If ‘Cult’ is the work of opening to God through religious and spiritual practice, ‘Culture’ is the necessary work of developing and living out a just and compassionate human social reality. It is building a way of life that outwardly reflects and embodies the divine realities encountered in prayer, meditation and relationship with God.
I write this post with respect and solidarity with people who are doing the work of charity (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, tending to the sick) and social justice (protesting unjust systems, fighting oppression, striving to right social wrongs). These efforts are necessary, and for many who live in basic economic insecurity and/or under the weight of marginalization and oppression, they are a matter of survival. Thinking and writing about the ‘long game’ of culture change is a privilege that many do not have as they fight for their daily survival.[1]
Peter Maurin spoke of the need to ‘build a new society from within the shell of the old.’ We have chosen to commit, as much as we are able, to focus our outer work onbuilding a culture rooted in divine reality. As the shell of the modern United States society continues to fracture and crumble, we believe it is essential to build the foundation for a new culture, re-rooted in contact with divine reality. Rather than fight either to tear down or prop up aspects of the old, our commitment is to support the birth of something new.
An anthropological definition of the term ‘culture’ is: ‘The dynamic and evolving socially constructed reality that exists within a human community. This includes its shared set of implicit and explicit values, ideas, concepts, and rules of behavior.’ [2] Every human grouping has its own culture, whether the culture of a tribe, a family, a professional organization, a neighborhood, or a nation. I believe that every stable, healthy, enduring human culture has had its roots in ongoing contact with divinity. Examples of culturally stable contact with divinity abound. Many Native American communities had and have a ‘vision quest’ rite of passage where young adults go off to fast and pray for four days, and then return to the community to share the visions and insights they receive, both for their own benefit and to help inform the ongoing life of their people. Both medieval Europe and classical Tibetan cultures had monks and nuns at the center of their cultural life – that is, people with a singular devotion to spiritual practice helped to shape and guide the culture of the entire human community. Judeo-Christian cultures have historically honored divine revelation, such as the Ten Commandments, as a stable foundation on which to build the greater complexity of their systems of law and justice. These are cultural expressions that have rooted their ‘socially constructed reality’ in dialogue with spiritual reality, thus allowing for a measure of human social life to be ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ – in other words, in harmony with spiritual reality.
A culture that does not support regular access to divine reality, for at least some portion of its population, is doomed to build its society upon the mental and emotional constructs of the human mind. Inevitably, these systems devolve into greater and greater dysfunction, as the inherent self-centeredness of the human ego becomes the organizing principle of a given society. This means the ‘socially constructed reality’ of the society is based on a sort of collective delusion. In the ancient world, this often manifested in human emperors and kings being worshiped as gods and given unlimited power. In both the ancient world and in our recent history, this self-centeredness manifested in societies where a majority of the population was enslaved. In current United States culture, materialism dominates and our collective way of life is driven by the singular goal of increasing material affluence (at least for the top 10% of the population, who control more than 75% of the nation’s wealth) to the destruction of both the poor and the planet. We’re also taught to seek success at all costs and to avoid the pain, discomfort, and uncertainty that is an inevitable part of life in a finite world. Lacking access to the peace of divine love, we are culturally oriented to seek more and more from material and social sources that can never fully satisfy. With this collective orientation in place, it is impossible for me to imagine a just society emerging, no matter how much compassionate charity and passionate social justice work is done in the effort to ‘make the world a better place’. At the root of our social problems lies a degraded culture, which perpetuates a collective set of delusions about the nature of reality and the source of human happiness. All social problems, whether slavery, warfare, violence, racism, or environmental destruction, are at their root the collective expressions of our individual delusions about our true nature and the source of happiness and human well-being.
Singularly, individuals may wake up from the collective delusion of an ego-centric culture through prayer, meditation, spiritual practice, and ultimately through the action of God’s grace. We can wake up into a different reality, a wholeness that emerges from contact with our original nature and the presence of God. Yet, if our world is to be healed, we must take the difficult next step of building a culture where human access to divinity is supported and empowered. I don’t think there’s much hope to do this at the level of a nation. It can certainly be done within one’s individual way of life and spiritual practice. I believe the next, essential step is the building of families and small intentional communities that share a culture and way of life that is centered around receptivity to God and spiritual reality. That is a central part of our mission and our experiment at the Metanoia homestead. Historically, in the West, the cultivation of a divine society was considered the sole providence of monastics. Is it possible for lay people, families, households, and small communities of ordinary people to also develop and live in cultures based on prayer and intimacy with God? I believe it is not only possible, but necessary for the survival and thriving of our species in the coming generations.
In future posts, we’ll continue to explore ways in which people can participate in the spiritual renewal of culture, building new norms and modes of being that can express divine reality in our collective social world.. We’ll also be inviting others to share in their experiences of culture-building from a spiritual foundation.
An essential attribute of an enduring, stable human culture is that its ‘socially constructed reality’ is rooted in divine reality. This is the heavenward or transcendent aspect of a sustainable culture. In a similar way, any enduring, stable human culture must also have a healthy relationship to its local ecology, and especially an ability to feed itself while maintaining the health of its soil and the integrity of its ecosystems. This is the earthward, or immanent aspect of a sustainable culture. It is to this next essential task that we’ll turn in our next post, the work of cultivation.
[1] I also write as a white male, raised in a place of relative comfort and security in the United States. In other words, I’ve lived in a position where I benefit from the status quo of our current culture. Yet, if I take the gospel seriously, I cannot rest at peace with our current state of affairs.
[2] This definition is derived from the article ‘Culture and Quality: An Anthropological Perspective’ by Patricia M. Hudelson, International Journal for Quality in Health Care, Volume 16, Issue 5, October 2004. Pages 345-346.
A double rainbow over the field at Metanoia Homestead this summer
This post is part of the ongoing series:
- Cult, Culture, Cultivation and Conversation -
Imagining a vital human community
Peter Maurin, who started the Catholic Worker movement along with Dorothy Day, spoke of renewing society through the practice of ‘cult, culture and cultivation.’ Writing and speaking in the early 20th century, Maurin saw Western society in precipitous decline and envisioned a wholistic, spirit-centered restoration of vital human community. In our Metanoia reflections, we are adopting Maurin’s template, while adding a fourth ‘c’ of ‘conversation’.
- Cult -
Reflections on spiritual practice and growth, both communal (ritual, liturgy) and personal (spiritual discipline)
- Culture -
Exploration of human culture, renewed by spiritual insight and just relationships between people and with the land
- Cultivation -
The work of building fertility and abundance in land and discovering ways to live in healthy interdependence with the natural world
- Conversation -
Spiritual dialogue with pressing social and cultural issues and dialogue with other thinkers and perspectives beyond our vision at Metanoia.