Pagan Godspell

I have learned, via Chas Clifton’s blog, that Dolores LaChapelle passed through the veil on January 22nd.  Dolores was an incredible personality and an amazing writer and leader in the Deep Ecology movement (a movement that has obviously influenced much of my thinking).  Her book, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life, continues to be an inspiration for me in the ongoing evolution of my ecological polythea/ologies.  She was an incredibly accomplished skiier well into her 70s, and she loved the Rocky Mountains with a soulful, bone-deep passion.  She was also an enthusiastic proponet of Earth-based ritual.  In honor of her passing and her incredible life, I would like to quote from her article “Ritual is Essential: Seeing ritual and ceremony as sophisticated social and spiritual technology“:

If we want to build a sustainable culture, it is not enough to “go back to the land.” That’s exactly where our pioneering ancestors lived and, as the famous Western painter Charles Russell said, “A pioneer is a man who comes to virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off the wild meat, plows the roots up. . . A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.”

If we are to truly re-connect with the land, we need to change our perceptions and approach more than our location. As long as we limit ourselves to rationality and its limited sense of “practicality,” we will be disconnected from the “deep ecology” of our place. As Heidegger explains: “Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.” It takes both time and ritual for real dwelling. Likewise, as Roy Rappaport observes, “knowledge will never replace respect in man’s dealings with ecological systems, for the ecological systems in which man participates are likely to be so complex that he may never have sufficient comprehension of their content and structure to permit him to predict the outcome of many of his own acts.” Ritual is the focused way in which we both experience and express that respect.

Ritual is essential because it is truly the pattern that connects. It provides communication at all levels – communication among all the systems within the individual human organism; between people within groups; between one group and another in a city and throughout all these levels between the human and the non-human in the natural environment. Ritual provides us with a tool for learning to think logically, analogically and ecologically as we move toward a sustainable culture. Most important of all, perhaps, during rituals we have the experience, unique in our culture, of neither opposing nature or trying to be in communion with nature; but of finding ourselves within nature, and that is the key to sustainable culture.

Amen.  She has also said: When you start seeing the world as patterns…everything opens up. 

May the many holy and gorgeous patterns that she perceived everywhere in the natural world, especially the breathtaking mountains that met her love with their own in return, receive her joyously into their magnificent fold.