A Gospel for the Earth

On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God
by Erik Reece
Riverhead Books (Penguin Group), 2009
240 pages, hardcover, $24.95
ISBN 978-1594488597

Another Sunday morning comes
And I resume the standing Sabbath
Of the woods

After reading Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau in the summer of 1890, Leo Tolstoy began writing an essay “The Kingdom of God is Within You.” Whitman in particular influenced Tolstoy’s opinion that the Jesus of the Nicene Creed, depicted as the judgmental incarnation of a judgmental god, and the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, a gentle moral teacher, are so radically different that you cannot logically believe in both. Tolstoy asserted that the “man who believes in a god, a Christ coming again in glory to judge and punish … cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left cheek, judge not, forgive those that wrong us and love our enemies.” To accept the concept of salvation through faith would, in Tolstoy’s view, dilute one’s energies for pursuing Jesus’ moral teachings – the core of Christianity. Beginning from this perspective, Tolstoy outlined an earth-centered religion of moral action.

This dichotomy between a heaven-based, judgmental faith and a world-based activist faith would for many years vex environmental writer Erik Reece. It drove his father to suicide and pushed Reece to the edge of madness. Eventually, however, he resolved the conflict and found meaning in a spiritual philosophy, an American Gospel, shaped by such important thinkers as Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and William James.

“An American Gospel” is Reece’s second book, following his prize-winning “Lost Mountain,” a passionate and lyrical condemnation of mountaintop removal in the quest for cheap coal. The loss of the American soul through the pursuit of bloated profits is a major theme running throughout Reece’s work. “Lost Mountain” was an intensely personal book, as is “An American Gospel,” which traces both the development of this spiritual path in American intellectual history and Reece’s own evolution from hellfire fundamentalism to a life-affirming spirituality rooted in the natural world.

The first section of “An American Gospel” focuses heavily on family history. His Baptist minister grandfather preached apocalyptic jeremiads on sin, guilt, retribution, and eternal damnation. Reece’s father, also a Baptist minister, had been steeped in this harsh theology, and was increasingly torn apart by his inability to accept it and, at the same time, his inability to escape it.

At age 33 – not by coincidence the age at which Jesus was crucified – Reece’s father committed suicide. His Bible was marked at Matthew 10, where Jesus is purportedly saying,

I have not come to bring peace but a sword,
I have come to set a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother…
He who loves father or mother more than me
is not worthy of me…

Looking at this marked passage years later, Reece asks himself, “Who is the egomaniac speaking these words?” Can this be the gentle Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount? His father, already suffering from bipolarity and unable to resolve his argument with the very the Bible he preached, ended his despair with a blast from his hunting rifle. “In the end,” Reece says, “my father was locked inside my grandfather’s story, the morality tale of fundamentalist Christianity. He couldn’t find a way to make it his own.” Erik, age three at the time, was to fall increasingly under the influence of his grandfather and his dark religion of shame and punishment. As he grew older, though, he found among the great American writers and thinkers attitudes that pointed him toward a different kind of theology.

Reece spends much of part one discussing William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson. Byrd, an 18th century Virginian, set down many of his thoughts in a largely forgotten book “The History of the Dividing Line,” his chronicle of a surveying trip along the border between Virginia and North Carolina. While most Puritans, ensconced in their City on the Hill, saw nature as alien and hostile, Byrd cherished its beauty. His long walks were a spiritual activity; nature was a source of healing and inspiration. Byrd’s work was a key component in moving Reece away from a fundamentalist negation of the sacredness of the physical world.

Another major influence on Reece was Thomas Jefferson and his “Jefferson Bible.” It is amusing to hear the religious right refer to the “Christian nation” established by the founding fathers. The founders were products of the Age of Enlightenment and many – including Washington, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson – were influenced by the philosophy of Deism, which rejects supernatural explanations and divine intervention.

Jefferson actually created his own Bible, taking the New Testament and a pair of scissors and cutting out every sentence smacking of superstition or magic. This included all references to the virgin birth, the resurrection, and every miracle. The result is a Jesus who has realized his own divinity far better than the rest of us have recognized ours, a Jesus who teaches the wisest moral philosophy anyone has devised – a moral code to be put into practice in this life and for this life. This was a Jesus Reece could accept, one that would wash away his self-loathing and fill him with enthusiasm for a religion centered here, in this moment, on this earth.

Part two of “An American Gospel” is dominated by the larger-than-life figure of poet Walt Whitman. At age 33, the same age his father committed suicide, Reece began suffering migraines, anxiety attacks, and a general disintegration of personality. This toxic blend of survivor’s guilt and acute neuroses propelled Reece into the mountains of Kentucky where he lived in a primitive cabin near a Zen monastery. He meditated at the monastery every morning, reflecting on the Buddhist concept of original nature, rather than the negative doctrine of original sin. The rest of the day he read and walked in the woods, activities he hoped would repair his damaged psyche.

Reece took several books to the mountains, but it was Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” that most profoundly affected him. Whitman’s poetry reflected his absorption of Emersonian transcendentalism with its emphasis on the presence of God in nature and the divinity of all persons. “I am the poet of the body,” Whitman announced, “and I am the poet of the soul.” For Whitman, this life and this earth were heaven enough, and he celebrated all aspects of human experience. “The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer,” he insisted, “This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.”

Reece spends the bulk of part two analyzing Whitman’s message and the impact it had on him on those summer days in the Kentucky mountains. The poetic vision of Whitman is vast and transcendent. He sees the essential oneness of the universe and the interdependence of all things in creation. He has no interest in discussing beginnings and ends, believing

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

In this poetic vision of the universe as a timeless, single entity, Reece finds many parallels with the work of several contemporary scientists, particularly bacteriologist Lynn Margulis who proposes that “every kosmos, from the microcosmic organism on up to our macrocosmic planet has evolved through a very long game of symbiosis,” and it is this “coming together that leads to physical interdependence and the permanent sharing of cells and bodies.” It is the same message found in Whitman’s “Song of Myself:” “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

There remained a long and difficult path for Reece to travel when he left the mountains, but his migraines and anxiety attacks were gone and, having experienced a Zen-like enlightenment, he was now convinced that “Life, not the Christian promise of life after death, is the purest of religious impulses.”

The third and final section of “An American Gospel” begins with the words, “Years after I gave up on the church, I finally discovered a Christianity that I could accept … the Gospel of Thomas.”

Legions of the fundamentalist faithful believe that the Bible was handed down to man, intact and in its present form. They are blissfully unaware that there are, for example, numerous gospels besides the four – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – that were selected for the final version of the New Testament. In the 4th century CE, church officials made crucial decisions about what to include in the New Testament and what to reject. The controversial Gospel of John – the only one of the four canonical gospels that asserts the divinity of Christ – made the cut. The Gospel of Thomas, which contains no miracles and no assertion of divinity, was out. (Readers interested in perusing the Gospel of Thomas and more than a dozen other gospels that did not make it into the New Testament can find them in Robert J. Miller, ed. “The Complete Gospels.” San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994.)

I can’t do justice here to part three of Reece’s book which, although fascinating, is a lengthy discourse on biblical scholarship and comparative theology that is beyond the scope of this review. Readers of the book will find that Reece builds a persuasive case that the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas is the closest thing to the real Jesus we can know. This Jesus is a figure Emerson would have understood: a human being who is completely aware of the divinity he shares with every other human being, a man who has discovered a way of life that is a pathway to liberation. This Jesus is what Jefferson found when, using his scissors to clip away the arrogant boasting and magic tricks, he was left with a supremely wise moral teacher. This Jesus epitomizes the life that Whitman was attempting to live, with unconditional love for and total acceptance of every person he encountered, and a reverence for every tree and animal and blade of grass on the sacred earth. This Jesus understood at the deepest level what the framers of the American Gospel have intuitively sensed: the kingdom of heaven is all around us, right where we are. And this knowledge carries a responsibility: to be thoughtful and assiduous stewards of this planet. There are few more profoundly spiritual activities.

In the final pages of “An American Gospel,” Reece turns to America’s great contribution to philosophy: pragmatism. The pragmatic school, most notably John Dewey and William James, emphasized “the importance of what we do in this world, not the next.” This philosophy, Reece suggests, should guide not just the religious liberal, but the conservative as well, for “If we believe Jesus died for our sins but do not act in accordance with his teaching, then that belief ultimately amounts to very little.”

John Dewey’s friend Jane Addams can be seen as an example of someone following the pragmatic spiritual path. She was, in effect, putting Jesus’ principles into action when she founded Chicago’s Hull House in order to provide social services and education to the poor. The pragmatists were advocates for the full development of the individual, but also believed that the most pragmatic and workable system was one in which we see ourselves as threads in the larger social fabric. If parts of this tapestry are allowed to fray – through poverty or lack of opportunity or prejudice – the entire cloth begins to unravel. In the workings of society we again see the presence of the oneness that Emerson and Whitman stressed.

The book closes with a plea for an ecologically sensitive, sustainable lifestyle that parallels as closely as possible the rhythms of the natural world. It draws upon a diversity of sources, from the early environmental sage Aldo Leopold to a utopian treatise by architect Frank Lloyd Wright on creating cities that nourish the soul.

Reece feels that if “we as a culture can begin to replace the unsustainable, linear, industrial economy with an economy of nature,” the soul will indeed be nurtured. He ends his book by saying, “We might discover that the natural world and our own natures are two mirrors that infinitely reflect the kingdom of God. There we might find both our refuge and our calling.”

“An American Gospel” is a remarkable book, spanning and unifying theology, history, literature, science, political science, psychology, biblical scholarship and personal narrative. Hardly a sentence passes that doesn’t invite questions, philosophical musing and marginal notations. If I had to fault the book for anything, it would be the absence of an index, for I often wanted to turn back to something I had read the day before. The bibliography, however, is a rich source of future reading. I immediately photocopied it and started marking the books I want to read first, beginning with the essays of the eccentric Thoreauvian genius Guy Davenport.

Finally, Reece’s prose is exquisite. This is one of those books you read more than once, more than twice. You read it for its ideas, of course, but also to come back again and again to writing that is poetic, powerful and, in the fullest sense of the word, inspired. §