‘I prayed with my heart, everything around me seemed delightful and marvellous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they existed for man’s sake, that they witnessed to the love of God for man, that everything proved the love of God for man, that all things prayed to God and sang his praise.’ This description of prayer captures the sense of God in all things central to Christianity. It comes from the Russian classic ‘Way of a Pilgrim’ which encourages repeating the Jesus Prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ as aid to attaining the ability to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5:17). As one who uses and has written about the Jesus Prayer I confirm its ability to make the one praying feel one with nature in their prayer. Given the enormity of the environmental crisis I find this sense of creation praising God in tension with its ‘groaning in labour pains’ awaiting ‘be[ing] set free from its bondage to decay [to] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Romans 8:21-22). Both passages, ‘Way of a Pilgrim’ and Romans, imply a link between the agony and ecstasy of nature and human beings in their origin and destiny as understood in Christianity. Thinking through the ‘eco-friendliness’ of Christian faith uncovers a number of weighty things to be balanced one with another: heaven with earth, dominion with stewardship, physical with spiritual, individual with collective, economic with political, strategy with serendipity and belief with practice.
Ecology is the science of our home (Greek: ‘oikos’) seen as our physical environment. Christianity, believing ‘our homeland is in heaven’ (Philippians 3:20), lives with a balancing act here which explains some historical short-falls in eco-friendliness. Though heavenly-minded gratitude for all that is, as in the ‘Way of the Pilgrim’ example, keeps people in the present moment more aware of others and of nature, living assured of heaven with contempt for earth has an opposite sense. It is telling that, despite generations of theological reflection, it took until 2015 for a Pope to give teaching on the environment as in ‘Laudato Si’. In his encyclical Pope Francis is at pains to achieve the rebalancing of human dominion and stewardship of earth taught in Genesis: ‘The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). As a result, the originally harmonious relationship between human beings and nature became conflictual (cf Gen 3:17-19 linked to the sequel to this Sunday’s first reading). The insight Christianity brings to human origins and shortfalls can help the educational task facing the international community faced with damage that affects every living organism through the global environmental crisis. Holding belief in the dignity of human beings as bearers of God’s image goes hand in hand with belief in their falling well short of that dignity through sin. If dominion were not more comfortable to us than the selfless service of keeping the earth, that damage would have been lessened.
Is Christianity environment friendly? Inasmuch as it balances reverence for both physical and spiritual elements in life. Spillage of oil, leaking of chemicals into our rivers, acid rain, deforestation and burning off fossil fuels are an irreverent assault upon the physical environment. Catholic and Orthodox traditions have developed sacramental understanding of the physical world counter to this irreverence, seeing the spiritual conveyed through physical nature. Whilst not denying the immediacy of the Holy Spirit held in Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions they see the extending of the incarnation of God in Christ into the sacraments. Spiritual grace is given through the physical order as in the water of baptism, bread and wine at the eucharist, oil in anointing and through the action of laying on hands. As Pope Francis writes: ‘It is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation. Grace, which tends to manifest itself tangibly, found unsurpassable expression when God himself became man and gave himself as food for his creatures. The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours… the Eucharist is also a source of light and motivation for our concerns for the environment, directing us to be stewards of all creation’.
In the understanding of the Eucharist across Christian traditions there is a potentially eco-friendly balancing of individual, collective and global. ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread’ (1 Corinthians 10:17). ‘The bread that I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh’ (John 6:51b). With other religions and movements Christianity represents people in solidarity committed to the common good beyond the aspirations and actions of individual followers. The common good of the world is also served by farming, fishing, industry, technology, the means of communication, governments and all who contribute to the creation and distribution of wealth. Having an effective say about the means of wealth production, curbing damage to the environment in its process and just distribution of that wealth goes beyonds individuals. It is achieved by collective aspirations especially governments. The future of the environment depends on such balancing of economics and politics in service of the common good where Christian witness stands alongside others in championing those on the margins.
My own career has seen involvement with the indigenous people or Amerindians of Guyana, South America training priests for the vast interior of that beautiful land which has its heavily populated north coast on the Caribbean Sea. Over the years I have seen the indigenous people of Guyana’s interior grow in confidence as a minority group through struggles with mining and logging companies hard to police in a vast forest land. The Church has helped and continues to help give voice to such minorities who, especially in the Amazon basin, stand on the front line of rainforest devastation with its human consequences.
In solidarity with such groups and many others the Chair of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network made the following statement on the environment: ‘The Christian faith is certainly about personal salvation. But it is more than that: Christianity is first and foremost a concern for the whole of the created order - biodiversity and business; politics and pollution; rivers, religion and rainforests. The coming of Jesus brought everything of God into the sphere of time and space, and everything of time and space into the sphere of God. All things meet together in Him: Jesus is the point of reconciliation. Therefore, if Christians believe in Jesus they must recognise that concern for climate change is not an optional extra but a core matter of faith.
Christianity eco-friendly? In this question there is a weighing of a big cause alongside the world’s biggest problem and how they connect. We have considered balancing heaven with earth, dominion with stewardship, physical with spiritual, individual with collective and economic with political. From our initial list of weighty things in need of balance we have left balancing strategy with serendipity and the obvious conclusion of tipping belief into practice in serving the environment. Serendipity, openness to all contained in the present moment, thrills from the opening quotation about an individual praying the Jesus prayer in solidarity with ‘the trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light’. Strategy has an eye to Christians planning corporately and with others to address the environmental crisis. This needs balancing by individuals laying hold of the world in serendipity, moment by moment, with humility and gratitude before God. Though church documents contribute to forming strategies for environmental renewal to be acted upon, the future shape of the world relies on individuals recovering humble living as addressed in a powerful paragraph from Laudato Si’ with which I conclude my homily:
“‘The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast’. For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion… whereby the effects of encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in [a Christian’s] relationship with the world around… gratitude and graciousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift, and that we are called quietly to imitate his generosity in self-sacrifice and good works… the conviction that “less is more”... marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with a little’.
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