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| Sacred Canopy CC Jean Stimmell: Fort Foster, Kittery ME: March 2014 |
Watching the movie Melancholia forced
me to look death straight in the eye. It explores the existential question of
finding meaning in life, even in the face of imminent death.[1]
Justine, the heroine of the movie, who
had been, up to this point, overwhelmed by the pressures of modern life, pulls
herself together at the end as a rogue planet is about to obliterate earth. She
takes charge of her family, showing them how to find meaning in their lives in
the face of death by building a magic teepee – a sacred canopy – and seeking
refuge inside.
Her brother-in-law, the rational,
man-in-charge, placed his trust in science to save the day. When it finally sinks
in for him that their situation is hopeless – that science has no answers – he
commits suicide, leaving his family members to fend for themselves.
Isn’t this the story of our modern times?
We have been set adrift. When push comes
to shove, we can no longer count on organized religion or science to protect
us: to provide us with that magic teepee or sacred canopy that our human
species has always depended upon when death comes knocking.
In the West, the fabric of the religious
sacred canopy began to fray over 500 years ago when Galileo “discovered” that
the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, ushering in the age of
science. Since then, our society has
become increasingly secularized as science emerged as our surrogate, defacto
god, the new deity who has mesmerized us with an endless stream of magical
inventions, fooling us into believing that with science on our side, we are
invincible, able to control our destiny.
But now we are beginning to see through
that illusion. Rather than floating effortlessly on the magic carpet of
technology, we find ourselves more stressed, anxious, and impoverished than ever. We are finding science has few real solutions
to improve our human condition, just an endless arcade of new products and
gizmos.
And most important, when our own death
draws near – facing the end of existence as we know it – we are discovering
just as Justine’s brother-in-law did in the movies, science is powerless to
help.
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| Magic canopy: Province Town CC Jean Stimmell |
Perhaps that is because, in the cold
world of empiricism, scientists can’t grasp that sacred canopies really exist
because they can’t be measured or dissected like a laboratory rat. Rather, they
agree with social scientists like Peter Berger who concludes in his book about
religion entitled The Sacred Canopy, “Religion is to be understood as a human projection, grounded in
specific infrastructures of human history.” [2]
However, whether science thinks sacred
canopies are really real or not, in terms of mythological and psychological
reality, they are an indispensible aspect of what it means to be human. Sacred
canopies will vary depending on time and place and may involve symbolic
self-transcendence or maybe not. But the
bottom line is, as our final moments approach, we need to be able to validate what
is most meaningful in our lives, our human connection to one another. We do
that by coming together and being there for each other, seeking refuge
together under the symbolic sacred canopy of our choice.
For indigenous people, able to live mindfully in an animate world,
their sacred canopy is not a human projection but a seamless part of everyday
life, an ever-present reality woven out of their sustainable interdependent
relationships with their tribe and the living, breathing earth.
For the rest of us, entangled as we are in the death throws of our
materialist, out-of-control world, we must use the one tool we have left, our
imagination, to try to recreate that indigenous experience where every moment is alive
and sacred, secure in every fiber of our being that we are not alone but cradled in the arms of our
living, breathing mother.
xxx
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