States of Grace: book review

october 3, 2006

~book review~
Charlene Spretnak: States of Grace:
The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age


Using a multi-disciplinary and multi-leveled approach, Charelene Spretnak has written a book that is both a passionate call to reconnection and a guide on how to do so. States of Grace weaves together four of the great wisdom traditions and deconstructive postmodernism into a gestalt worldview she calls “ecological postmodernism”(230). Considering our current planetary situation, States of Grace is a concise illumination of worldviews that practice sane and sustainable ways of living. While the real key is personal experience, practice, process itself, Charlene Spretnak engages eloquently in ontological discourse, blending ancient with post-modern for a perspective broad and deep. Her hope is to give each reader some of the ancient spiritual keys in hopes that we can collectively shift away from hyper-exploiting our surroundings, and enjoy living, once again, in grace.

Charlene Spretnak has subtitled the book Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age, referring to our current age as ‘postmodern’ in both to the philosophical movement characterized by Foucault and deconstructionism, and to the failure of modernity to deliver the great freedom it promised. Modernity chopped the world into little pieces, dividing and dissecting it into tidy, individually known bits of substance. Science became the worldview. In this century much soul and culture searching has been done in an attempt to understand humanity and whether/how we have wrought so much havoc. Postmodernism looks hard into culture creation through a process of deconstruction to see how culture is a self-organizing system: while the culture is a reflection of its citizens, it creates its citizens; while language is used as a symbolic order, it also works to create meaning, and further, these meanings then create reality. While postmodernism has been very useful in untangling how ideology is naturalized, normalized, and self-policed, Spretnak argues vehemently against the final discursive step of ‘Deconstuctionist Postmodern’ that is anti-essentialist, declaring there is no essential meaning in anything aside from social construction. Spretnak argues that this worldview is a continuation of the destructive disconnection of science and patriarchy, which has facilitated the hyper-exploitation of our habitat. Modernity devalued relationships and reformed life into mechanical metaphors; postmodernity gave us some powerful ontological tools, but also emptied everything of any essential meaning. The recovery of meaning is then by necessity a reconstructive journey, and the state of our habitat begs for immediacy. Where better for us to look than the spiritual traditions that have been around for hundreds upon hundreds of years.

The four wisdom traditions the book engages are Buddism, Native American Spirituality, Goddess-worship, and the Abrahamic religions. Though she focuses an aspect of each worldview, she cautions against taking only a piece and leaving the rest: it is better for one to hold the philosophy with integrity and engage the wisdom within its context. Buddism has focused intensely on the mind and has much to teach about observing patterns, meditation, gaining perspective, re-patterning ourselves, and engaging in the participatory universe. Native American spirituality has much to teach about living with this land, about living in prayer and gratitude for the generosity of life and land. The traditions of the great Goddess give deep and beautiful attention to the body, the senses, the erotic, the awesome wonder of fertility, and the power of ritual. The Abrahamic traditions offer guidance regarding our sense of social justice, describing how looking after others is part of the path to spiritual fulfillment.

Spretnak’s core intention is to move people beyond theory, apathy and meaninglessness into actively living in a passionate, conscious, and harmonious way. The key to creating these deep changes is in practice/ process/ experience/ ritual; the truth of our lives exists in our repeated daily actions. The four wisdom traditions herein all emphasize honoring the process, using ritual, and daily life as spiritual practice. She integrates postmodern science to support how we continually create ourselves through our experiences. Systems theory is post-mechanistic science that begins to understand relationship and process as equally important to substance. We and everything else exist in a continual state of relationship and flux, in which we affect everything and are affected by everything; in the language of Permaculture, everything gardens. We are interconnected in a continuous dance of interbeing, to use a term coined by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. This knowledge, though perhaps more poetic than scientific, lay at the core of most ancient worldviews. Disconnected mind and disconnected theory will not bring us into the deep understanding we need to live harmonious. We need to move back into relation, back into the continual process of our bodies, our environment, and our infinite interconnectedness.

As science now knows the Buddists knew long ago through their practice of observing the mind and nature: all is transitory and we are but vibration and oscillation. We are solid but in a continual state of flux; we are substance made of wave. There is paradox at core of life, referred to by Buddism in the Everything and the Nothing. I have taken to calling this the Great Paradox, and vision it as a yin-yang of two forces, each with a bit of the other, continually flowing, concurrently, creating possibility like a kaliedescope creates pattern. Western thought tends to see two forces as contradictory and tries to simplify them, but much is lost in the process. The ancient traditions honored the paradox, understanding that this flow is the creative matrix. I have encountered this idea in so many Indigenous paradigms that I have come to believe that the acceptance of this apparent paradox as non-problematic at the core of all things is essential to our paradigm shift. Spretnak has helped me to articulate myself regarding my position. She makes visceral an essentialist argument that at the core there is interconnection, continual flux and paradox: regardless of our social constructions there is something essential and with meaning. She uses a Christian term for this experience of this deep state: grace.

To be critical, there is a section in which I find her language a bit problematic. Her chapter on the Goddess tradition begins with pegging biological evolution as rooted in the male-female split, making it a duality is at our very core. The way she uses language in his chapter supports the idea that we are trapped in this binary. Spretnak goes on to compare patriarchal societies with gynocentric communities in a very bad-good sort of way. The stark contrast of these comparisons does not sit well with me. To me, they reinforce the concept of the binary, which I see as a false construction. I do not see things as a duality, or even a continuum, as both concepts imply a two-dimensional linearity; I see reality as more web-like, better visualized as a sphere. Beyond these two examples she does speak from a place of honoring the paradox, acceptance of the multivalent complexities, indeed, of grace.

In conclusion, I felt the book to be wonderful. It is academic, indexed, and well cited, while also being passionate and useful. This one book has helped my articulate my discomfort with Postmodernism, and realize that I do hold an essentialist viewpoint. Most importantly, the book has encouraged my resolve to commit to practicing Vipassanna meditation and ritual. I am deeply grateful for the read, for the academic dialogue through personal spirituality, combining discourse with physical practice. It is an eloquent map in ways to shift ideologies and ontologies, which is what our planet urgently needs.


~Works Cited~
Spretnak, Charlene. States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Era. San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991.