Ensoiled-Freedom

Toward a Lichenous Conception of Divine Freedom

We have been exploring “sacred thread” and our conceptions of divinity in my Theologies of Social Transformation class this term, and I recently wrote a paper putting the Kelly Brown Douglas and Monica Colemans vast different understandings of God’s freedom in conversation with one another in the context of an ecological paradigm.

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Introduction: Pulling (Sacred) Threads and Mixing (Mycelial) Metaphors

 “Some loose ends need to be tied up, but still, their threads are part of the tapestry. Some loose ends need to be re-woven. Some need to be pulled and allowed to lead us where they may.”^[1]

Over the course of the 300,000 years since Homo Sapiens emerged onto the world stage, we as a species have undoubtedly been wrestling with questions of divinity.^[2] Dating at least as far back as the Upper Paleolithic era, some 50,000 years ago, we have abundant archaeological evidence for the development of symbolic thinking, production of representational art, and the emergence of distinct ritualistic burial practices among our early ancestors.^[3] While this archaeological evidence does not provide us a full picture of early human spirituality or religious practice, it reveals the early threads from which a larger sacred tapestry would be woven as our species continued to wrestle with questions about the nature of God.^[4] From cave paintings to mythic poetry, from proverbs to parables, and from creeds to catechisms, we as a species have woven, unwoven, and rewoven this tapestry to construct a response to these questions that reflects our specific contexts and ultimate concerns.^[5] Among these questions of divine nature lies deeper questions regarding the freedom experienced by God, what this divine freedom reveals about God’s nature, and more so how God’sfreedom comes to bear on our own sense and experience of human freedom.^[6] From Clement of Rome to Jürgen Moltmann, from James H. Cone to Roland Faber, and beyond the weaving of these sacred threads has often turned to these questions of divine freedom, and it is on these loose threads that I will begin pulling and tracing in the pages of this paper. What follows then is my attempt at placing the free-living divinities of Kelly Brown-Douglas (The Great High God) and Monica Coleman (God in Process) alongside one another in a compost heap of mycelial metaphors hoping to cultivate an entangled and symbiotic theology of divine freedom weaved from the rich rhizomorphic connections developed therein.^[7] Furthermore, I hope to briefly demonstrate the ways that our present ecological crisis necessitates the cultivation of a mycorrhizal theology of divine freedom capable of developing the deep connections required for the emergence of an ensoiled-freedom that can resist the dis/membering effects of ecological overshoot.^[8]

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^[1] “Monday Quotes,” Shellen Lubin, accessed March 17, 2024, http://www.shellenlubin.com/web/default.asp#e.

^[2] “Human Evolution Interactive Timeline,” The Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, accessed March 16, 2024, https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-evolution-interactive-timeline.

^[3] Sapiens, “How Did Belief Evolve?,” SAPIENS, accessed March 16, 2024, https://www.sapiens.org/biology/religion-origins/.

^[4] I have italicized “God” here in hopes of highlighting the limitations of this word considering the diversity of spiritual traditions and religious imaginations beyond the Abrahamic faith traditions and Christianity in particular. I first encountered a similar practice in the work of John Caputo, who used an entirely different font when speaking of “God” in reference to the traditional understanding of the divine in the Christin tradition. I have done this to be cognizant of how language can be used to reinforce the Christian hegemony and draw attention to how easy it is to take language for granted despite its clear and present inadequacies. I will continue this practice throughout this paper when not quoting the work of others.

^[5] Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York, NY: Perennial, 2001).

^[6] William Rowe, “Divine Freedom,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 31, 2007, accessed March 17, 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-freedom/.

^[7] “Free-living” is a technical biological term that refers to certain fungi, algae, bacteria, and other organisms that are neither parasitic, symbiotic, nor sessile. Unlike most free-living organisms’ fungi tend to become symbiotic organisms under the simplest conditions as if always looking for intimacy among strangers. I will draw out this usage more in the proposal section of this paper, but it feels important to define it here before continuing onward.

^[8] My use of “ensoiled-freedom” throughout this essay is an attempt to build upon the notions of “ensoilment” I have articulated in previous papers by turning the concept toward the nature of God’s freedom as the very ground from which our own human freedom must emerge. Further, my use of “dis/membering” and “dis/memberment” operate as a theological construction and conceptualization of an ecological amnesia predicated on severance from our bodies, our souls, our world, each other, and the divine; William R. Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois P., 1982)