The Dionysian Naturalist

  A Rite of Remembering A Dionysian Religious Naturalist Ritual to Accompany "Sacred Nature, Wild Grief" \ Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Designed for the CLUE Forum Approximately 30 participants Running time: 25–30 minutes Purpose and design This ritual gives embodied expression to the central argument of "Sacred Nature, Wild Grief": the environmental crisis is not only a scientific, technological, or political problem. It is also a crisis of relationship, belonging, memory, and moral imagination. Religious Naturalism has often been predominantly Apollonian—strong in cosmology, intellectual coherence, scientific understanding, and ethical reflection, but comparatively thin in ritual, ecstasy, grief, and embodiment. This rite seeks to hold those dimensions together. Its clear structure, scientific cosmology, and carefully stated boundaries form an Apollonian container for Dionysian experiences of grief, breath, sound, gratitude, solidarity, and renewed commitmen...

                                           Sacred Nature, Wild Grief Remembering Our Place in the Environmental Crisis Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. DRAFT: Prepared for potential presentation at the CLUE Forum on “ The Spiritual Roots of our Environmental Crisis Opening Prayer: We Gather Within the Living Earth Spirit of Life— the sacred creativity moving within the unfolding universe, the life of which we are made and the living community to which we belong— we gather upon the ancestral and unceded lands of the Chumash people, whose care for these mountains, creeks, islands, and coastal waters reaches back beyond memory and continues today. We honor Chumash Elders, past, present, and future, and the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation and other Chumash-led communities protecting sacred lands and waters today. We gather where the Santa Ynez Mountains ri...

  The Spirituality of Attention Presence, Wonder, and the Sacred Wild: A Theological Statement for Dionysian Naturalism Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Introduction Dionysian Naturalism has never named attention as its central category, but attention is what the tradition has been asking for all along. Its architectonic principle holds that reality invites participation rather than escape, and its religious task is to cultivate forms of presence adequate to the beauty, suffering, ecstasy, mortality, and abandonment of the living world.¹ Presence is not a metaphor here. It is a discipline of sustained, undefended attention toward what is beautiful, what is dying, and what has been left behind — the same three objects the tradition refuses to let its adherents look away from. A theology built on presence is, whether it says so or not, a theology of attention. This statement makes that claim explicit and draws out its consequences for practice. I. Presence as Attention Sustained To spea...