CHANTS FOR SURVIVAL
We chant together for the future of our humanity. We chant together for what has been forgotten and what has been lost. We chant for remembering. We chant together for crisis being the tension we have been waiting for. We chant together for emergency become emergence. We chant with our souls lit, our spirits roused, and our earth shaken. We chant together for hope, that this is the hour we rise together as one humanity.
CHANTS FOR INSPIRATION
MY OWN CHANTS FOR SURVIVAL
Over the last 15 years, I have been writing what I now understand to be ‘Chants For Survival’. Chants for our humanity and for Earth at this specific moment of crisis. I share below poems from Rite of Passage and Heart of Crisis in the hope of supporting people into the meeting the rubble of our world, and finding active hope for our common future. I chant in the hope that others will join me in chanting, in invoking change.
“I haven’t come across anything like this – the astounding poems in Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage writhe with raw visionary life, as if made of bone and fire. They terrify and hypnotise. They are chants of survival, incantations to bear us safely through climate collapse and mass extinction. They draw our elemental selves out onto burning fields, and miraculously heal us. This is poetry as initiation, as Orphic oracle and rigorous truth telling.”
RITE OF PASSAGE
RITE OF PASSAGE
RITE OF PASSAGE
RITE OF PASSAGE
RITE OF PASSAGE
RITE OF PASSAGE
OUR KEY ‘WHAT IF’ QUESTIONS.
At the heart of Church for Earth is an ongoing enquiry AROUND the following questions -
What if spirituality could become not an experience outside of ourselves but an embodied rememberance of ourselves as part of one, alive planet? What if we saw ourselves not as external to Earth, but as expression of it? And what if we learnt to more deeply love each other and the earth from that remembrance?
(Our Spirituality)
What if a church could be a place where people came together to reconnect with themselves as part of earth, and simultaneously took action locally to sustain, rewild, and nature our earth?
(Our Church)
What if the breakdown of our planet and civilisation was not the ending, but an initiation of humanity into unity? (Heartcrack of crisis as initiation)
(Our Work)
What if our grief and brokenness for our world was not a flaw, but a doorway to belonging with each other and with the earth?
(Our Hope).
What if from this place we chose to stand and move together, powered by the whole in response to planetary emergency?
(Our Call to Stand).
It’s around these core questions that we GATHER AND EXPLORE in service to a world in crisis.
WE WANT TO FOSTER A SPIRITUALITY WITH OUR PLANET AT THE CENTRE
FOR US, THIS MEANS…
A spirituality grounded in the body.
Our body is our gateway to life. No surprise then that our culture have been so disconnected from it. It is time to change that. Let’s fully inhabit our bodies, with their pain, pleasure, emotion, and aliveness. Bring it all.
A spirituality based in community.
The new age era promoted individuality and self-development, it has failed. Being in community is vital for our healing, for our growth, for celebration, for creation. Let’s come together.
A spirituality rooted in Earth.
We believe the divine lives as much in the Earth and our bodies, as out in cosmos. We believe the miracle is not walking on water, but living on earth itself.
A spirituality engaged in the world.
We want Church for Earth to be a place where spirituality and planetary emergency come together, where living at the edge of catastrophe becomes the doorway to the collective human heart.
We feel spiritual evolution is not a dissociation from the world but a path of becoming more deeply human, in recognition of ourselves as part of one connected planet.
Choosing to live through the heart-crack of crisis.
Download our 2 page introduction to Church for Earth and discover more about why we exist and what our mission is.