• The ultimate question of personal and planetary health: What do we love ?
• Clerk's message: Communities need our help!
• Wangari Matthai's Nobel Prize began with a frog egg necklace.
• Quaker Missions Stamp Project buys new DVDS for QEW Lending Library.
• Rejoice with the Western Shoshone!
• Water as commodity: Pricing the priceless.
• Staff boost QEW relationships from DC to SC.
• New QEW website is networking tool and information center
• Michigan Gray Panthers tap QEW co-founders for activism award.
• Ohio Valley YM 2006 sessions to seek "Spiritual Path of Stewardship."
• Adventure in Canadian wilds reminds us to connect with nature and live in the present.
• Northwest Earth Institute courses educate and help build eco-communities.
• Letters.
• Ecology and Spirituality... a New Friends Bulletin book project.
• Scenic Ghost Ranch, N.M., picked for QEW 2006 Fall Meeting & Annual Gathering.
• QEW events to complement Gathering's `Living Waters' theme.
• Traveling Gently on the Earth, a new trifold from QEW.
• Sale on Population is People book.
• Earthcare for Friends, a new book from QEW.

by Louis Cox

Previous BeFriending Creation articles have discussed fundamental disorientations that are driving modern industrial civilization to insane destruction of its own life-support system: We don't know where we are, we don't know what time it is, and we have forgotten who we are.

After reading the late Jim Corbett's last book, Sanctuary for All Life (Howling Dog Press, 2005), I recognized another even more important dimension of the current human-earth condition—what some call "compassion" (agape) and what Jim called by many names, including "communion." As the ultimate question of personal and planetary health, it comes down to, "What do we love?"

The book's title mirrors that of the Sanctuary Movement that Jim and others in the faith community helped found in the 1980s to seek justice for people fleeing from fighting and persecution in Central America who were being denied legal status as refugees by the U.S. government.

It was the voice of a Higher Authority, a call to communion with people of all creeds, colors, and nationalities, that led the Sanctuary Movement's supporters to put human suffering above abstract laws and artificial political boundaries.

It's interesting to note that, in replacing the original statement of FCUN Goals with a new QEW Vision and Witness statement in 2003, we dropped the phrases, "…to live in deep communion with all Life Spirit," and "…to affirm the unity of all Creation" (another way of saying "communion"). These words were felt to be semantic stumbling blocks for some Friends, along with the word, "Nature." However, Jim preferred to use the word "Nature" in referring to a sense of communion with the Ultimate Reality, since it avoided the idolatry he believed is inherent in all theological propositions. It is our ignorance of and spiritual isolation from this all-embracing Reality that contributes to our ecologically destabilizing behavior, he maintained.

What Jim had to say about Nature is very much to the point of the Quaker spiritual ecology movement. In his keynote address to the 1995 Annual Meeting in Cuba, N.M., he described the Quaker principles underlying the Saguaro-Juniper Corporation that he helped found in southern Arizona as a "human-land covenant," but he was still wrestling with an even more profound vision of a redemptive realignment of humankind and the Earth community. He seemed to be approaching clarity as he worked on final drafts of Sanctuary for All Life, shortly before his death several years ago.

In his visioning, Jim went against the current within the modern unprogrammed tradition that tends to soft-pedal Quaker-ism's Judeo-Christian roots. As a "Judeo-Quaker," he had long been interested in the pastoral strain of the ancient Israelite religion, traces of which can be distinguished from later traditions of Judaism that were more urban-centered and domesticated. (These studies were integrated into his 1991 book, Goatwalking, a Guide to Wildland Living, which described the earthy spirituality he found in the freedom and simplicity of subsistence herding in desert wildlands.)

He found that the core message of Moses and other Hebrew prophets was about justice and right relationship, a message most relevant to those who have been liberated from bondage and who practice an open, nature-oriented spirituality, maintained by sabbatical consciousness, as a way of keeping from being re-enslaved. When Jesus proclaimed the coming of a new Kingdom, he was speaking mainly to those who had become oppressed and margina-lized in their own homeland, and he offered liberation by inviting them to become its co-creators. This new order resides in peaceful covenant communities that generate their own cohesion, in contrast to social structures and religious institutions that rely on coercion.

The inspiration for Sanctuary for All Life may have come when Jim began to see a deep spiritual stream running through four themes of his life: his work with the Sanctuary Movement, his personal experiences as a goat-walker in the desert Southwest, his role in drafting the land stewardship principles of the Saguaro-Juniper Corporation, and his interest in the Earthcare movement emerging within the Religious Society of Friends.

By tracing its roots in the Hebrew scriptures, he could see that the Kingdom of God isn't just about people; it includes the whole life community, just as the original Covenant in the Book of Genesis did. He could see that the Higher Authority principle of the Sanctuary Movement applied just as compellingly to restoring the inalienable rights of the land, and that the global environmental crisis is fundamentally about our spiritual relationship to the earth.

The resulting integrative vision is not the kind of smooth-flowing work that a person can simply read and summarize. Like the many ancient scriptures that it draws on, Sanctuary for All Life is meant