If mankind is to avert climate crisis in time to save the planet, it is certain that there must be many profound and perhaps painful changes to the way we live but also to how we transform the way we live. Each of the world’s wisdoms has its own way of expressing and practicing this, but for all, it is crucial that wisdom transform perception as well as inspire practical change in the way we live. For centuries, wisdom has been exiled, leaving capitalism to impose technologies to increase profits for the few and consumerism to impose production for profit at the earth’s expense, alienating the consumer by imposing a plethora of false, seductive needs. In practice, modernity reduced glory to a monotheist legitimation of consumerist capitalism or left glory out of account altogether. Post-modernity challenged some of the mind sets that conditioned modernity but not consumerism, so even post-modern spirituality, its alternative to what it sees as redundant religion, became a commodity sold at a profit. The desolation of the planet mirrored a desolation of spirit which extinguished wisdom, calling for a renewal in wisdom that restores the planet.
But wisdom has always known what modernity forgot, that glory is a dance of love, glory dancing in co-inherent circles round all, in all, through all. Wisdom’s circle dance, which the Patristic tradition calls perichoresis, embodies a vision that sees through the mind sets of consumerism and uncovers nature’s co-inherence, embracing the planet’s own dance of wholeness and healing. Wisdom was always already present uncovering the dance of glory, but secular scientism was closed, leaving technology vulnerable to the consumerist dictates of elitist wealth and power.
All this begins to change when climate crisis begins by sheer necessity to force change. Glory is always already present beneath the desolation of decimation, waiting to be heard. Wisdom was exiled from our consumerist minds but not from the dance of glory that sustains the earth. If wisdom was always already wedded to glory as a dance of co-inherence, closed hearts did not perceive this. Consumerism needed addiction to feed its all-consuming drive to produce, using addiction to maintain control. Collusion between addiction and production ruled the day until climate crisis called a halt, turning hearts back to wisdom, restoring glory in natural co-inherence, wedded to divine co-inherence.
When impasse implodes, new paradigms emerge, inviting co-inherence to open where closed systems held control. Here, wisdom can again be heard as broken systems shatter, freeing glory to renew the dance. The circle turns as wisdom’s seeing sees, restoring harmony of heaven and earth in glory. Climate crisis can be itself the tipping point that turns institutional resistance into transformational change. It can be the juncture that breaks the pattern of addictive presumption so that wisdom intervenes to restore the wholesome glory of the dance. In God, the dance is what it always was, glory co-inhering in harmony with nature, calling on us to co-operate with nature, freed to restore and be restored by her co-inherent dance.
Wisdom is loved because she never fell from glory or fell for the consumerist addiction. She offers ancient cures to all from resources of hallowing healing that never run out. As we turn, we see with her eye, as God sees, and see as we are seen by God, inside the divine dance of glory that never failed. Wisdom shares her vision with us so we may see, see as we are seen by God, through God, in God: Holy Trinity. Her injunctions to turn and see open us to transformation through purification, illumination and glorification. Purification experiences glory as purifying fire, illumination as uncreated light, and glorification as deifying glory. Wisdom knows glory to be grace; indeed grace is glory as uncreated fire, uncreated light and uncreated, creative deification. The dance of glory embraces us, restores us and opens us to glory, offering glorification as wisdom’s way to change and to be changed. There is still time, time to release the addictive time of consumerism, time to dance the timeless circle dance of glory.