"Avatars Of Wisdom"
A Sermon Preached by Bruce Sanguin
January 3, 2010
Sirach 24:1-12, Wisdom of Solomon 10: 15-21
So a new decade begins, and an auspicious one at that. Financial pundits are calling the past 10 years, The Lost Decade.* The S and P index ended the decade down 24.1% and the TSX fared only slightly better, with the past decade showing return rates 60% below those of 1980’s and 90’s. A global appetite for speculation signaled a world prepared to increasingly “rely on markets for our wealth and well-being” ** a precarious trust. We went through four 50% plus swings – two up and two down – in the first decade of the century. For a great many boomers, preparing for retirement, the decade was indeed lost.
It can be considered a lost decade for other reasons. It was a decade of war, as George Bush invaded Iraq in response to 9-11 for incomprehensible reasons, deceiving the entire world in the process. Canada shed its peacekeeping persona and went to war in Afghanistan. The loss is very personal and mounting, for reasons that over ½ of Canadians don’t embrace. The decade ended with a lost opportunity to make real, significant progress on the crisis of climate change. Copenhagen, for all intents and purposes, failed. And I wonder if the most recent political maneuver of our federal government, to prorogue Parliament, is a telling symbol of the decade. Prorogue means “to adjourn by royal prerogative”. Why deal now with issues we can put off to some time in the future? If it’s been a lost decade, perhaps it’s best just to take a break from all our responsibilities.
But it’s a new decade – a chance to start again, and not prorogue the Parliament of our lives. In the West Coast air, rumours and predictions abound that ancient Mayan prophecies will begin to be fulfilled beginning in the year 2012. There is talk of a transformation - a spiritual awakening to our oneness with All That Is. Upheavals and dislocations are predicted as businesses, religions, and all manner of cultural institutions and political systems realign with this emerging consciousness.
James Cameron’s new blockbuster, Avatar – in full 3 –D glory – is an early attempt to capture the impact of this new consciousness. It depicts the culture clashes between tribal, mythic, scientific, and pluralistic worldviews as each comes to terms - or not – with an understanding that the universe as animated at all levels by what our own religious tradition calls sacred wisdom. I would describe sacred wisdom as the evolutionary intelligence, which has established cosmic habits (science calls them laws) over vast spans of time – and when followed, issue in a creative life of serving the purposes of Spirit. It’s not always a peaceful, or even harmonious life. It’s a life of creative disequilibrium, where we bring our most authentic, engaged, conscious and compassionate self to every encounter. This means that more often than not we’re living on the edge of the new thing God is doing – through us and through our spiritual community.
Avatar is set on the planet Pandora, the name foretelling that all manner of chaos is about to be let out of the box of this culture clash between the ways of wisdom and the ways of foolishness. The natural resources of our own planet have been pillaged and so humans have begun to colonize other planets. Jake Sulley is a Marine, who has lost the use of his legs in battle. He’s offered a new start, a chance to make a difference – to serve his country by infiltrating a local tribal people, the Navi (which means a “new way”), gaining their trust and convincing them to get out of the way of a mining operation. The mining corporation is coming, backed by the military.
It’s all a tad cartoonish in the caricatured portrayals of institutions as unambiguously evil – but who can objectively scan this past decade, and argue that there isn’t an element of truth in it? Think, for example, of the close association between the military and the oil industry in Iraq, for example.
Sacred wisdom is symbolized by an enormous tree of life. Around this tree the Navi organize their communal life. Its living roots reach deep down into the planet, forming a vast underground network connecting every life system of the planet. It’s branches reach up into the heavens, tapping into the wisdom energy field of their departed ancestors. The tree is a manifestation of a vast field of sacred information that is required to live in right relationship with the sacred powers of the universe. The military and the corporate brass are portrayed as having virtually no respect for this wisdom tree or the ways of the Navi. Again, this is an unnecessary caricature, but again, it does describe in very broad strokes, the last 300 years of our industrial history.
Our readings this morning describe wisdom through the lens of the Jewish tradition. First of all, wisdom is personified as a feminine divine presence who functions, at least in the reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, as God. She liberates the oppressed (10:15). She enters the soul of a human servant who stands up to kings and tyrants (v.16). She acts as guide to people her live according to her ways, sheltering them by day and guiding them by the stars at night (v.17). She gives the victims a voice and helps even infants to speak with great clarity (v. 21).
In Sirach, Wisdom is portrayed as a primal mist emanating from the mouth of the Creator. Her presence extends into the further reaches of the heavens and as deep as the abyss (24:5) – much like the tree of life in Avatar. She is portrayed as holding sway over the forces of chaos and all forces opposed to God (v.6). Wisdom searches the earth for a place to rest and finds it in Jerusalem and in the Jewish people. She pitches her tent with them (v.10-12), and takes “root” there.
When the gospel writers were trying to come up with a template through which to write about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, they concluded that he was the presence of Wisdom in human form. Wisdom pitched her tent with him, and took root in Jesus according the writers of the gospel. When we read the opening of John’s gospel, it is a description of the Logos (or Wisdom of God) becoming flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.
It is clear that James Cameron is attempting to create a wisdom story for our age and for people who may not be able to relate the biblical wisdom tradition. At the turn of this decade, he has made an admirable, if limited, attempt to describe what this new wisdom might look like.
I say “limited” because there are some features in the film that perpetuate illusions. When I defined wisdom earlier, I said that it was evolutionary intelligence. This film has a tendency to romanticize the indigenous worldview. If only we could return to a pre-modern, pre-scientific, pre-rational worldview, we would be able to live in harmony and bliss. But we now know that tribal peoples did not always live in a state of harmony, either with the earth, or with other tribes. Having said that, there is no question that they lived closer to the earth, and experienced the planet, plants and other creatures as enchanted. This worldview, that the cosmos is a living, enchanted being is called animism. And there’s no doubt we’ve lost this sensibility. In my book I write about how important it is to recover a spirituality of awe.
Dr. Wade Davis, an ethno-biologist, has done great work at bringing forward long-lost wisdom of tribal cultures. We are grateful for his work and others who are helping us to go back and carry forward this lost wisdom. What is required, however, is not a pre-modern animism, but an integral animism – and Cameron doesn’t completely fail at this. I just wish it could have been made more explicit.
The evolutionary arrow moves forward, and the sacred wisdom of a new age is being concocted from an admixture of tribal wisdom, traditional, modernist, and postmodernist wisdom. There is an integral wisdom emerging on the planet that is gathering the wisdom of each of these worldviews and applying it to technology, medicine, psychology, spirituality, and business. This wisdom is an urban, technological wisdom, expanding our definition of the meaning of the “natural” world. Because it is grounded in the processes of natural life systems, it will seek to enhance these life systems, not draw down the natural capital of the planet.
In other words, wisdom evolves. Wisdom itself, this evolutionary intelligence, actually expands as it connects more deeply with itself, through the evolving consciousness of human beings. You are, I am, we are, the presence of sacred wisdom seeking new expression.
Ok, then, what are the lessons and the invitations of both this new film and our own Wisdom tradition, as we make out New Year’s intentions – or perhaps New Decade’s intentions, so that this one is not “lost” on us?
James Cameron writes a big story for an age that is living without orienting stories that are large enough to awaken the soul. He is writing a story for those for whom the traditional stories of the religious traditions hold no sway. Big stories have the power to confer bigger identities. The viewer cannot watch this film without feeling an implicit tug to expand his or her identity from 21st century consumer to cosmic citizen, to expand his or her life project from finding a career in order to make money to finding a sacred vocation to make a difference, and to expand his sense of core community from biological family to include as family, All That Is. This is what it means for us to live in the Kin-dom of God. This is a wisdom identity for a new decade, and I think that Avatar is an attempt to suggest a larger story to live by.
The central character, Jake Sulley, undergoes this kind of identify shift. He expands his sense of self, from a wounded marine, who has given his life to fight the enemy – as defined by his superiors, to an Avatar, which is what the people of the Navi tribe are called. Again, the vast majority of the audience will not know what an avatar is – but this is part of Cameron’s genius. He is bringing forth the forgotten language of ancient wisdom. An avatar is technically an incarnation of a Hindu deity, one who has returned to spiritually liberate the people. So, what you end up with in the film is a wounded marine – wounded both physically and spiritually – in the body of an Avatar with a spiritual vocation to save the Navi tribe. The locus of authority has shifted from external – (the orders of his superior commanding officers )– to an inner directed sacred mandate that has more to do with this soul than any sergeant. Jake Sulley undergoes a transformation, from an unconscious, obedient warrior of the state to a conscious spiritual warrior – one who has discovered where he stands in life, and is prepared to harness all of his life energies for this cause. Jake Sulley chooses to become, in our language, the fierce presence of sacred Wisdom (or the Christ), and that choice is available to us as well.
At one point, Jake goes and visits the soul tree, where it’s possible to listen to the voices of the ancestors and tap into what the film calls The Great Mother. He is seeking wisdom and courage. When his love interest, an indigenous Avatar, informs him that the Great Mother cannot take sides in the battle – but rather acts only to restore the balance – Cameron attempts a higher level theology than we usually get in pop culture films. The invitation of wisdom, then, is to be a spiritual warrior on the side of rebalancing the pathological energies of the planet: rebalancing the masculine with the feminine; rebalancing the short-term perspective of “what’s in it for me and mine”, with “what can I do with my life to ensure a better future for future generations; rebalancing our egoic instinct to survive with the soul’s need to serve a larger purpose and make a difference; rebalancing the cultural pressure to conform with the desire to uniquely express our creative energies; rebalance the cultural definitions of who I am and who you are with an identity that is cosmic in scope.
So, here are a few of questions to leave you with as you make your New Decade resolutions:
- Are you willing to be an Avatar of sacred wisdom, and allow the evolutionary intelligence that is you to flourish?
- Are you willing to visit your soul-tree every day and tap into the field of evolutionary intelligence that is flowing through you?
- Is your Big Story big enough to evoke and awaken the energies of our soul? Are a few of your resolutions made in response to the Wisdom story?
Blessings friends, on your sacred journey into a new decade.
** Ibid…