Slow Earth Theology
Reflections on listening to people (folks living among the the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes and the Heiltsuk First Nation) who are close to the land and seeking wellness when my own societal and theological impulses resist: I need a slow earth theology shaped by the Gospel.
Lately when I discuss the question “what have you been reading?” folk are surprised to hear of a Japanese missionary in Thailand. I’m re-reading Kosuke Koyama’s book Water Buffalo Theology. It was reprinted in a revised and expanded edition in 1999 to celebrate it’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
Koyama learned much from the farmers he lived among and served with in Thailand. The lessons are evident in the first chapter, “Theological Situations in Asian and the Mission of the Church.” He moves through a series of theological reflections by moving geographically from Singapore to Thailand to China to Hong Kong to The Philippines to Indonesia to Myanmar to Vietnam to Japan to Taiwan and then back to the reader in order to talk about contextualization and indigenization and what he calls authentic contextualization.
I can’t summarize all his work, however, I do want to suggest that a full-bodied discipleship with Jesus that seeks to bring God’s Word and the Gospel to bear in all of our relationships — with God, with people, with self, and with the stuff of earth must be what Koyama calls “slow theology” and “an eretz or earth theology.” His introduction to Singapore contains both concepts. Slow theology is inefficient. It’s human. It seems to run counter to our desire to be efficient — that is fast. It may be helpful for us to see a bit of what Koyama writes of Singapore:
Is not the biblical God an “inefficient” and “slow” God because he is the God of the covenant relationship motivated by love? He walks forty years in the wilderness with his people, speaks through the “ox-cart” history of three generations of the united monarchy, twenty kings of Judah and nineteen kings of Israel, exile and restoration, diaspora, and so on. Isn’t this simply too ‘inefficient’ and ‘slow’… The image of the cruified Christ (‘nailed down’ — the ultimate symbol of immobility, the “maximum slowness”) is an intensification of the forty years wandering in the wilderness. Can this “immobile,” inefficient Christ speak to “mobile-efficient” Singaporean’s? How are we to retain “being slow” in Singapore, which is constantly getting to be fast?”
To realize that the bilabial God is “slow and inefficient” in the midst of Singapore life–is this “salvation today?”
What kind of lifestyle would communicate salvation in the “slow God” in Singapore?
The whole of Singapore is after money (as is the case in Japan). Shall we just say, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt 6:24) and sit down? What is the missiologically meaningful interpretation of this passage?
Thousands of people are living in concrete square boxes (government housing project). Some of them live on the fifth floor or on the nineteenth floor. Their lives have been “uprooted” from the ground. “Distance from the ground” is causing psychological problems. “To be human” is “to be on the ground,” particularly for the Singapore Malays. Theological “erets-ology is needed (erets=earth in Hebrew, see Gen. 1:1).
Water Buffalo Theology, 25th Anniversary Edition, p. 4.
I believe the lack of a grounded theology of place and of people in evangelical theology alienates us from each other and from what Jesus, who makes all things new, would have us do together as wise stewards. Our discipleship is incomplete if we always just want to send people away and have them look forward to Heaven.
Here’s two examples of a people in a grounded and local context trying to respond to the impact of people who came through and continue to just act fast. I believe slow and erets theology can emerge within Christian engagement as neighbours, however, we are going to have to slow down and listen just as Kosuke Koyama did in Thailand.
Our neighbours south of us (in Vancouver, BC) the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes are working to restore salmon habitat along Nookachamps Creek, a tributary of the Skagit River near Mount Vernon, Wash. The way they talk about this work and the horizon they maintain for their labour is important to me. For one it’s a slow work. They believe with scientists that their labour may take as many as 90 years before the salmon recover. Second their work is not “an environmental project” abiding in isolation from a people. Rather, the work is part of their vision of wellness or health for the people who live there.
Jamie Donatuto, a graduate of the University of British Columbia who serves as the tribe’s environmental health officer, and Larry Campbell, a 71-year-old tribal elder, have created a tool, Indigenous Health Indicators, to include the land, the cultural connections to a history and people there, their inter-relationships with the creatures and each other in this space. They are entering into a grounded slow work of restoration and community revitalization. (See The Washington Post, An ancient people with a modern climate plan, Jim Morrison, 24 November 2020)
I am also seeing the same impulse for a grounded and slow work among the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) through the leadership of Jess Housty in Bella Bella to north of us in Vancouver. She recently highlighted how their sense of personhood linked to the land and their labour together as a people brings them into conflict with what we might call “fast” practices and perspectives contained in all colonial impulses:
My family and community taught me that I’m part of a culture and knowledge system that have thrived for millennia because they are perfectly adapted to the world around us. Our identity is inseparable from our lands and waters, and protecting them is a sacred obligation to return the care they show to us. This often pits us against extractive industries and western values, but it’s who we are.
(The National Observer, This Heiltsuk activist wants sovereignty and self-reliance for her community, Patricia Lane, 23 November 2020)
Jess’s persistent work has been so encouraging to read and follow over the past couple of years. I find her deep emotional and relational connection to the land (and waters) so encouraging when she recalls the sinking of a tugboat full of oil in Gale Pass, October 2016. She reminds me of the trauma my mother felt when the land in North Georgia that she had tended with her family as a child was bulldozed and scarred by a drunk man on an excavator. Jess says,
I was the Heiltsuk incident commander during much of the six-week emergency phase. We had to fight to ensure the deep local knowledge of Heiltsuk responders was respected, from marine conditions to sacred cultural sites. We started work before dawn and continued past nightfall. We watched hundreds of non-local responders cycle through relief shifts while we had no choice but to keep working. They brought a professional detachment to their work that does not exist for Heiltsuk people; we responded to that spill from a place of deep attachment to our homelands.
Our laws and values invested us fully in that work because homelands and non-human kin were in the balance. I struggled every day knowing that my ancestors had cared for our territory for millennia, yet this incident was unfolding on my watch. The impacts of that traumatic time still linger in the form of depression and PTSD, but embracing the insights and lessons from that time is part of how I’m shifting the framework of my story from one of trauma to one of resilience. (National Observer, 23 November 2020)
Professional detachment verses deep attachment.
Because the evangelical impulse has typically been attached to several generations of highly mobile people we may not have done the theological work necessary for treasuring the deep attachments people may have to each other, to their ancestors, and to a land. We have valued fast theology: how to plant churches quickly – and sky theology: Jesus is coming back and will rapture us. In doing so we have neglected the weightier matters wrapped up in slow earth theology: justice, mercy and faithfulness. I wonder if Jesus would also say to us, “You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” (Matt 23:23)
So what to do as local community theologians? Let’s slow down and get to know a neighbour connected to the land through their history, their ancestors, and by some practices of sustenance. I am not sure that it is enough as Wendell Berry says, to “leave the regions of our conquest… and re-enter the woods.” (Wendell Berry, Native Hill) I think we need to get to know and listen to folks who have survived the conquestors.
Notes
1. Kosuke Koyama, Water Buffalo Theology, 25th Anniversary Edition, p. 4.
2. (See The Washington Post, An ancient people with a modern climate plan, Jim Morrison, 24 November 2020)
4. Wendell Berry, A Native Hill, p. 27. Here’s the quote in context:
“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.”
5. I should say that I have never met the people referenced in the two articles. However, the articles over the past couple of days have tapped into the habits of relating, reading, and listening that I have been nurturing for the past several years.
