Shelley is a familiar member of that small, sensitive, select company of writers known as literary romanticists. They lived at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, during what is referred to as the English Romantic period. The period was incredibly brief as we calculate time. But in that span of years those men, using words the way an artist would use brush and paint, sketched a portrait of spirituality that gently but irrevocably challenged the religious notions and liturgical lamentations of the day.

They arrived on the European scene two and half centuries after the wrenching reformation. But unlike that reformation and its theological eruptions, which shattered and scattered the church, these men discarded the theological language of sin, expiation, justification, sanctification, salvation, redemption, etc. Instead they wrote about creation's rhythms that spoke of passion and pleasure and pain, beauty and tragedy, faith and doubt, love and grace, strength and weakness, hope and despair, truth, fecundity, of a world selfsustaining, re-productive, throbbing with energy and vitality. All of it sacred, all of it essential, all of it the design of life of which they were an integral part.

Clearly, they sensed that the planet was in serious trouble; the solution, difficult, What was needed was not more religion, but an earth ethic as the consequence of spirituality. The notion that spirituality was accessible only through the chartered waters of religion ritual, conformity, uniformity, morality, that religion was the womb, the only "house," where spirituality could occur, was complete idiocy. 

Shelley writes of a wilderness having a mysterious tongue, a mountain with a voice which teaches. And its teachings form the link between creature and creation and awaken the first symphonic strains of the soul. When he writes "the wise ... deeply feel" he is speaking of a spirituality not manufactured in the mills of religious industry, packaged and experienced within specific venues, but rather the natural communion between the soul of the creature and the Creator through creation.

The God of the Old Testament is a God who speaks, and that Word echoes through the fabric of nature. Unfortunately, as Isaiah wrote, "He said you look but will never know, you listen but will never understand" Shelley merely rephrased it when he lamented that that voice is "not understood by all."

The paradox in all this is that those who claim to be the spokespersons, the spiritual leaders, of their religious institutions seem the least capable of hearing that "v e," understanding it, or worse, believing it has anything to say.

That creates a serious, spiritually dysfunctional, problem. Failing to hear the voice, recognize the speaker, or comprehend the message, they have, in the course of centuries, created religious systems that are spiritually deaf, tuned to the ruminations of collared morality, supported by cyclical theologies and lethal liturgies that bang on the ear-drum of the soul.

Flannery O'Conner, author of such novels as Wise Blood, and The Violent Bear It Away, was interviewed about her feelings as a Southern author at a time when there were very few Southern writers, and fewer Southern women writers. She made this observation:

One wonders if the reason so many suffer so awfully from a kind of spiritual vacuity is precisely because the voice they hear, the one that prods them and keeps them awake to their "errant" lives, is not the quieting voice of the Creator but the haunting mantra of the religious translator who views the whole of life in the measured terms of moral good and evil. And that is a religious recipe for death.

Daniel Maguire, Professor of Ethics at Marquette University, and author of the book The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity, made this observation:

The image of spirituality blurs when viewed through the poorly crafted, often fogged lenses of religion. Someone once observed that centuries-old institutions seem to have suffered a fatal fatigue. Christianity seems tired, dated, exhausted; Judaism has defaulted on the universalist dream of Isaiah; it is anything but a "light to the nations." Both appear to exist in a kind of self-designed splendid isolation. In Thomas Moore's book Care of the Soul, he writes, 

 Two things seem clear: the search for authentic spirituality is a frightening experience, and laden with risk. Risky in that we must discard the costumes and masks and intellectual games we play so we may be able to confront ourselves, accept that side of us that currently makes us blush. Frightening in that as we mature in our understanding of ourselves, our universe, we may have to discard the religious crutches and acknowledge that we, and we alone, are responsible for this pastoral planet.

 The English Romantic writers mentioned earlier were not another wave of panthiests, another garden variety of nature-lovers, seekers of the simple life. They weren't recommending we abandon, desert, retreat from civilization to some garden. Nothing so simplistic or trite. They never viewed the world as one global garden, perfect, ideal. Life was a wrestling match: a cacophony of pain and fears, joys and tears, ensconsed within the serenity of life's quiet harmonies.

 In Leo Marx's book The Machine in the Garden, the machine in the garden, characterized as a locomotive, is symbolic of life's intrusions-religion, industry, economics, science, technology, education -are vital signs of a civilization that is alive. In the midst of the pastoral there is the shriek of life; it's that shriek which changes the texture of life. Those sights and sounds stir the soul, and in the free interaction between harmony and dissonance, a sacred reunion of Creator and creature takes place.

 Art, literature, music, dance are alive with the jarring shrill in the otherwise pastoral motif-and the message is clear. In the moment of the disrupting awesomeness of life in the center of the garden that we find spirituality.

 Read Hawthorne's Sleepy Hollow or Thoreau's Walden they speak of gardens; then suddenly the shrill whistle of the locomotive shatters the pastoral. Twain's Huckleberry Finn, with Huck and Jim floating serenely down the river; suddenly this monstrous, whistle-blowing, smokebillowing, paddle-driven machine descends upon them, crashes and splits their reverie and their raft.

 Victor Hugo is the master of symbolism in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He juxtaposes the dancing, swirling, sensuous gypsy Esmeralda and the women in the cathedral nave, shrouded, muttering mantra-style "Give me ... give me ... give me." But it is Esmeralda who brings water to Quasimodo, the ugly, disfigured bellringer, following his public beating and humiliation. Suddenly it is he who rocks the tranquility of religion by setting off every bell in the tower, intercedes alone in her rescue, falls in love, and at the same time recognizes the idiocy of his feelings.

 That confluence, the garden of humanity and the free expression of the soul, is the setting and the beginning of spirituality. As Erasmus suggested, friendships are made in the moments of our foolishness.

 As we continue our search for spirituality and sustainability we need a new language, a language that incorporates the richness of myth, ritual, and symbol but that is relieved of the self-destructive images of god, of who we are, and the razor-sharp lines that differentiate good and evil; a language that alludes to both the harmonies of the pastoral and the dissonances of the shriek of life.

We need what Nicolas Cusa described as "educated ignorance" a studied unlearning of the concepts that seem to hold us hostage to yesterday's notions, opinions, truths. We need to unshackle ourselves from the medieval words which in turn are wedded to antique ideas, words which have become societal waste-baskets into which each generation tosses convenient interpretations.

Our pursuit of the meaning of spirituality will not permit the oxymorons of the past; rather it will demand a new lexicon written in the tears and laughter, the celebrations and funeral orations, the ethics and ethos of the human race.

Friedrich Nietzsche blew a fuse in the electrical circuits of Christianity when he declared in his book Gay Science that God is dead. The madman, lantern in hand, ran through the market places calling out to the crowds, "I seek God, I seek God," and against the barrage of their ridicule, shouted "We have killed him." With that he threw the lantern to the ground; it shattered and the light was extinguished, symbolizing that death. As they led him away, he pointed back and muttered, "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God."

We dismiss these outbursts as the babbling of an insane man. But for those of us who search for spirituality and a sustainable society in which spirituality becomes reality, Nietzsche's question prevails. What are these "houses you build for me" if not tombs and monuments.

The issue is not whether God is alive and well, or God lived and died, or God never existed. God isn't dead! It's the language that died, because it failed, and fails, to communicate who we are, and whose. And that failure is a barrier to spirituality.

C. K. Chesterton once observed that "Christianity hasn't failed; it simply has never been tried . " Perhaps the same can be said of all the great religions of east and west. 

Spirituality is not a negotiable commodity bargained out on the altar to the unknown god. It isn't an intellectual exercise or mental achievement; it is not the consequence of retreating into safe havens protected from the wrenching sights and sounds of life. It's a state of being. It is a condition, unfinished, in the rough, a "work in progress." As with all things conditional it is predicated on the phenomenon of the soul in spiritual intercourse with the voice of creation. The degree of our humanity can be measured by our capacity to "hear" the voice of the Creator through the megaphone of creation, to comprehend the earth not as a birthright, but as a sacred trust.

This "voice" has been seriously compromised by our persistent abuse of the earth. All we hear today are the groanings of a planet in travail, a planet that seems, by all outward appearances, to be dying. Someone once compared viewing our planet with reading a version of the creation story backwards, beginning with a picture of lush greens, of forests, fertile lands, crystal clear streams, and pure air, and concluding with a primordial wasteland; what Wordsworth called "the fever of the world."

This planet is an art form that is being defiled; humanity is to be compared to a depraved individual who, in a moment of abject, destructive insanity, takes a chisel to Michaelangelo's Pieta. The earth's patience and tolerance of this abuse appears to have been exhausted, and possibly Daniel Maguire is correct when he suggests we are living in what may be the first stage of creation's fatigue.

Byron was wrong when he suggested in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that man's control stops with the ocean shore. There is no "plain" our "ruin" does not touch. Ours appears to be an insatiable economy feeding on natural resources until they are beyond restoration or resuscitation.

We are called on to reverse these selfserving intellectual cul-de-sacs, the belief that more is better, the inane economic mentality that assumes the earth is ours to exploit, to exhaust, depreciate, and deplete in the name of progress.

We can no longer prepare the child to be an adult and without time to be a child -quality time to be curious, to explore, to experience, to test, not knowledge, but feelings, to read not another text book, but the quiet, new sensations that chum deep within-and to listen, not to one more lecturer, but to the voice that whispers to soul.

Alfred North Whitehead said "the human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul." The universal art forms,-painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama,-are not decorative embellishments, they are the deep, moody, anguished, struggling expressions of the soul. For those who have ears to hear, who understand the "voice," it is the sound and sensation of a frightening holiness! Spirituality.

We have come to the point where we must return to the site of that first symbolic expression of sustainability and spirituality and be fascinated once more by the sight of a burning bush that is not consumed. Then, listen to that voice that reverberates across the earth as a reminder to all of us: Remove your sandals; the ground you stand on is holy.

Do I believe we are on the verge of witnessing the death of earth? No! Spiritually inspired, sustainable oriented people will not permit it. Do I believe we will achieve our goal conclusively, maybe even create a new Eden? No! In the pastoral we all seek and need, I want to hear the shriek of a fecund life. Do I believe we make a difference? Absolutely!

Donald W Cashen is a senior partner at Professional Services Associates, and holds a M.Div. in sacred theology and a Ph.D. in educational psychology. He has completed his first novel, Indecent Disorder, which examines religion and the environment. Dr. Cashen is on the board of directors for The Humane Society of the U.S. and the Center for Respect of Life and Environment.

.