A review of SANCTUARY FOR ALL LIFE: The Cowbalah of Jim
Corbett
(2005: Howling Dog
Press – available now at www.howlingdogpress.com)
“I avoid eating anyone I have not known and cherished,”
wrote Jim Corbett in “Sanctuary for All Life”, his final testament now in print four years after
his death. “When slaughter breaks the
bond, the killing must be hallowed. All
food is sacramental.” One
sunset-streaked evening on the pasture near Jim and Pat Corbett’s place along
the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona, I watched him commune with one of
the cows he cherished, stroking its head with his arthritis-ravaged hand. I began to understand how he earned, among
other roles, the status of the “cow-whisperer” of Cascabel. Neighbors brought animals to him for healing
from gut impactions and cactus-spine wounds. No wonder that his heartfelt ambivalence about raising animals for
slaughter was reflected in a sub-chapter entitled “On Killing and Eating One’s
Friends” in his first book, “Goatwalking” (Viking Press, 1991).
“Sanctuary for All Life” hallows humans’ relationship to the earth in
words that point to a realm beyond words, a Peaceable Kingdom beyond the thrall
of kings and states, living a law that trumps all written codes because it is
“in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14). To show the way, Corbett obstinately
synthesized the disparate disciplines in which he had steeped himself, from
analysis of the range-grasses of the Sonoran desert to dissection of the finer
points of the medieval Jewish mysticism of Spain. But what else could we have expected from a
Quaker cowboy with a masters in philosophy from Harvard? Added to these challenges for the reader was
his death at age 67 from a rare brain disease that cut short his completion of
the book.
These difficulties are mitigated by the exceptional
front-matter provided by Jim’s friends. Father Ricardo Elford’s touching “Foreword” reflects his collaboration
with Corbett in the Sanctuary Movement and in co-authoring a pamphlet entitled
“The Servant Church” (1996: Pendle Hill Pamphlet #328). It is a manifesto for an earth-hallowing,
justice-seeking church that exists beyond denominations and creeds. The poet David Ray says of “Sanctuary for All Life” in his
“Preface” that “one cannot remain the same after reading it.” And on Daniel Baker’s lengthy and very
helpful “Introduction” hang many needed keys to unlock the treasures in
Corbett’s dense prose. Daniel lives in Hot Springs Canyon near Jim and Pat’s place up the
dirt road from Cascabel. His deep
understanding of Jim as a person and of the topics and texts to which the book refers, and his collaboration with Jim in the process of writing it,
make his overview of the book invaluable.
The front-matter also includes a speech by Corbett when he
received the Letelier-Moffit Human Rights Award in 1991. He got the award on behalf of the Sanctuary
Movement, which he co-founded in the 1980’s to protect asylum-seekers who
crossed the border to escape death during the Central American civil wars. As a borderlands rancher who was fluent in
Spanish, driven by a conscience steeped in the tradition of such Quakers as
John Woolman, the colonial-era anti-slavery activist, Corbett began guiding
Guatemalans and Salvadorans over the border. He partnered with a Presbyterian pastor in Tucson,
John Fife, to create a network of churches and temples around the US which
offered sanctuary to refugees who were being denied for asylum status and
threatened with deportation. His speech
described the foundation guiding his inception of the movement: civil initiative. Civil disobedience is the willful breach of
unjust law. Passive resistance is non-cooperation with unjust force or
law. But civil initiative is active
fulfillment and expression of the higher, natural law that is written on the
heart. When he and others in the
movement were charged with being “coyotes”, smugglers of aliens across the
border, their defense was based on the argument that the US government was
breaking guarantee to asylum for refugees under the international law to which
it was bound .
Corbett became nationally recognized for his personal
heroism. (It was powerful to listen to
the testimonials of some of the people whose lives he had saved, during his
memorial service at John Fife’s church, Southside Presbyterian, in 2001.) But for Jim, the Sanctuary Movement (words he
never capitalized) was a temporary distraction from the work that mattered to
him most – the redemption of wildlands and the hallowing of human beings’
place in it.
In “Sanctuary for All Life”, Corbett, as a self-taught Hebrew scholar,
delved into the nature of “torah”, the law of Israel. It is a law that he aimed to follow through
“civil initiative”, a law written not only on human hearts, but on the hearts
of cows, goats, javelinas, mescals, and saguaros.
The law of Israel specified the honoring of the Sabbath, which prohibits the exercise of
“malacha”, a Hebrew word that is translated as “labor” but more precisely
refers to any human interference in the processes of nature. Corbett explains that the ritual observance
of Sabbath was the Jewish people’s way of keeping themselves connected to a way
of life in symbiotic harmony with Nature. A way of life reminiscent of that of Abraham – the “wandering Aramean”
who followed a herd in the wildlands of Palestine. “Sanctuary for All Life” might be described as a theology
and practice of Sabbath, and not just from sundown on Friday till sundown on
Saturday, or Sunday for the Christians. Rather, a year-round sabbath that re-integrates humanity into deep
communion with all life. A Sabbath with
a haunting call for us to return to what Corbett calls the “cimarron” (Spanish
for feral livestock) way of true freedom through re-integration into the
natural order.
The focus of the book is intensely local, but its
implications are global. “Sanctuary for All Life” begins
and ends with a stretch of Sonoran Desert on the east side of the San Pedro River in Arizona, a
place where he and other “associates” of the land made covenant with it. The Saguaro-Juniper Covenant, described in
the book, is a “betrothal” of a group of Jim’s friends to this patch of earth,
with a commitment to give the land back to itself. The Covenant is the land’s bill of
rights. First on the list: “The land has a right to be free of human
activity that accelerates erosion.” Many
of the “associates” of the Covenant live in the Tucson area and are supportive
with money and volunteer time on occasion. Several, including Daniel Baker, live on or near the land and either
herd cattle on it according to the Covenant’s careful guidelines, or participate
in other land-redemption efforts.
Corbett microcosmically explored the challenges of living
and ranching in harmony with his homeland in Arizona. In so doing he modeled what it will take for
the whole human family to go “cimarron” and live in harmonious communion with
all life, while confessing the limits of his and his community’s
ability to live out their vision of the liberation of the land. “(Jesus) doesn’t condemn anyone for failing
to live in full accordance with the restitutional mitzvot (Hebrew for just
actions) required for redemption. We are
to forgive one another our failures. He
just condemns those who would lead us to think that anything less will do.” (p 190)
Corbett saw Jesus as a Jewish rabbi who announced “jubilee”
– the liberation of peasants from
indenture, of Jews from Rome, of nature from human management. The Sermon on the Mount is a manifesto for
the redemption not just of humanity, but of the natural order, called for in
the Torah. The Jewish law required that
after the 49th year (a sabbath of sabbath years, seven times seven), a time of
“jubilee” was to be enacted in which all land was to be returned to itself. No
plowing or planting was allowed, and all land divisions were erased to end
unjust accumulation of property.
“Sanctuary for All Life” is a radical call to "jubilee" liberation of the natural world,
but Corbett was emphatic that it was not about “eco-sainthood”. He described the person who recycles
everything, gives up automobiles, eats no meat, takes no vacation trips. “Yet the saint’s perfect conservational
thoughtfulness can never be as effective as a single case of contraception.” (p
168) “Individuals can denounce and
resist a way of life, but only a community can live a way of life into being
and bequeath it to succeeding generations.” (p 168) For Corbett, the
hallowing way is one that integrates humans into the natural world as
co-creating “associates” – unlike those who want to ban all human activity in
wilderness. This integration is the task
not primarily of governments, but rather of the “church” as Corbett described
it: “a voluntary society based on communion”
(p 150). And by communion he refers to a
real meal, not just the ritual symbolism of wafers and chalices. “To awaken to the forgotten meaning of
sacrifice is to see that all food is sacramental, that every dinner table is an
altar, that life itself is the primal form of holy communion, and that God is
Nature, the creative source for Whom there is no other…. The way we live on
life – our food – is of fundamental religious concern.” (p 110) “The hallowing of our food has to do with care of the land, care that
the animals on the land flourish….” (p 111)
Corbett indicted capitalism for its half-hearted embrace of
the “free market”. A full embrace would
result in abandoning not only governmental interference in the “spontaneous
order” of markets, but also the capitalists’ attempts to interfere in the
“spontaneous order” of nature. Nowhere
was this better exemplified for Corbett than through the Western cattle
industry’s reduction of cows to cash, which has resulted in wholesale
degradation of rangelands and unholy treatment of animals. The real idolaters aren’t the biblical
apostates adoring golden images: “… it
is market morality that worships the golden calf, as a commodity, in the name
of profits and property.” ( p 249)
“Go deep enough into eco-wisdom, and you’ll find a
practicable, down-to-earth mysticism.” (p 247) "Cowbalah" is Corbett's playful term to express his resonance with the Jewish system of "kabbalah", a web
of relations through which the creative energy of the universe flows. “A visionary myth rather than theosophical
speculation, kabbalah is concerned with humanity’s quest to recover its
homeland in Eden: an unfarmed, fruitful oasis; an untamed paradise of living
waters. This key myth of kabbalah fuses
the communion insight with the down-to-earth quest for Eden…” (p 258)
In his first book, Corbett remembered two incidents from
earlier in his life. “On the prairie,
when the wind wails a dirge and snow sifts in rivulets through the sagebrush,
I’ve hugged the sticky-pink, death-chilled body of a newborn lamb under my
coat, and its heart fluttered in reply. And on a desert mountain, amidst the hush of soaring granite, I’ve
opened a forgotten spring. The few who
remembered thought it had long ago gone dry, but I found the hidden place and
dug down until a stream ran clear and cold in the summer sun. So what are epitaphs to me? I’ve shared life’s warmth with a lamb. I’ve opened a desert spring.” (pp 12-13,
“Goatwalking”) Jim Corbett’s spring
still runs with prophetic insight for our time, and times to come, through
the practical mysticism of “Sanctuary for All Life”.
(To see my previous article about Jim Corbett and the
Saguaro-Juniper Covenant, see www.openchristianity.com/covenant.html )
To order "Sanctuary for All Life":
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