The Earth

This is an excerpt from my book on Managing Diversity published by Dunamis Publishers, 2009.

The liberation of the Earth

    An absolutely crucial word needs to be said about the importance of our modern understanding of ecology and cosmology in opening up new possibilities for appreciating the role of religious diversity and its implications for our living together.

     For the first time in the history of humanity we have the capacity to provide a universal and coherent story of our origins.  Science has unraveled so much of the story of the origins of the universe, of our planet and of life on this planet that we are now able to piece together a story that can help us understand who we are in the context of our planet and indeed our universe.  In that respect, the “story of the universe” becomes a major inter-cultural achievement that can provide a whole new bridge to inter-religious dialogue and to our identity and place in the universe.

     There is a further urgency to addressing the question of ecology in the fact that human activity has come to constitute one of the gravest dangers to future life on this planet. We are all aware of global warming and of the vast extinction of species that is already underway.  The urgency of concerted action to arrest the consequences of our irresponsibility is of the highest priority.  Even so, the political will often does not seem to be present and our leaders wade through oceans of verbiage with very little concrete results.  Part of the incapacity for action can be placed on the shoulders of Catholicism that has, for the last five hundred years (or much more) placed human beings at the apex of God’s creation and considered the earth to be an environment to be exploited for their benefit.
     The origin of the current crisis of the environment can be found above all in the doctrine of Catholics that sees the “other” as alien and excludes it.   This other can be another religion, another culture or even the Earth itself considered as “other” than human.  These three “others” are in fact inter-related.  
     We have much to revise.  Moreover this very revision may be an important bridge for bringing together several religious traditions that together could provide the weight and momentum to turn around the environmental struggle for responsible action.  The Aboriginal and Afro-American traditions place considerable importance on integration with nature.  There is much also in the Hindu tradition that is deeply respectful of all expressions of life.  If Catholics were able to reinterpret their own tradition with a view to a more sensitive treatment of the earth, we might be able to go a long way toward building that bridge with other traditions and provide the motivation for serious advances in improving the quality of life on the planet.
     One way to begin to look at this question is through the perspective of an option for the poor.  In our days a priority task of religion in the world is the elimination of poverty, oppression and violence.  Without this major effort religion loses its credibility in face of the crushing reality of the majority of humanity.  However, if there is a “poor” and “vulnerable” sector that urgently needs attention as the matrix for the hope of all those billions who live in misery, it is the Earth itself.  The liberation of the Earth is urgently needed.  Such an effort requires the collaboration of all peoples and all religious traditions.  This is particularly so because it was religion that had such an important role in creating the mentality that led to the massive destruction of humanity and of the Earth that we have witnessed in the last 100 years.  Only through radical change in this mentality can we come through the crisis.
     We need a new theology that can provide a bridge for religion to move out of its own ghetto and begin to practice the collaboration required for real change.  A theology that opts for the Earth, a theology of religious diversity that includes the Earth in its agenda touches on values that are important to every religion.  It is high time that we mobilized the wisdoms of all the religions and cultures before Mother Earth decides to sweep us from the scene.
      There are obstacles of course and they need to be recognized.

      The first obstacle is that nature is considered as just an “environment,” that is to say a bunch of things that serve to sustain life and human comfort.  Secondly, we need to deal with a scientific shift that took place in the 17^th century through people like Newton and Descartes.  For them the environment was considered a set of inanimate “natural resources” that are at the disposition of the economy.  Plants and animals were even regarded as “machines” that we could reshape and destroy at will and with impunity.

     Patriarchy played a major role in all this.  For many centuries the Catholic Church taught that women were not equal to men but rather formed part of that nature that they had already decided was an enemy of sinful man whom God had excluded from paradise.  In marriage it was understood that the male “acquired” a women as a piece of property.  Women were valued mainly for their reproductive capacity, much as any animal.  Thus, women suffered an exclusion that paralleled that of nature.  While all this may have become codified in the Middle Ages through matrimonial legislation, patriarchy as such was already present much earlier in the Mosaic Law.
     This patriarchal and macho view of being human and of nature disfigured our relationship with God.  God was not seen as really present in nature.  We thought God just used it to give us lessons and to offer natural resources to satisfy our desires.  The Catholic religion seems to have suffered from schizophrenia.  On the one hand it said that all that God created is good and serves to know God and on the other hand it said that nature is the enemy of humans who must struggle against it in order to survive.  Moreover it insisted that man is above nature and separate from it.  Nature exists merely to serve man’s needs and comfort.
     Beginning with the 14th century, Europe went through a slow process of secularization that managed to separate the sacred dimension from natural phenomena.  This opened up even more doors to the manipulation and exploitation of nature.  After this separation had been established, a series of scientists in the 16h century established the scientific method and modern science was born.  Unfortunately this turned out to be rooted in a profoundly mechanistic mentality.  Newton studied nature to discover its laws and ended up reducing everything to a series of mechanical (mathematical) principles.  Descartes completed the job with a total separation between the material world and human consciousness.  The industrial and technological revolutions followed.  At first the Catholic Church resisted this new approach.  Several persons were condemned for having contradicted what the Church believed to be found in the Bible.  The case of Galileo is perhaps the best known.  Those that studied the human body using dissection ran the risk of falling into the hands of the Inquisition.  Nevertheless the scientific method prevailed and the Church largely adapted itself to the results.  The Church resisted secularization more because it entailed a separation of church and State, with the consequent loss of power, than for any preoccupation about the exploitation of the Earth.

Paths to another view
     In the twentieth century there were other important shifts: the rejection of patriarchy and a new scientific posture. A new vision has emerged that opens up the possibility of a profound collaboration between Christians and members of other religions for the liberation of the Earth. I will only touch on some of the avenues available for doing so.  We begin with feminism.
     The feminists state that patriarchy was already well established at the time of Abraham and Moses.  For that reason they were interested in reviewing the texts of the First Testament (sometimes called the “Old”) that deal with women.  In the struggle for the recognition of their human dignity on an equal plane as that of the male, feminists have reinterpreted at the same time the patriarchal perspective that unites women to Nature.  They argue that the patriarchal system has dangerous ecological implications. [1]  If we think that human beings are called to dominate the Earth – conceived as a sum of resources without any intrinsic value – it should not surprise us that the Earth ends up devastated.  Feminists accept that women are intimately linked to the Earth – and men as well!  They then proceed to reappraise Nature in a positive way.  They propose that, as human beings, we recognize our integration in and even our dependence on nature instead of thinking of ourselves as a superior being.  They suggest that human beings are part of the Earth and not simply living on the Earth.  They insist that women are incarnated, just as men are, in one and the same flesh of the Earth.  Finally, they affirm that the Earth is composed of living beings, all of whom bear a divine presence.  This is a view of what it is to be human that is much more holistic.  Body, intelligence and feelings are seen to be interrelated and complementary.  They even insist that feelings have a primary place at the moment of regarding the world.
     This perspective of an integration between being human and Earth has barely made its entrance into Catholic theology and is still hotly resisted.  Yet it allows for a much greater openness to the religious perspectives of Aboriginal peoples not to mention Hinduism, Buddhism and other religions that are less patriarchal than Catholicism.  Recognition of the sacred dimension of all natural and historical reality can even provide for a much larger opening to the Islamic world and corresponds to a very ancient Jewish tradition.
     Another important path for a theology of religious diversity comes from modern science.  In recent years, a few scientists have taken an important new direction in their way of understanding nature.  When the first astronauts traveled into space, they saw something that no human being had ever seen in all of human history: a small, extremely beautiful blue planet full of life and yet limited and fragile.  The image has served to remind us that, as human beings, we are a small part of an immense planetary history.  We are reminded also that we have a decisive impact on the future of life and that, for the first time in human history, physics, biology, chemistry and archeology, to mention only a few of the sciences, can explain to us in detail the whole history of life on this planet and even the history of the universe itself. [2]  We are the first generation in history that knows exactly how our universe emerged out of nothingness 13 billion years ago.  We are the first to know how our planet, Earth, was born 5 billion years ago in a stupendous and yet ever so delicate process that made possible – miracle of miracles – the phenomenon called life.  We are already beginning to understand that in order to produce this mysterious creature called a human being who is conscious of itself, the Earth gave it a “genetic code”[3] that summarizes in itself all that evolution, in all its various stages, had been able to learn about life.  We are, for example, the first generation of human beings to know the intimate relationship between the capacity of our eyes to see and the capacity of plants to absorb light from the sun.  Finally we are much more conscious today of how the ecological systems function.  This is an extremely valuable piece of knowledge.  The fact is, now we know!  That knowledge entails responsibility.
     Scientists are beginning to recognize that animals and plants, as living things, are endowed with consciousness, experience, feelings and not simply instincts.  They are much more like human beings than we thought in recent centuries.  Human beings have a whole substrate that unites them to plants and animals.  This is precisely their genetic code.  Scientists like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock[4] as well as some theologians like Thomas Berry[5] go further and suggest that it is easier to understand the activity of the planet itself, with its ecological systems, if we consider it a living being.[6]  Barry is of the opinion that human beings are, in this context, the self-consciousness of the Earth. The “self” here refers not just to that characteristic of consciousness that an individual might have of him- or herself as an individual but also that consciousness in so far as it is able to articulate the broad experience of the Earth of which he or she is an integral part.  In that human self-consciousness the Earth itself achieves its articulation and celebrates its experience of God.  For this reason, it is important to pay attention to how human experience is rooted in what nature “tells” us.  Berry suggests that our experience of God would be totally different if we were living on a planet similar to the moon because we would not have the same language to speak of God.
    For some Christians it is blasphemy or even idolatry to speak of Mother Earth (with capitals).  Nevertheless, on second thought, why not?  When we speak of persons we name them with capital letters (Mary, Peter).  Why not also the Earth?  Some will say because to treat the Earth as a person, as something living and intelligent would be to transform it into a god.  It would be pantheism.  Nevertheless, to recognize the Earth as living is not the same as making it equal to God.  It is rather to make it a magnificent creation of God.  Karl Rahner, speaking of angels, proposed that they are precisely forces of the universe, messengers and guardians of God.[7]  So, above all the natural forces I propose an “archangel” called Earth.  Why do we think that this implies denying God his/her place?  Or are we denying the dignity of those beings created by God in order to place ourselves subsequently at the same level as God?  Is this not precisely what the second chapter of Genesis condemned?
     Accepting that the Earth is a living being would lead us to develop a new theology of creation, a theology very different from the one that was taught in the seminary for the last several centuries.  Plants and animals, rivers and mountains would be sacred, as sacred as human beings.  This would put economic exploitation out of bounds.  We would have to develop another moral theology to speak of our relationship with the “natural environment.”[8]  The theology of religious diversity would need to develop the foundations for recognition of this bridge with other religions.
     Many images of the psalms tell us that the animals, the plants, the rivers and the mountains rejoice to know and praise God.  How can we pray all those psalms and not take them seriously?  They are constantly telling us how the Earth, the animals, the hills and the rivers praise God.

Let the heavens rejoice and the earth exult,

Let the sea roar and all the creatures in it,

Let the fields exult and all that is in them;

Then let all the trees of the forest

Shout for joy

Before the Lord…. (Psalm 96)

     So, they have a religious experience!  God speaks to them and they praise their Creator.  We are called then to respect them.  According to the tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi we should listen to them and unite our voices with those who recognize God.  They are beings that know God, that are open to God, that know how to respond in their own way to God.  This perspective can be found also in the writings of various mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen (12^th century):

I am the fiery life of the essence of God: I flame above the beauty of the fields; I burn in the sun, the moon and the stars. And, with the airy wind, I quicken all things, vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life. For the air is alive in the verdure and the flowers; the waters flow as if they lived; the sun too lives in its light; and when the moon wanes it is rekindled by the light of the sun as if it lived anew. [9]

     In summary, the recognition of the living dimension of all nature and of the Earth itself offers another important approach to a theology of religious diversity. If we knew how to relate to the Earth in this way, if we had a theology of creation that incorporated this element, our relationship with other religions like Hinduism, Islam,[10] Buddhism and the Aboriginal and African religions would be very different. In this sense Catholicism seems to be the religion that least appreciates what the Earth tells us.

 The diversity of religious cultures

     Eva and Priscilla are two Sisters of Saint Joseph.  They are the daughters of an Ojibway leader, Art Solomon, who helped me recognize the sacred mystery of the communion and community with my native Earth.  They have achieved a very beautiful integration between their Christian faith and the spiritual traditions of their Aboriginal culture.  In this they carry the legacy of a painful struggle carried on by their father to distance himself from what the Catholic Church had taught him about his culture and to recover the traditions of his people.  While many Aboriginal Christians continue to reject those traditions, considering them contradictory to their faith, there is a growing number of Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants and Evangelicals among the Aboriginal peoples who experience a new and positive integration.  Nevertheless, for the theologians, these experiences represent a great challenge because the beliefs of this growing number contradict what all the catechisms since the Middle Ages have taught right up until the 1960s.  So, we need to look at the question of cultures.
     The texts that ground our doctrine of creation did not arise out of nothing.  They incorporate many other texts that come from other cultures.  So it is that the first two chapters of Genesis incorporate elements from stories about the origin of the universe that existed in various cultures of the Middle East.  We also know that some texts, like that of Colossians 1, 15-20, for example, speak of how Christ was present in the process of creation.  In this way they reproduce old concepts in the wisdom tradition that are also found in other Middle Eastern cultures.  So, in the construction of the sacred texts about creation, the biblical authors knew how to appreciate what was good in other cultures of their times and they managed to incorporate many elements from those cultures into what they were writing.
     Catholics however have not always appreciated what other cultures have contributed to human diversity.  They thought that only their way of explaining things was valid.  They even preferred to deny the contribution of those cultures to their own doctrines.  So it is that they considered all the myths of other cultures about the origin of the world and the activity of Nature as pure superstition and idolatry.  Recognition of the context in which our own origin myths were written would at least allow for an openness to appreciate the contribution of other cultures to our perspectives on Nature.
     The fact is that we are not the only people who have myths, parables or stories about creation.  The Aymara people of Bolivia and Peru speak of how they originated out of an encounter of the Sun with the Earth (el Inti with Pachamama) in Lake Titicaca.  The Maya speak of themselves as the People of Corn.  The Ojibway also have stories about how Turtle Island (North America) came to be and they themselves along with it:

And Kitche Manitou (the Great Spirit) had a vision. He saw the universe and understood that his vision had to come about.  So he created stone, water, fire and the wind.  Into each he breathed life.  From them he created everything else, including the human being.  But a disaster came over the world and everything was buried in water.  Then the woman-sky lived alone and Kitche Manitou had compassion and sent her a spouse with whom she had sons.  They fought among themselves and destroyed one another.  With that, the water creatures persuaded her to come down and they persuaded the turtle to rise to the surface.  And the little muskrat, ridiculed by everyone, went down to the bottom and brought up a little earth that was placed on the back of the turtle.  And the woman-sky breathed life into it.  The Earth grew and formed an island full of plants and creatures known as Michilimackinac.  Later the woman-earth gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.  They were called Anishnabeg (people) and the creatures of the Earth fed and cared for the children.  When the woman-sky was sure of their survival, she went back to her place in the heavens and is known as the first among mothers, the Grandmother (the moon).[11]

   
      Myths like this have served in all cultures to assist people in discovering and preserving their identity over many centuries and in face of multiple adversities.  Every culture has its origin myth; every religion proposes a myth about the origin of the world and of its people.  So it is that such myths have a fundamental importance in the consolidation of a cultural and human identity both for Aboriginal peoples and for the great world religions.  For that reason it is important to take seriously any attempt to know the origin of human beings, of our planet, of the universe.  Besides, an attitude of respect for the way in which these things are explained is fundamental if we want to arrive at an inter-religious and intercultural collaboration to defend the Earth and its peoples.  In this sense the book of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God, deserves special attention for its study of the creation myths in various classical cultures (Babylonian, Greek and Hebrew) as well as the new myth based on recent scientific explanations.  All this opens possibilities for a commitment of our religious tradition to the liberation of the Earth.
     The idea that only the Catholic stories are correct and that those of the Aymara, Maya, Ojibway and Hindus are not as valid as those we find in our sacred texts is ultimately self-defeating.  Truth itself invites a more humble attitude.  All human knowledge, including that of the Word of God, is historical, that is to say that it passes through the mediation of the limited categories offered by human consciousness.  It is never complete; it is always subject to revision.  For that reason we need to welcome with great reverence every attempt to articulate what God says through these myths as also through Nature.
     The perspective of a human being as an integral part of a living Earth and not in any way superior offers elements to reinterpret our Catholic doctrine about the Earth that would allow for a serious opening to Aboriginal religions, Hinduism and Buddhism among others.  These points of view may even be useful in dialogue with non-believers and ecologists.  It is a dialogue in view of the liberation of the Earth and of all that is contained in it.  Human beings (male and female) are then part of the Earth as its self-consciousness.  Animals, fish and plants are “our elder brothers and sisters,” as the Ojibway say.  There is much to be learned from these elders because they existed long before us and therefore have a much longer memory. (Human beings have a history of at best only one or two million years, or even less if we are to consider only our own species.)  If we know how to listen, we discover how the animals, plants, fish, mountains, rivers share with us their profound wisdom and can present us with a word of God.  They can also teach us how to live and respond to God with an authentic ethic and religion.  By reading the prophets attentively we recognize that this was the way they encountered the word of God.  In that perspective we respect other living beings and even venerate them as manifestations of the love of the great mystery that is God.  This way of relating to the Earth introduces into our ethic the dimension of reciprocity, which is so much appreciated in Andean cultures.[12]  From the Earth we receive life and with this life we help the Life that is the Earth to grow.  And in all this we encounter God who is love, source of Life and extravagant in his/her benevolence.
     It seems ironic that modern science, the foundation of so many ideological notions that have destroyed the ecological systems, offers elements for Catholics to move forward in defense of the Earth and to be capable of dialoging respectfully, even profoundly, with other ancient cultures and religions.  Nevertheless, this seems to be the case and it deserves attention.

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[1] Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. Also Heather Eaton, Beatitudes for the Earth: A Feminist Approach to Ecological Ethics, Ottawa, Novalis, 2005.

[2] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.  

[3] I am placing this phrase in quotation marks to indicate that the reference it not just to the sub-molecular dimension.  A human being is an enormously complex organism.

[4] Lynn Margulis, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, Berkeley, University of California, 1997; James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, New York, Oxford University Press, 1979.

[5] Berry Thomas, The Dream of the Earth, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1988; The Great Work, New York (U.S.A), Bell Tower, 2000.

[6] There is no scientific consensus on the use of the word life in reference to the Earth itself.  Nevertheless, the use of this word in an restricted analogical sense seems to me at the very least extremely appropriate.  We are far from understanding what life is.

[7] Karl Rahner, "Angels," in Karl Rahner, ed., Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi, New York, The Seabury Press, 1975.

[8] See Heather Eaton’s effort in this sense, op. cit.

[9] Reproduced in Gloria Durka, Praying with Hildegard of Bingen, Winona, MN, Saint Mary’s Press, 1991.

[10] I am thinking especially of the mystic traditions like Sufism in Islam.

[11] This is my own summary of a much longer story to be found in Basil Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1976, p. 12-20. There are similar Aymara stories in the appendices of Fernando Montes Ruiz, La Mascara de Piedra, Bolivia, Editorial Quipus, 1984.

[12] “The Andean ethic does not separate the human from the natural. This holistic and cosmic Andean vision is a wonderful contribution to survival on the Earth. Furthermore, the masculine and feminine elements interact in favour of life on mother earth.” Diego Irarrazaval, “Eco-human rights,” Sacred Earth, Sacred Community, Toronto, Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative, 2000, p. 273.