Settling Well

A few years ago, I finally completed my M. Div. It’s 18 units, and I did one each semester, so nine years of studying, which I loved. My degree culminated in a year-long thesis on Revelation and how it might shape our response to the massive ecological damage humans inflict on the planet.

Suppose you have heard anything about the book of Revelation. In that case, you probably know it goes to some pretty weird places, and it felt particularly appropriate (worrying?) to be spending so much time there once the pandemic hit nine months into my thesis. It was a year of sitting with Revelation, reading the text, looking into the Greek and reading many pages of what other people thought—finally, fleshing out my thoughts on a responsible ecological action consistent with the ideas presented in Revelation. I spent a lot of time thinking about the big questions: Where are we headed? How do we fit in with the rest of creation? What are the Imperial power structures of our time? How, or even can I disentangle myself from them? Who is this Christ we follow? What does it look like to follow him? All of this made me rethink how I am in the world.

I was listening to a podcast the other day, and Todd Wynward was being interviewed. Partway through, he said, “learning how to become a person of place is the new curriculum for myself,” and I realised that is a good description of where I find myself. While my formal study is finished, what I learned is shaping my learning focus by widening my interests to include local flora, fauna, history and the current state of our neighbourhood. It prompted my walking/running-every-street project, my desire for a local church, sustainability efforts, choices in our garden, and many of my reading choices, especially around understanding and learning from Aboriginal Australians. You’ll probably see these preoccupations popping up all over my blog, but most often in “Looking and Listening,” in “Nature,” and in “Resistance.”. These are little snippets of my wrestle to understand myself as a fellow creature inhabiting a particular place. I think that Wynward is probably right that “being a person of place” in the way he understands it is “an antidote to the racism, the economic inequality, the ecocide, and the conspicuous consumption that we have.”

On a semi-related matter, the fat caterpillar from yesterday’s post has moved to another stem and has been there all day. I wonder if this means it’s getting ready to moult.