Genesis Farms – Feminism and Religion

Part 1 was posted yesterday. Miriam MacGillis’ words from Education for a Small Planet continue:

“And those implications, have been the unspoken assumptions which lie at the heart of the way western civilization evolved, distinctly different from eastern civilization or from tribal civilizations. That’s why we look so different. That’s why in 300 years where I live, our ancestors totally, totally altered the natural world. Their obsession with development is outside themselves.

“So, what has transpired in the unfolding of western civilization has been this extra-ordinary capacity of the human in its rational, linear, analytical mode of knowing, to understand, to probe, to analyze, to uncover, to discover, to alter, to change, to redesign and to bring about a better state of affairs than what was. Whether it was the discovery of fire, or the wheel or the printing press or the computer, always the real issue behind the technology is not the technology itself, it’s the vision of bringing about development, the perfection of.

“Now ironically, it’s because of that very detachment from the world that the western mind was free to do that. “If this is just matter, you can do anything you want with it.” That’s not really where there is any moral dimension. Moral development happens between humans, human/human, human groupings and human/god. That is why the whole unfolding of western civilization, we were able to probe to such a depth of the physical energies of the world that in this century we were able to do what we did.

Author’s Note: When my mother died in 2018, I became the custodian of her voluminous files. I found some gems inside them. My mother lived in NJ not too far from a place called Genesis Farms and its founder and proprietress was/is Sister Miriam MacGillis. There was a whole file on the farms.

Included in these files was a binder of cassette tapes from a workshop Miriam MacGillis gave in 1986 called “Education for a Small Planet.” There are 4 double-sided cassettes. When I first saw them, I was afraid to even touch them as 40-year-old cassette tapes are not known for their sturdiness. A friend helped me find an agency that agreed to digitize them. Since then, I have had the great honor of transcribing the tapes. It took me several months, but I have now completed the transcription. (They are a little rough as I added punctuation as I went.) I have been in touch with Miriam about them and she agrees that the message from 1986 is still important, in fact, likely more important now and they should have as wide an audience as possible.

Miriam MacGillis is a modern-day prophet who not only holds a broad understanding of cosmology but brilliantly expresses it. She was an early colleague of Thomas Berry, introducing many people to the Story of the Universe.

I believe these tapes need to be studied and shared and I am happy to make them available to anyone who is interested. Below is a taste of their wisdom. It is from Tape #1A (first tape, first side), lightly edited. This is really just an introduction and it will be in two parts.

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