Evolutionary Dancer, book review (Rev. Dan De Leon)
Soon after reading Carol Kilby’s book, Evolutionary Dancer: Out, In, and on the Fringe of the Church; Revolutionary Wisdom, Stories, and Rituals to End Planet Abuse, I found myself across a cafe booth from two of my uncles, both of whom were raised Catholic, and who now adhere to a nondenominational Christianity that leans strongly conservative. When I mentioned a Netflix movie I thought they would like called The Two Popes about the relationship between Francis and Benedict, they said, “I don’t like Pope Francis at all.” When I asked why, they replied, “He says that even atheists can be saved,” as in “make it into heaven” according to their beliefs. “What happened to accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Now anyone can get in.” Their self-absorbed frustration was symptomatic of the anthropocentrism Kilby realized and relinquished in her journey away from being a Christian clergy person, toward what she came to articulate as evolutionary consciousness, and back into the place that remains an inescapable part of her identity: the church.
Kilby explains the evolutionary dance to be “the ongoing tango between belief and consciousness.” Her book, that I read as a spiritual memoir, is offered in three parts reflecting on that dance, and providing resources for continuing in that effort: Part 1, “Out of the Pulpit and into the Woods: Evolutionary Wisdom for a Climate of Uncertainty,” chronicles Kilby’s departure from the Church to start a retreat center for various seekers and speakers to gather for communal learning about “an emerging belief system called Evolutionary Spirituality.” Part 2, “Out of the Woods and Back IN the Church: Evolutionary Stories for Climate-Conscious Pewsters,” shares accounts of her return to Christian church circles as a facilitator and teacher, rather than as a clergy leader, offering Gaia-conscious and planet-focused reinterpretations of the high holy seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter. (“Gaia is the name for a Greek goddess that dwelt in the Earth nurturing and sustaining all life,” and Kilby notes that “the word implies that the planet, being home of the sacred, is sacred.” Kilby capitalizes terms throughout the book, such as ‘Cosmology,’ ‘Earth,’ and ‘Universe,’ to not only point out their sacred nature—as a Christian, for example, capitalizes ‘God,’ ‘Christ,’ and, ‘Holy Spirit’—but to insist on the need to familiarize ourselves with new terminology for the purpose of addressing urgent realities that our current lexicon falls short of understanding, let alone appreciating. A glossary of these terms is included in Part 3 of Kilby’s book.) In Part 3, “Evolutionary Rituals: Out, In, or On the Fringe of the Church,” Kilby provides resources for continued learning.
As a clergy person in the Mainline Protestant Christian Church, I found Kilby’s book true to it’s subtitle of “revolutionary,” most profoundly in its urgently unapologetic mission of getting us to quit thinking that the end game is all about me and my own salvation. Sharing her own identity as a means of placing anyone who reads her book’s identity in context, Kilby points out, "Before I was a Christian, I was an Earthling and a cosmic being. Whereas Christianity was a worldview that was two millennia old, the cosmology offered by post-modern science was almost fourteen billion years old.” The bottom line is that the world we assume to inhabit is not all about us, and to proceed with such a presumptuously self-absorbed mentality does the Earth a grave disservice. By relinquishing “the norms of acquisition, immediacy, and individualism,” as Kilby suggests, the notion of salvation—which, at its root, is about healing—becomes less about my mortal soul achieving a spot in the skyward real estate of heaven, and more about my whole self becoming what it is intended to be: intrinsically bound to the whole of what Christian’s call Creation for the purpose of reconciliation, healing, and ongoing new life. As Kilby explains, when the soul is reclaimed from religion, it “is no longer what needs to be saved. Soul is the Evolutionary Impulse for more life. It is what drives the spiritual journey and hungers for more.”
Kilby pulls no punches about our present reality. She states that we are living in the end times, as in “the end of the planet as we’ve known it.” That pressing reality is what urged her to leave the church to be part of a community that was post-denominational and inner-spiritual. In leaving the church, she writes, “I came to believe that only by learning to see the planet as our holy home and the Universe as sacred revelation will humanity refrain from totally destroying Starship Earth.” An individualized doctrine of salvation consequently harbors an anthropocentric worldview, where “the earth and all that is in it,” as the psalmist writes, exist for securing my well-being in this time between the already and the not yet, and for ultimately granting me safe passage to heaven. Setting aside anthropocentrism, we recognize the intrinsic value of each thing: “just as animals are blessings to humans, humans are intended to be blessings to animals,” Kilby writes. “Church and society had schooled me to believe in the primacy of the human. I began to recognize Christianity’s story was deeply humancentric.”
Back to this clergy person’s appreciation of Kilby’s evolving consciousness as revolutionary, I would argue that Christianity and Western society in general being human-centric harbors the historically undeniable bias of that anthropocentrism being a patriarchal reverence for male whiteness as pure, perfect, and above all else. It is this human-centrism that justifies dehumanizing narratives, such as subjugating women to be less than, and seeing Black people as three fifths of a human being, which are baked into the individualistic doctrine of salvation. In short, and at the risk of being overly preachy, to repent—as in turn away from—westernized anthropocentrism and toward a planet-focused consciousness not only addresses Kilby’s “plea for an evolution in religious thinking, for the emergence of a Gaia-conscious culture, for faith in the future,” it also equips human beings to see one another with sacred equality and equity where all are humbled in mutual service to the Earth and one another.
Eventually, Kilby would return from the spiritual retreat center she started to the place that was a deep part of her formation. “Though leaving ministry introduced me to a vast world of evolving consciousness, it left a family-sized hole,” so she went back to visit and keep on visiting the church. Kilby writes about being a guest teacher, sharing her vision of Christianity playing a crucial part in battling the climate crisis enveloping us all. She writes, “We prepare to give birth to our best, most Christ-like selves by accepting we are not too small to affect the whole; we are the whole. Our environmental crisis is a challenge to church and society to discover our place in the planetary community; to say yes to the evolutionary process, and to become all we can be.” Instead of having a mission of saving souls, the church can embrace a more authentic, relevant mission of helping people become their best selves. Kilby suggests that this requires an evolution of language, including that of the Ten Commandments—“You shall not steal Earth’s resources from your grandchildren’s future”—as well as an expansion from the Golden Rule to the Green Rule: “Love your atmosphere, hydrosphere, and all Earth as yourself.”
While my formation within and understanding of the church and Christianity differ a great deal from Kilby’s, I embrace her book as a prophetic voice speaking from an authentic experience that, if given the chance, can resonate with anyone. About the arguments she poses, Kilby writes, “I dare to write such claims based not on any authorized teachings but on random and wonder-ful experiences.” In the end, this is all that we have and all that we are: those precious, pertinent things we experience as vulnerable people, made to be intrinsic parts of the whole that Kilby calls the Universe. Evolutionary Dancer is not an either/or insistence on a “new” religion to replace Christianity or any other belief system. Rather, Kilby’s book offers what she terms an Evolutionary Spirituality, providing an expansive “view of the Universe as conscious and synergistic,” incorporating the best of what our human-made belief systems contribute to meeting this moment of ecological degradation.
Ultimately, Kilby offers suggestions for where we go from this point of the Earth as we know it fading from existence. In one of the powerful stories she shares in Evolutionary Dancer, Kilby reminisces about a conversation with a man and his son who are her neighbors. She says, “Conflict is neither the nature of the Universe or a sign of deity’s judgment. It’s a sign that somewhere, somehow, something in the system is out of sync. And when something is out of sync, it’s time for something new to emerge. Emergence is one of our story’s greatest treasures…Emergence waits at the edge of every crisis.” Kilby’s revolutionary book doesn’t answer the question of what that emergence might look like, but it provides a sound argument for why envisioning that future is necessary, and the spiritual rituals and resources to reach that evolving horizon.
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Rev. Dan De Leon is senior pastor at Friends Church, UCC and a member of the AllCreation team. Read more of his writings here and on The Eagle. To learn more about Carol Kilby’s amazing work, visit carolkilby.com.
