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Books Gebara challenges old concepts
LONGING FOR RUNNING
WATER: ECOFEMINISM AND LIBERATION By Ivone Gebara Fortress
Press, 240 pages, $22 |
By GARY MacEOIN
Writing in a low-key, almost conversational style, Ivone Gebara, a
Brazilian Sister of Our Lady, challenges what she calls the traditional
monotheism and anthropocentrism that have characterized and structured
Christian tradition. The underlying philosophical theories, borrowed from
the Greeks, have always had a human-centered and male-centered bias, and simple
justice requires that we undo the resulting harm.
The male-centeredness has resulted in creating a culture in which
masculine qualities are exalted to the downgrading of other
qualities. Even the formulations of Christian beliefs have been affected.
This means accepting the fact that none of these concepts is more than a
perspective, a tentative point of view adopted in order to deal with everyday
life and with the broader sweep of history. The words are deceptively
gentle, but Gebaras message is clear. Every Christian formulation of
belief is reformable, even such basic dogmas as the nature of God, the Trinity,
the role of Jesus of Nazareth.
The male-centered bias resulted in the creation of a hierarchy of
knowledge. The type of knowledge regarded as important by men, and monopolized
by them -- science, philosophy, theology -- was true knowledge.
What was left to women and the poor was so-called experiential knowledge,
knowledge based on everyday experience; but this was not automatically
recognized as real knowing.
The human-centeredness underlies the destruction of the planet,
the pollution of the atmosphere, the destruction of the worlds forests,
all of which have reached crisis levels in the last hundred years. We cannot
even begin, however, to reverse these processes until the assumptions on which
our understanding both of the world and of God are identified and analyzed.
The world that Gebara would have us envision is one in which
relatedness would be the center, with relatedness as another
word for God. To call God relatedness is to use a word to
describe something that goes beyond all words; it describes an experience but
goes beyond all experiences. It speaks of God as possibility, as opening, as
the unexpected, the unknown, as physical and metaphysical. This is a
relatedness that has no exact definition; it cannot be reduced to a given
being, a given species or a given system.
Relatedness is for Gebara the primary reality. It is more
elementary than awareness of differences or than autonomy, individuality or
freedom. It is the foundational reality of all that is or can exist. It is the
underlying fabric that is continually brought forth within the vital process in
which we are immersed. Its interwoven fibers do not exist separately, but only
in perfect reciprocity with one another -- in space, in time, in origin and
into the future.
Gebaras concept of relatedness undergirds her militant
ecological stand. She sees the traditional understanding of Gods mandate
to humans in Genesis to fill the earth and conquer it, as leading
logically to todays abuse of the sacred body of the earth, which is
bought and sold and prostituted for the sake of easy profit and the
accumulation of wealth by a minority. ... It is our actions that have put the
earth in bondage, that have damaged it, polluted it and impoverished it. For
this reason, it is the earth that is both the subject and the object of
salvation. We need to abandon a merely anthropocentric Christianity and open
ourselves up to a more biocentric understanding of salvation.
The ecofeminist perspective developed in this book, Gebara says,
is a different way of knowing: a different understanding of the human
person and a different experience of and discourse concerning God. She
insists, however, that she is not post-Christian. Rather, I am
post-dogmatic and post-patriarchal. She certainly raises important
questions, and it would be a mistake not to join with her in her ongoing search
for answers.
Gary MacEoins e-mail is gmaceoin@cs.com
National Catholic Reporter, September 8,
2000
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