by Sr. Mimi Maloney, preached at Earth Ministry’s 16th Annual Celebration of St. Francis: Creation-Care Sermon Contest on October 4, 2008. Winner of the clergy category.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about the Care of Creation as a Moral and Ethical Imperative. I will be speaking from the Catholic tradition but really, the moral and ethical imperative to care for creation comes to us from all spiritual traditions.
I’d like to begin by saying that the beauty and grandeur of the natural world touches each and every one of us and is a constant source of wonder and awe. The Sacred Texts of all spiritual traditions speak constantly of the stupendous magnificence of the Universe and Earth: of its overwhelming beauty and elegance, of its vast and diverse array of creatures, and of the incredibly complex and interdependent weave of its ecosystems. In the Jewish Christian Scriptures, God is first described as the Creator who, as Creation unfolded, “Saw everything that He had made and found it to be very good.” And in the Book of Sirach we find this beautiful passage:
Now will I recall God’s works: As the rising sun is clear to all, so the glory of the Lord fills all his works. How beautiful are all your works! To meet each need each creature is preserved. All of them differ one from another, yet none of them has God made in vain. For each in turn, as it comes, is good; can anyone ever see enough of their splendour? Sirach 42: 15-25
Clearly, for our ancestors and for indigenous peoples, the natural world was alive and permeated with spirit. They lived in a sacred universe and virtually every notion they had about God or about that Mystery that is at the heart of everything that exists, was awakened and shaped by this beautiful world in which they lived. They experienced Earth as the Mother of all beings and habitually spoke of Mother Nature and Mother Earth. For them the Creator Spirit was not seen as separate from the natural world or outside of the natural world. Rather, the Creator Spirit resided in the world and was present in and through all created things. The natural world was a spiritual reality for them. It was their primary revelatory environment – their primary Temple – because all of their experiences were set in the matrix of Creation. If they had a vivid and keen sense of the divine, it was only because they lived in the midst of such stupendous beauty and awesome magnificence. Thomas Berry, cultural historian, eco-logian and Passionist priest, often says that if we lived on the moon our spiritual sensitivities, our notions about God and the sacred, would reflect that arid and barren lunar landscape – because that would be the only world we knew.
This notion that we live in a Sacred Universe permeated with spirit and revelatory of that Mystery we Christians call God, seems like a strange one to mainstream western culture however, because we have been raised in a secular landscape and we have been taught to identify the sacred primarily with our churches and cathedrals, but we have not been taught to identify the sacred with the natural world. In fact for most of us today, at least in the west, the natural world has come to be viewed purely as a material reality – with no intrinsic value and no inherent worth. Its’ value for us is simply utilitarian – its’ worth coming only from the value we humans give it. Nature’s bounty and abundance are seen solely as commodities, as natural resources that can be bought and sold, extracted and exploited, used and even abused if we humans so desire. And it is this mentality that has brought us to the desperate state we find our world in, as this quote from the Pastoral letter on The Christian Ecological Imperative that The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote, indicates:
God’s glory is revealed in the natural world, yet we humans are presently destroying creation. In this light, the ecological crisis is also a profoundly religious crisis. In destroying creation we are limiting our ability to know and love God. The ecological crisis is a moral issue and the responsibility of everyone. “Care for the environment is not an option. In the Christian perspective, it forms an integral part of our personal life and of life in society…
A second insight that comes to us from our spiritual traditions and from indigenous peoples as well, is this notion that there is only One Earth Community, there is only One Sacred Community and that is The Community of Life, and virtually everything that exists is part of this interconnected, interdependent, interrelated and living system.
When we look at the natural world this web of interconnection is everywhere and if we want to unlock the meaning of life in our world, we must try to understand this interdependent and interconnected way in which all of reality is interlinked. John Muir once wrote that when you try to take out anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe. When we eliminate any one layer or dimension of reality – or when we destroy any one life-form or life support system, say through global warming or pollution, then all the others are threatened – including the human community. Humans do not – humans cannot – exist apart from this total community of life because, even though everything is different, we are not separate. We form one, living, evolving, interconnected and interdependent system – One Sacred Community. As Thomas Berry so eloquently says, “The human community and the earth community together form a single, sacred community, and we will go into the future together as a single sacred community or we will both perish in the desert.”
The last point I’d like to make is that for people of faith, The Care of Creation is also a matter of justice. It is a matter of ecological justice as well as social and economic justice because, as we all know, the environmental degradation that comes from say, global warming and climate change, always disproportionately affects adversely, the poorest and most vulnerable people in our local communities and throughout the world – and they are the least able to deal with it. As Pope John Paul II so eloquently said, “For people of faith, the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor is one.”
When we humans cause species to become extinct and destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation, when we cause changes to Earth’s climate through global warming and climate change, and when we degrade the integrity of Earth by contaminating her waters, land, air and life with poisonous substances, we diminish the vitality and compromise the integrity of this One, Sacred Community of Life on Earth. These are of course environmental issues, but they are not just environmental issues. Fundamentally, at their core, they are moral and ethical issues and the responsibility of every single one of us.
I’d like to conclude my remarks with two very pertinent quotes.
The first is taken from a Pastoral Letter that the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote on The Christian Ecological Imperative that I referred to earlier: “Throughout history, every person’s and every people’s religious beliefs have conditioned their relationship to their environment. Some Christians have developed a very keen ecological sense, but many others have misinterpreted the Genesis account to subdue the earth and establish dominion over all living things. For this reason Pope John Paul II emphasized the need for “ecological conversion,” because he recognized that many Christian churches have not yet come to grips with how aspects of Christian theology and tradition are implicated in the Western capitalist development model, which has led to so much ecological ruin in our day.”
The second quote comes from an essay that Lynn White Jr. wrote some years ago entitled The Historical Roots of the Environmental Crisis – an essay that created quite a stir and was not very well received in many Christian circles at the time. He wrote: “What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis, until we find a new religion or rethink our old one.”
I do not think we need to find a new religion, but we do need to rethink our old one, by re-discovering and re–claiming our rich Mystical, Creation-Centered Spiritual Tradition – a spiritual tradition in which – for those who know how to see – everything in nature is a face of God, everything in nature is sacred and revelatory and therefore, worthy of the utmost reverence, respect, protection and care.
Thank you!