The Ecological Challenge to Christianity
(Article published in New Theology Review, (February 1998)
and in Corpus Reports, (May- June, 1998))
Eugene C. Bianchi
Most people who think seriously about the ecological crisis will agree that
it presents the premier challenge for the coming millenium. Exploding human
populations will put vast strains on resources. Global warming, deforestation
and other forms of pollution to air, land and water will continue to expand
as the ethos of technology takes over our world. In this evolving scenario of
ecologicl degradation, what is the role of religion in general and of Christianity
in particular? Just as all religions were shaped in specific cultural climates,
all living religions have had to adapt their message and action to new crises
in history. In his brilliant meditation on the poetics of matter-energy convertibility,
David Toolan (America. Feb. 24, 1996) asks: "So now, what shall we make
of nature?" In light of the new creation story, that of a multi-billion
year development, and of the new physics in our time characterized by Einstein,
Toolan seems to be asking our great world systems of spirituality to respond
in depth to the ecological challenge.
I would like to explore some avenues for approaching this challenge to religions
in a more limited way by focusing on dimensions of Christianity that are summoned
toward revisionary thinking in face of the growing threat to the planet. Those
of us who work in the interfacing of religion and ecology are aware of significant
thinkers who are addressing these issues; a growing list of such scholars includes
Thomas Berry, Sallie McFague, Jay McDaniel, James Gustafson, Rosemary Ruether
and many others. There are also Christian environmental organizations and programs
attempting to raise consciousness within churches and seminaries. But on the
whole, the ecological reconfiguration of Christian thought and practice is still
in its infancy. Ecology has hardly penetrated the shell of modern Christianity.
The impact of this spiritual reconfiguration has not been felt significantly
in the concrete circumstances of Christian living; it is like a distant comet
still far removed from where we live. The new challenge calls us far beyond
recycling or a few prayers for the earth at Mass or turning the church garden
into a bird sanctuary or talking occasionally about a stewardship ethic toward
the planet. If we take the challenge seriously, it will cut to the roots of
our religious consciousness and activity; it will ask about how Christianity
can become a nature religion. I will consider aspects of this challenge in the
areas of doctrine, liturgy, spirituality and ethics.
Ecological Doctrine
Honesty demands an admission that in the realm of doctrine Christianity does
not lend itself easily to becoming a nature spirituality. Lynn White, in his
now seminal critique of Christianity as anthropocentric and otherworldly, threw
down in the 1960s a gauntlet that theologians have been running ever since.
In The Travail of Nature, for example, Peter Santmire traces in scripture and
tradition myths that point in an otherworldly directions, to escape from earth
and others that point horizontally toward journeying and fecundity on earth.
While his effort is stimulating, it tends to make Christianity look more ecological
than it really is. It is, of course, possible to find an Irenaeus in antiquity
and a Francis of Assisi in the medieval chruch who become spokesmen for a somewhat
ecological vision. But Christian master stories, inherited from Judaism, and
modified by platonism and by more than a touch of gnosticism and manicheism
resist ecological interpretation. In the Hebrew stories, creation is certainly
good, but the main drama is anthropocentric-theocentric; it is a parent-child
tale about God and Israel. The long drama of the Jews is about salvation history
of humans not about salvation of the planet. Notice also how the Israelite mentality
is shaped in constant struggles against pagan symbols, fertility statues in
high places and golden calves. They were protecting the transcendence of the
divine; they were not encouraging its immanence, for the most part. Early Christian
thinkers tried to defend against the extreme dualisms of gnosticism and manicheanism,
but Augustine's heritage of dualistic thinking (City of God/City of man, the
depravity of the sexual body and human will over against God's grace) profoundly
influenced subsequent Christian history. Even the famous Catholic doctrine of
grace building on nature was about human nature not about the nature of rivers,
birds and mountains.
I focus on these ecology-resistant dimensions of Christian teachings to underscore
the need for candor, lest we slide into an easy theology of nature, something
like Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace". Even the process of retrieving and
reinterpreting ecologically friendly Christian doctrines will call for a kind
of hermeneutical courage. For example, when we theologize about creation, incarnation,
sacrament and covenant in an ecological vein, we will find ourselves moving
toward new understandings which may be quite different from those we were taught.
The doctrine of creation, for example, points to the goodness of all creatures
and to God's abiding love for the universe. But the doctrine of creation is
intrinsically linked to that of redemption. We have not been used to thinking
about God's work of redeeming the nonhuman world. If the latter is as valuable
to the Creator as the human species, what restraints, accommodations and additions
will need to be made in other areas of Christian thought? Most Christians associate
the doctrine of incarnation to Jesus as the Christ, although it is also understood
in the broader sense of God's enfleshed or "en-mattered" presence
in all things. But does the image of the crucifixion extend in an intrinsic
way to the suffering of animals and to devestated rain forests? The Christological
myths express Christian faith as the nearness and concreteness of divine presence.
But God's sacred dwelling will need to transcend humans to be found in calves
tortured in immobilizing boxes to produce milk-fed veal, in poisoned rivers
and bays, in mountains clearcut and gouged by greed.
The process of rethinking Christian doctrines in an ecological direction raises
at least two problems. One is the danger of turning Christianity into a form
of pantheism. The Judeo-Christian tradition has resisted this move because of
its faith conviction about the supreme mystery of God. The divine was not to
be limited to or totally contained in the finite. I will not pretend to deal
adequately here with this question. Rather I will point toward a helpful mode
of approaching the inclusion of the universe in God in the Process Theology
concept of panentheism. The latter permits us, at least intellectually, to conceive
of a radical immersion of all things in God, while at the same time preserving
the transcendence of the divine. A second problem in a serious greening of Christian
teachings concerns the historical continuity of the very religion itself. Would
the changes necessary to realize a deeply ecological Christiantiy result in
creating a completely different religion? Again, answers to this question would
require a long treatment of the possibilities for development of doctrine and
institutions.
My thought on this issue takes two general roads. One way is summarized
in A.N. Whitehead's phrase "religion in the making". All religions
are the products of human spiritual imagination and experience over millenia.
This statement does not exclude divine revelation; rather it points to the mode
of that gradual revealing, that is, through the development of human consciousness
in history over a vast evolutionary time. The human mind does its limited best
in shaping creative metaphors (doctrines) to represent what it believes are
experiences and contours of the divine. This is done individually (great teachers)
and in groups (church, sangha). In this perspective, religions are always in
the making as is the revelatory process in history. This outlook may be discomforting
to those who demand certainty and conceptual literalness; it is a test of one's
ability to live with ambiguity and even religious surprise. This also means
that religions can change, in light of new conditions and experiences, much
more profoundly than many of us are willing to acknowledge. A second path to
grappling with the continuity problem has to do with taking the contemplative,
the mystic dimension of religion with primary seriousness. Our doctrinal metaphors
are very valuable aids for religious thinking, but they are secondary to the
experience of prayer and contemplation. Christianity, like most religions, has
as a central purpose the inward transformation, both ethical and spiritual,
individual and communal, of its adherents. I will make more of this below in
a section on ecological spirituality.
Ecological Worship
While doctrinal issues are important, Christians are more immediately formed
by involvements in liturgy and worship. Ecological spirituality is still generally
absent from worship in Catholic and Protestant churches. The earth is merely
an incidental backdrop to the main action in liturgies of word and eucharist.
Listen to the readings from scripture, to sermons and eucharistic prayers. The
messages are almost uniformly about human-divine and interhuman transactions.
One can go through a whole year of the liturgical cycle and hardly know that
the earth exists, much less that it is sacred. The problem is only partially
one of lack of seminary formation in ecological liturgics and homeletics; the
more profound issue is that ecological questions, as we know them today, were
not being asked during Christianity's last two millenia. Religions are shaped
in terms of key questions posed during their formative periods. Even when nature
is mentioned in hymns and prayers, it is rarely commended for its own intrinsic
value; it is used rather as testimony to the glory of God or as an example to
underscore human virtues. The worshiper's orientation is pulled away from nature.
Earth continues to be seen as a cluster of beautiful or frightening objects
but not as multiple subjects for spiritual communion. To rephrase Toolan's question
here, it is not so much what shall we make of nature, but what can we learn
religiously from nature's voices? Can Christianity be greened by listening with
respect to those religious traditions we used to dismiss as "animist"?
Even an amateur survey of the gospels, read regularly at Christian worship,
reveals a remarkable number of references to nature. Here is a partial list:
salt, light, physical illnesses and cures, stormy and peaceful waters, multiple
eating scenes, seeds, trees, vegetables, the weather, fruits, bread, wine, wilderness,
flow of blood, wells and springs, birds, flowers, sheep, mules, yeast, humans
and references to their different organs. Most of these nature tropes are employed
as background for parables that focus on human-divine relations. We need to
foreground these many nature symbols for an ecological interpretation of scripture.
The same point could be applied to the larger body of Hebrew scriptures. The
Book of Psalms, for instance, is replete with nature references. Here again,
they serve as background for the great myths of parent (God) - child (Israel
or the psalmist) relations in a context of persecution from enemies. In the
process of foregrounding the earthly aspects of the psalms, we could emphasize
the intrinsic value of the natural realities which both praise Yahweh and are
filled with divine presence. If they are filled with this presence, they become
subjects for intercommunion, not dead objects of lesser value. In this vein,
two kinds of gospel stories, those of healing and of eating, are particularly
fraught with ecological potential. These passages are not just for something
beyond nature, a spiritual healing alone or a banquet somewhere in the heavens.
Rather they speak of healings of body and mind right in the natural realm, and
of convivial and inclusive eatings in the here and now. Where are the ecologically
trained biblical and liturgical scholars now that we need them?
When I asked a renowned liturgical scholar for leads to books
of contemporary ecological liturgies, he was stumped. Articles here and there
dealt with the topic but not books. An ancient and a modern version of ecological
liturgy provide examples of work that can be mined from the past and created
in the present. A eucharistic prayer complied in the fourth century, Apostolic
Constitutions, has a remarkable description in some detail of natural elements
right down the the "hissing of reptiles and the cries of birds". The
descendants of John Calvin, writing in Reformed Worship (Mar., 1995) present
prayers, songs and sermon themes on water, soil and air. Sources for creativity
in reformulating Christian worship in an ecological mode can be fouond in liturgical
writings by ecofeminists, like Dolores LaChapelle, and others influenced by
the contemporary Wicca movement. Another rich source for creative liturgists
are the abundant works of nature writers and poets. These artists of the word
can lift our souls in a holistic way into feeling mystically the beauty and
meaning of nature.
There is understanable resistance to making substantial changes in the liturgy.
The prayer of the church has existed in its present form of a God-human drama
for ages. Yet great liturgical festivals like Christmas, Easter and Pentecost
are related to nature events: the winter solstice, the rebirth of Spring and
the gathering of harvests. It might be helpful to approach a liturgical revison
of the Christian calendar by way of theological analogy. A number of the New
Testament stories of love, such as that of the good Samaritan or the prodigal
son do not speak explicitly of God or of things out of the earthly order. The
love actions are horozontal, this-worldly: caring for a wounded man, embracing
a lost child. The theme of the First Letter of John (Chap. 3) sums up this point:
when we open our hearts to our brethren, we are implicitly loving God. We don't
have to be using the explicit language of "God" or "Lord"
or "Father". When we love the neighbor, it is understood that we are
loving God who dwells in him or her. By analogy, it seems correct to say that
when we are liturgically meditating on the splendors or the sufferings of nature,
we are implicitly honoring the God who, to people of faith, lives in the natural
world.
Serious liturgical revision in an ecological mode could also be
based on the teaching of the cosmic Christ. This is a way of looking at trinitarian
doctrine in an intensely sacramental manner. By reflection on the cosmic Christ,
the Christian imagination sees the presence of God in the universe as a saving
or reconciling interconnectedness. In this perspective the universe becomes
the sacrament or outward sign of a redeeming God. A neglected period of church
history could also provide insights for an ecological liturgy. We need to revive
our knowledge of Celtic Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries. The religion
of Patrick and Columba was still closely linked to the sacred places and mysterious
groves of the Druids and Bards. The Celtic religious leaders saw no opposition
in using the language of nature to speak of holiness and spiritual presence.
They found a holy intimacy of human, natural and divine. John Scotus Erigena
could speak of the two shoes of Christ: scripture and nature. Monastic traditions
like that of Iona bonded with nature as already graced.
I have stressed litugical renewal in an ecological direction because liturgy
at its best moves people from the realm of concept to that of experience. It
transcends the merely intellectual to grip the worshiper aesthetically and affectively.
It is mainly in the realm of affect and beauty that we learn to bond with nature
as sacred. Without such bonding with earth, our environmental ethics will risk
being anemic and externalist. Nature will remain for us a zone of objects, of
commodities for conservation management rather than a community for communing
with subjects. E.O. Wilson, the sociobiologist, understands this very well in
his concept of biophilia. If we don't love nature deeply and feel united to
what we love, he is telling us, we will not cherish it. But liturgy is only
one way for the Christian to bond spiritually with the earth. Equally important
is the development of a naturalistic spiritual life.
Ecological Spirituality
Perhaps the greatest difficiency in Christian nurture today in
most churches is their almost total neglect of cultivating our mystical potential.
Most Christians associate the spiritual life with going to church, with formal,
mostly oral prayer or singing, with liturgical participation and with listening
to sermons that exhort them to do good and avoid evil. Few have the sense of
a personalized spiritual path that can be enhanced by regular meditation and
other spiritual methods. Institutional religion in the west has generally been
suspicious of mysticism because it is hard to control. Some of this is changing
today with the expansion of retreats like the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
into the daily life of retreatants as well as the recent development of techniques
for centering prayer.
The Deep Ecology movement in the post World War II era challenges Christianity
to re-discover its contemplative tradition as a major way of contributing to
a fuller appreciation of being an ecological self in an environmental community.
A leading visionary thinker in the Deep Ecology movement, the Norwegian philosopher-ecologist
Arne Naess, would have us awaken to the ecological self. In the image of Joanna
Macy, we are today called upon to recover from a millenia-long amnesia, especially
in the west, to who we really are. We have seen ourselves as separate and competitive
beings generally isolated from the natural world rather than coextensive with
all planetary life. This ecological sense of selfhood calls for a spiritual
change, a new kind of metanoia, through which we experience ourselves profoundly
interconnected with the rest of nature. Gregory Bateson called the false separation
of the human ego from nature the "epistemological fallacy of Occidental
civilization". From the early days of twentieth century science to contemporary
systems theory, we have been challenged to reimagine the human self as deeply
interactive with other species and the with the environment as a whole. Deep
Ecology does not deny the distinctiveness of our species nor the particularity
of other species. Rather integration and differentiation are the very rhythm
of the evolutionary dynamic. At one and the same time, we are the rainforest
thinking and yet distinct human entities.
Without using God language, the deep ecology movement understands
the importance of a mystical or deeply experential conversion in our attitudes
toward nature as a prerequisite for thinking and acting in ecologically sound
ways. But a contemplative ecological movement needs more than theorizing. It
needs to learn from the experiences of contemplative traditions that have not
only thought about the mystical tradition, but which have also developed techniques
and insights for the meditative process. In this regard, deep ecologists like
Macy tend to seek wisdom from the Buddhism with its long meditative tradition.
For the most part, the Christian contemplative tradition seems to be unknown
to the ecologically-minded who look to traditional world religions for resources.
This is understandable since most churches today ignore their own contemplative
traditions when it comes to popular piety. The Quakers may be the only Christian
family that has preserved meditation as a regular practice for all the faithful.
In genral, most Catholics and Protestants wouldn't know what to do with long
periods of silence in our now wordy services. They haven't been taught the ways
of contemplative prayer. For most Christians going to church means prescribed
prayers, hymns, sermons and other liturgical actions. It does not mean learning
and practicing the inward journey, the way of deeper personal union with God
immersed in the universe and in our inner being.
Yet Christianity has venerable contemplative traditions from antiquity to the
present. Unfortunately, this spirituality has usually been confined to religious
orders, with the exception of retreat movements among some laity. It is heartening
to see significant changes today in the expansion of contemplative prayer and
spiritual direction into the lay world. The Ignatian Spritiual Exercises are
being conducted with and even by lay people in the daily circumstances of their
lives. Spiritual guides like the Cistercians Thomas Keating and William McNamara
are making the ways of contemplative prayer known to a wider public. Keating
presents centering prayer as a means toward an interior silence, a "resting
in God", that is beyond thinking, images, and emotions. As a spiritual
guide, he is showing people through one type of meditative prayer how to gradually
move away from a false self, "dis-eased" by fears and cravings and
other negative thoughts/emotions to find their authentic selves in a peaceful
union with the freely given mystery of God's presence. It was encouraging to
see Keating on national tv instructing an Episcopal congregation on contemplative
prayer. But Keating and other Chrsitian spiritual directors do not significantly
incorporate nature into their mediative teachings. The same critique can be
made of those who lead retreats based on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius.
Again nature is only backdrop, a congeries of stage props in the compositon
of place; the main drama of discernment takes place in personal relations between
the retreatant and God. Perhaps the clearest place in the Exercises for Christian
nature mysticism comes in the final meditations where Ignatius summons the retreatant
to contemplate the vast, dynamic process of God's love coursing through the
whole universe. The challenge to ecological retreat leaders will be to re-imagine
the Exercises in light of this culminating point. A key for this rethinking,
this foregrounding of nature, can be found in the central Ignatian genius of
finding God in all things, of discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary,
of becoming people for others. The "other" here in its intrinsic sacredness
can be bird or river or mountain or air, all constituting the body of God.
Such ecologizing of Christian spirituality will take special notice of our own
traditions that are explicitly open to nature. The recapitulation theology of
Irenaeus offers a sweeping vision that gathers all things into a Christic framework
that need not be limited to humans. Eastern Christianity sees its icons as images
of the "divinization" of nature, of God's sanctifying presence in
the very wood, metal and artistry of the icons. We have already noted potentially
rich sources in early Celtic Christianity. The Benedictine monastic tradition
certainly had its hands in the soil, as it were, teaching agriculture, animal
husbandry and herbal medicine to populations surrounding their monasteries.
St. Francis stands out as a primary nature mystic. Matthew Fox has helped us
better appreciate the nature mysticism of medieval visionaries like Meister
Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. What is true of most great
writers is certainly appliable to Dante: an immersion in natural images from
the dark forest at the start of the Inferno to astronomical visions in the Paradiso
of that which moves the heavens and all the other stars. A rich vein of Christian
reflection on nature in an organic as opposed to mechanistic way can be found
the in the tradition of the fifteenth century school of Marsilio Ficino in Florence
to Pico della Mirandola, John Dee and Giordano Bruno. This tradition, combining
forms of Neo-platonism and the old hermetic wisdom was widely respected in is
time, even by churchmen like Nicolas of Cusa. An ecological re-visioning of
Christian spirituality would certainly want to look again at the great religious
art and architecture of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The cathedrals themselves,
as natural extensions of hand and brain, were not only shaped in stone, but
the tales carved into them include plants and animals and other natural elements.
Perhaps we can learn today to move against that tendency in Post-Reformation
churches to look with manachean eyes at the earthy beauty of Renaissance and
earlier art. God might found again in the beautiful breasts and lips of Botticelli's
Florentine maidens celebrating Spring. The erotic and the sensual, despite all
attempts by clerical censors to the contrary, belongs to the long sacramental
heritage of Christianity.
In its attempt to become ecological, Christian spirituality will need to become
broadly ecumenical. Such a dialogue could begin with nature writers whose humanistic
outlook may be full of spiritual insight in secular idiom. A long American literary
tradition of such writing stretches from Thoreau to Whitman to Gary Snyder,
Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard. These verbal artists know how to evoke the deeper
resonances of things and our relations to them. In their works, nature comes
alive as subjects speaking to our imaginations and hearts messages of intrinsic
worth, shared benefits and special needs. A number of great modern scientists
like Edwin Schrodinger and Albert Einstein have left us profound spiritual reflections
from their experiences of physical reality. Scientific visionaries like Loren
Eiseley and Teilhard de Chardin are also sources for a contemporary lectio divina
on the spirituality of the natural world.
As Christians develop a more adequate ecological spirituality,
the ecumenical journey involves crossing over into other religious traditions
and returning enriched by mutual conversations. Or as John B. Cobb, Jr., the
noted process and ecological theologian, has learned from years of dialogue
with Buddhists, religious traditions can offer correctives to one another as
they mutually seek truth. Buddhist teachings present a nondualistic worldview
in their concepts of nonself, of co-dependent arising and compassion towards
all sensient beings; these perspectives lend themselves to an ecological grasp
of the evolutionary process. Buddhism also offers valuable contemplative methods,
many of which have already been incorporated by western thinkers and practitioners
of the spiritual life. Christianity and Buddhism differ on important theoretical
levels. But it is intresting to note how contemplatives from both traditions
describe similar experiences when they talk about the outcomes of their meditative
processes. The ancient Taoist tradition of China is rooted in respect for nature
and knowledge derived from it. In the Tao Te Ching, the master not only teaches
us the virtues and nonactive action of living in accord with nature, but she
also helps us sense the deepest mystery of nature, the unnameable Tao, within
ourselves and in the natural world.
Shaping a deeper ecological spirituality for Christians could benefit by studying
American Indian attitudes towards nature. Christianity has generally favored
time over space, the long sweep of human history as a temporal process over
immersion in the sacredness of earthly places. Although the historical-temporal
mindset dominates in Christianity, a sense of sacred place is hardly absent
from it. In addition to the space-place perspectives of Celtic Christianity,
one could argue that the great Christian churches and shrines possess a sense
of holy space. Think of the pilgrimages to shrines like Compostela or Lourdes
as well as the festivals drawing the faithful to great cathedrals or to landmarks
of martyrs. Even though these shrines are human artifacts, they are also natural
in the sense of being extensions of human creativity, and they also become a
sort of holy ground. One might think this way about Francis' Subiaco or Ignatius'
Montserrat. But the Indian perception of place occupies a much broader part
of their spirituality. Their myths of origin are powerfully connected to a particular
mountain or valley or mesa. Their processes of spiritual transformation, such
as the sweat lodge rituals, the vision quest, modes of healing and counseling
participate closely in the concrete rhythms of animate and inanimate nature.
The Great Spirit rises up from the center of the kiva, dug into the earth, to
energize the tribe.
A new Christian ecological spirituality will have to reconsider our relationship
to animals. On the whole, Christian theology has been enormously negligent in
reference to the animal realm. Our anthropocentric and hierarchical attitudes
have relegated animals to inferior species; we treat them in almost totally
instrumental ways. In a market capitalist culture, we reduce them to commodities
without intelligence or affect or any rights to decent ways of living. Wanton
cruelty to animals is still very widespread: the confinement of calves for milk-fed
veal, the caging of de-beaked chickens, unnecessary laboratory experiments.
An ecological Christian spirituality must be concerned with many ramifications
of our treatment of animals. One of these aspects is the question of vegetarianism.
Beyond the health dimensions of moving toward a more vegetarian diet, there
are very important ethical, ecological and spiritual considerations. Ethics
of animal treatment is a very large topic involving issues of needless suffering
and animal rights in general. But the ecological and spiritual aspects are less
understood. The cattle and meat industries, for example, are involved in the
destruction of rain forests to obtain grazing areas, excessive uses of scarce
fresh water, and the pollution of soil and water tables with animal waste. Meat
consumption is also a hugely inefficient and often unhealthy way to nourish
humans. The generalized use of a more vegetarian diet could help to eliminate
a number of these ecological problems.
But vegetarianism (respecting a whole spectrum of choices among
people from more radical types to more moderate options) can also become a valuable
spiritual discipline. It not only heightens our awareness of what we eat and
the consequences of food choices. It also helps us appreciate the intrinsic
value of animals; in the past Christianity has stressed mainly their instrumental
value for humans. We can contemplate how God's presence in animals implies divine
concern for them. If animals are part of God's body, the divine suffers in them.
In many cultures, animals have been seen as spiritual guides; at the very least
Christians would be called upon to reconsider what they mean by "the image
of God" to include animals. Christians who choose to consume animals could
profit spiritually from prayerfully invorporating an Amerindian attitude of
gratitude and respect for the animal who gives its life for us. In New York
City's cathedral of St. John the Divine there is an annual ceremony of the blessing
of the animals in which various species are processed through the church to
receive the blessing. While such a service is ecologically sensitive, we might
also wonder how we are spiritually blessed by animals. This can't be hard to
understand by anyone who has had a long relationship with a companion animal.
An ecological spirituality for Christians would also involve new directions
for pastoral counseling or spiritual direction. A growing body of literature
in ecopsychology focuses on a key theme: technological culture with its mechanistic
mentality has separated us from a deep connectedness with the earth and with
communities of intimacy. Among the pscyhological results of this alienation
from nature are chronic anxiety, anger, a sense of personal woundedness and
of not belonging: a homelessness on earth. Many of our addictions in highly
developed technological cultures are the result of not having primary needs
met; as a consequence, we substitute secondary sources in addictive ways in
an attempt to fulfill more basic needs for connection to the earth and to intimate
communities. Another way of stating this problem is that the vast outward damage
that we are inflicting on the health of the planet brings with it significant
psychospiritual harm for individuals and groups. How much do spiritual directors
appreciate the connection between our dis-ease and even rage about our condition
and our separation from the healing earth and from communities that are closer
to it? In this regard, Thomas Berry made a very significant comment about our
fear of death as related to our dissociation from our earthly roots. In Dylan
Thomas' words, we "rage against the dying of the light", not knowing
that our rage is largely based on denying our place on and eventually in the
earth. Perhaps the earth-consciousness of the paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin,
led him to pray that he would be able to end well, at peace with his condition
in nature. Certainly, the Taoist master understood this when he taught: "Immersed
in the wonder of the Tao/ you can deal with whatever life brings you/ and when
death comes, you are ready".
Ecological Ethics
The ecological challenge will also call for new reflection on
Christian ethics. While there are a few good books in Christian ecological ethics,
churches have not written major documents or encyclicals on the topic. In some
ways this lack of documentation may be a blessing. A truly serious Christian
ethic on the environment should follow from the experiential living of an ecological
spirituality in daily life. Otherwise we will tend to write an abstract set
of principles and applications that do not derive from our own deeply felt participation
in the natural world. We first need to become porous to the sacred in nature;
we need to dwell holistically on earth letting its creatures dictate their needs
to us. To be in dialogue with nature in this mode, we will have to listen carefully
to the earth's voices, re-personalizing nature as a conversation partner after
such a long period of de-sacralizing and de-personalizing it. The best Christian
ethic for nature will be an aesthetic morality that is forged from our own bonding
with the sufferings and joys of Gaia. Such an ethic will not be anti-instrumental,
as all of nature uses nature in some manner or other. But a new Christian ethic
for ecology will not start from a stance of dominative hierarchy, the human
over all creatures seen as objects for manipulation and consumption. Rather
this ethic will flow from a renewed sense of the co-creativity of God, nature
and humanity. It will be an ethic built on intersubjectivity that acknowledges
sameness and difference, but that above all respects the intrinsic worth of
the natural world and our essential interconnectedness with it.
Sallie McFague ( in The Body of God) invites us to shape the foundations
of a Christian ethic of nature in part from a reinterpretation of major stories
in the New Testament. She points out the deconstructive or destabilizing aspects
of Jesus' parables which overturn conventional hierarchies such as the human
dominating nature. These dislocating stories make us realize that it is we who
have marginalized our fellow creatures in nature for our own greedy purposes.
The healing stories associated with Jesus bring forth the reconstructive task
toward nature. Healing here is not only of the human spirit, but of the physical,
earthly bodies of the world around us. The many eating stories involving Jesus
look ahead to a new kind of conviviality in which all creatures are invited
to the banquet, accepting and respecting our differences. Again this is not
a spiritualized feast, but one that feeds the legitimate and very real hungers
of all creatures. McFague is shifting the focus of liberation theology to undergird
an ecological ethic that identifies with the suffering and needy in nature.
These reflections on the present and coming challenge of the ecological era
call for a profound reinterpretation of Christian traditions. Such a task will
be one of both retrieval and of construction on the levels of theory and practice.
Whether the greening of Christianity will go forward depends in large measure
on how one judges the reality of ecological crises. Are these exaggerated fads,
hyped by the media or are they the most crucial dilemmas facing the future?
The scientific evidence for the seriousness of ecological decline increases
year by year. We can ignore it and live in denial, a dysfunctional mental state
for which our progeny may curse us. Yet the ministry of Jesus, like the prophets
before him, was to awaken people from spiritual blindness and denial. He wanted
his hearers to become aware of the signs of their times.
The ecological challenge underlies most of the major world traumas:
war, poverty, famine, overpopulation, the destruction of species and many others.
Christianity, in dialogue with other wisdom traditions, can contribute significant
spiritual resources for ecological awareness and inspiration. This great mission
will require joint efforts from the world's religions. A Laguna Pueblo prayer
sums up this breathing together, this conspiracy for our sacred earth:
I add my breath to your breath
That our days may be long on the earth
that the days of our people may be long
that we shall be one person
that we may finish our roads together.
_____________________________
Eugene C. Bianchi is a professor of religion at Emory University.
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