist this reduction of life to utility. As John Moriarty said,

 “It is time for us to do what that little Chinaman did. Stand in front of the modern world, wave a red flag, step off the pavement, it is a safe place, it is made for pedestrians, and say, ‘if human beings want to destroy themselves fine, but in the course of destroying themselves we have no right to destroy whales, we have no right to destroy dolphins, gazelles, elephants, behemoths…’ We need to stand in front of the world and speak the great perennial truths into it. The perennial truths are divine ground that the whole universe had its origin in divine ground, and it is a blossoming out of divine ground, and it is blossoming still in divine ground. That is there is soul, and by soul, I mean that there is something in me that is older and prior to the elements. There is something in me and you that is older and prior to the sun, the galaxy, and the universe itself. There is something that isn’t even involved in the universe. It is transcendent. “

 

I interpret that to mean that there is something sacred in nature and in us that must be respected. It cannot be reduced to what is useful. It is divine and we need an entirely new attitude to nature to properly appreciate it. We must standup to the prevailing world view that says nature is only something we can use as we choose. Just like that man in Tiananmen we can stand up to authority. We can rebel. It takes courage but we can do it.