Ecological Spirituality
Reverend Joseph A. Tetlow, SJ
Excerpt…
Ecological spirituality begins, as any spirituality must, by authenticating
moral practice. No one is holy who is not first good. Hence, disciples
who are spiritually alive actively seek to discern God’s will
and act as collaborators with God. Today, this must include a reassessment
of what Genesis means when it tells humankind to subdue the earth and
have dominion over all living things on it. Can we be collaborators
with
our Creator if we wantonly pollute air, pile up atomic waste, denude
our forests, and foul our rivers and lakes? No. A serious spirituality
begins with a deep conversion from callous tearing of whatever we want
from the earth to a caring stewardship.
In the
distant past, human technological capacity and the tools available
allowed us to make the earth more fruitful, but there was no capacity
to inflict lasting damage to the balance of nature. An earthy spirituality
was expressed during that time in St. Francis’ delight in God’s
creation, of which we are an intimate part along with brother sun and
sister moon. The spiritual experience of God was summed up in St. Benedict’s
dictum, to work is to pray. All people needed was a good intention
to serve and praise God, and that attitude turned work into spirituality.
Many men and women found God while working in everyday life: plowing,
weaving, baking, and working wood.
During the past century, however, humankind found ways of manipulating
the very forces that shape nature- gravity, the atom, and the gene. We
no longer simply mine coal, work wood, and spin cotton; now, we transform
the forces of nature as we create atomic fuel and weapons through engineering
and new forms of life through genetics. Our powerful instrumental control
over nature alters our sense of how we belong in and to nature. The extent
of earthly changes- depletion of ozone, deforestation, contamination
from toxic and nuclear wastes, global warming indicates that we are acting,
not as stewards of a renewable earth, but as masters of a pliant earth.
Ecological spirituality sharply challenges our behavior. We are of the
earth. We must treat it as we do our home. There is no true spirituality
without obedience to this moral mandate.
How We Belong to Creation
Spirituality goes beyond moral action and transmutes it. Ecological spirituality
begins in the acknowledgment, grateful and joyful, that all creatures
owe their existence to God. Humans are not somehow separate from the
rest of creation. We share it intimately with other creatures. We acknowledge
God as Creator of us all.
This ecological
spirituality grows from a change in the way we think about God’s creative work. For centuries, Christians viewed God’s
action in the world in terms of sin and redemption. First we sinned and
then God redeemed us. The pattern was holy and helpful. A new awareness
of the whole of creation expands this view, and we now tend to think
of God’s action in the world this way: God creates and, when we
reject grace, saves us from our sin. By understanding creation as part
of God’s plan for our salvation, we more readily understand
that God remains first, Creator and Lord at every moment of history.
Scientific
thought shifted during the past decades from cosmology, the study of
the way nature works, to Cosmo-genesis, the study
of the way
every existing thing in the universe originates from the Big
Bang. As those ideas grew familiar, we as Jesus’ disciples expanded our
spirituality to include a new understanding of creation. Who made me?
we asked as children, and answered, God made me. This is surely true
but not the full truth. God is Creator of all things, but it is not true
that God’s creating is just in the past. To realize that
God is making me in the present is a transforming spiritual
insight.
Furthermore,
anyone who understands creation knows that God makes everything out
of nothing. But we can sensibly realize,
as well,
that God is making
each human person out of the concrete chaos of chemicals
and gravitational forces, movements of history and human activities,
in which that
person comes to be. Wouldn’t a spiritual person tend
to be interested in those forces and activities?
Obviously,
ecological spirituality has deep roots in this renewed understanding
of ongoing creation. Scientists have taught Christ’s
disciples to see that the universe has prepared for human
life for billions of
years. Some scientists think it has been waiting for us.
Some - even among the most rigidly mechanistic who believe that
physical laws
utterly determine everything- go further. They think that
the universe
calculated
from the Big Bang on to bring forth human life, almost as
though the universe thought humanity. We need not stretch the meaning
of consciousness
that far. We can say that all the forces of evolution unfolded
into human life as God created each creature moment by moment
until the
instant
when the Creator summoned the first intelligent and free
person
to life.
The Immanent God Revealed
This spirituality clearly requires that we renew our relationship with
God. The people of God have always known that nature reveals God; Israel
sang that the heavens declare the glory of God. Nonetheless, the chosen
people tended to imagine God as far above humankind as the heavens were
above the earth. Christians, in our turn, feel reverence and awe at God
the infinite, transcendent One, the One outside of time who began time
and will end time. The universe, all possible universes, could not contain
God, who transcends all creaturehood.
In ecological spirituality, as we absorb the reality of ongoing creation,
we learn to perceive God the immanent One. God gives us good gifts, all
that we are and have, and we begin in thanksgiving. This is sound spirituality.
But we go on to remember that God remains present in the gifts. Indeed,
God works busily in them as well as through them. In some brief histories
of time, scientists put God at the very beginning of time and at its
very end. In between, they must believe in an impersonal universe, one
that runs like a clock. Such a universe, humanity found easy to ravage
and despoil. Nothing personal it was, after all, just an object, a thing.
We remember now that we know God as our ongoing Creator, One infinitely
removed from chance, or fate, or the force. In this ecological spirituality,
we perceive God working busily in all creatures. Hence, we experience
the universe as personal, charged with the divine presence.
When we
turn again to find God in nature, we recognize that all that exists
reflects the divinity and participates
in
the divinity.
All
that exists stands before God the way a mirror stands
in a field, facing the
sun and full of its light. Stand in front of such
a mirror and its brilliance will blind you, the light
blazing
from the mirror’s heart. And
yet, that light is the sun’s light, every lumen of it. In this
spirituality, we return to recognize that if there is justice in the
human heart, it is a share in God’s justice; if there is love among
us, it is a share in God’s love.
A Christ-Centered Universe
There is more to an ecological spirituality than this, for we know that
in the beginning all things were created through Christ. In Christ, all
the eons of time have brought humankind to life on the earth. As the
Son chose to remain with humanity in the Spirit, we must say that all
the eons of time are now bringing to life on earth the mystical Body
of Christ, who is our Head.
Ecological spirituality requires that we keep in focus that the second
person of the Trinity has come and remains with humanity through the
Church. What we do to our human flesh, then, we are somehow doing to
the Christ, and what we do to our environment, our earthly home, we are
doing to our flesh. For even this earth, in whose atmosphere we are punching
holes and whose depths we are poisoning with wastes, also groans awaiting
its redemption. For all things are to be made new in Christ, in whom
we live and move and have our being.
We must
think of humankind as the self-aware and reflective part of the universe.
We are the
universe’s self-revelation of what life all
tends toward (some scientists call this the universal anthropic principle).
In a certain sense, humankind is the last species on the earth evolving
according to its own inner dynamic. We have touched every other creature’s
evolution, at least in some way. Some we have
obliterated, many we can still discover. Notice
that human understanding
and human
desiring
give
shape to the fate of the earth.
Ecological spirituality elicits this awareness in us: God in eternity
passionately desired intelligent freedom to
adorn the earth. We are that adornment. God in eternity has hopes for
the earth: that it flourish
and grow steadier and more beautiful. We are
that plan. Can we have any deeper reason for caring for our planet
and for every single person on
it?
Real Sin
This spirituality will seem unreal and romantic unless we look resolutely
at what we have done and are doing. For too long, in our narrow self-absorption,
we have thought of sin only in our intimate private lives. Sin was between
the individual and God or perhaps between a whole nation and God. A true
ecological spirituality demands that we broaden that horizon vastly.
Here is the truth about the Original Sin: humankind is relentlessly destructive.
The human imagination is so diseased by sin that we defeat our own interests
time and time again. We have depleted the fisheries from which we eat,
poisoned the rivers from which we drink, and fouled even the air we breathe.
Worst of all, we live denying these facts, which gives the full measure
of our sinfulness. In this sinful denial, people could run so many cattle
over vast areas of grass that they destroy the grass. We could cut down
so many trees that we deforest our own woods.
Our sin
destroys. New Age theologies dislike this thought; few of us like to
remember
this for long.
But ecological
spirituality confronts
us with the truth that God is just. Working
in the splendid laws
that
he is enacting for our good- atomic processes,
nutritional requirements, drugs’ effects -God justly lets us suffer the consequences of our
deliberate and calculated disruption of proper relationships with our
selves, our earth, and God’s self.
Now we
know: Humankind’s problem is
not the romantic one of nature bloody in
tooth
and claw.
Our fault lies
in that we
pervert the very
laws God is decreeing in the universe to
our own harm and to the harm of our home
the earth.
Struggling
with
and
overcoming sin
means
ending
those disruptions.
This struggle,
central to ecological spirituality, demands a radical asceticism. Now
we must
learn that we serve
God by acknowledging
and acquiescing in the stern requirements
of the laws of nature. All creation
works as God teaches it to work; all
things follow those laws that
God is etching in the depths of their
being. In human beings, God’s
spirit etches the desires to make all
beautiful and equitable, safe and song-filled. We
must, at great
peril, attend
to those desires.
The source
of hope is not that we expect to end by our own efforts the wrongs
and evils
we have
perpetrated.
We do,
however, have
hope. For
ecological spirituality keeps us mindful
of the whole of God’s
plan for creation.
At the end of time, wielding a power of which we can only dream, God
in Christ will make all things new. Jesus Christ will come- to earth
again- in power and glory, and unite all things in his divine Self. And
we shall rise again. As every lily of the field now is, so shall each
of us be, a splendid song of praise to God our Creator and Lord.
—
Reverend Joseph A. Tetlow is a visiting distinguished professor in the
Department of Theological Studies at St. Louis University. He has been
president of the Jesuit School in Berkeley and dean of Loyola University
in New Orleans.
The Principle of Stewardship
Father William J. Byron, S.J.
Catholic Social Teaching Principles (March, 2000)
Our
Catholic faith tradition urges us
to show both gratitude and respect to the Creator by exercising proper
stewardship of creation. The fundamental
idea of stewardship is simply this:
wealth possessed is held in trust for others. The possession of assets
(material
or spiritual, physical or intellectual)
involves serious
social responsibilities.
The
greater the wealth,
the more awesome the responsibility.
Moreover, the human person's coexistence
with gifts of creation that he or
she does
not own but depends upon for the
maintenance of life
(woodlands,
croplands, grasslands,
air,
water,
and all the other assets that are
part of "natural creation")
implies a stewardship relationship
of the individual toward the environment.
The steward
is a manager, not an owner. This truth is grounded in
the first
verse of the
24th Psalm: "The earth is the Lord's, and the
fullness thereof." Another rendering of this verse puts it this
way: "The earth is the Lord's
and all it holds, the world and
those who
live there."
Ownership is proper to God; use of all our wealth is God's gift to us.
We are stewards, not owners.
From a theological perspective, it is apparent that no one of us owns
anything absolutely. God, in fact, owns everything you possess, despite
the fact that your name appears on the legal title or deed of ownership.
Private ownership is necessary for the orderly conduct of affairs in
any person's transit through life. Indeed, private ownership is a cornerstone
of our highly productive economic system.
Not to
be forgotten, however, is the fundamental fact of God's sole
ownership
not only of "the earth," but
also of all that the earth contains.
This means that God owns the
mineral
deposits
and also
all that is produced
or fabricated from the earth's
natural endowment. Similarly,
our intellectual
property (the
ideas generated by our
creative but
created
human minds)
also belongs to God.
Return now for a moment to the fundamental idea of stewardship, namely,
that wealth possessed is held in trust for others. Everyone has some
wealth. All have wealth of mind and body. Like other assets, these are
subject to depletion. Good stewards care for them and use them well so
long as time permits. This has implications for personal management of
nutrition, exercise, sleep and general attention to personal health.
Think of
all your personal assets and consider how well you are
cultivating, caring for,
and preserving them,
and think
also
of how you are using
those assets in the service
of others. Once you acknowledge
that they are God's gifts to
you, you
cannot avoid declaring yourself
to be "much
obliged." Your obligation is both to say thanks to God (as well
as "make thanks" ritually in the Eucharist), and also to "do
thanks" in a practical
demonstration of your gratitude
by using your
wealth for the
good of
others.
Think as well of the natural environment that literally surrounds you
on land, air, and sea. Your stewardship responsibility looks out, and
up, and all around. Sustainability is the word to keep in mind. Since
life itself is dependent on this environment, it must be used, but used
with great care to assure that it will be there to sustain the life of
future generations so long as God wills humans to inhabit the earth.
Use of
the word "humans" in
that last sentence may prompt
some to wonder
if our stewardship
responsibilities
apply
only to
the welfare
of humans. No, there is a
human responsibility for the preservation
of plant and
animal life too, but
our faith
tradition understands
God's plan as providing plant
and animal life for the enrichment
of human
life.
Hence in caring for nature,
humans care for themselves.
Stewardship
is a wonderful
word
that holds great
potential for prompting,
if not pushing
us to work together to build
an
even more wonderful world.
Jesuit
Father William J. Byron is teaching a course
on "Catholic
Social Theory and the American Economy" this
semester at Georgetown
University. His 1975 book,
Toward Stewardship
(Paulist),
now out
of print, expands on the
theme of this article.
Environmental Justice
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