|
___ Article ___________________________________________________________________ Reenlivening The Dying Earth
Even 20 years ago, it was possible to feel unquestioning faith in the resilience of nature. I remember reading about acid rain in the 1980s, and thinking, “well at least the oceans can never be spoiled, whatever we do to the land”. Now of course we have heard about the residues of pesticides found in polar bears; the coke bottles in Antarctica . We know that there is nowhere on the earth that is beyond the reach of our pollutants, and of the changes we have made in the earth's atmosphere. We make up our minds about what is true in the deepest level of our souls. There have been reports in the media about climate change for many years. Until recently it was possible to balance one party against another. Now, there is an overwhelming consensus that the climate has been severely unsettled by the activities of human beings over the last 200 years, although what this will mean precisely is a matter for debate. This consensus of experts has reached the deep layer of feeling within ordinary people, the layer in which they decide what is true. This was confirmed for me when my hairdresser told me she was glad the approaching catastrophes would probably not happen in her lifetime, or her daughter's. I asked what she felt about her granddaughter's life chances, and I told her about William McDonough, the great designer, whose maxim is “designing for the grandchildren.” She was impressed by that, but still found it comforting to think that she won't be around. The events of 2005 contributed a great deal to this acceptance of the reality of climate change as something that will have a profound effect on all of us. Hurricane Katrina—the product of incredibly complex systems of the interconnected currents of warm and cold air and water—showed that we cannot compartmentalise the world. Wherever we are, our weather is shaped by events and human decisions that happen half way round the world. And the Asian Tsunami, although unconnected to climate change, was a vivid demonstration of the flimsiness of human constructions in the face of the devastating forces that can be unleashed by the natural world. So as we start the new century and the new millennium, we are facing up to serious questions about the future of the natural world that sustains us. This is a very new situation. The fundamental attitude of humanity in the modern period is based on a feeling of independence from nature. Descartes expressed this in his famous separation of the world into res cogitans—the “thinking thing” ie the human being, and res extensa, the non-thinking thing, that is, the world. Human beings with their minds are unitary and self-determining. Things in the world are made up of many parts and are determined from without. Descartes had a great problem in explaining how the body can be affected by the mind, if they are of such fundamentally different orders of being. The attitude that he expressed, however, was fundamental to the development of civilisation. From the time of the Renaissance, human beings have increasingly seen nature as something to be subjugated and exploited. The development of ever more powerful technologies, which has accelerated progressively, made this subjugation ever more complete. Now we are facing the realisation that our feeling of domination and independence from nature was in fact an illusion. Our status as dependent creatures is bearing in on us again. Some technological supremacists insist that we will be able to master any disaster that befalls us; however, along with growing scepticism about the ability of technology reliably to deliver on such promises, nobody seriously enjoys the prospect of living in a capsule on a life-support machine. How are we to respond to this? Before asking what we should be thinking and feeling, or what action we should be taking, we might take stock of where we are now. It is very interesting to notice that the reactions of many people mirror the five stages of grieving that a dying patient experiences when informed of their terminal prognosis, which Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross identified. These are: Denial (this isn't happening to me!) Anger (why is this happening to me?) Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...) Depression (I don't care anymore) Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes) If I look back on my reaction to the reports about climate change over the last decades, I have to acknowledge that my attitude was more or less one of denial. It was too frightening to think that the reports might be true, so it was easier to gamble on their being false. Many people feel such despair that they blank out the scale of the problem. There are particular aspects that pierce the defences. Each one of us probably has some area of the natural world about which they feel particularly concerned. For me it is the rainforests. I have never visited a rainforest, but somehow their vital importance as lungs for the world, as stores of healing plants and as a supreme example of the generosity and abundance of nature has impressed itself on me. Occasionally I read a report about how much rainforest is destroyed every day, and often I find myself thinking: I can't think about that, I can't go there. Now that I have started to let the crisis be real for myself, I can easily feel angry about the choices made by former generations that have led to this situation. The stage of bargaining, which Kuebler-Ross describes, perhaps corresponds to our belated attempts to live ecologically, to take the glass to the recycling depot, for example, feeling that if I do this then I don't need to feel it is all my fault. Then there is depression, a feeling of hopelessness. I am not sure how many people have yet achieved a true acceptance of the ecological crisis. It is interesting to find this parallel between stages of grieving and our response to environmental crisis, because it makes it clear that we are responding to a death—the death of a beloved being, of the earth. In fact if we take the parallel exactly, we become aware that we are responding to the death of a part of our own self. This part is our bodies, which belong to the earth. We know that to respond to things that worry us by blanking them out is unhealthy. In our personal lives, we try to look at uncomfortable thoughts, and go to the places that we want to hide from. We know that if we continually push them away, we will reduce our capacity for living fully. It is a great insight of the new wave of thinking about the ecological crisis that our culture cannot be healthy until we own our pain about what we are doing to the natural world, for two reasons. First, only then will we take whatever action is still possible. Second, and perhaps more important, authors such as Joanna Macy point out that we cannot turn in a holistic way to the earth and our responsibilities to it until we ourselves have become whole. We can't be whole until we acknowledge our despair about the destruction of what is dear to us. One of the things that stop us from owning our pain is the feeling that the crisis is so huge we cannot encompass it. And it is indeed true that its roots are very deep—as deep as the roots of our culture. The modern capitalist world is based on the exploitation of natural resources which are transformed through manufacture and traded around the world. Through the transformation and trading, value is created, which is expressed in money, not in goods. The disposal of waste and the replenishment of resources are not included in the picture of value and are not the responsibility of manufacturers. Here I have tried to put in neutral terms the market economic system. When we hear economists talking, we know that they use words in a particular way. However, if we let the words resound as we know them, we come closer to the true situation. Exploitation means abuse. Waste tells us that the process is careless. No responsibility tells us that the process is immoral. If we take something without thinking whether there will be any left for the next person; if we make a quick profit without thought of the mess we make; if we then walk away from the problem, we know that we are acting wrongly. Perhaps it is not surprising that ecologists have called our culture with its rapacity and carelessness a “death culture.” Really to think this through means understanding the implications of our personal life-choices in a way that is often painful. We can review them and find places where we can reduce our cooperation with the death culture; however, we soon realise the futility of thinking we can remove ourselves from it and live a life in which we can fulfil the aims and ideals we feel to be important. And at the end of such reflection, we might arrive at the question, what are we trying to save, and why? There was never a fixed state of the earth, which has been lost through our actions, and which was supposed to be preserved eternally. The earth has always been evolving and developing. How long will it be possible to save the state we know, and why should we use our energy for this? A Christian Perspective In the religious world view, the fact of the dying earth can make us ask why the God of life creates a world which is subject to death—a “dying earth-existence”. In asking this, we take in a far longer perspective than the ecological movement. All the mythologies of the world share a vision of an original paradise, a garden where there is no death. The descent from paradise is a transition into a world where death holds sway. With this transition goes an awakening. We know ourselves that pain makes us conscious; the pain of death makes us most conscious of all. It is only when we give something up that we realise what we have lost. So it seems that for the development of consciousness, a dying earth is necessary. In the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, the younger son experiences in the famine a reflection of his wasteful and destructive path. The experience of being close to death makes him wake up to his situation, and decide to be a contributor to the world of his father, from which he arrogantly took his share of the paternal “substance”. The father's reaction of extravagant welcome shows that the son's near-death experience has made him into a person. The path to true personhood lies through destruction. From a spiritual perspective we can see our present situation as the latest scene in the tremendously risky yet creative drama that started with the Fall of Man. The illusion of freedom from the world, even from the body; the ruthless exploitation of the substance given to us—all this has created the culture in which humanity can come to maturity. After receiving baptism in the Jordan , which made a ritual of the process of dying and coming to consciousness, the crowds asked John “what then must we do?” We are in the midst of a kind of humanity-wide baptism. We have seen how the awareness brought about by the ecological movement can help us. We can learn to think ever-more inclusively. Our pain about the earth can be a good guide. If we find ourselves shrinking from some image of the destruction, or of the consequences of something we are doing, we might develop the habit of looking particularly closely. We can cooperate with the efforts to change the “death culture” wherever we can. However, the Christian task goes further than avoiding destruction, and than confronting what we fear, however vital these activities may be. It is summed up in some famous words of St. Paul . They present the picture of the “dying earth”, and its counterpart: resurrection. This begins in the “sons of God”—that is, human beings who have achieved their divine destination, and continues with their work to liberate creation from the bondage of transitory beng—of death. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to transitory being, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in the travail of delivery until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8: 19-23) It is remarkable that this aspect of Christ's healing work, the salvation of the earth, received hardly any attention in the first 20 centuries of the Christian church. Initially, Christians saw salvation in terms of Christ's struggle with the adversary forces. Later, images of the restoration of human beings' relationship with God became central—the ideas of justification and “penal substitution”. Most recently, from the 19th century, salvation came to be seen as a more internal, personal matter: Christ lived a perfect human life which could inspire human beings to follow him. It is only from the 20th century that attention has begun to be focussed on what is usually called the “cosmic” Christ—cosmic here meaning in and of the world. However, much of the emphasis here has been on the creation, not on the resurrection. What then does it mean that the earth is to be reenlivened through human beings — to be released from its bondage to futility? It means far more than conserving nature. As those who are on the side of life, we will of course seek not to accelerate the dying of the earth. But reenlivening is more than conserving, or indeed recycling. It means bringing what has died to new life: to resurrection. And it is no coincidence that human beings, the heirs of freedom, the main actors in the risky drama of the dying earth, are the only ones who can bring new life to the earth. The Hassidic Jews believed that by our handling the earth with reverence and love, we release the forces that are trapped within matter—that sparks of the divine light can be freed to fly up to God again. We can experience something of this by noticing the difference it makes when our eyes are opened for the wealth of what we experience, for instance on a walk through a summer meadow with a friend ho can show us how the different plants grow, where the water table is high or low, and so on. In seeing the world, we release the beings that have been trapped in too solid form in the dying earth. In taking earthly substance and transforming it into art, we also come close to the mystery of reenlivening. In the December-February issue of Perspectives [1] this year, Deborah Ravetz wrote about the artist Dominique Mazeaud and her project to make exhibitions from garbage found in the Rio Grande River. In her diary, Mazeaud describes how her attitude gradually changed from a rather self-righteous environmentalism to something far more prayerful: "All alone in the river, I pray and pick up, pick up and pray. Who can I really talk to about what I see? I feel the pain quietly, knowing that I too must have been unconscious at one time". A friend compares Mazeaud's project with the story of Isis who must gather together the dismembered pieces of her murdered husband's body in order to bring him back to life. What is important about the project is that it springs out of empathy with the earth. The longer Mazeaud continued with it, the more people she met and the more joined her in praying and gathering together the garbage so unconsciously thrown into the water. [2] Here, the work of a sincerely seeking artist becomes takes on a mythical, sacramental quality. Of course it is worthwhile removing the unloved refuse of human beings from the river, from a purely physical, environmental point of view. The action has a far deeper significance than that. It becomes a prophetic enactment of recreation, of the resurrection of the earth. In the sacramental life itself, the body of the earth is permeated by the resurrection body. The substances of bread and wine stand for all earthly substance. When they are elevated and taken into the life of Christ, with them a part of the earth is brought to new life. When the congregation goes out into the world after having received communion, they bear the resurrected earth within them. We can imagine their footsteps leading away from the church, imprinting the ground with what they have received. Such an image makes it possible for us to reach the 5th stage of the grieving process, which Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross described: acceptance. This is no passive resignation; rather, we can accept the reality of the situation without flinching because we see its place in the development of the world. We see too where we can help to redeem it, letting its deeper meaning shine forth. We can accept the reality of the dying earth, because we know that we are engaged in its re-enlivening. Tom Ravetz [1] Ravetz, Deborah. Article in Perspectives, Dec. 2005 - Feb. 2006 issue. _________________________________________________________________________________________________
|