Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

By way of some reflection today, I want to offer a glaring contrast in how human beings view the ecological crises we face. There is a line being drawn here that is getting clearer and clearer, more and more focused as the earth warms, climate changes, and we deplete the very life sources that gave birth to us and upon which we depend for our existence.

What inspired this today was an article in The Washington Post that reports on the efforts of the Bush administration to weaken the pending statement from the wealthy G-8 countries on climate change. Those countries are meeting right now in Germany and some of these wealthy countries are trying to take steps to deal with the overwhelming responsibility of the industrial and post-industrial world for the global warming crisis.

The article shows us more of the same from this government. I just have to wonder what goes on in the hearts of people that they would try so hard to defend self-interests against a world facing something as unprecedented and potentially catastrophic as the destabilization of the Earth’s atmosphere.

So, in contrast to this US commitment to inaction, and therefore disaster, I want to offer these few paragraphs from one of the mentors of an ‘earth spirituality’ movement here in the US, the monk, Thomas Berry. They come from his book, The Great Work. You see, the Bush administration looks at the crisis and tries to ward it off; Berry looks at it and says, let’s engage it, for this is the ‘great work’ of our time, to learn to live differently on this planet.

History is governed by those overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe…

The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner… we awaken to a period of extensive disarray in the biological structure and functioning of the planet…

…the success or failure of any historical age is the extent to which those living at that time have fulfilled the special role that history has imposed upon them. No age lives completely unto itself…

The Great Work before us, the task of moving modern industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode of presence, is not a role we have chosen. It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves… We are, as it were, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that is beyond any personal choice. The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role.

Berry writes that it is important that we believe that we have also been given everything we need to meet this challenge.

Now compare this vision to that of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Condie Rice, who have done all they can to keep the world from taking up this Great Work.

One vision appeals to what is most timid, fearful, self-interested, and selfish in us. The other provides a grand mission for the human, a project worthy of us, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

[tags] G-8/climate change, Thomas Berry, Great Work[/tags]