Psalm 96
"all the trees of the forest will shout for joy"
One of the striking images from the Psalms is the communicative aspect of nature. Rivers clap, the heavens speak, mountains shout, the trees praise.
In the paperback version of Hunting Magic Eels I talk about Hartmut Rosa's work on resonance. According to Rosa, resonance is the experience of being addressed by the world. Reciprocally, upon being addressed we can answer the call. A dialogical relationship with the world is established.
The opposite of resonance, according to Rosa, is alienation from the world. The world is silent and mute. Without a voice, the world becomes inert and factual. Alienation, says Rosa, displays an "asymmetrical anthropology," where subjectivity is arrogated to ourselves leaving the world silent and objectified. In the language of the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, alienation creates an I-It relation with the world, where my side of the relation is alive and the other side is dead. Materialism, therefore, is a relationship with deadness, metaphysical necrophilia.
Staying with Buber, resonance establishes an I-Thou relation with the world. We step into a symmetrical anthropology where life exists on both sides. There is a relationship of communication and exchange where I am addressed by existence and can answer in turn.
In his seminal book I-Thou, Buber has us consider a tree. On the one hand, Buber says, we can observe the tree factually and scientifically. We can "classify it in a species and study it as a type." We can "subdue" the tree to analyze its chemical makeup, reducing its organic life to a "law." We can turn the tree into a number. In all this, says Buber, "the tree remains my object."
But a symmetrical, communicative relationship could also be established with the tree. The tree can address me. As Buber puts it, the tree "has to do with me." My relation with the tree, says Buber, is "mutual."
The life of faith is to participate in a sacred conversation with the world, to exist in an ongoing, resonant, I-Thou relation with life. You are being addressed by the world. If you listen well, you can hear the trees shouting for joy.
Faith is answering that call.
Richard Powers' books are fabulous! Some people believe in panpsychism which holds that all entities, even the smallest like quarks, have some degree of consciousness. There's a variation in process theology and open and relational theology called panexperientialism which holds that the smallest entities can experience but aren't necessarily conscious. That sounds weird at first, experience without consciousness of the experience, but we sometimes do that ourselves. Things happen to us, our body registers it, our brain registers it, but we are not conscious of it (unless we deliberately attend to it). For example, when I am out walking, listening to an audiobook, paying attention to the book while watching for cars (lots of the streets where I live have no sidewalk), and a breeze is blowing, I am totally unaware of the breeze most of the time. But my skin senses it, my neurons send the signals it causes to my brain, and my unconscious mind experiences it but I am not conscious of it. If panexperientialism is true, then it's easy to see that there might be a back-and-forth flow between nature and ourselves, we experiencing nature and nature experiencing us.
This is what draws me into the Avatar movies. The connectedness - in the first film he is taught while hunting to say to the creature “I see you”. We have a family friend who was very much part of the New Age hippie spiritual but not religious movement in Eugene. She told us that she asks the rock in her garden permission before moving it. While we laughed and teased “and what did the rock say?” There is something to the practice of seeing, asking, and listening to nature that resonates differently. Thanks Richard for reminding me of this and pointing out a Psalm I’ve not paid attention to before.