“Whoever blasphemes against the father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.” - Gospel of Thomas (44)
I’ve been thinking about this line from the Gospel of Thomas for a while and what it might mean. Surely, it might mean many things and, I am only working with the English translation.
But some cursory etymological research led me to understand that the word used for Father could also mean ‘ancestor’ and the word used for son could also mean ‘descendant’. And, what if the holy spirit referred to that which gives us life and allows us to live and that this might be understood as a certain kind of village-mindedness, a shared culture, the depth and strength of the relationships that exist between us in our human community and between us and the non-human and unseen world?
If that were so, it might read in this way:
“Whoever blasphemes against their ancestors will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against their descendants will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against village-mindedness will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.”
And so, could it be this: if you speak ill of or hurt those from whom you came, they will forgive you your madness and find some way to reach through to you from their world. Perhaps they would find you, a scribe of the Church, contending with the voices of your own old timers and their stories as they contend with the new voices of this new religion, and whisper to you some words that might appear in your texts like breadcrumbs for those hundreds of years to come in the future. Perhaps they might find some way to keep the culture alive inside of you so that those to come might have a chance. They may yet plant some yearnings inside of your heart that will tether you to them and lead you to some needed place.
If you speak ill of or hurt those to come, they may come to forgive you. They may yet shape the meaning of your life, however carelessly spent, in some finer way.
“Yes,” they will say. “Those from whom I came were troubled. But I come from them. And I claim them as my own and I will, by the way I live, redeem the meaning of their life because without them, you would not have me and I will be sure that you are glad of my presence and those who come from me and surround me.” And others will see that it was too soon to cast judgment on your old timers. They will begin to see the longer story. You might behave badly, but those who come after you might yet write another chapter on the story you’d imagined over.
But, if by word or deed you manage to shatter the spirit of kinship that lives and breathes amongst us, there will be no ‘us’ left to forgive you. You will have destroyed the source of your own forgiving. When a community is fractured too deeply, the capacity for restorative justice goes into retreat and the need for punitive justice steps forward.
Perhaps this is why traditional communities have always been so strong on the understanding of what theft does to a village and how, if it is not contended with quickly and well, it can erode the trust amongst people, prompt the desire for revenge and escalate all too quickly into an out of control spiral that little will walk away from unscathed.
If you, like the missionaries of the world, hellbent on conversion, sow seeds of dissent against the elders, mockery on the old stories and ways of knowing, if you strike at this root of shared understanding, it may die and, in its dying, be unable to bring the healing that culture brings to the world.
This is one of the deep and unspoken consequences of too many of our actions in these modern times, instead of feeding culture, they kill it.
Traditional cultures from all around the world have known the deep importance of culture.
In most traditional diets you will find cultured foods (e.g. kefir, yoghourt, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha etc.). They understood that this mysterious culture that lives inside of us must be fed and that, in feeding it, it keeps us strong. They strains of bacteria they used were prized and passed on from generation to generation. The sticks they used to stir their concoctions, kept in family lines.
We like to think that its all of our effort in chewing that digests the food but it’s not.
Like the culture in our guts, that lives within us without being a part of us, that digests our food and turn it into nourishment we can use, outer culture is that which we live within with is constantly, just by being itself, eating up all of the messes and problems we bring to it. Every dance moving stress from our bodies. Every song we sing, bringing healing to us. Every story we hear, helping us find ourselves in the world.
It is a stunning thing to realize that instead of needing to isolate every nutrient you need (e.g. fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals etc.) one can simply eat well and make sure one’s gut flora is strong and that gut flora will extract the nutrition you need from the food much more efficiently than you could isolate it and ingest it. We are only now coming to understand how vital this living culture inside of us is.
Individualism is like trying to take a pill for every nutrient. Individualism leaves us all to contend with our troubles alone - troubles that the culture would help us metabolize on its own.
Simply by living in a deeply wrought culture, many of our troubles are met and turned into food for ourselves and others.
Consider it: Without culture, we metabolize almost none of our food. Food must go through the medium of culture in order to nourish us.
Without culture, we metabolize almost none of our troubles. Our troubles must go through the medium of human culture in order to become food for us and the world.
“Whoever blasphemes against their ancestors will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against their descendants will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against village-mindedness will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.”
Not only will you not be forgiven, neither will others.
So many of us live unforgiven for the messes we have made; not because there isn’t the desire and not because you don’t deserve it but because there isn’t the capacity anymore.
As we swallow the anti-biotic notions of this culture, the bitter pills of individualism, heroism, punitive justice, essentialism, private property and the whole ungodly cabinet full of pills we are told to take and the pills we are told to take to deal with the symptoms of the first pills, there isn’t the capacity to digest those dodgier foods we maybe shouldn’t have eaten or even the healthiest ones; not because we don’t want to digest it or we don’t deserve the nourishment but because there isn’t the capacity anymore.
Culture eats what the sharp, teeth of our mouths can not.
Culture is the life giver and if, like an antibiotic, we speak in such a way that the living culture between us itself is killed off, we, in the end will be starved too as the food of our troubles rots inside the guts of the village giving us none of its nourishment.
And so perhaps one of the most pressing questions before us today is: what feeds culture and what kills it? And how might we live our days so that something which is not us, and yet that grants us our days, might flourish?
In the past culture was fostered in a place dictated by how far a person could travel regularly on foot or man powered boat. So we have pockets of people having lived on a fairly definable piece of land. Ie: Salish sea and the Coast Salish people. The people and their culture are the result of their living and interacting on that specific landscape. Architecture, spiritual practices, rituals, food etc are all framed within the limits of the landscape that can be interacted with on a daily basis. So for me it begs the question. Does the culture belong to the land or to the people? Having travelled and moved and being a descendent of diverse linage I am now leaning on the idea that culture belongs to the land and not to the people. In fact, people also belong to the land. Now that we can get on a fast boat or plane, now that we can wake if Victoria and fall asleep in Hong Kong, does it really make sense to drag a big bagage of culture on our shoulders and try to continue to live “our culture” in a new place? Or do we keep culture alive in a place by fully engaging in the culture that that place / landscape calls forward? We see our desire for this emerging already. 100mile diet, buy local etc. So then culture is not so much a noun but rather a verb. Or maybe we need a new word that is defined as “interactions with the landscape which contributes to the depth of that places culture”. The dying of culture is a direct result of people’s choice and belief to rely on industrialization alone for their survival. To use the body analogy. It would be like trying to keep our bodies alive on vitamin pills alone. That just doesn’t work. Our bodies need real food that comes from nature. In the same way, culture needs real interaction with the local landscape to stay alive. Unfortunately the stories and behaviours around the idea of cultural appropriation has instilled fear of judgement when taking part in cultures that are “not ours”. Though cultural appropriation at its worst is extremely disrespectful for sure, we may also want to turn it in its head and say “hey, join me on this land, come be a part of the foods, celebrations, art etc that this land calls forward in us, let the land appropriate you while you stand in its soils.”
I really love this.