From Garden to Tower: Genesis 1-11

Chapter 6 in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry is written by Ched Myers, an activist theologian who has worked in social change movements for thirty-five years.  He is an educator who animates Scripture and issues of faith-based peace and justice.  Ched points to his solidarity work with Indigenous peoples in and around the Pacific Basin in the 1980s as key to his political and spiritual growth. (Information taken from biographical notes in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry).  Chapter 6 is titled:  “From Garden to Tower:  Genesis 1-11 as a Critique of Civilization and an Invitation to Indigenous Re-Visioning”.

The first of the following excerpts is from the opening of the chapter, the second from its conclusion.  Though the entire middle of his chapter is missing, my hope is that these excerpts will be helpful in capturing the essence of his writing.

Origin stories matter.  They tell us who we are, how we got this way, and what our responsibilities are to our collective past, present, and future.  They shape meaning and help us order life … for good or for ill.  (pp 109, 110)

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The bold, archetypal strokes of Genesis 1-11 name our settler history, however unsettling its critique may be to those still loyal to the Promethean fables of modernity.  The biblical “fall” is not so much a cosmic moment of moral failure as a history of decline into civilization – exactly contrary to our mythic Western narrative of Progress.  As a literary expression of resistance to empire, the primeval creation story rightly warned us of the social pathologies and ecocidal consequences that have intensified exponentially now for a dozen millennia.

As a result, our generation faces a threefold crisis:

1.     The natural world has been increasingly demystified and subjected to ever more intense technological exploitation, to the point of collapse;

2.     Hierarchical social formation, economic stratification, and war have proliferated to the point of perpetual class and national conflict; and

3.     Human spiritual life and ecological competence have atrophied, resulting in our growing alienation from both nature and Spirit.

In light of this, the conversation represented in this book is crucial.  Our settler churches need to learn from contemporary keepers of Indigenous wisdom – both Christian and non-Christian – about how to re-vision creation care and sustainable community.  This includes exploring how a “Native hermeneutic” might help us re-read our sacred texts.  But this will also mean challenging deeply held assumptions about the congruency between “Christian civilization” and the will of Creator for humanity and nature.

Furthermore, we Christians need to re-center our theology and practices in real landscapes for which we take keen responsibility.  In southern California, our educational work around what we call “bioregional discipleship” is grounded specifically in the Ventura watershed.  We have come to understand that we can’t save what we don’t love, we can’t love what we don’t know, and we can’t know what we haven’t learned.  So, we are committed to literacy, both in the ecology of our watershed and in the painful history and remnant culture of the First Peoples of this place.  For us, this means experimenting with Native habitat preservation and restoration, and learning from Indigenous Chumash traditions of relationship to this landscape and habitat.

It is impossible to argue, given today’s ecological crisis, that the “civilized” life-ways of the last five thousand (or five hundred, or even fifty) years are as sustainable as those of the previous five hundred thousand.  Let us settlers heed the ancient wisdom of Genesis 1-11, which may be “all we have to fight off illness and death”.  And let us “repent” – which is to say, struggle alongside Native communities to turn our wrong-way history around, and recover the old ways for which we were created.  (pp 119-121)

 To put your hands on your own copy of Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, contact Steve Heinrichs at the offices of Mennonite Church, Canada.  It’s a powerful read.

The blog Easy Yolk has a interesting post about Myers' work.  You can read it here. 

Submitted by Gareth