A Covenant with the Earth
I set my rainbow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the Covenant between me and the earth.
Genesis 9: 13
P. Mark O'Loughlin cfc
[March, 2003]
Prior to a Conference in the University of Otago in Dunedin in the summer of 2000, I spent three days experiencing the transcendent grandeur of Fiordland in the south west of New Zealand. Amongst my experiences was a launch trip on the drowned glacial valley of Doubtful Sound.
During a diversion into the mirror calm waters of Hall Arm our launch was surrounded by a pod of dolphins, which playfully and exultantly displayed aquatic skills and exhilarating speed for no apparent reasons other than their satisfaction and our enjoyment. As a scientist I am warned against anthropomorphism (attributing human qualities to animal life), but how else can I rationally explain the behaviours of these dolphins? Is their life experience and awareness different to mine? Why should it be? I had a second and different encounter with dolphins later that day in another part of the fiord.
The launch had made another diversion, this time into Crooked Arm. Here was a pod of dolphins in a starkly contrasting mood. The members of this pod were grouped, seemingly huddled, and quietly intermingling. About fifty meters away two were in close attendance with one which was belly-up and floating, presumably deceased. Here was a pod ritual, centred on the deceased. Who were the attending individuals? Were they pod leaders, or parents, or siblings, or offspring, or partners, or ministers? I continue to wonder. But that there was a ritual appeared to me unmistakable.
A young friend and colleague, Rebecca McIntosh, is currently doing her doctoral studies on a sea lion colony on Kangaroo Island. I was deeply moved recently when she shared some of her observations of the colony. Bec had remarked that the individuals always come back to the colony to die. And she went on to describe finding the body of an aged female. In apparent anticipation of death she had made the effort to climb a cliff and find a ledge above the colony. Bec found her body lying across some low vegetation, her head pointed towards the colony on the beach and towards the sea. What was the awareness of this mother as she apparently calmly faced death? Bec and I pondered her awareness, her thoughts. Were they different in kind to our human thoughts? We felt not.
The breeding females in the colony regularly go to sea for days at a time to find food, and have to leave their cubs unattended. All individuals in the colony are at risk from aggressive and lumbering males, and the cubs especially so. Cub mortality from crushing by males or direct assault is high. So the females leave their cubs in a sheltering 'cubby' in the nearby vegetation. Bec told me that at the opening into a cubby she always observes shells and pieces of sponge and other natural artefacts with which the cubs can play to entertain themselves. And according to Bec the cubs love to play. She has observed them lining up pieces of shell and sponge from the beach along the backs of their lazing mothers. Is there a consciousness here which makes these behaviours different in kind to what we experience humanly? We imagined not. And we pondered the bewilderment of mothers returning from the sea to find their cubs gone, taken by human predators from aquaria or zoological gardens who excused their plunder with the devious justification that the cubs were "abandoned"!
I find many causes for wonder amongst the records of animal behaviour. Two young male baboons engaging in a mutually fatal attack on a leopard which threatened their troop. The pair of migratory birds which make the almost certainly fatal descent from their formation to attend a downed member of the flock. Elephants which carried the carcass of a herd member to the precise place in a village where it was killed and from which the carcass was removed by the villagers, and then covered the bones with vegetation. The scallop-like marine animal which flipped over another when it lay in a position of immobility. Brittle stars (lacking sense organs and any central nervous system) which together captured fish and squid with extraordinary mutual awareness and cooperation.
It pains me to recall just how prejudiced my awareness has been in terms of being 'educated' to regard human beings as essentially different from and superior to the rest of creation. Rather than having an understanding of shared being and interdependence and openness to the transcendent. Horror, then, to recently encounter the morning reading from the Book of Genesis with its injunction: Be the terror and dread of all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all the fish of the sea. How horrendously faithful we have humanly been to that injunction! Some relief, then, to find at the end of that reading a declaration of a Covenant with all of the earth: I set my rainbow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the Covenant between me and the earth. May I embrace that Covenant, and in the spirit of The Heart of Being Brother nurture a further transformation of my consciousness into one of radical relationships of equality with all of God's creation.
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