Highlights

a genuine Unitarian conception that God is One

a profound inter-connectedness of all things - and I really do mean all things - becomes increasingly apparent

an integral part of the ecosphere includes the asking and answering of fundamental philosophical questions about the role of human life. A shallow ecology is simply a branch of the biological sciences or a merely utilitarian environmentalism.

Now the initial spiritual insight that God is One and that there is, in some way, a profound connectedness between God and Creation we owe in the first instance to the man Jesus who was, as we know, a faithful Jew.

It was and is incumbent upon every practising Jew to recite daily what is known as the Shema which begins: 'Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength' - to which Jesus wisely added the other well known Jewish command to love one's neighbour as oneself.

in truth there is nothing that is not one's neighbour. Jesus' mystical utterances in the Gospel of John at the end of chapter 17 that everything, he, you and me are one with God is beginning to sound not only spiritual plausible - to a unitarian at least - but also scientifically plausible. It also begins to sound like Deep Ecology.

When I talk about a unitarian (lower case U) conception of God I am not referring only to Unitarians (upper case U - many of whom, confusingly, are not unitarians in any technical sense of the word) but to any group or person that conceives of God as One. This includes, most obviously, Judaism and Islam, but it also includes certain kinds of Hindu thought - namely Advaita or non-dualism - and, depending on what you mean by that tricky word God, it can extend into certain kinds of Buddhism and Taoism.

there are at least two basic types of unitarianism (lower case U). The first one, the classical theistic one (to which I personally do not subscribe - though you may of course, its perfectly legitimate!) is that there is God on the one hand and, on the other, there is Creation. The two, though intimately linked, are understood to be separate. The second unitarianism is much more radical and it is to this view that I subscribe. In this view God is Nature and Nature is God - in Spinoza's memorable phrase, Deus sive Natura. Western philosophy and radical religion gets this in its most developed form through Spinoza, though we see the same idea regularly pop up from time to time within radical Christian groups across Europe from at least the fifteenth century onwards. A good English example would be Gerrard Winstanley

this pantheistic/panentheistic way of thinking

since Deus sive Natura has nothing to do with a personal creator God but is more to do with the idea of the Divine Unity, the Absolute, the Ground of Being, Ultimate reality or reality in itself - call it what you will - this is what allows me to say that it also connects with Buddhism and Taoism neither of which holds any theistic personalistic conceptions of God.

we consciously acknowledge that we belong to this unified reality - Deus sive Natura - in a way more intimate than we often think because our language and place in the world mean we have concepts such as knower and known, object and perceiver.

trying to use the language of particularity to point to this underlying unity of all things.

the oneness of which I speak doesn't only bring a message of deep comfort and belonging - though I certainly believe it does that - it also brings with it a realisation that there are some tough and dirty duties to undertake in existence that entails real work and, alas, real suffering and sacrifice.

To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are -- painful, impermanent, open, imperfect -- and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence. (Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild in the Gary Snyder Reader, Counterpoint Washington D.C. 1999, p. 168)

what Jesus was teaching when he said if we are to be first, and by implication free, we must be servants and so last (Mark 10:42-45)

We improve the campsite, our world, by an ever greater commitment to a more sustainable way of living and by radically reducing our consumption of the world's natural resources. It really does matter and, because you are an intimate part of the whole, what you do always counts.

there are also many tyrannical ideologies that must be ousted - fundamentalisms of all the world's religions and also of certain forms of secularism. They, too, must go.

Gary Snyder's poems called "For the Children"

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

By 'staying together' I think he means in part learning what it is to be an individual, with all one's individual distinct qualities, but always knowing this in community - in relationship with one's neighbour

By 'learning the flowers' I think he means in part taking profound notice of what we commonly call the natural world seeing both its beauty and experiencing an associated joy as well as seeing spiritually and scientifically its deep and mysterious structure and inter-relatedness. So it is at heart an encouragement to develop both a gentle unitarian philosophy (lower case U) and to engage in rigorous scientific search. As Spinoza wisely said: 'the more we understand singular things, the more we understand God' (E5p24).

By 'going light' I think he means in part living in such a way that when you die there is no blasted and dead landscape where you raped the earth, no pile of refuse where you couldn't be bothered to clean up after you, no system of religious or political oppression that you put in place or supported. If we go light our most valuable bequest to the world will be to leave no traces in the universe except love, wisdom and compassion. As Snyder also observed, 'Nature' [which I, of course, also take to mean Deus] 'is not a place to visit, it is home' (Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild in the Gary Snyder Reader, Counterpoint Washington D.C. 1999, p. 169).

a radical, politically engaged and deeply ecological way of life.

If in our freedom we love our children, truly love them, then we have no choice but to get our hands dirty in loving each other, and God which is to say Nature, our home, in all her wild fullness, beauty and joy.

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “Improve the Campsite, Teach Children, Oust Tyrants.” Caute, 26 Sept. 2007, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-campsite-teach-children-oust_26.html.