Christian Response-Ability While Facing Global Warming
and Pursuing Pax Gaia
March 21st, 2007
Maureen Wild, SC
It’s an honour for me to be with you here at St. John the Divine – and especially on this first day of spring. In the midst of the Christian calendar of Lent approaching Easter, we stop to celebrate what Earth’s calendar is saying to us: Spring is with us. So, Happy Spring to each of you!
As I prepared this talk, I wondered how I might focus it so that it connects or parallels, in some way, with the messages of Spring … and the call to stop for awhile today to ponder and celebrate those revelations of divine goodness, and the instructions that Earth writes each moment, each day. So, I will draw on metaphors that the season of spring brings to our awareness as we reflect on the particular theme of ‘Christian Response-ability while facing Global Warming and Pursuing Pax Gaia.’
And as promised in the description of this talk, I will also draw from the wisdom of Thomas Berry - Catholic monk, geologian, wisdom figure for many, and inspiration to me for twenty years. He is now 92. And his most current published work – in 2006 - is entitled Evening Thoughts – Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community. I will also draw from other sources of inspiration and wisdom - human and more-than-human.
On Sunday, I was walking with my dog, Belle, along the wooded edge of Dolphin Lake in the Nanoose Bay area. On the lakeside of the trail, hundreds of frogs were in full chorus. And on the forest side of the trail, the Song Sparrow and other diverse songbirds offered their melodies. Even an eagle – perched high in a fir tree just above its huge nest - was sounding its shrill-like cry and a second eagle appeared within minutes. I supposed that they were mates and their mating season had begun. The air was filled with croaking and singing, soundings and sightings. Further up on the trail was a garter snake that had come out of its period of hibernation.
And then there are the sea lions that I’ve been noticing in the waters of Georgia Strait near my home. It’s their barking and grunting that calls one’s attention. At this time of year they migrate in pursuit of the Pacific Herring.
Coming out of the winter sleep, hibernation, the dormancy, other winter habitats, … into the longer light and warming days … to sing or croak, to screech or bark or grunt or slither … to feed on other solar-dependent life (in essence to feed off the Sun), to attract a mate, to join as one body, and to become pregnant again with new life. All these are wonderful metaphors for us in this historical moment.
We might ask ourselves, how are we coming out of the dark and through the ‘winter sleep’ of our time, out of a state of dormancy – personally and collectively as a species?
What sounds and sights are drawing our attention – bioregionally, nationally and globally?
Are we waking up to the warming days – and to a warming Earth? What response of the collective soul is being evoked?
And, what new song lives within each of us in this season of our life? In this season of Earth’s unfolding story?
What voice are you finding within yourself to say ‘YES!’ to life … to seek out or attract kindred spirits, to unite your energy with theirs, to co-create something new – so that life can continue to celebrate itself all over again?
The audible signs of spring in our surroundings bring encouragement to follow these urgings – these instincts for survival.
And it is also the silent ones of spring that attract my attention - perhaps even in a deeper way. Sunday was the day that I noticed the first rush of pink in the salmonberry bush. Seeing this five-petal bright pink blossom come out of a spindly brown, ordinary branch is always extraordinary for me – an attention-grabber, a moment of ‘wow!’
Flowers can be our teachers at this historical time, too. Actually, their story offers us a lot of inspiration and encouragement.
In his book, The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley, dedicates a chapter to “How Flowers Changed the World.” After millions of years of hesitant evolutionary groping, flowers exploded upon the earth with what Eisley describes as truly revolutionary power. This ‘quiet revolution’ began bursting forth at the close of the Age of Reptiles. Before the coming of the flowering plants, our own ancestral stock – the warm-blooded mammals – consisted of a few mousy little creatures hidden in trees and underbrush. Do you remember those days? These creatures gave no evidence of remarkable talents, remaining lost in the shadow of mighty reptiles for millions of years.
It was the Age of the Flowers that changed the face of the planet. As Eiseley expressed it, the weight of a petal has changed the face of the world. The Earth began to glow here and there with strange colours, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs.
Our own evolution (along with the evolution of all other mammals, birds and insects) was intricately dependent on the store of energy that flowers would bring us … their energy transformed into seed and fruit. If we could see the story like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one would see our human need and quest for energy adapting as the forms of that energy changed. We consumed seeds and fruits, and other animals who took their energy from the grass. We adapted to the environment and we also began to control the environment.
We now know that over eons of time, during this emerging Age of the Human, we have discovered, captured and used various forms of energy that have enabled us to build homes, stay warm, have nourishment, mobility (even to travelling in space), communication (even via satellite systems), all sorts of gadgets and conveniences and toys and weapons.
And now, we face global warming because - within a blip in evolutionary time - we have, in short, imperilled the natural world by our inadequate worldviews and consequent misguided behaviours. Particularly, we have put more carbon into the atmosphere than Earth’s life systems can absorb because we had a perspective that the Earth’s atmosphere was limitless and the human economic drive took precedence. We have done this over a little more than a century by burning fossil fuels in an unsustainable way. And for a few hundred years, we have been chipping away at the lungs of the planet - the great forests that absorb CO2 – because we viewed them solely for their ‘use’ to the human economic enterprise. We have degraded the living systems of our home, because we lost our sense of a deep, intimate connection as part of this living system, as part of a sacred Earth. Somehow, we came to believe that we were separate and dominant over the creation and that it held no sacred dimension.
A million years ago, flowers began to change the face of the planet in quite an amazingly stunning and powerful way? Without them, we would not be here. In a little more than one hundred years – within what could be considered another kind of revolution - humans have changed the face of the planet in a shockingly powerful, and destructive way. The Good News is that we are becoming aware of it. We are waking from our winter sleep to a new kind of ‘warming’ days.’ As you know, alarms of urgency have been rippling through the scientific community for more than a decade, media reports bring us story after story of the havoc wrought by weather disturbances across the planet, politicians are now feeling the heat as they debate how to address the growing public pressure around climate change, universities are providing more environmental education, even some corporations are beginning to challenge themselves to address their carbon imprint.
Thomas Berry’s way of seeing this is that we have, over time, fallen asleep into a kind of deep cultural pathology characterized by a radical discontinuity of the human from the more-than-human community. A disconnection. He writes:
“That we should have caused such damage to the entire functioning of the planet in all its major biosystems is obviously the consequence of a deep cultural pathology. Just as clearly, there is need for a deep cultural therapy if we are to proceed into the future with some assurance that we will not continue to lapse into the same pathology at a later date. We still do hot have such a critique of the past or a therapy for the present. Yet even without such evaluation of our current situation, we must proceed with the task of creating a viable future for ourselves and for the entire Earth community.”
He urges us to rediscover an emotional, spiritual connection with the Earth, so that we come to know it again as sacred. Over and over he reminds us that the Earth is primary and the human is derivative, and not the other way around. We need to shift this ingrained way of thinking that the human was primary and the Earth derivative. We need to move from this anthropocentric worldview into a biocentric worldview.
And with this, Berry reminds us that the universe and Earth community is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. While we may have an intellectual understanding of our interconnectedness, Berry suggests that our cultural shaping has dulled our sensitivities, and robbed us of any emotional and visceral experience of that interconnectedness which we are more likely to have had as small children, but which has been socialised out of us by a highly ‘anthropocentric’ alienating culture. So often I’ve heard him say, “The Earth is sacred. We have to recover that deep feeling. If we don’t get that, then we are truly lost.”
Thomas believes that what is required to wake us up out of our illusions, is a cultural therapy that is not yet created. He says that “two things are needed to guide our judgment and sustain our psychic energies for the challenges ahead: a certain alarm at what is happening at present and a fascination with the future available to us if only we respond creatively to the urgencies of the present.” And he’s realistic when he says that changing the existing situation will require an “awesome amount of determination, a lot of insight and endurance.”
After 9/11 Thomas wrote an essay that reflected the urgent need to embrace a cosmology of comprehensive peace. He held out a vision for Pax Gaia - the Peace of Earth - as the most compelling mission of our time. It is a peace, he says, that transcends Pax Romana (the peace of an empire) and Pax Humana (peace among humans). We are called to the Great Work that engenders Pax Gaia. To this end we must create and foster deep cultural therapies that address the deep cultural pathology of our time that has brought about such ecological diminishment. (Evening Thoughts, 2006).
For about 30 years, Thomas Berry has been a friend and mentor to cosmologist, Brian Swimme, in his own journey of evolving consciousness. Brian states the challenge that we are facing in this way:
“In terms of our impact on the planet, over the last several decades the human species has become something more than one species among many. We’ve become something comparable to the atmosphere or the hydrosphere. We have become planetary. We’ve become a planetary partner to the atmosphere and the biosphere. But we don’t live in institutions that were designed to carry out that larger role. These institutions were designed to deal with problems that are smaller than the entire planet. So our challenge is to give birth to institutions that are shaped by a mind that is planetary, or a mind that is holistic. We’ve given birth to a planetary power but we’ve shaped it with a microphase wisdom. So the challenge right now is to give birth to a macrophase wisdom, a wisdom that is responsible to the entire planet.” (from interview with Andrew Cohen, “What is Enlightenment?” Magazine)
It seems to me that many are awakening to this new self-definition, that we have become, indeed, an influence that is ‘planetary’ in the size of its consequences to our Earth home.
Changing the climate of the planet is one example that is ever before us these days with the news of unprecedented weather disturbances disrupting life in so many places. And we have voices of visionaries, within our nation and our own bioregion, encouraging us to take heart and to take action, and to become engaged in this next chapter of our evolution as a species … and help turn the tide as our species becomes a positive planetary partner to the atmosphere and biosphere. We are being stretched to give birth to a wisdom that is responsible to the entire planet – a ‘macrophase’ wisdom. This is the new ethic that is emerging in our day.
We hear this invitation from well-known Canadians like David Suzuki and Elizabeth May. You have the flyers from the Suzuki Foundation – the nature challenge, and going carbon neutral. [Actually, preparing for this talk helped me to become more aware of how to go carbon neutral when I contacted a friend who volunteers at the Suzuki Foundation. She recommended some websites, and this flyer. As a result, I was able to calculate my own annual carbon footprint, and I learned about purchasing high quality carbon offsets … while also being challenged to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions instead of offsetting them.]
And one bioregional voice is environmental activist, Guy Dauncey. As many of you may know, Guy is the editor of EcoNews and President of the BC Sustainable Energy Association. In listening to an interview with Guy that was broadcast by Shaw Cable a few weeks ago, I sensed that he, too, encourages the growth into such a macrophase wisdom when he talks about how exciting it is, in our time, to be totally engaged in the next energy revolution … and how important it is to take a “brighter’ view. “Why would we think we can’t do that?” he asks. And we can’t afford delay. We have been an indulgent generation. The global warming ‘fingerprint’ is on many aspects of our indulgent ways. But we are becoming smarter and more compassionate, and now we have a great opportunity to be part of the next energy revolution. It’s exciting, he says.
Well just check out the website of the BC Sustainable Energy Association and you’ll catch the excitement: announcements about energy fairs, overview of the latest educational material that can help us change course from global warming, updates on government energy plans, a comprehensive sustainable energy directory, 10 great reasons for using sustainable energy, descriptions of the latest sustainable energy technologies, and so on.
And what response are we noticing from the Christian Churches? What response is underway? The handout that I have prepared for you gives some examples of how Christian Churches worldwide are responding in the face of climate change. It was very encouraging for me to discover this when I was doing a little research for today’s theme. They are drawing from moral and theological foundations for understanding the response-ability of Christian faith in these unique times of planetary crises.
[review these groups]
Perhaps what we are seeing can be compared to “the weight of a petal” that has the potential for a new kind of revolution to unfold. Perhaps the next energy revolution that is unfolding in our historical moment will be just as amazingly stunning and powerful as how flowers have adorned and nourished the life community! May it be so!
We are told in so many ways these days – by visionaries and scientists – that with all other created reality we are part of a single energy event that continues to unfold in space and time. We are inseparably linked. There is a seamlessness to our oneness with all. This sense of one body, one flesh, one energy event unfolding has also been expressed by poets and artists for a very long time. Perhaps this truth is imprinted into the depths of our psychic-spiritual-genetic memory.
I want to share a poem with you. It was written in the 1300’s by Shams Muhammad Hafiz. ‘Hafiz’ we often say. He was a beloved poet of Persia. Imagine Hafiz having a dream of seeing, hearing and experiencing a deep peace for this world that is all one – imagining a great harmony, with this one flesh, as the way forward. It seems his poem came out of such a dream for ‘Pax Gaia.’
(Love Poems from God, p. 159)
I Have Come Into This World to See This
I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height
of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound
I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as
we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way
to even a greater being of soul,
A being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play
with God.
I have come into this world to hear this:
every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in
the Divine’s womb and began spinning from
God’s wish,
every song by wing and fin and hoof,
every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child,
every song of stream and rock,
every song of tool and lyre (lire) and flute,
every song of gold and emerald
and fire,
every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity
to know itself as
God;
for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching -
only imbibing the glorious Sun
will complete us.
I have come into the world to experience this:
men and women so true to love
they would rather die before speaking
an unkind
word,
men and women so true their lives are God’s covenant -
the promise of
hope.
I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men’s hands
even at the height of
their arc of
rage
because we have finally realized
there is just one flesh
we can wound.
And we recall the ‘one flesh’ that is experienced within our own bioregion in this season that we celebrate today. Local naturalist, Briony Penn writes about her experience of this oneness in a tribute to spring.
“Somewhere about six o’clock, as the sun gently collapsed into the sea, I saw a Little Brown Bat dart out from a big fir and scoop up an early moth. The insects were emerging and their predators were following. Bats are quick to come out of their semi-hibernation if it is a warm evening. I think they hear the flip of the herring tails, the grunt of the sea lions and the trill of the sparrow. If the bats made an appearance, then another familiar group was sure to appear. Sure enough, within a few seconds of nightfall, another type of grunt and bark began. It was the chorus of the male Pacific Treefrog, warming up to a deafening climax of croaks to lure the females into the swamp with a splash. Like the sea lions after the herring, they will drown out everything and single-mindedly pursue their rites of spring. And thus my tribute to spring begins in the dark with grunts and splashes, and ends in the dark with grunts and splashes.”
So the blessing of Spring is with us – the grunts and splashes … of listening to the songs that fill the air and of finding our voice and singing our song … the mating rituals in bird friends and swimmers, and our own joining with kindred souls and co-creating what is need at this moment in time.
The blessing of flowers is with us. Like them, may we change the face of the planet with beauty of soul. May our energy unite with the energy of others as we become a planetary energy revolution, motivated by a comprehensive compassion, fostering and sustaining life into the future.
And may deep time reveal that Earth’s human experiment might one day be compared to the ‘weight of a petal that changed the face of the planet’ – softly, gently, beautifully, elegantly turning things around.
