The Theopoetic Art of Anticipation
By: Christopher Fici
Tags: Theopoetics, Climate Justice, Spirituality, Earth, Bhakti

“Poems and cans of beans”

Last year, as I began to participate in a course entitled “Anticipation, Adaptation, and Reenchantment,” facilitated by one of my dearest friend and colleagues Sara Jolena Wolcott, the unconventional Quaker minister and director of the ecotheology company/community Sequoia Samanvaya, we were asked to imagine and anticipate what we would need if the frameworks of our fragile civilization gave way. Poems and cans of beans is the first note in my massive mind-map for our course. Cans of beans I certainly have…my English partner and I finished a beans-centered quasi-English Easter breakfast as we sheltered-in-place in the middle of Manhattan in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Poems we have too, in abundance. You can hoard poems and not feel guilty about it.

Consider here Joy Harjo and an excerpt from her poem “A Map to the Next World.”

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep…

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map.

Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

Some of the wisest advice I have heard from elders, mentors, and trusted friends in this time of interruption/transition/contemplation/apocalypse-as-unveiling is the absolute need for humility. All we have are imperfect maps. All we have ever had are imperfect maps. Attempting to love in the time of cholera or corona and whatever is to come next reveals the imperfection of our maps. It reveals the absolute necessity of this imperfection, for in such imperfection, and in the humility it demands, the opening to the next world can be truly anticipated. It is to understand that right now we are living in a Zen koan, which requires a keen sense of beginner’s mind and a devotion to all that is sacred.

In our course and within our broader Sequoia Samanvaya community, we are exploring the theopoetic art of anticipation. In my soon to be defended doctoral dissertation, this is my main topic of concern: what does it mean to anticipate in times of emergency, catastrophe, and apocalypse? I imagine and experience anticipation as 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. Our work within Sequoia Samanvaya is of a community discerning what is anticipatory community, and by doing so we become an anticipatory community. To understand what is anticipatory community I draw primarily here upon the sutra-like definition provided by the Lutheran theologian and ethicist Larry L. Rasmussen. Rasmussen 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.”

The art of anticipation and the practice of anticipatory community is inherently theopoetic. Theopoetics is the natural energy of the root of devotion. Theopoetic anticipation acknowledges the inevitable precarity of anticipation in a time of such unpredictable and unprecedented transition. By acknowledging and embracing such precarity, one gains, as described by the theopoetic theologian L. Callid Keefe-Perry, “an acceptance of cognitive uncertainty regarding the Divine, an unwillingness to attempt to unduly banish that uncertainty, and an emphasis on action and creative articulation regardless.” As the constructive theologian Catherine Keller adds, “God-talk is mindful of its own edge, e.g., the unspeakable vs. the word, or between silence and language itself. Process theopoetics is the steady work of auto-deconstruction: the critique of abstractions in order to keep discourse vibrant and relevant. This discourse occurs in a space between theopoetics and theopolitics. Poiesis is the making of something that previously did not exist, a creative practice. It is an action, a poem.” The practice of anticipation works best and emerges most fruitfully in the spaces and edges which are mysterious, precarious, vulnerable, yet tinged deeply with devotional energy, with an erotic Earthiness, and with an unshakeable commitment to justice and the flourishing of every human and creaturely being.

“Anticipation is Practical MAGIC!”

Another note from my “Anticipation, Adaptation, and Reenchantment” course mind-map proclaims: Anticipation is Practical MAGIC! Underneath the status-quo frameworks, structures, and assumptions we are chained to and controlled by is the energy of freedom, the energy to shape our own realities, as the true magician shapes and forges and forms and dances with the elements of creation. My own anticipation is always renewably fueled by my practice of bhakti-yoga, the yoga of devotion which emerges from the classical traditions of Hinduism in India. The poet and translator A.K Ramanujan describes bhakti as that which “is necessarily anti-structure…unmaking, undoing, the man-made. It is an act of violation against ordinary expected loyalties, a breakdown of the predictable and the secure…The Lord is the Illicit Lover; He will break up the world of Karma and normal relationships.” The practice of bhakti is simultaneously an act of religious devotion and an act of prophetic creative resistance against the banality of evil, the ordinary structures, loyalties, and securities which reinforce the evil of Earth-denying mindsets and practices. The experience of bhakti breaks down and away what is predictable and secure. Bhakti breaks down the world of karma, the trappings of destiny, freeing our being and will to engage with the Divine illicitly, beyond the pressures, attachments, and assumptions of a dying fossil-fuel, turbo-capitalist culture. The experience of bhakti leads us to the inner flame of anticipation

As we moved deeper into our course last year, our community desired to strengthen our bonds of preparation and resilience for the coming multiplying climate apocalypses through a deeply intentional spiritual process of nurturing the seeds, roots, and flowers of our interconnected gardens of faith. The mantra we chant in our study together is a question: why are we here as the anticipators? While the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic catch all of us off guard in many ways, some of us have a deepening intuitive sense and experience that the unveiling of the fragility of our civilizational constructs and assumptions is well under-way. Apocalypses abound, especially if one and one’s beloveds have been victims of the massive wildfires, hurricanes, and floods of the most recent decade. For those beloved souls on the bottom of the pyramid scheme which is our turbo-capitalist economic system, apocalypse can be an everyday reality and enduring trauma. The underlying reality of apocalypse is always there, even within the constantly decaying cellular structures of our bodies.

Whenever this reality emerges we become uncanny. It feels very much like a dream-state, as expressed by my friend and colleague, the Quaker theologian Christy Randazzo, who in their recently published essay “The Sleepers Must Awaken,” writes that “there are moments when, akin to a waking dream, we are fully aware of ourselves in the grand sweep of history, when we can feel, viscerally, that we are in the midst of seismic shifts in our lives. Right now, we are standing side by side with Ezekiel, desperately trying to process exactly how we wound up in a world we don’t recognize and over which we have no control. For this is truth: the world, as we know it now, has irrevocably changed.” The question of where to find and how to build, preserve, and nurture our anticipatory communities in a global civilization teetering on collapse is no longer academic. It never was. The nature of COVID-19 is nothing else but the true meaning of apocalypse: an unveiling. As Keller has written in her return to the Book of Revelation, “apo-kalypso: to unveil; thus to reveal, to disclose…we live, arguably, among its effects. For those dwelling in the dregs of modernity, preoccupied by the shutdown of sustainable ecologies, viable communities, and historical hopes, a “coming again” to “The End” may, paradoxically, dis/close an opening.” The question of what is being anticipated, and the question of how to anticipate, is the question of discerning what is being unveiled. It is the question of understanding what is being unveiled about our very selves and the nature of our most intimate relationships, including the ones we may not even know about (like a virus to our cells). It is also the question of understanding our place in the great movements of history, as the Catholic priest/mystic/geologian Thomas Berry argues that “the success or failure of any historical age is the extent to which those living at that time have fulfilled the special role that history has imposed upon them.”

Anticipation is practical magic because we must create and build and regenerate our communities in an anticipatory fashion. Many of us realize that we don’t know how to either start or put out fires, in the literal and metaphysical sense. Many of us know that we don’t know how to listen to what Earth is telling us, and we yearn and ache to be able to listen effectively and with a compassionate heart. Anticipatory community can begin when we know and intentionally connect to the 4–5 people in your locality whom you would reach out to (who you are reaching out to right now) in the midst of a disaster. The practical art of anticipation enhances our awareness of the precarious human-made infrastructure which is embedded within the natural systems which provide us with survival/quality-of life. What do we know about this infrastructure? What are the strong points? What are the weak points? What must we live within and what can/must we live without? How do we become better connected to the natural, indigenous systems (and peoples) of ecological support and nourishment underneath our extra fragile and fallible infrastructure?

The theopoetic art of anticipation is the practice of regeneration in an ecotheological key. It is the practice of regenerative ecotheology. 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 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, as described by the Potawatomi elder and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, “the ecosystem is not a machine, but a community of sovereign beings, subjects rather than objects. What if those beings were the drivers?”

“Superb catastrophic imagination…chain of revelation.”

My course mind-map certainly becomes more interesting now at the point in our discussion where we enter our current time of pandemic. The art of anticipation is certainly about the discernment of transitions big and small, personal and communal, in the time of our climate emergency. Our current time of pandemic accelerates those transitions, whether it is something like the “death” of the academy or the seriousness of the relationship we are in. One needs “superb catastrophic imagination” to anticipate well and to teach others the art amidst such accelerated precarity. These are times in which it feels like a chain of revelations is being given to us. The anticipator is one who responds to these revelations by helping others find their creative and regenerative agency in the process of unveiling. The anticipator asks: how can we enchant this moment? How can we become more generous? How do we shape a narrative which is always shifting? How do we not go back to a normality that was already catastrophic? The anticipator serves the ever-emergent processes of resurrection and reincarnation. As the philosopher Andreas Weber declares, “those who see themselves as part of the world perceive aliveness’s desire for them in the form of a pleasant anticipation. They allow themselves to be infected with life.” In such a time in which we try to avoid certain infections, it is the art of anticipation and the call of the anticipator to spread the infection of life, compassion, and love. It is the art of anticipation to reveal the devotion which is inherent to all creation.

Christopher Fici, PhD is an ecotheologian based in New York City. He teaches courses in religious studies at Iona College, NY and at DePaul University in Chicago.His recently defended doctoral dissertation is entitled “Where Earth Meets the Divine is the Root of Devotion: Anticipatory Community and Regenerative Ecotheology in the Time of Climate Catastrophe.” He is a student, teacher, and facilitator in the Sequoia Samanvaya community, “an ecotheology company connecting the disconnected.” In Sequoia, he has taught the ReMembering for Life course, which teaches the practice of ReMembering by exploring our personal, familial, and community understandings of the interconnected histories of climate change and colonization.