Earthed Spirituality: The Spirituality of Creation
Last week, when we were introducing ourselves, Sarah talked about how hard it is to be a Christian around environmentalists – since it has been Christians who have sparked the industrialization of the world and much of the environmental disaster that we now live in.
Sarah’s classmates aren’t the only ones to think this way – nor are they the first.
Lynn White, a historian, wrote a paper for Science back in 1967 called “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” where, unlike Sarah’s classmates who would say that Christians caused the mess we are in, he basically says that Christianity itself caused the mess. Christianity’s placing of humanity as separate and over nature has allowed us to exploit nature to its (and possibly our own) destruction. He posits that since the problem has a religious cause, that it may have a religious, and particularly Franciscan, solution.
I actually think that the problem lies less in biblical Christian teaching than it does in the Christian adoption of Platonic dualism.
Let me ‘splain…
Plato’s Cave & Dualism
Socrates: And now, let me show in a parable how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light; here these people have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised walk; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the walk, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
This metaphor caught on and it led to a dualism that said that the unseen or spiritual world was better (both qualitatively and quantitatively) and “more real” that the seen and natural world.
It impacted Christianity and was adopted to a certain extent by Augustine and fully by Aquinas.
Modernism grabbed on to this dualism and ran with it. Even in this “post modern” age we see this dualism in movies like The Matrix – I’ve had Christians try to tell me that The Matrix has such a Christian world view, and I answer, “No, it has a Platonic world view” -- a biblical world view says that the physical is created by the God we worship and it is declared good (both qualitatively and quantitatively) by God.
When you combine the belief that this visible world is secondary at best with good old greed, you get the present ecological crisis that we find ourselves in.
Patrick would not have read Augustine and likely not Plato!
Patrick, and the Celtic saints that came after him, had a holistic understanding of the cosmos, with a very fine line between the seen and the unseen worlds. This is why last week we saw that Patrick could, in the same breath, ask the protection of the natural elements and the spiritual beings in the Lorica.
When Patrick calls on
the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of Rock… for his protection, he is not calling on shadows on the side of a cave!
The old Irish saying was “Heaven is only a foot and a half above a man’s head.”
It is good to remember that Patrick’s faith was formed out in the countryside, praying constantly in the out-of-doors for six to ten years
Patrick’s studies in theology later in life did not seem to change this creation orientation, and while Augustine, who shaped the theology of the Western Church, began his theology with the sinfulness of humanity and our need for redemption by the creator, Patrick begins his theology with God being the creator of all that is. We all do our theology from the place we’ve come from: Augustine was always very aware of his misspent youth – his experience of God was of the one who saved him from his sins, which were many. Patrick, on the other hand, experienced God first as a comforter and sustainer in hardship, and then as a rescuer from slavery.
According to tradition, Patrick was questioned about his faith by two heathen princesses, daughters of the high king of Laoghaire. “Who is God? Of whom is God?” they asked. “Where is his dwelling? … How will he be seen, how is he loved, how is he found?” The dialogue which ensued took the form of a great creation-oriented credo, very different in its emphasis to the redemption focus found in the Nicene and other western creeds.
Our God, God of all men,
God of heaven and earth, seas and rivers,
God of sun and moon, of all the stars,
God of high mountain and lowly valleys,
God over heaven, and in heaven, and under heaven.
He has a dwelling in heaven and earth and sea
and in all things that are in them.
He inspires all things, he quickens all things.
He is over all things, he supports all things.
He makes the light of the sun to shine,
He surrounds the moon and the stars,
He has made wells in the arid earth,
Placed dry islands in the sea.
He has a Son co-eternal with himself …
And the Holy Spirit breathes in them;
Not separate are the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.
Here we see St Patrick speaking in terms that would have resonance with his Irish hearers: the pre-Christian love of creation as good. The perception of the holiness of the earth and the sacredness of matter belonged to the world familiar to them, the world in which the natural and the divine still met. Elsewhere in Europe the Christian Church was warring against the natural world, imposing its strictures on the landscape, cutting down sacred trees, despoiling sacred wells, and denying the natural rhythm that depended on the slow turning of the sun and moon and planets. The anti-pagan polemic and admonitions of the councils in sixth-century Gaul and Spain, which were nothing less than a conflict in the relationship between man and nature, had no place in the Celtic approach to God. – Esther de Waal, Every Earthly Blessing (Charis Publications, 1991), pp.67-8.
For the Christian Celt, God and His creation are deeply connected as Saint Paul said to the Athenians: “For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
Everything good comes from God and is to be given freedom to be itself, to enjoy and to be enjoyed. We are enslaved if we care for anything in ways that exclude the giver. So there is a sense of common creation, by which men and women, plants and animals, the Trinity and the heavenly powers, are all bound together, and the only response to this can be one of praise.
It were as easy for Jesu
To renew the withered tree
As to wither the new
Were it His will to do so.
Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!
Jesu! meet it were to praise Him.
There is no plant in the ground
But it is full of His virtue,
There is no form in the strand
But it is full of His blessing.
Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!
Jesu! meet it were to praise Him.
There is no life in the sea,
There is no creature in the river,
There is naught in the firmament
But proclaims His goodness.
Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!
Jesu! meet it were to praise Him.
There is no bird on the wing,
There is no star in the sky,
There is nothing beneath the sun
But proclaims His goodness.
Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!
Jesu! meet it were to praise Him.
Psalm 19
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is hidden from its heat.
This is not the animism of pre-Christian time where everything in nature had a spirit that could be offended and needed to be placated.
Nor is it a pantheism that believes that everything is God, or everything is a part of God
John Howard Griffin writes of praying in the midst of creation:
The very nature of your solitude involves you in union with the prayers of the wind in the trees, the movement of the stars, the feeding of the birds in the fields, the building of the anthills. You witness the creator and attend to him in all his creation.
He goes on to find what generations of earlier Celtic solitaries knew:
This is not for one moment mere pantheism. You do not ‘worship’ the thing, but the creator of the thing. The thing fascinates precisely because it raises your attention through its beauty or interest above itself to the creator… . (cited in Esther de Waal, Every Earthly Blessing (Charis Publications, 1991), p. 75.)
[T]here is never any confusion between the Creator and the world of his creating. God is involved in his creation, and is close to everything that he has made in his world, but there is here a vision of creation which yet avoids pantheism. In this, once again, we find distinct echoes of the East. Gregory of Nyssa or Basil the Great see creation as a revelation of the presence of God, but they are careful to preserve the distinction of the two and insist on their separateness. Esther de Waal, Every Earthly Blessing (Charis Publications, 1991), p. 78.
While the Celts understood the separateness of God and his creation, they also understood the sacredness of the creation.
One modern Celt, staring out a clear church window upon creation while the Mass was going on, wrote:
“And I noticed
The priest’s eyes
As if he were unknowingly
Putting his hands
On these gifts,
As if these gifts of nature
Were
The bread and the wine.” – Esther de Waal, The Celtic Vision (Liguori Publications, 2001) p. xxv.
While Lynn White hopes for a Franciscan spirituality to save us from the mess we’ve made, I wish he had known about the Celts. One writer said that if Francis had been a Celt, he would have hardly received a note; there are so many stories of Celtic saints’ intimate relationship with creation as well as the Creator.
Saint Columbanus
“Understand, if you want to know the Creator, created things.” When St Columbanus said this he was speaking out of his own experience. The integration of humankind with the birds and the animals as part of a common creation was something the Celtic world not only grasped intellectually and affectively but also lived out as well. Jonas, the biographer of St Columbanus, tells how during his periods of fasting and prayer in solitary places, the saint would call the beasts and the birds to him as he walked, and how they would come straightaway, rejoicing and gambolling around him in great delight would behave “like little puppies around their master”. He would summon a squirrel from the tree tops and let it climb all over him, and from time to time its head might be seen peeping through the folds of his robes. On one occasion when twelve wolves came up to him he stood still, motionless and fearless, repeating a verse of the psalm “O God be not far from me” until, after sniffing at his garments, they went peacefully away. Even the bears respected him, and so gentle was he that his gentleness communicated itself to them and they obeyed him. One bear was persuaded by him to leave its cave so that he could make it his hermitage; another, which was preparing to eat a dead stag, left it so that St Columbanus could have the hide as leather for his monks. On another occasion the brothers, getting ready to pick the plums, found a bear already there and it seemed as though nothing would be left for them, but St Columbanus decided that they must be shared, one part for the bear and the other for the monks. -- Esther de Waal, Every Earthly Blessing (Charis Publications, 1991), p. 82.
So how does this relate to us?
I don’t think any of the Celtic Saints could have imagined the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Over half a century ago H. J. Massingham, the English writer on rural affairs, was saying that if only the Celtic Church had survived it is possible that the “fissure between Christianity and nature, widening through the centuries, would not have cracked the unity of western man’s attitude to the universe.” Creation spirituality, which the Church is discovering at the same time as the world of politics is discovering ecology and a green platform, has been there in fact all the time in the Celtic tradition, and we have paid the price for the neglect of that heritage. When we cut ourselves off from the earth we are impoverished, whether as individuals or as society as a whole. Again the Celtic speaks of something which is basic, is universal. It is an awareness which is found amongst indigenous peoples, known for example to African or native American peoples while it has been forgotten in the West. A world which has lost its vision of the sacredness of creation has also lost its commitment to the dignity of human life. Only now is our western society becoming aware of living on a planet of which we are a part, and that God the creator and redeemer is at work with the whole of his creation. --
Esther de Waal, Every Earthly Blessing (Charis Publications, 1991), p. 80.
There is something that we might learn from the Celtic saint’s friendship with the animals as we think of how we live in this good earth. For those who use the command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” as an excuse for a scorched earth policy, Calvin DeWitt reminds us that we are not the only ones: “While human beings are expected to be fruitful, so is the rest of creation: ’Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. . .Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.’ [Genesis 1:20, 22]”
The Prophet Ezekiel in the Old Testament gives what I think is the most direct passage that connects economics, the environment and leaving room for the rest of the people and God’s creatures in this world:
" ’As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet?
" ’Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says to them: See, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak sheep with your horns until you have driven them away, I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. I the LORD will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the LORD have spoken.’” (Ezekiel 34:17-24)
Conclusion
If the platonic dualism got us in this trouble, maybe the Celtic understanding of creation will help us get out
Homework
· Visit myfootprint.org to calculate your own impact upon God’s creation.
· Patrick blessed a river at least once. Our rivers and streams need miraculous healing beyond just better ecological practices. Bless a river near your home.
· Meditate on a piece of creation as a way to know the Creator. “For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see His invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature.” (Romans 1:20)
TREES
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
-- Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, 165th Infantry (69th New York), A.E.F. Born December 6, 1886; killed in action near Ourcy, July 30, 1918.
· Bless to Me, O God
Bless to me, O God,
Each thing mine eye sees;
Bless to me, O God,
Each sound mine ear hears;
Bless to me, O God,
Each odor that goes to my nostrils;
Bless to me, O God,
Each taste that goes to my lips;
Each note that goes to my song,
Each ray that guides my way,
Each thing that I pursue,
Each lure that tempts my will,
The zeal that seeks my living soul,
The Three that seek my heart,
The zeal that seeks my living soul,
The Three that seek my heart.– Esther de Waal, The Celtic Vision (Liguori Publications, 2001), p. 6.
