This post is part of an ongoing series expanding on the seven sacred teachings of Respect, Courage/Bravery, Love, Humility, Truth, Honesty, and Wisdom/Intelligence. This post explores the sacred teaching of Truth.
This summer, there was a black bear living in my neighborhood, hiding in backyards and tall cottonwoods for over a month until she was caught and relocated by Game and Fish. She, like an alarming number of other bears across the Rocky Mountain region this spring and summer, was driven down from the mountains by severe drought and poor berry crops following an almost entirely snow-less winter. Add to that several decades of relentless human encroachment on animal habitat, as the strip mall and cul-de-sac sprawl has crept violently across the Rockies, and you can’t help but find bears in places that humans say they shouldn’t be.
The desperation of these bears has touched a nerve in my heart, sending up a flaring tightness of anxiety and grief. I don’t recount the story here to trigger further climate grief in others, but rather to point to what the bears teach us, which is that all the beings who share our Mother Earth have no choice but to live by the truth of our biological and physical realities.
The Coalition holds Truth as one of our Seven Sacred Values, which together weave the fabric of our covenant with one another as we seek liberation alongside Indigenous peoples. Truth, though, is not only something we adhere to in our relationships with one another. It is at the very core of the work I feel we are here to do.
It’s the work of weaving a covenant with Truth itself—with the fabric of our reality. All that is, all that ever will be. We are finding strength in the vulnerability of admitting we are bound by the laws of physics, of matter, energy, the universe. It is the work of catalyzing an honest reckoning with the limits of our planet and with our existence as beings who are not separate from or dominant over the rest of Creation, but who are interdependent with it.
This weaving is slow work, multigenerational work. Remaking our role in this covenant requires building a movement of people who see the truth and who are willing to align with it, work for it, fight for it. It requires all of us aligning with the Indigenous cosmologies which already see the reality of our planet as it is, as Sarah Augustine calls it, “a closed system of mutual dependence”.
How do we get there, when so many of us don’t want to see the truth, and for now don’t have to acknowledge it, deluding ourselves that we are insulated from reality?
So many of us also already know reality, aren’t insulated from it, never have been. Those of us colonized, those of us marginalized, whose land and water and bodies are considered sacrifice zones, the people fighting daily for survival while also fighting to protect land and water.
The delusion will fail–sooner or later the Truth will surface as undeniable, for everyone. Flight or insulation from reality will be possible for fewer and fewer people in the coming decades, as the current economic system based on infinite growth and resource consumption collides with the reality of the physical and biological limits of a finite planet.
Those of us whom the current system has so far largely benefitted, providing a relatively high level of material prosperity and security, are beginning to see the crumbling of that system. Costs are rising, precarity increasing, and the markers of “a good life” or “the American Dream”—such as a retirement account and owning a home—are becoming ever more out of reach, especially for younger generations.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest people on Earth, those who profit massively from and who uphold the current economic and political structures, are already quite literally fleeing for the hills, buying doomsday bunkers and sprawling ranches where they hoard the wealth they have “plundered from ecological sacrifice zones around the world”.
Their delusion, too, will fail, as reality comes rushing in.
Instead of resisting the undeniable reality, may we choose to align with Truth. The truth that the four-leggeds, the winged ones, the swimming ones know, that the black bears know. The truth of Creation holding us in kinship, breathing life into us, lighting the spark that brings us into being.
May we stand with our Mother Earth and all our siblings, on this miracle of a planetary home. May we choose to live.
Amanda Pittman is a staff Organizer with the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. She facilitates the Episcopal Indigenous Justice Roundtable, a network of grassroots Episcopalians, congregations, and dioceses committed to material change and liberation across the church. She is also a leader in the Coalition’s work for land and water protection and land rematriation. Amanda is a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant through her mother’s family, and through her father’s work she is a coal miner’s daughter. She is compelled to follow Jesus’ call to seek justice and liberation alongside the oppressed and vulnerable.
