roots

I led a primary school assembly yesterday, in which I wanted to help the kids learn something amazing about tree roots. As an experiment, I'm not sure it quite worked, but the idea was to get a number of children, randomly scattered around the school hall, to stand up and be trees - and then for each of those trees to be linked to all of the others by a complex root system - involving children around the "trees" holding the tree's ankles with one hand, and with their free hand beginning a chain of held hands, spreading outwards. If it had worked (it didn't!), one tree could have sent messages to another tree, by wiggling its "roots", and the "roots" passing on the message by squeezing hands, down the chain until another tree's roots were reached.

Somewhere along the way, the excited children got a bit lost with instructions from me that were, in the heat of the moment, just a little bit too complicated for a hurried demonstration. But what I'd wanted to illustrate was the incredible interconnectedness of our world - and more specifically, the amazing phenomena called mycorrhizae [from the Greek: mikas = fungus, riza = root].

Through scientific discoveries that date back to the late nineteenth century, but are developing right now at an accelerating pace, we are discovering more and more about the complex symbiotic (i.e. mutually dependent) relationship between plant roots and the "macrofungi" that attach themselves to them. The fungi help plants get minerals that the roots alone can't absorb, and in turn the fungi live off sugars that they get from the plant's photosynthesising processes. But more than that, the mycorrhizae are the structures of the fungi that extend the plant's root system by becoming a functioning part of it. Tiny threads of fungus called hyphae extend the mycorrhizae further by growing into spaces where the roots can't go, accessing nutrients beyond the plant's own reach.

But there's more. The mycorrhizae also connect the roots of one tree to the roots of others, in what Susan Simard has termed the "wood-wide-web". Through this web, nutrients flow to the trees that need them most (such as the youngest ones), and information and energy are transferred from dying trees to those that are continuing to grow:

"We have learned that mother trees recognise and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbours, affecting gene regulation, defence chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system." (Simard 2016:249)

In this communicating system - over 90% of plants have some kind of mycorrhizal relationship, and some scientists believe these networks may span entire continents - chemical signals can be transmitted from a plant under attack (from insects, herbivores and pathogens in the air or soil) to neighbouring plants, stimulating protective chemical responses in those other plants. But these incredible networks are also fragile: plough up the soil or fertilize it with agricultural chemicals, dig it up to build houses and roads, and the mycorrhizae are, inevitably, destroyed. Lone trees on city streets, cut off from their neighbours, are stranded, vulnerable.

***

I dared to venture into this awesome "underland" (to use Robert MacFarlane's poetic term) with a school full of primary children, partly because it felt like a fabulous visual metaphor for the interconnectedness of all living creatures (humans included) in our world - this was a Harvest assembly, it should be said. But partly also for its own sake - I wanted to find a way of sharing with them one of the biggest "wow" moments of this year for me, discovering, through Simard's work and those who have written about it, a stunning, hidden dimension of the infinitely complex ecosystem we inhabit.

As a theologian, it is all too tempting to appropriate the mycorrhizal "wood-wide-web" as a theological metaphor, primary-school-assembly-style. And it does indeed have fabulous metaphorical potential. But in our developing "theological ecology", it feels like the mysterious fungal connections between the roots of plants and trees demands harder, more profound theological work of us. If the Holy Spirit, the "go-between God" (as John V. Taylor termed her), is not just "like" the pulses of air that constitute our human-to-human communication, but is somehow in them (Pentecost, to take the most obvious example), then might we dare say that that same Spirit is in those chemical pulses that move through the complex root-and-fungus networks stretching out through the dark earth beneath our feet? What are doing, theologically, when we poison, dig up and disrupt those networks? What would healing and flourishing look like, and what is our role as human beings within that? What might we humans - we Christians among them - learn from the mycorrhizae?

References:

• Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, 2019, pp.95-99
• Robert MacFarlane, Underland: a deep time journey, 2019, pp.87-116
• Suzanne Simard, 'Notes from a Forest Scientist', in Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: what they feel, how they communicate, 2016 (see also Simard's TED talk, 'How trees talk to each other')
• Isabella Tree, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, 2018, pp.19-22, 47

radical (ecological) receptivity

One of the things that I've found myself talking about a lot over the last few years (emerging from our intentional life nurturing community in Hodge Hill, and my PhD research that emerged from it) is what I've called (following radical democrat Romand Coles) "radical receptivity".

It sounds complicated, but it's really just asking a very simple question: "how can we be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

It started, for me, as a question of "mission" - our relationship, as Christians, with our neighbours who wouldn't call themselves Christians: "how can we be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our 'non-Christian' neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

But then, when you start being attentive to power relationships - particularly those (de)formed by the social structures within which we live - it became a question of "privilege", at work particularly in the social structures of class, gender, and race: "how can we - as middle-class and/or male and/or white - be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our neighbours who are 'othered' from us by social structures, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

And when "mission" and "privilege" are themselves entangled, one of the biggest theological questions for multiply-privileged Christians becomes: where do you locate Jesus? I realised that so often, when thinking about mission in so-called "marginalised" communities, Christians - particularly Christians who are multiply privileged - do one (or both!) of two things. 

On the one hand, they locate Jesus in or with "the marginalised other" as lacking, in need - with the help of a biblical text like the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for example - "I was hungry... I was thirsty... I was a stranger... I needed clothes... I was sick... I was in prison...". This allows those privileged Christians to identify with the "and you..." who feeds, welcomes, clothes, visits "the other".

On the other hand, multiply privileged Christians have been very good at identifying with Jesus ourselves - but a Jesus, now, in the active role of feeding, welcoming, healing, etc. In recent decades, that's often been expressed through the idea of "incarnational mission", or the question, "What Would Jesus Do?". But you can trace it back much further in the Christian tradition - through the 16th century saint Teresa of Avila, for example, who famously wrote, "Christ has no body but yours... Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world..."

And all of this is OK, except for the way it risks radically deforming our relationships with our neighbours. For me, this comes to its sharpest expression in the reflections of critical white theologian Jennifer Harvey, on the "What Would Jesus Do?" question:

"It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which white people are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of white racialization. And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of being toward which white people are already inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a white person whose life is embedded in white-supremacist structures should be doing."  

(Jennifer Harvey, ‘What Would Zacchaeus Do? The Case for Disidentifying with Jesus’, in George Yancy (ed.), Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do? (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.94-5)

Since I first read that, I've found myself returning to it many times - as a warning, and as an invitation to a different way (Harvey herself calls white Christians to dis-identify with Jesus, and identify instead with a character like Zacchaeus, marginal to the story in which Jesus is the central character, but on the receiving end of Jesus' challenge to repent, make reparations, and change). And I've found myself working with it not just in terms of race and whiteness, but in terms of middle-class-ness (within unjust economic structures), and maleness (within patriarchal structures).

But more recently I had another moment of epiphany. What if we translated Harvey's challenge into human beings' relationship with the Earth and its myriad other-than-human creatures? What if we acknowledged the ecocidal (i.e. earth-killing) dimension of our social structures?

"It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which human beings are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of anthropocentrism (i.e. a human-centered worldview). And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of being toward which human beings are already inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a human being whose life is embedded in anthropocentric [human-centred], ecocidal [earth-killing] structures should be doing."

Now, that may well need some qualification. Because anthropocentric, ecocidal structures are, themselves, a product of patriarchy, of white western colonialism, of exploitative class relationships. Ecocide is, on the whole, a crime of the human beings of the global North for which the human beings of the global South - as well as the Earth itself - is suffering greatly. And a crime that, while almost all of us in the global North are complicit in some way or other, has been led and sustained by the richest and most powerful in our societies.

But, to go back to where we began, what if we asked the question again, like this: "how can we human beings be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our other-than-human neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

That's the starting point, for me, of the next step of the adventure of what I'm wanting to call radical (ecological) receptivity. 

We might think we're quite good at being "open to the gifts... of our other-than-human neighbours" - through our appreciation of, awe and wonder at, what we call "the natural world" around us. But we're keenly aware that even that so often degenerates into relationships of consumption, exploitation and indifference.

But how do we even start opening ourselves to the challenges that come from our other-than-human neighbours? What does that even mean?

Australian ecotheologian Jan Morgan, in a recent book, explores the human - and Christian - vocation of attending to "Earth's Cry" - a cry that is not just (as the Hebrew bible often puts it) a song of praise, but also (in the language of the letter to the Romans) a deep groaning, a lament.

In the posts that follow on this blog, I want to try and explore further, and begin to embody, that radical (ecological) receptivity - and see where it takes us.

something new

I'm going to try something new.

Since 2010, I've been writing a blog, on and off, rooted in my outer estate neighbourhood on the edge of the city of Birmingham. Often its subject matter has stretched wider - touching at times on national politics, and the internal politics of the Church of England - but its focus has been, and remains, the labour of love that we call "community-building", often across dividing lines of race and class, but with a focus on nurturing relationships between neighbours rooted in particular places. Much of what I've written there over the years has been about what we've been doing in our own neighbourhood (the Firs & Bromford estate, Hodge Hill), and what we've been learning through that doing. Some of that learning became a PhD (developing a "radically receptive" political theology from the urban margins), and that in turn has turned out to be a springboard for some writing and speaking and some fascinating, stretching conversations in the wider world.

This is something different.

This is venturing into terrain that I, personally, don't know remotely well. It will be following the footsteps (and, at times, paw-prints) of people (and other creatures) that know the ground much better than me. I come as a late arrival to a "party" - or perhaps it's a walk in the woods, a picnic, a protest, a dance, a lament - that many others have been at for years.

But better late than never. And better something than nothing. As the public-theologians / comedy-rap-jazz-duo Harry and Chris put it:

"They say it's a drop in the ocean / as if that's a reason to stop.
Well maybe they've forgotten the ocean / is literally made up of drops."

So what is it?

When theology is divided into sub-disciplines, it's often labelled "eco-theology".

But many practitioners of "eco-theology" would argue, I think, that compartmentalising it as a sub-discipline is, itself, part of the problem.

An earth-centred (rather than human-centred) theology should change everything: not just the way we think about creation and salvation, but the way we think about God, and Jesus, and the gospel, and discipleship, and church, and mission, and... everything...

Eco-theology reminds us that everything that is, is connected. Interrelated. Entangled. Interdependent.

In Western theology, over the last couple of centuries, the idea that everything in theology is connected to everything else has been expressed in the sub-discipline called "systematic theology".

But the "systems" of "systematic theology" have too often been overly rigid, fixed, rational. Drawn only in straight lines. "Mind over matter", imposing their intellectual categories on messy reality. And captive to a profoundly white, Western, heterosexual male way of thinking about the world.

What if we were to think about theology not as a "system" but as an "ecology"? Where the connections and interrelations are rarely in straight lines, and are often more mysterious, hidden, buried deep beneath the surface? Where nothing is fixed - where everything grows, changes, evolves, dies? Where one thing changing, changes everything else? Where "matter" is what matters, and what thinks, and breathes, and communicates... and grows, changes, evolves, dies...?

This is what I want to call the "theological ecology".

And the blog posts that follow will not attempt, as systematic theology has often claimed, to offer a comprehensive description of all the ecology's elements and interrelations. The ecology is too wonderful, too mysterious, too complex for that to be even possible. And even if it were, I am - as I've already said - a late arrival, a novice, a stumbling beginner in this unfamiliar terrain. Here, then, I'll just offer a handful of fragments, whether picked up from others or glimpsed for myself - fragments of beauty, wonder (and sometimes terror) that I find myself turning over and over in my hand, or straining my eyes to see from a distance.

Some connections between the fragments may emerge over time. I'm expecting this to be a place, though, not just to sit back and marvel at the complex connections. But a place that calls us to jump in with both feet - to immerse ourselves in the overwhelming realities of the one world that we live in - and to action: to be changed and to change; to grow and evolve; to live and to die...