Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
Replacing church slide share
- 1. A project of The United Church of Canada and KAIROS www.replacingchurch.com practising reconciliation in the watershed
- 20. Declaration of Intent from UNDERCURRENT by Rita Wong http://www.nightwoodeditions.com/title/undercurrent
- 24. Sources: KAIROS Reconciliation in the Watershed Campaign http://www.kairoscanada.org/sustainability/reconciliation-watershed/ Photos: Sara Stratton, Susie Henderson, Keith Nunn
Editor's Notes
- In the spring of 2015, “Down by the Riverside: walking into watershed wisdom” was organized by United Church staff from Toronto Conference: South West and Southeast Presbyteries, and the General Council Office, together with KAIROS. About 40 people gathered at the Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto to walk into the Don River watershed, into reconnection, into justice and spirituality, into an understanding of place.
- We created the walk as a Jane’s Walk, http://janeswalk.org, part of an annual festival of citizen-led walks in locations around the world, held in memory of Jane Jacobs. Jacobs was a writer and an activist with a passion for cities. With no formal training in city planning, she was dismissed by the “professionals” of her time. But her deep commitment to grassroots organizing was successful in stopping the Lower Manhattan expressway. The Jane’s Walk movement is a living example of her legacy.
- We began in a good way with a reflection from Mary Oliver. Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.” Oliver, Mary. Why I Wake Early, New Poems Beacon Press; 1 edition (April 15 2005)
- We created 11 stations to dig into connections in the Don River watershed. We touched on the history of the Don River, First People’s History, and the long view of geologic history in the area. In light of these connections we named contemporary issues of justice that are alive in the watershed, including: habitat restoration, climate change, and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Along our walk, we looked at watersheds in four ways – as geography, as connection, as a moment in time and as a path of discipleship. DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE WALK STATIONS #1 Gathering #2 Placing Ourselves In Our Watershed Station #3: Honouring First People’s History #4 Building Good Cities #5 The Long View Of The River #6 Re-claiming This Place #7 Climate History + Our Watershed Moment #8 Restoring Animal Habitat #9 Protecting The Water #10 Reconciliation In The Watershed #11 We Are Watershed
- 1. Watershed as geography. Watersheds are geographic places: an area, a basin of land that drains into a body of water. Watersheds capture water, filter and store water in the soil and release water into a water body.
- At the watershed map sculpture at the Evergreen Brick we tried to locate our own watershed. We shared with each other how we felt, or didn’t feel, connected to the places where we lived.
- 2. Watershed as connection. Watersheds are basins of relationships. Every living organism within the basin is connected and dependent on the health of the whole. It’s a wider lens on the question of who is my neighbour?
- Wherever you live your tiny spot is deeply intertwined with a larger place, embedded fractal like into a whole system called a watershed
- Considering our own relationships in the city on the historic brick works grounds, that has constructed so much of the city we know today, we stopped to name the building blocks of a good city (neighbourhoods, bike lanes, common grounds, housing, and more). We constructed our own brick altar in response with the help of our own master builder.
- At the purple martin house we considered the impact of invasive species on local habitat and the increasing loss of habitat due to the way humans occupy our watersheds today. In thanksgiving for this little house of reconciliation we left an offering of suet for the birds and read a bit more of Wendell Berry while listening to chorus around us.
- 3. Watershed as a moment. A watershed is also a metaphor -- a point in time where everything comes together and we must act. We face a number of watershed moments in our country, as we come to terms with the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in the climate crisis as we have hit the point of what environmentalists call “peak everything.” Watershed language speaks to the urgency to our cause. Myers says: “we are amidst a watershed historical moment of crisis, which demands that environmental justice and sustainability be integral to everything we do as Christian disciples—and as citizen inhabitants of specific places.”
- The site of the old quarry has exposed a fascinating geological record of the last 135,000 years including the tooth of a giant pre-historic beaver. We took it as an opportunity to stop and consider the current climate crisis and we stopped for a time of prayer and naming the moment. http://planetrocks.ca/s15-don-valley-brickworks-100-000-years-of-climate-history/#sthash.iQi5zPHS.dpuf
- Creation care is not new for Christians – it’s a part of our practice – not a new idea. But creation care teaching has been soft on the edges. It is no longer enough to just be about changing the light bulbs, or recycling the paper. We can no longer avoid the controversies about pipe lines or tar sands, or fossil fuels, or fracking. This is an “all hands on deck moment”.
- Myers chooses the language of discipleship to draw out the basis of learning at the heart of discipleship and to draw Christians into deeper engagement into the places in which we live. In Canada, the initiative is led by KAIROS, http://www.kairoscanada.org/sustainability/reconciliation-watershed/, as a part of their Reconciliation in the Watershed Program.
- Wendell Berry says we don’t stand against ecocidal policies because we have no place to stand. “The pathology of placelessness can only be healed by disciplines of “re-place-ment”. Watershed discipleship is a path of teaching in response to the watershed moments that we face as people of faith who have common cause with others.
- Our challenge today to paraphrase a Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum is this: “We don’t save places we don’t love, we can’t love places we don’t know, and we don’t know places we haven’t learned.”
- Watershed discipleship invites us to re-inhabit our places. Myers says: “replaced ecclesial community can make an enormous contribution to the wider struggle to reverse our ecological catastrophe and we can recover the soul of our tradition in the process.” Many of us, have become severed from a sense of rootedness. Many of us, as we have colonized and displaced others, we also displaced ourselves, lost or forgotten our own stories. “In so many ways our churches are well situated to become centers for learning to love our places enough to defend and restore them. Christians have a deep culpability in the present crisis, but also ancient resources for the deep shifts needed.”
- On our walk, in between some cedar trees, we stopped to create some ephemeral art – an offering into the KAIROS heart garden project that was constructed to honour the Indigenous children who died in residential schools. It was our way to acknowledge the hope for reconciliation among Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in the watershed.
- Here’s a contemporary voice, Rita Wong, who has a declaration of intent based on watershed wisdom: let the colonial borders be seen for the pretensions that they are i hereby honour what the flow of water teaches us the beauty of enough, the path of peace to be savoured before the extremes of drought and flood overwhelm the careless water is a sacred bond, embedded in our plump, moist cells in our breaths that transpire to return to the clouds that gave us life through rain in the rivers & aquifers that we & our neighbours drink in the oceans that our foremothers came from …. water connects us to salmon & cedar, whales & workers its currents bearing the plastic from our fridges & closets i hereby invoke fluid wisdom to guide us through the toxic muck …although i am part of the problem i can also become part of the solution Declaration of Intent, by Rita Wong, Gibsons B.C. Nightwood Editions, 2015 http://harbourpublishing.com/cart.php?function=add&item_id=1025
- We ended our walk by singing “Down by the Riverside” and with a welcome drink of water. Myers points out that water marks the beginning and the end of the gospel is marked by water. At the beginning Jesus is baptized into the Jordan River watershed, following in the footsteps of the wilderness prophets; at the end of Revelation, the city is transfigured into a garden watered by the “River of Life”. Following the waterways is a way to re-asserts the handiwork of the Creator – some say that the watershed map reveals the veins of mother earth. Myers holds that we have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere, but the map woven into creation can lead us home. We can map a new contextual theology and practice by focussing on what is most basic to life: how water flows. Watershed literacy is a key to our survival.
- Come and create your own watershed walk. OCTOBER 3, 2015 9:00 - 3:30 $30 (includes lunch) Evergreen Brick Works 550 Bayview Avenue, Toronto R.S.V.P. to South West Presbytery drutz@united-church.ca
- Come and create your own watershed walk. OCTOBER 3, 2015 9:30 - 3:00 $30 (includes lunch) Evergreen Brick Works 550 Bayview Avenue, Toronto R.S.V.P. to South West Presbytery drutz@united-church.ca