Dancing round the elephant

Notes from a Spirituality Ecology forum at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in April 2016.

St Ethelburga’s is a small 12th Century church nestled among the looming steel and glass towers of London’s financial centre. The original church was all but destroyed by the IRA’s Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. In response to this act of violence the surviving fabric of the building was reconsecrated as an interfaith Centre for Peace and Reconciliation.

The day’s focussed on Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s work with Joanna Macey on The Great Turning: a proposed root and branch transformation of our lives in the face of socio-ecological collapse. Macey’s holistic understanding of ecological and spiritual repair is introduced as four framing principles: interconnectedness, reverence for life, service and stewardship. A second four-fold frame is then offered to help embody these principles in our day-to-day lives: witnessing, grief, prayer, action.

Apart from this brief overview it’s not an information heavy day – less about studious note taking than a space for honest communication. Opening a conversation about ‘what we’re doing to the planet’ seems to trigger a fairly predictable set of responses. Grief, yes; rage, yes; overwhelm, certainly – but also a growing impatience with all of this anguished handwringing. Even with our own hands quietly gripping each other under the table.

All such default moves are cunningly pre-empted by the grounding we begin with. Sitting in silence, we’re invited to come more fully into our bodies, and from there, to begin meeting each other – one at a time, and at close quarters. Through cycles of silent face to face eye contact, followed by a rotation of speaking and active listening in pairs, we’re gently but firmly pulled down from airy argument and opinion into an encounter with what’s written on the face of this particular and unique being, looking back at me.

I’m taken aback by how well this sets the tone for the day. There follows an improvised ritual in which we’re invited to step out into the circle and continue this sentence wherever it leads us: ‘Being in service to something greater means…’. Again, what this calls forth is less a series of opinions on ecological crisis or on what’s to be done about it, than a collective witnessing of the unpredictable and vulnerable experience of each individual human being.

The day’s left an impression on me that I’m still processing, nine years later. One aspect of this is the realisation that my own most visceral sense of struggle around ecological crisis, then and now, concerns the ability to remain stuck fast in a condition of distracted preoccupation. I don’t just mean this in sweeping big picture terms – the blind locomotive force that keeps our over-developed societies locked in a state of passive entrancement, as we dismember the living world. Blah blah: yes of course that, but I mean it more immediately – and more embarrassingly – about myself. The weirdly tenacious grip of performance anxiety, in particular. The endless struggle to be ‘good enough’ within contexts that you know in your bones to be irrelevant distractions from what actually matters.

Perhaps the greater challenge hereis less about finding a way to change the world, or even about finding a way to change the culture, than about finding a way to change. Of allowing ourselves to be changed. To get better at coming unstuck, as I’ve taken to thinking of this of late. And I think there’s a good, time-worn word for this species of change: metanoia. A turning around in the heart before the ongoing eruption of a shared predicament.

In the round-up to the day the well-known Anglican priest Peter Owen Jones, whose work I’ve enjoyed and valued in the past, speaks of his sense that although we’ve made a good start, ‘We need to be much braver’. ‘What might the world look like’, he asks, ‘if we were?’ Peter throws it out to the room that in our niceness, in our eagerness to put each other at our ease, we’re all still ‘dancing around the elephant in the room’. 

This somewhat bombastic provocation is picked up by a woman, who suggests that rather than lamenting the limited nature of our responses, ‘dancing round the elephant’ offers a fine image for the value of what we’re already doing here. Faced with a predicament of such unimaginable complexity, what we’re left with, she suggests, is exactly this – the ongoing dance of all that its looming, immoveable presence provokes in our lives.

I like this woman’s reading of the image, and have kept it. But what I come back to most of all about this day is sitting in silence with a series of strangers, looking into each other’s eyes. Challenges like Father Peter’s are best weighed, perhaps, whilst gazing unhurriedly at one peculiar, fallible, resourceful human being. I’m still intrigued by how effectively doing this shifts the conversation away from guilt, away from morose certainty, and away from the too-easy judgements we pass on our peers, and pass on ourselves.