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Cover
story Best
medicine -- a healthy globe
By RICH HEFFERN
Here are four key insights from Thomas Berry that turn religion on
a dime (make that paradigm!) and provide a spiritual framework for the work of
transforming our relationship with the planet.
1. When we destroy the natural world, we destroy the ground of
our religious imagination. Our ability to imagine what God is like owes
everything to the world around us. We have a wonderful idea of God because we
have always lived on a planet that is chock-full, every nook and cranny, with
marvels and mysteries, dark beauty, happy encounters and splendid landscapes.
How could we picture God in our heads as an ever fresh and creative daybreak,
as a compassionate father or nurturing mother, as a wonder-counselor if we had
never experienced these qualities in the people, land and life around us? What
kind of God would we pray to if we lived on the bleak surface of the moon? We
are literally killing off our religious imagination when we destroy the natural
world. The real human tragedy lies in this soul starvation.
2. We have forgotten that the revelation found in the natural
world and in the wider universe around us is the primary divine revelation.
Revelation is the awakening in us of a sense of divine mystery and power; it is
the way the divine communicates. Gods revelation to us lies in the
scriptures, but also primarily in the story of how our universe began, evolved
and brought us humans forth. Berrys namesake, Thomas Aquinas, wrote:
A mistake about creation means a mistake about God.
Since we have learned so much in the past two centuries about the
universe and how it unfolded life, then it follows that we have new insight
into that primary revelation, an increased understanding of God. We must take
this new story of the universe seriously in order to fully understand both God
and ourselves.
Spirituality, for Berry, is about enchantment. Awe and wonder are
the primary spiritual qualities, the cure for our spiritual autism. Seeing the
universe and the earth that gave us birth as sacred mysteries is key to turning
the world around.
If this fascination, this entrancement with life isnt
evoked, Berry says, then our children wont have the energies
needed to sustain the sorrows inherent in our condition. They might never
discover their true place in the vast world of time and space.
3. Our Christian preoccupation with personal salvation can
yield to a more holistic understanding of Jesus Christ.Christianity now is
too focused on redemption, says Berry. Being a Christian has to do with
the Christ reality and this is thought to have nothing to do with the
earth. The personal relationship between the individual and the person of
Jesus is seen as primary, as salvific, to the exclusion of all else. The
redemption view misses a great deal of the doctrine of Christ as spoken by St.
Paul, for example, who writes that in Christ, all things hold
together. This is a way of thinking of Christ as a cosmic person and the
universe as a collection of subjects rather than objects. The reality of Christ
is a communion between various levels of reality -- cosmic, social
and personal.
There are other strains in the Christian tradition, Berry points
out, that are less focused on redemption, more on that relationship between the
earths economy and ours: the animate spirituality of the Celtic period,
for example, or the custodial model of the Benedictine monasteries and
convents, the fraternal model of St. Francis, the fertility model presented by
Hildegard of Bingen, the integral model brought to us by Teilhard de Chardin,
the poetic imagery of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
These strains in Christianity present a view of God and Gods
world where deep in the heart of matter, right here, right now and always,
everything is interconnected and all is well and all manner of things shall be
well. The love that moves the sun and stars beams out of every atom, molecule,
face and flower.
This is not pantheism but pan-en-theism, the mystery of the divine
in everything, shining out like shook foil, in the laughter of children, in the
goodness of summer sweet corn, in the God-haunted sound of the wind through the
pines, in North Carolina meadows.
4. Berrys essential message as a prophet for the earth is
the necessity of establishing a mutually enhancing human presence on the
planet. This is the great work of our time. The primary object
of all our endeavors should be to make sure the earth does not fall into
deficit as a result of our presence. No enterprise serves us unless it is
grounded in this earth-human relationship. The primary focus of our medicine,
for example, should be to maintain the earths health. What sense does it
make to have healthy humans living on a terminally ill planet?
Our businesses must change the bottom line from profit
to healthy globe. If the earth corporation goes bankrupt, where
does that leave the rest? Our legal system should be concerned about just
distribution of the earths resources, with preventing harm to the air,
land and sea. Our politics must lead to cooperative, earth-based decisions and
public policies.
Or, as theologian Daniel Maguire says, If present trends
continue, we wont. Thus, the need for, in Berrys words, a
great courtesy toward the earth.
National Catholic Reporter, August 10,
2001
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