rent collective state of mind, I decided that we should explore how all this gloom and doom got started. How did we fall into this narrative that says our world is going to end in catastrophe, death and destruction? What sort of principles and ideals had generated this theme for our tale?
The Fatal Founding Principles
My next task was to take my students backward in history for a critical review of our story to discern the origin of their “thematic universe.” To accomplish this, I figured we’d have to identify the principles and ideals that formed the foundation and direction of our worldview, because I believed these to be the origin of my students’ generative theme. So, we set off to uncover the origin of the theme hidden in the narrative my students were living. Fortunately, I didn’t have far to look. I found
the source in our fifth-grade Social Studies cur- riculum. In California’s fifth-grade classrooms, educators were supposed to teach how the United States of America was “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” and “the ide- als of the Enlightenment.” There they were, our good old principles and ideals. Now, to determine what those principles and ideals are,
we would need to listen closely for evidence of that kind of discourse ‛humming’ through our story. We would need to hear “the voice of Mother Culture” as Daniel Quinn describes it in his book, Ishmael, because: “Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll…be tempted to say to the people around you, ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’” (1992, p. 37). Wanting my students to be able to recognize our domi-
nant narrative for what it is, we started searching first for evidence of the Judeo-Christian principles that helped to form our culture. Once again, we didn’t have far to look: the chalkboard. On it, I had written the day’s date. “And where does this come from?” I asked. “None other than our Grego- rian Calendar! It’s our world’s civic calendar that Pope Greg- ory XIII introduced to correct the inaccuracies of the Julian calendar. It’s based on the Anno Domini system, or the birth of Jesus. Therefore, our civic calendar is about as Judeo- Christian, or more specifically, as Christian as anyone can get.” And right there, I thought, with our entire world dated to the birth of Jesus, essentially, to one degree or another we were all living in accordance with certain Judeo-Christian principles. In the United States, we citizens hear all kinds of Judeo-
Christian principles humming away in the background. We even chime into the story’s mantra everyday in our public schools when reciting the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. Heck, our country’s official motto, written on our dollar bill, is “In God We Trust.” Likewise, I’ll bet that if you listen closely enough you can hear Judeo-Christian principles humming along in the dominant narrative of nearly every country in the Western world. At this point, I presented a gallery walk of quotations
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and illustrations from a few prominent “voices” heard in our Judeo-Christian discourse. For this, I glued specific quotes and illustrations on posters, and hung them on the wall for display. Students took turns reading, reflecting on and writing a response to each piece, and commenting on each other’s responses, thus turning the entire exercise into a discussion of sorts. The last poster on our gallery walk included two images
that I believe identified the true origin of my students’ “generative theme.” The first was a painting of the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, receiving from this God we trust, his two apocalyptic visions. The second was Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment from the Sistine Chapel. Surrounding these two images, I also included a variety of dreadful quotes from the Book of Revelation. Since those horrific revelations, it seems, we as a culture have been talking, writing, filming and dreaming about, and perhaps looking, waiting and even hoping for the end of the world, non-stop. So, this is the narrative we had uncovered. It’s what
Thomas Berry, the former Catholic priest and eco-theo- logian, called in his book The Dream of the Earth the “redemptive story.” As Berry states, “[t]his religion-based story originated in a revelatory experience some three thou- sand years ago.” First was the ‘fall’ of humanity described in Genesis: “[a]ccording to this story, the original harmony of the universe was broken by a primordial human fault.” Because we’re fatally flawed, Eve picked the fruit that got us expelled from the garden. Now we’re under God, in whom we trust, even it seems, to the exclusion of our own self-reli- ance. However, because we’ve been made in His image, we should be fruitful and multiply. And because human beings are the only creatures who possess a soul and the ability of self-reflection, this land is our land and we hold dominion over all the other creatures on our planet. Thus, for the glory of God, we’re supposed to create a great city on a hill, so that it can all end in a horrible apocalypse. But those who believe in the savior will be redeemed and “mov[e] infal- libly toward [their] fulfillment in the peace of a reconstituted paradise” (p. 124).
GREEN TEACHER 93
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