THE NON-NEGOTIABLE IN THE CRISIS: PERSONAL COMMITMENT

We are in the depths of an environmental crisis understood by very few of us. Nevertheless, we need to act now. We need to be personally involved, not passive victims, not unthinking contributors to the on-coming catastrophe.

The most obvious response is one of helplessness. What can one person do in light of the magnitude of the problem? Hope in a loving God demands that we do all that we can and trust in God for the rest. We are never alone in the struggle for life and justice and freedom.

Only transformation of consciousness will deliver us from our ignorance. It will challenge the myths of the advertising industry. It will surface gospel values to contest the seemingly unending call to self-indulgence and self-absorption. It will raise questions about a reasonable use of energy and attack the gross waste that is the foundation of the indulgent lifestyle that is proposed to us as the gateway to happiness. We need to see the world differently. There is no greater prism for real truth, beauty and justice than the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we accept the call to love God and our neighbor, that surely will include saving our world from its ongoing destruction. It will mean examining our lifestyle. It will mean sacrifice as Jesus tell us so often: take up your cross and follow me, lose your life, serve your brothers and sisters, sell your goods and give to the poor, etc.

We are now caught up in a world-view created by the profit motive. The potential for further profits is enhanced by our unchallenged ignorance. Our consumer-driven world defines our needs and is relentless in creating our desires. It tells us what we need to be happy. But it actually drives us to anxiety and unhappiness as we live in fear that we do not have the latest of … whatever. It even implies immortality by suggesting the possibility of unending youth through purchases of the right food and drink, the correct well-being programs of mind and body, the latest fashion designs, the proper medicines and travel plans.

So, what can we do to overcome a sense of helplessness as we become aware of how deeply we are personally entrapped in the environmental crisis? First and foremost, let the gospel values help us see that we are called to simplicity in our daily living. Nurtured by an ever-increasing awareness of God’s gracious presence in all of creation, we should cultivate a mindfulness of the beauty and wonder of this gift and the horror of devastation that our lifestyle supports. We also need to open our hearts to the poor in our midst. They are the ones most often victimized by our continual neglect of the environment. Pope Francis has this to offer: “Happiness means learning how to limit some needs which only diminish us and being open to many different possibilities which life can offer.” (Laudato Si #223)

Our growing recognition of the depth of sin and injustice in this area will encourage us to act, to begin the changes on the long road to freedom and ecological justice.

In 2000, at a meeting in The Hague, the Earth Charter was developed and proclaimed. It was a significant step in the expanding quest to prod humankind’s action to avoid the oncoming disaster. The Earth Charter addressed the issue of personal change and commitment. “As never before in history, common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning… Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.”

Such a beautiful vision needs to become reality by the little things at our disposal. We can make riding the bus an equal option with using our car. We can choose a sweater rather than more heat, less food rather than a diet program. We can become aware that every single purchase is a moral decision for or against true concern for the environment. Creating a passionate concern for recycling, especially of plastic and paper, realizing the implications of energy consumption in heat, light and electrical consumption of all sorts of things, and nurturing and planting trees and plants can become the norms of our new lifestyle. These changes are a beginning. Deeper personal involvement will open up further options. In an essay called “Think Little,” Wendell Berry summarized the lifestyle issue with these words: “If you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, learn to quit being an environmental parasite.”

This more intense engagement will only be sustained by a spirituality that is supported by the growth of virtues. Pope Francis says in Laudato Si: “Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to the life of virtue; it is not an optional or secondary aspect of our Christian experience.” (#217)

Personal transformation will evolve from addressing God’s call to cherish the gift of creation along with love for our brothers and sisters. It will reveal new horizons of action. While the response begins with the individual, it must lead to common action with others. Social problems demand a community response. There must be networks of groups. The lasting change foreseen in ecological conversion will lead to community conversion and community action.

However, true community conversion will always find its strength and purpose in the enlightenment and commitment of the individuals that make up the community.

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A SPIRITUALITY FOR THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

“Holiness is everywhere in Creation, it is as common as the raindrops and leaves and blades of grass, but it does not sound like a newspaper.” Wendell Berry

Down through Christian history, various spiritualities have evolved. Many have been rooted in specific religious traditions such as the Benedictines, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Jesuits. Other spiritualities have arisen to meet specific historical needs such as the twelve step program of Alcohol Anonymous in our time.,

All spiritualities aim to facilitate our experience of God. They emphasize prayer, spiritual practices, the development of virtues, a transformed consciousness, and conversion at ever-increasing levels of growth.

In all spiritualities, the basic commitment starts with the heart’s search for God. We might call it happiness or the yearning for meaning. Whatever we call it, it is more than we have now. There is an emptiness we want to fill. This pursuit eventually leads to prayer.

Prayer brings us a better understanding of God’s word and a desire to embrace God’s will. This leads to an initial enlightenment. There is a change of values but also a negative reaction that resists the mounting demands for personal sacrifice. This struggle leads to a new dimension: self-knowledge. We begin to see a brokenness within ourselves and in all reality. In one parable, Jesus called it the weeds and the wheat.

Continuing faithfulness, in spite of the struggle, brings more clarity to the search for God. Likewise, personal change leads to more authenticity and purification. Ultimately, this spiritual process makes God’s goal clear. We are called to love and freedom.

The implementation of this spiritual vision has consequences in our life. We begin to buy into the upside-down world of the gospel where the first are last: to become the servant, to forgive our enemy, to take up the cross and so much more on the road to Jerusalem.

One of the gifts of Carmelite spirituality is to explain how the spiritual journey is a personal purification and transformation that leads us to the deepest possible experience of God in this life. The individual, always with God’s grace, achieves a unique harmony of the sensual and the spiritual. Not only does the person see himself or herself in God as in a mirror, they also see all things in God. (IC 7.2.8) This experience of seeing God in all things is an essential feature of any evolving ecological spirituality.

Over the centuries, the excellence of Carmelite spirituality, along with most spiritualities, became distorted. There was an excessive, and almost exclusive, emphasis on the personal component. There was a withdrawal from the world. The earthly struggles of ordinary life, and especially political life, were trivialized. This included a sweeping neglect of environmental issues.

Vatican II offered a singular challenge to this privatized deformity of the spiritual life. In the document, The Church in the Modern World, we have the clarion call for new horizons: “A new humanism is emerging in the world in which man and woman are primarily defined by their responsibility toward their brothers and sisters and toward history."

The post Vatican II Church took up the challenge of integrating the personal and social in our spiritualities. Today, any mature spirituality will treat the body and all of nature with dignity. This has led to a new appreciation of the historical and incarnational elements of spirituality. This more holistic attitude has been growing in significance in most spiritualities for the past fifty years. The social dimension of the gospel, the call for justice and peace, a new concern for the poor and marginalized, have had a growing prominence along with the personal dimension in guiding our search for God.

Now, Laudato Si is encouraging an ecological dimension for our spirituality. We are invited to see God reflected in every creature. God had put forth a plan in the natural world that Jesus celebrated in the Gospels. Pope Francis exhorts us:

“How then can we possibly mistreat them (the birds of the air: Lk 12: 6) or cause them harm: I ask all Christians to recognize and to live fully this dimension of their conversion. May the power and the light of the grace we have received also be evident in our relationship to other creatures and to the world around us. In this way, we will help nurture that sublime fraternity with all creation which Saint Francis of Assisi so radiantly embodied.” #221

Francis the Pope and Francis the saint are calling us out of a self-centered approach to creation. In today’s too common model, the natural world is seen solely as a resource for humankind’s convenience and comfort and, most often, the ever-demanding quest for profit. This view of creation is totally unrelated to any spiritual experience in the exploration for God. Creatures simply become objects disconnected from a distant divine Presence.

Moving on from this static attitude toward creation is the first step toward an authentic ecological spirituality. This transformation of consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of any long-range solution to the environmental crisis. We must cultivate a sense of mystery and beauty about creation in openness to God’s presence in all, even the smallest speck of dust.

This new awareness will help us to recognize our common origin, our mutual belonging now and in a future to be shared with everyone and everything. We need to see that creation was not some final divine declaration in some far-off past. It is, in fact, an on-going and dynamic reality in which all beings participate in the very Being of God. In creation, we experience God’s presence in every single creature. Creation offers us a pathway into the hidden Being of God.

The next step in this new development of spirituality is a new lifestyle. This will only happen by an expanding self-knowledge that exposes our enslavement to the consumer economy that engulfs us.

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FROM A STONY HEART TO A NATURAL HEART

I 

As we begin the search for a spiritual path to lead us out of the ecological dilemma, there are two points we need to highlight. These ideas must be at the beginning of our search, in the middle and at the end. It is difficult to overstate their importance.

The first is that we are not alone in the struggle. God is with us no matter how overwhelming the challenge may appear. In fact, our poverty and seeming helplessness are extremely helpful in revealing our dependence on God.

Therefore, we need to realize that our small personal efforts are important. They benefit society in a way most often hidden from us. Likewise, they lift our self-esteem, encouraging us to stay in the battle.

Secondly, most of us will need to change our understanding about creation. The most common view of creation is that God created the world and it was good and that was it.

I am going to present another way of experiencing creation it this text. In this view, creation is not static but dynamic. Creation is filled with God’s presence. In Laudato Si, (#8 & 9), The Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, speaks eloquently on this dynamic presence of God in creation. He states that violation of the natural environment is a direct affront to God. Stripping of forests and polluting the rivers, lakes and oceans are not neutral acts but direct violations of God’s presence and plan for creation. Bartholomew pleads for responsible participation with nature, not the violent denial of responsibility. This sin against the natural world is a sin against both ourselves and God.

II

Creation as God’s Presence:
A Story of Conversion

All experiences of conversion start out with a prevailing blindness. Then there is a challenge that the individual rejects. This first encounter leads to a series of gradual insights that cut into the deeply impaired vision. This is the beginning of a transformation of consciousness which eventually eradicates the error of our ways. This usually is a process over a long period of time.

In my case, I was totally unaware that I was operating from the static view of creation which denied God’s dynamic presence in union with both humanity and the material world. I was operating with a mentality that centered on the almost exclusive importance of the human venture.

My crisis was the building of the Obama Presidential Library in my neighborhood. Its progress had been delayed by protesters trying to protect the parkland and various environmental issues. I was one hundred percent against this view. I wanted to move ahead as quickly as possible.

In reality, the project’s impact on our local environment had plenty to be concerned about. However, my blindness to creation—recognized as the dynamic presence of God—blocked me from seeing any complexity. This same unbending and self-absorbed mindset has been the story behind the ever-escalating destruction our natural world. I had been a blind, unthinking supporter of the human-created chaos that has caused the doomsday onslaught of our environmental crisis.

This false mentality operates as if everything exists solely for humankind’s benefit. Nothing is more important for “progress” than human desires, ambitions, and plans. This attitude removes God from the center and sets up the aspirations of some men and women as the singular beneficiaries of God’s creation. Sooner than later, this attitude leads us to support a heartless plundering of the divine and gracious gift of creation.

My conversion from the static to the dynamic presence of God in creation began with Laudato Si. This opening freed me to read two truly prophetic authors, Sr. Connie FitzGerald and Wendell Berry. With the initial stages of an open heart, their material was both frightening and exhilarating.

Their message was spectacular in its simplicity. We are one with all of creation and each other in God. All creatures speak eloquently of the divine glory if we bring an open and faithful heart to the encounter.

This initial grasp of unity with nature and one another ushered me into an incredible new horizon. Slowly, I am beginning to see my connection with all of nature, with the beauty of the skies, the wonder of the seasons, the marvel of a tree and the incredible expanse of the animal world. The flowers and the farms, the sunrises and the snowstorms are all present to me in a new way. They are a mirror and an invitation into the presence of God. This is a new world for a diehard White Sox fan.

No longer is creation the ancient act of an awesome but distant God. Now I am beginning to understand and embrace the unity with God in all of his creatures both human and otherwise. Now I see that creation is God’s presence to all creatures. My spiritual growth is just at the beginning. However, it is so much better than my blind ignorance of the devastation of God’s gift of creation.

This is the beginning of a journey. Ezekiel describes it well. “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ez 36:25-26)

This journey to acceptance of the wonder of the unity and dynamism of God’s presence in all persons and all the natural world, offers us passage out of the dilemma of our environmental crisis. We need to start by putting God at the center. For that we need a spirituality.

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THE NEED FOR A SPIRITUALITY

Recently, I read an item that really caught my attention. It was an insight that is truly at the heart of the ever-growing environmental crisis, a dilemma that endangers the future of the human race. It seems like a simple statement on the face of it: Humankind is not only detached from nature, it is above nature.

This assertion is a violation of God’s plan. God sees all creation and humanity as one reality, manifesting and celebrating God’s presence in all of reality, both humankind and all of creation. There needs to be harmony not domination between the human venture and nature. The statement in question suggests a separation that sees nature as primarily a resource for the profit and support of our economic wellbeing.

De facto, the separation is the foundation of our modern economy. The growing pattern of climate change and its escalating destructive forces flow from this gross distortion of God’s plan for harmony and unity. One of countless examples is the stripping of the forests in the Amazon. This is profitable for a few but affects the breathing of everyone in the world. This separation generates the patterns of production and consumption that are the underpinning of the way we live and the way we are destroying God’s gift of creation.

Placing humanity over and above nature, fosters a sense of domination over all the elements of creation. In this approach to God’s creation, all of nature has one main purpose: to be used to create a comfortable and profitable life for the beneficiaries of the human economy.

This mindset drives an outlook that has made our air a threat to human life as does the continuing destruction of the land and seas along with the constant elimination of species of animals. The stripping of forests and purging of wetlands and making our sources of water an ever-expanding garbage dump, along with the prime culprit, air pollution, are all destroying our environment.

We have slowly become aware of the danger. The most central element of the crisis is this. It does not depend on our awareness but on reality. It does not matter if propaganda encourages us to deny the problem. The only thing that matters is what we do. Finally, after a long period of denial, we are making some changes. These changes always seem to involve a minimum of personal sacrifice. If we have sun panels on our roof or windfarms in the countryside, it is all to the good. It is a win-win situation. We attack the problem, but there is no personal cost. This is the same with the growing market for electric cars. Most changes in our production system have been at negligible cost to individuals. We have made efforts to reduce energy in household products and other everyday items. These patterns will continue to grow as long as the price tag to the individual is insignificant.

If the present pattern continues, the consequences of the inevitable doomsday conclusions will be at our doorstep, if not through the front door, before we face the reality that we have to change. Our lifestyle of excessive consumption and its consequent waste is a dominant driving force of the environmental crisis. Pope Francis in his encyclical on this crisis, Laudato Si, has joined his voice to a chorus of wisdom spokespersons around the world. The message is clear. The game-changer is to modify our lifestyle to be more responsible and respectful of the gift of God’s creation.

Right now, comfort and convenience are the coin of the domain. It seems likely the destructive consequences of the crisis will prevail until personal sacrifice becomes the norm. We are not going to legislate our way out of the crisis. Nor does technology have a magical exit for us. We will have to live our way into a compatible union with God’s plan for God’s creation.

I find it helpful to contrast the present universal danger with the circumstances of World War II when I was a child. I was six years old when Pearl Harbor triggered our national involvement. Almost immediately, there was a call for personal sacrifice on the part of everybody. There was a draft for the young men to be called into the service. There was rationing of food and gas along with a de facto shortage of most other items, especially clothes. People were encouraged to start “Victory Gardens” to supplement the food supply.

I remember one effort, in particular. Every two or three months, there was a neighborhood rally. After patriotic speeches and music, most of the participants, both children and adults, went out into the neighborhood, even door to door, to collect any form of scrap iron and rubber to support the war effort.

I point out this World War II experience to contrast it to the present day situation. Today, it is political suicide to suggest any personal sacrifice. Yet, we are in a much more dangerous situation. The very existence of human life is in peril. Covid-19, with its mask and vaccine controversies as a distraction, is truly a minor issue if we are going to be open and honest about the depth of the environmental crisis. Yet, the majority stand rigid in opposition to personal sacrifice and change.

This is why Laudato Si is so emphatic in asking us to recognize that at its root, the crisis is a spiritual problem. We need a spirituality that will help free us from enslavement to a devastating consumer lifestyle. This will lead to a more intelligent, committed openness to face the threatening reality in front of us.

The issue is sin. It is sin to fail to recognize God’s dominion. It is the sin of blasphemy that treats God’s creation as if it were only a tool to satisfy human greed. It is sin that generates the most fundamental disrespect and neglect of human life. All of these are straight-out denial of God’s plan for all humankind and God’s creation. Nature is there for the glory of God not for our convenience. The fundamental sin is placing ourselves at the center with God as our servant.

We indeed need a spirituality that frees us to see with both the eyes of the heart and the eyes of the mind. We need a spirituality that encourages us to create the virtues to let us live responsibly with what we need, not with the desires coming from a multibillion dollar advertising industry that engulfs our daily life with falsehoods. These are the first steps in a journey to help all of humankind live a productive, healthy and responsible life that respects and nourishes God’s gift of creation.

The following blogs in this series will offer an outline of this ecological spirituality.

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