The Theopoetic Art of Anticipation
By Christopher L. Fici, PhD
Understanding the meaning of anticipation begins with understanding the meaning of anticipatory community. I draw primarily upon the definition of anticipatory community provided by the Lutheran theologian and ethicist Larry L. Rasmussen, who describes anticipatory community as those:
“...home places where it is possible to reimagine worlds and reorder possibilities, places where new or renewed practices give focus to an ecological and post-industrial way of life. Such communities have the quality of a haven, a set-apart and safe place yet a place open to creative risk. Here basic moral formation happens by conscious choice and not by default (simply conforming to the ethos and unwritten ethic of the surrounding culture). Here eco-social virtues are consciously cultivated and embodied in community practices. Here the fault lines of modernity are exposed.” (Earth-Honoring Faith, 227 )
Within anticipatory community the practice of anticipation is constantly cultivated by those who are the anticipators. The anticipators are those who create the prophetic edge against the threats of ecofascism and climate totalitarianism. In anticipatory community the very idea and practice of community is brought to the common tool-shed and repair-table to be fixed up again for the sake of each and everyone's Earthy and spiritual flourishing.
The practice of anticipation has an inner flame: think of the anticipation one feels when one is falling in love with someone, or when one is aching deeply for a return to one’s Earthy roots, or when one is aching for a reunion with the divine beloved (these are often one and the same experience). That ache, that sense of devotion, in which prayers for such a reunion rise naturally like incense from the heart, is the inner flame of anticipation which makes the practice of anticipatory community possible.
“Anticipation” Michael Levine-Clark
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The anticipators are the practitioners of regenerative ecotheology. The anticipator understands that the ecology of our human-being is always already entangled with the ecology of our Earthy-being. To experience regenerative intimacy is to fall in love again with the Earthiness of one’s being. The anticipator always honors and learns from Indigenous peoples and cultures who have not forgotten this love and intimacy, always foregrounding their knowledge as the keepers of the inner flame of anticipation. This is cutting-edge common sense. The anticipator knows that every element is holy. Every element is full of divinity. Regenerative intimacy is the element which can help us to repair our political and cultural systems and structures, as it also repairs our relationships to the body politic of Earth and allows us to participate with Earth in practices of regeneration. Regenerative intimacy is taking the indigenous worldview, where we understand that “the ecosystem is not a machine, but a community of sovereign beings, subjects rather than objects. What if those beings were the drivers?” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 331)
The anticipator is an organic intellectual in the Anthropocene, with a primary emphasis on the organicness, the Earthiness, which defines and forms the intellectual, ecological, and spiritual content of her work. She does not demand regeneration as a linear progress. The messiness of her Earthiness as an anticipator contains certain creative energies which refuse to be tamed or ordered or domesticated. The anticipator gives herself to the vulnerability of becoming in the service of regeneration. The anticipator even questions traditional languages of revolutionary thought and practice. Too much attachment to revolutionary fervor may also implies an over-attachment to massive structural change at the expense of local and organic change. As the political theorist William E. Connolly argues, “the point today is not to wait for a revolution that overthrows the whole system. The ‘system,’ as we shall see further, is replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are suffering too much now.” (The Fragility of Things, 42)
“Organic Explosion” Sandra Strait
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Anyone who practices anticipation must avoid the temptation for a change which is either too big or too small. If the practice is too big it will not provide the kind of radical intimate creativity which is necessary for vulnerable becoming and regenerative practice at the grassroots level. If the practice is too small it will not attend to the massive systemic evils of the Anthropocene. The practice may then attend to sufferings which emerge from these evils but only in the key of charity and not of justice. In doing so the practice does not rise to the level of anticipation. The anticipator insists on justice, for “charity means helping the victims. Justice asks, ‘Why are there so many victims?’ and then seeks to change the causes of victimization, that is, the way the system is structured.” (The Heart of Christianity, 201)
The mysteries of anticipatory creativity and becoming also require a certain amount of readiness for and appreciation of how contingency and failure are an unavoidable part of these processes. As the physic/mystics Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme teach us “the more closely we look at any place in the fifteen billion years of the universe’s story, the more we realize that the universe is both violent and creative, both destructive and cooperative. The mystery is that both extremes are found together. We even find it difficult to determine when violence is simply destructive or when violence is linked to creativity.” (The Universe Story, 51) Failure may feel like certain contours of one’s practice anticipation not actually manifesting in an anticipatory way. Yet the mystery of anticipation emerges from the capacity to fail and to “fail again and fail better” as the eminent poet Samuel Beckett rhapsodizes.
“Centre of the Universe” Natalia Medd
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We come to understand that certain ways and means and views of our self which we have become accustomed to and attached to must die away. The philosopher Andreas Weber connects the embrace of death to the experience of erotic ecology:
“Learning to die means seeing reality without nudging it in some pleasant direction. That alone is what it means to really see. And that alone is what it means to really see. And that alone is what it means to be sculptural, to be creative without having to be ashamed of your imperfection. That alone is what it means to be wild, wild in the sense of an animal who does what is necessary, wild like the whole of the natural world...Welcoming the Eros of living means nothing less than being ready to die, accepting the unavoidability of breaking down. Only then will we fully be our bodies, and at the same time, much more than them. Complete creatures of matter and complete preservers of freedom that constantly entangled matter in creative overflow.” (Matter and Desire, 68, 71)
This dying away, this feeling of failure, is actually natural, organic, and inherent to the very fabric of Earthly existence. Failure, like destruction and death, is not the last word. Anything which fails can become compost. The anticipator understands that “a creative act, even though it may backfire, is an uncanny power that helps to bind us to the vitality of existence itself. It ties together vitality and the sweetness of existence, amid the risks that accompany the former and the deadness that would accompany the loss of the latter. Freedom: to be and to become otherwise than we are.” (The Fragility of Things, 78-79)
The anticipator can break the machine of the turbo-capitalist from within by going within, by turning back into her own Earthiness, her own roots of being always already nourished by the elements of Earth. Yet there is no such thing empirically as solid ground. She instinctively understands that “the laws of nature are much more like pathways, scripts, or habits that get performed, and in every performance there is some per/version, leading to new possible ways for the future of nature naturing, including humans, culture, and technology here. Thus performativity is a metaphor for the becoming process of reality.” (8) Relearning to hear again (primarily from the peoples and cultures who have not forgotten) the polyamorous languages of the elements of Earth is one of the most urgent practices of anticipation. She learns to hear the “land itself...crying for its people. Come home. Come home.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 248) Earth is teaching the anticipator that relationship and intimacy is the key for regeneration.Regeneration enfolds and entangles inner ecology of being and Earthy ecology of being together, for “restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 338)
“Some Place to Come Home To” Thomas Hawk
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The anticipator does not just think about anticipation. She performs it, invents it, and refines it at every moment, drawing upon the nourishment of roots long embedded from her history and culture, leaning into the mystery of the process which is always occurring. Earthy entanglement, like any entanglement of our being with another, is eternally mysterious, eternally apophatic. Within this mystery is also the eternal chance to fail and to fail better. Our despair and grief, our tears, water the soil of our inner ecologies and Earthly ecologies. Entanglement inherently requires a kind of vulnerability from which grief is inevitable, as death is inevitable, as death is inherent to Earthiness. Resurrection is inherent to Earthiness as well. The anticipator becomes fluent in the arts of death, composting, and resurrection. Earthly entanglement requires fluency in all of these elements. The anticipator acknowledges “that pain simultaneously lures theology into compassionate understanding, ethical responsibility, breathing with other masks in their labored breaths, and even celebration of creaturely love.” (“Irreverent Theology,” 71) Entanglement entails the very risk of becoming so closely associated with the creaturely other who has come so close to us that the boundaries of our individual sanctity become achingly porous.
References
Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key
Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story
Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology