Many Iowans relish and quote the lines, “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa!” from the iconic movie Field of Dreams. The film is a baseball lover’s paradise in which an Iowa farmer hears a voice that inspires him to plow under his corn crop and build a baseball field. Who would do that? Despite the economic and personal cost for his family, he does it, “creating something totally illogical.” The field of dreams is where long-dead baseball players can return to fulfill their dreams of playing again just for love of the game. In the course of hearing the voice say things like, “If you build it, he will come,” “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance,” the farmer finds himself unraveling life mysteries of other characters who have lost their way, sacrificed their dreams, or suffered broken relationships and disillusionment. He learns to listen with rapt attention. In broadening his vision, and literally clearing his field, the farmer’s compassion for the suffering of others expands his world-view, and he is finally able to heal his own fractured relationship with his father, which is where his story began. Which is where most stories and many dreams begin: with the profound fragility of love, the devastation of loss, and the desire for healing and new life.
Twenty-five years ago, self-designated “eco-logian” Thomas Berry wrote The Dream of the Earth, in which he began by talking about returning to our native place, our true home, where the dream of healing can begin. “We are returning to our native place after a long absence, meeting once again with our kin in the earth community. For too long we have been away somewhere, entranced with our industrial world of wires and wheels, concrete and steel, and our unending highways, where we race back and forth in continual frenzy.” Berry’s seminal work had as its purpose a reclamation of our intimate connection with the natural world. He was reminding us to broaden our vision and to clear our field of our anthropocentric obsession, so our compassion for the wider “We” could be fully and ferociously aroused. He called us to the Big Story, the Universe Story, to encompass that wider “We” of which we humans are barely a footnote. Berry knew that our vision shifts when the field is cleared of our own self-importance.
Since Berry’s work was published, many have written about widening our vision, creating “fields of compassion,” (ala Judy Cannato and Marc Barasch) and changing our collective experience of communal life and energy in the process. Eco-philosophers like Joanna Macy and David Abram continuously challenge us to widen our “We” beyond the human community so that our global community may thrive. “We” are dialogue partners in a “Great Conversation,” as theologian Belden Lane reminds us. “We are surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We are part of a conversation, but we deny our role in it” (The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul, 2019). Maybe our time is now to join the great conversation, not so much by talking as by deep and careful listening.
Spiritual awareness, indeed our very practice of prayerful attention, often jolts us into hearing and seeing in new ways. It helps us clear our field of vision for new dreams to emerge, for compassion to be stirred into action. Paying close attention to what seems intensely “other” or what frightens and confuses us, might serve to decompose fetid paradigms that paralyze and stultify, and allow us to brush ever closer and even embrace the edges of Holy Mystery. Listening with mouse ears and peering with owl eyes may sharpen our awareness. It may remind us how intimately connected we are, whether we are the tiny burrowers or the ones who take flight. What we hear and see may kindle a new dream from what seemed dead, but was also being composted, and will become new life when we are ready to receive it. Our spiritual awareness may help us heal what seems lost in relationship and can only be resurrected if we are open to something totally new. New life, perhaps. Life for us all, the wider “We.”
Communal Examen of Consciousness:
Who or what is in our field of dreams? Who or what are we excluding?
How might we clear and expand our spiritual field?
During this time of PanDeepening, how are we growing more aware of the wider “We?”
What broken relationships require our listening, seeing and compassion?
What seeds are we planting in hope of new life?
What is our dream for the wider “We?”
—Laura Weber, Prairiewoods associate director and retreats coordinator