Eco-Spirituality

Eco-Spirituality

 

     Eco-spirituality is a spiritual view of—and context for—our relationship with the universe and the earth. It has the potential to transcend boundaries between spiritual traditions and also between science and spirituality. On a personal level, it can foster a deep sense of belonging to the universe and the earth and a deep sense of participation in the unfolding mystery of this universe. Lived, it leads to sustained actions on earth's behalf. It is now self-evident to anyone who looks out and observes the environmental conditions at our doorstep that this earth is in trouble. The conventional spirituality of the churches and of most historic religions is tied to models of life and interpretations of the world (world views) that no longer suit contemporary sensitivity. They often leave the universe, nature, and daily life outside the realm of spiritual experience. Everything is centered on human beings: salvation is for them; they alone have a future. When have heard of the incarnation of the Word and the spiritualization of the Spirit transfiguring the stars, raising mountains, including plants, involved animals? When have we heard of the resurrection of flora with is plants, flowers, and grasses, and of the fauna with its vertebrate and invertebrate animals and microorganisms, and of the entire cosmos with its galaxies, star systems, and planets? We miss a great deal of the sacramental character of matter and the transparency of all things, because we know little of things or because we disregard the importance of knowing things in order to know God. Thomas Aquinas, who in addition to being a theologian was a learned man, wrote this wonderful observation: "Knowing the nature of things helps destroy errors about God … They are wrong to say: the idea that one has of creatures is not important for faith, provided one thinks correctly about God. An error about creatures results in a false idea of God." It is important that we know our cosmology as well as possible in order to better savor God's grandeur and glory. We need to create the conditions so that spirituality can emerge as something so deeply inside us that we need not even think about it, but we simply live the presence of God in everything and of everything in God.

 

Spirituality and Cosmogenesis - Spirituality comes from spirit. We want to examine spirituality along three different lines. They represent articulations of the single reality of the spirit: spirituality bound up with the experience of the spirit, spirituality in its religious manifestation, and spirituality as an expression of the spirit of the age.

 

1. Spirituality and the Experience of the Spirit 

     Eco-spirituality is the humble way of caring for the earth. It is the area where modern ecology and the resources of the spirit overlap and cry out for all of us to abandon the behavior destructive of the natural world and to transform our attitudes towards the earth. It requires of us humility, a quality of having a modest sense of one's own importance in front of other human beings and the rest of created world. It is often misunderstood as humiliating and lowering one's dignity, against what people of the Western culture are conditioned since childhood. The Christian scriptures rightly say that "God is spirit" (Jn 4:2) and that "the spirit of life" (Rom 8:10). Spirit means everything that breathes that inhales and exhales; everything living is spirit or bearer of spirit. That means God above all, then human beings and animals, then vegetarian, and finally earth itself everything that it holds. The earth is seen as full of spirit, for the wind surrounding it is earth's breath. It is experienced as Gaia, living superorganism, the great and bountiful mother, who gives life to all creatures and expresses her inherent vitality in all beings. By spirit we understand that capacity of primordial energies and of matter itself for interaction and self-organization, for becoming established in open systems, for communicating and forming the extremely complex web of inter-relationships that sustain the entire universe. The dynamism reveals the presence of spirit, vivifying the universe. It is not simply inert but is charged with energies interacting with everything that exists. The human spirit is this same dynamism become conscious, aware that it is connected to an animate body and through it to all bodies and energies in the universe. The spirit of the body means life, communication, enthusiasm, and radiance; it also means creation and transcendence beyond itself, creating community with what is most distant and most different, and even with the absolute Otherness, God.

     The human spirit is most open and universal in what exists, a node of relationships and connections in all directions and dimensions. If spirit is life, then the opposite of spirit is not matter but death, and the realm of death includes all the processes that lead to breakdown and prepare the way for death, such as oppression, injustice, and neglect of living conditions, which cause illness and dehumanized human relations, as well as the destruction of the landscape and the loss of the physical and chemical balance of the soil and atmosphere. Spirituality accordingly entails a true basic life-direction that confronts the logic of death as it exists in the current process of accumulation and total market, which are maximum organized expressions of the assault against nature and community around the planet. They are exclusionary and produce countless victims. Today, this spirituality is discovering the ecological dimensions of our responsibility for peace, justice, and the integrity of everything created. Opting for life means opting for planet earth as an assaulted and wounded organic whole (geocide), so that it may continue to exist in such a way as to preserve the independent worth and relatedness of all beings on it. This is the first rudimentary notion of spirituality.

 

2. Spirituality in its Religious Manifestation

     Eco-spirituality is a more contemporary form of nature mysticism, contemporary part of every religion and philosophy, a very precious form of spirituality, part of the Franciscan vision and the insight expressed in the metaphor of creation as a great book that humanity must learn to read. Every religion has something to say about nature as a dimension of the whole. It projects a cosmology or world view, as Durkheim explained very well, not in the sense of doing science but of showing the connectedness of everything with the Divinity. Hence there is always a religious ecology. It is not necessarily aimed at conservation or integration, however, but may foster an aggressive stance that destabilizes ecosystems, as, for example, in one particular understanding of the Jewish and Christian doctrine of the human being as lord and king over creation. But it may also, as in the case of natural mystics, internalize the Christian truth that we are all sons and daughters of the same eternal Parent and on that basis emotionally experience the bond of radical kinship that unites all beings from the ant on the roadside to the most distant star, from the tiniest elementary particle to the largest galaxy or quasar in the universe. The result is an attitude of deep reverence for each being in creation, an attitude that is absolutely necessary today if we to ensure the preservation and integrity of all that is created.

     Spirituality is the field of creativity par excellence. That is why institutionalized religions have always feared spiritual people and mystics. Such people do not invoke religious authority to legitimize their convictions but appeal rather to God's own authority as immediately experienced. They do not speak out of hearsay, but like Job that testify, "Now my eye has seen you" (Jb 42:5), and so they speak on the basis of personal, irreplaceable experience with the authority that such expression always possesses. Inasmuch as religion has arisen out of spirituality and the experience of the faith encounter with divinity, its function is to continually renourish this spirituality and encounter. It cannot replace the striving of the human being for ultimate Reality and encountering that Reality. Religion cannot enclose religious persons in dogmas and cultural representations. It must serve as an organized place where people may be initiated, accompanied, and aided in having the experience of God. Spirituality in the realm of religion then means internalizing and translating into personal integrated experience the religious content as established in doctrine and creeds. It is not thinking about God but speaking to God. Spirituality is less about religious ideas than convictions, and less about theological reasoning than the emotions of true "pietas." Spirituality is about feeling God in an all-encompassing experience, and not so much about thinking God.

 

3. Spirituality as an Expression of the Spirit of Age

 

     Third, spirituality is linked to the spirit of the age. People all over the world, inspired by the same Spirit, are increasingly, feel the same way about environment. As we awaken spiritually to understand the connection between man and nature, we ourselves are healed of the former attitude of dominance toward earth. We begin to see the natural world as a source of the divine. We begin to discover at the heart of the universe a source of love, goodness, and affection for the entire earth community. We experience earth as the source and basis of our life and we celebrate oneness with the earth, a mysticism with the land. As we reflect on our origins, we start to understand ourselves in communion with the universe. The universe discovers itself in us and we celebrate our journey with earth as our spiritual journey. By the spirit of the age we mean the powerful motivations, the spiritual and moral forces moving a generation, the utopias that energize practices, the sensitivities characterizing the way reality is approached, the generative and prevailing ideas that confer meaning on the whole. The spirit of the age also includes contradictory manifestations, group pathologies, and whatever might be regarded as counter-values that also have a bearing on human practices. The spirit of the age is produced by complex processes that sink roots into the collective unconscious, the cultural visions of a people, in their historic experiences, in their own idea of themselves, in their self-esteem or depreciation of themselves or of aspects of their situation, in their modes of production and social organization, in the type of prevailing rationality and the kind of science that becomes dominant, in their philosophy of life, in their religious expressions and their charismatic leaders, and the various realms of human, cultural, artistic, political, scientific, and religious expression.

     The spirit of the age is the common atmosphere where all breathe more or less the same convictions, dreams more or less the same dreams, practice more or less the same rationality, and develop more or less the same feelings. In short, the spirit of the age is the world view proper to each age. From this standpoint, spirituality means the set of values, projections, generative ideas, and models that give life personal and social meaning and that unify the sum of experiences that people undergo. It means the way we make the group world view our own. Spirituality by its very nature entails subjectivity. That is why it cannot by fully described or controlled. It is in spirituality that individuals may preserve their idiosyncrasies and stake out their differences. Even though the spirit of the age is something objective and can be described, there really is such a thing as a collective spirituality. Spirituality likewise has to do with the subjective way the spirit of the age is assimilated and made personal, whether by accepting or rejecting it, or by selectively fashioning a synthesis and syncreristically drawing on elements of other world views. The main function of the spirit of the age, of the world view and its corresponding spirituality, is to unify our vision of reality by coherently connecting all our experiences, knowledge, and practices. The spirit of the age represents a boundless need of human beings for an overall vision and a grasp of a whole. Things are not just thrown in somewhere, in the midst of an arbitrary juxtaposition or conjunctures and happenings, but everything must make sense, even if that sense is not always manifest.

     It must nevertheless exist as a given or as something to be built collectively. The basis on which spirituality lives is the conviction that there is a whole, and that it is much more than the sum of its parts; there we are set within this whole; and that the parts are in the whole and the whole in the parts. Although it appears with elements of fragmentation and chaos, the whole always tends to be generative and harmonious, for it is ordered with a drive in that direction. In this sense each generation has its own spirituality—and so does ours. Given the acceleration of history and of the global interchange of cultures and human experiences through the means of communication, there is an overwhelming variety of spiritualities—indeed, even a conflict of spiritualities. Recently, Catholics and all Christians have become interested in the ecological movement and a new awareness of the transcendence of the cosmos. Concern for the present ecological crisis has become more than a cause; it involves, too, a spirituality that supports activists and even simple lovers of nature to be caretakers of the earth and stewards of God's creation. Just as Christian spirituality focuses on one's relationship with God in the Trinity, God is revealed to the person in diverse ways. Eco-spirituality teaches that divine life extends to all reality, and the cosmos is an integral part of God's self-revelation. It studies our relationship to God as it develops in the context of our relationships with the cosmos in its totality. Ecology studies our total environment and all the living or non-living creatures that dwell with us in this cosmic house (oikos/house). The present religious and non-religious understanding of our relationship with nature can be grouped in to 4 different kinds of spiritualities.

Dominion Model Spirituality: Humans feel that they can rightfully exploit natural environment. The emphasis here is that humans are not at all at home in nature. It stresses differences between humans and the rest of nature, while we are not above the nature but with the nature. The danger is the arrogant disdain for material world; subjugating and empowering nature and environment, which leads to exploitation.

Stewardship Model Spirituality: Humans care for creation, which is intended to serve our needs. The emphasis is that there is a wide gap between humans and the remainder of creation; anthropocentrism, in which the human person is the center of creation. There is the danger of overemphasis on mastery, with focus on conquering and controlling nature; speciesism; no sense of solidarity with other species.

 

Creation-centered Approach Model Spirituality: Humans are not so much caretakers as fully part of creation the emphasis is on intrinsic value and sacredness of nature, so all species deserve protection; recognizes interdependence within the web of life. The danger is in the call for sustainable development leaves many unresolved issues! It is unclear how to balance human needs with solidarity with other species.

 

Deep Ecology Model Spirituality: It is the radical re-visioning of the relationships and boundaries between humans and the rest of creation. The emphasis is on the call for revival of asceticism, human renunciation, and mysticism; eco-theology views nature as a medium for the mystery of the sacred, which humans must not presume to know fully. The danger is overly romanticized view may make creation into an idol; danger of totally neglecting legitimate human needs.