impossible sacred
Painting by Vladimir Kush, “Purple Horse at Chartres”
“What we rudely call ‘climate change’ has a theological element to it that bears repeating. The dilemmas of today have emerged from a context that learned to see the sacred as distant, useless and backward. In desacralizing the world, the post/modern centralizes mankind. This anthropocentricity has material consequences. In seeing ourselves as independent, essential, whole, removed, distant, complete, sovereign and in control, we neglect the world that grants us our bodies. We fail to decorate the porosity and ongoing transcorporeality (a term by philosopher, Stacy Alaimo) that means we actually live through manifold bodies. We shut off the ecological intelligences and senses that might reframe our problems in surprising new ways. We deaden ourselves to the miraculous, to the gift of the cosmos, to the ecstasy that interpenetrates all things…
If the sacred were far away, we will abuse the nearby. If the sacred were in the future, we will discountenance the present, spit on the elderly, and steel ourselves against dying as if it were a pathology. If the sacred were hidden in the inner worlds of our minds, we will think of the material world as an obstacle in the way of our promised transfigurations. To think ‘god with us’ is to come to a place where we are undone, where god is not some pristine figure already coherent and transcendent above spacetime but a Becoming with no circumference and no centre. God as both intriguing possibility and intimate impossibility.”
- Bayo Akomolafe, Coming Down To Earth
