“The longing for Sophia stirs in many hearts today, but the spell of divine paternalism retains a strong hold. Those who belong to the tradition of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, tend to look toward their own religious roots for ways to recognize and recover Sophianic values. Particularly in the Christian fold there is an assumption that some kind of Gaia-centered “ecotheology” can be extracted or extrapolated from salvation narrative and the beliefs associated with it. Many intelligent, socially concerned people continue to think that we can get a viable ecotheology out of divine paternalism. The temptation to reconcile Sophianic principles with a perpetrator religion is irresistible to all those whose cultural identity is stronger than their attraction to surrendering self and merging with the planetary life force, Eros. Every excuse made for the victim-perpetrator syndrome reinforces the ages-old repression of the wisdom goddess. Every reversion to redeemer theology and the ethics of Jesus undermines the quest for sacred ecology.
The most common argument for reconciliation invokes the caretaker clause: the father god created the natural world and gave it over to human caretaking. But this is patronizing cant. The earth takes care of itself. Wilderness does fine on its own. The Garden of Eden is a misleading trope. The planet is a paradise even without gardens. Agriculture is not the sacred calling of the human species. We are not indispensable custodians of Gaia. The Goddess is not a feeble crone in need of geriatric services. We are at best temps in the Great Work, provisional migrant workers who may or may not acquire permanent niche. .” -John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image
Painting by Elisabeth Slettnes
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