Keep Fishing

What the Zuni creation story
taught us about religion and nature


A tribal museum at Zuni, New Mexico, was dominated by a large and colorful mural depicting the Zuni creation story. A Zuni man working at the museum explained the mural to us. The story was long and fantastical, not unlike the Christian creation story, which is also fantastical. I would mangle it if I tried to retell the Zuni story, but it included a complicated ascent to the Fifth World (the present one), where the Zuni people emerged near Ribbon Falls in the Grand Canyon. The Father Sun had charted a voyage for them that would end at the Middle Place of the World, which is where the Zuni people now live. En route they rested for some time at several places, including the Superstition Mountains, some buttes near Winslow, Arizona, the Jemez Mountains, Mount Taylor, and El Morro. Each of the moves brought them closer to the Middle Place. I think it was in the Jemez Mountains where the clans were established and given their various healing powers and rules to live by.

One of the things that struck me as we listened to the story was that, of the various places that were mentioned, we knew where most of them were. In fact, we had been to most of them. Obviously, they were part of a familiar landscape for Zuni people, but, more remarkably, they were familiar even to us. I couldn’t say that for Christianity. From the door of the museum, the Zuni man pointed out a mesa where the people survived a Zuni version of the Great Flood; and he suggested that, as we leave town, we should look toward the top of the mesa and see a hole that the Salt Mother passed through in one of the stories he had told. And where was the Middle Place of the World? Right there in town, just a few blocks away, where the old Catholic church now stands!

If I were a religious person, I’d be envious of that. The landscape around the Zuni people was full of things that were important in their religion, and their religion was relevant to things in the landscape around them. For us, it was completely different. Our religion says nothing about the landscape around us. Features of the landscape that turn up in our religion—Mount Ararat, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem, Calvary—are a third of the way around the world from us. Most of us have never seen them, and many of us never will. As for the landscapes that we do see, our religion has nothing at all to say about them (certainly nothing specific).

Our God is an abstract god. If you go far enough back in human history, god was in everything. Everything was sacred. As far as I understand, that’s true of most or all Native American religions. I gathered from the man at the Zuni museum that the sun was their god, but he made it pretty clear that all of nature was sacred. In fact, he told us that Zuni people took care of the earth for everyone, and he thought they should be respected for that. Our religion doesn’t tell us that everything is sacred. It tells us to love God and to love our neighbors, but the God part gets the most emphasis. And it’s a hard god to love, at least for me, because it’s so abstract.

There was a time when I tried to take seriously the commandment to love God, but every time I attempted to check up on myself—asking, “Do I love God?”—I found myself baffled because I didn’t know what God was. If God was here, in everything around us, like the hunter-gatherer god, instead of “out there somewhere,” it would have been easier to know how I felt about him. It would also be harder to assume that nature is unimportant. The gods of hunters and gatherers were in nature, or they were nature. I’d feel better about the prospects for our own environment if we had a God, or at least a sense of sacredness, that we believed was right here, around us, in everything we feel and touch and see.

Unable to understand the God part of the commandment to love God and love my neighbors, I've worked the best I can on the neighbor part. The earth part also seems important to me, but Jesus didn’t mention that. Wildness in the Bible, where it's usually referred to as “the desert,” is an odd place whose significance I have a hard time understanding. (“The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.”) The religious lesson that, for me at least, is most clearly about the environment is the story about Jesus and the fishermen. The men were no longer able to catch fish even though they continued fishing farther out. Obviously a case of overfishing. But Jesus simply told them to keep trying. Bad advice. Yet that’s exactly the way people often behave, from farmers depleting the soil to industrialists whose pollutants are altering the atmosphere. What they need to do instead is difficult. They need to make collective decisions to cut back, since anyone who cuts back on their own will be hurt by others’ continued abuse. Precisely the sort of thing that religion should help us with. But all our religion says is, “Trust Jesus,” “Pray to God,” and “Keep fishing.”

It’s been said that man created God in his own image. I would extend that to say that it was done because humans needed a god they could control. The hunters and gatherers had a god that was everywhere, in everything. The herders of domestic animals had a wrathful god, like the land and the weather that they lived with. By the time of the farmers, humans had already begun to separate themselves from nature, and they took control of God at the same time. If they wanted a dependable god, they made him dependable. If people wanted to be forgiven, they made a forgiving god. If they wanted to rape the planet, they made a god who said, “I’ve created this for your use.” They also created a god who, instead of telling the fishermen to cut back and allow the fish to reproduce, said, “Go cast your nets again,” and they did, and they caught more fish than they could imagine. Is that wishful thinking or what? Is that not a case of making a god you can control?

The modern god is farther away than the old gods and might therefore seem harder to control. The old gods were in birds and trees and rocks and wildflowers, whereas the new one is out there somewhere. But, because the old gods were in real things, they were actually less controllable: no more controllable than the trees, birds, rocks, and wildflowers themselves. Of course, humans did control those things—but not without first creating a god who would justify it. There’s nothing in Christianity about ravens, ponderosa pines, Mount Taylor, round-leaved trilliums, or any of the rest of the world around us. Christianity eliminated the idea that everything was sacred and substituted an abstraction. If the point was to make us quit caring about the environment, the God concept was brilliant.

There's an attitude among religious people—not universal, but common enough—that, in the words of the hymn, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” How I distrust that attitude! I know that those who believe in it are obliged to be “good” in order to earn the next home, but I worry that they will define “good” in such a church-bound fundamentalist way that they will see no need to take care of the present world for the rest of us. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know if there’s another world or not. The question of heaven is like the question of God. There’s no way to answer it, so it doesn’t seem worth asking. If anything, I’m inclined toward the view that heaven is right here, all around us, but too many of us simply haven’t noticed. As a result, we mess it up, replacing beauty with ugliness, poisoning the air and water, and settling disputes by killing one another. If there is a heaven beyond this life and we get there, we probably won’t notice that either, and we’ll mess it up, too. We are the Fall of Eden.