Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Just back from a conference in Hiawatha, Iowa, at a wonderful spirituality/ecology center called Prairiewoods, a ministry of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The conference featured Dr. John Haught, a theologian at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center. Dr. Haught has focused much of his thought and research on the intersection and mutually enriching relationship between Christianity and science, and especially between faith and evolution.

Well, we listened and discussed and exchanged for an evening and a day, so there is no way to summarize the weekend in a blog post. I have listed and linked to a couple of his books below. But I do want to make one comment that emerges from the weekend, and which I reflect on at some length in my new book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World,’ a Spirituality of Hope.

In the U.S. more than half the population does not believe in evolution. If you click this link, you will see that the percentage is actually growing - over the past two decades, the percentage of people that do not accept this scientific reality has increased. Of the 34 countries surveyed in this study, only Turkey ranked lower than the U.S. in accepting evolution.

Dr. Haught reflected on this at some length. It is a cultural reality that I find disheartening and unsettling as we approach a time when evolution itself is propelling us towards watershed decisions about the future of the human species within the fabric of life that emerged from this most recent era of evolution.

As long as we view the human as something plunked down on this planet over, above, and apart from Nature, we are going to have a hard time seeing our ecological crisis accurately, much less coming up with the kinds of life changes that can put the human species back into the balance of the biosphere of which we are an integral part, from which we cannot be separated. It is this perception of separation that has led to the abuse of ecosystems to the point where they are beginning to unravel. We will not be saved miraculously apart from that unraveling. We will not be pulled out of these natural processes by a God existing outside of all that is. The gift of us is precisely our emergence from these eons of the evolution of our cosmos.

And if faith and religion are to have any relevance to the real world and to this momentous era for our species, they must be able to worship a God that is at least as large as the scientific story of creation.

It’s as if we are trying to squeeze God into the small spaces of what we humans feel comfortable with rather than embracing an experience of the Divine that is ineffable, incomprehensible, huge, awesome, something we cannot wrap our minds around, something truly out of our control, including our ‘thinking,’ a Presence so enormous that it can, indeed, encompass all that is past in the 13.73 billion years of the universe and a future at least as vast.

If we can begin to summon up the courage to embrace the new sense of the vastness of Creation, we can perhaps begin to get a deeper, more profound sense of the sacredness of this planet and the unique, stunning life that emerged from it over the past few billion years.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we can begin to develop a deep inner sense of our identity as a species, beyond all these divisions of races, nationalisms, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and how true it is that we are all in this together.

Then our work to salvage ecosystems before they are beyond repair, our work to change values and lifestyles to make this possible, our work to restore our awareness of the deep connections we have with all the living systems and creatures of the planet, can become a most sacred act, indeed a form of worship. Because in this work, we honor the Creator, however we interpret what that means within whatever traditions or belief constructs form the meaning framework of our lives.

A final thought: places like Prairiewoods are manifestations of real hope for the future, that we can get through the crisis time by embracing a spirituality of ecological hope. Places like this one are springing up all over the place. When our new website is up and running in the next couple of months, we will profile more of them. Stay tuned!

A couple of Dr. Haught’s books:

Christianity and Science: Toward a Theology of Nature

God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution

[tags] evolution and faith, Christianity and Science, God and evolution, Prairiewoods, Dr. John Haught, Woodstock Theological Center, Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration[/tags]

Photo from the Hubble Space Telescope