Spirituality and Ecological Hope

NEW RELEASE – Faith Encounters the Ecological Crisis

We are very pleased to announce  that JustFaith Ministries has recently released an 8-week module “designed as a community learning process built around the book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World,’ A Spirituality of Hope,” by blog author Margaret Swedish.

Entitled, Faith Encounters the Ecological Crisis, this 8-week course follows the trajectory of the book, describing the various threads of the crisis and how they combine to present us with a challenge unprecedented in the human experience.  It identifies the ways in which we are already living beyond the biocapacity of the planet and challenges participants to identify elements of a spirituality that can get us through the crisis to a new way of life.  Participants will view several films, engage in small and large group discussion, and meet with several guest speakers as they consider various aspects of the ecological crisis.  Participants will also identify ways to ‘live beyond the end of this world’ with a rich and vibrant Earth community still intact, still able to support life.

For information or to register your group, visit JustFaith Ministries and click on to their JustMatters page.

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MEANWHILE:

What is going on in the Gulf of Mexico is changing everything.  Or at least it should.  I mean, it will, but the question is whether or not this society is prepared for what is necessary, whether we are prepared to make the personal, economic, social, and cultural changes commensurate, or on a scale, with those happening to our planet now.

This project often seems ever-shifting. The reason is that so is the subject of our work – our planetary crisis and how we humans are going about addressing it.  Unlike many other projects, our program is not an activist one – there are so many good groups organizing and mobilizing around various aspects of the ecological crisis and we support them wholeheartedly – it is rather one that seeks to articulate the values, the meaning frameworks and ways of life that are the underpinnings of the crisis, and then what values, meaning frameworks, and ways of life can move us out of crisis towards what Thomas Berry would call a ‘mutually enhancing’ human presence on the Earth.

Mutually enhancing for our eco-communities, the anti-thesis of what we are seeing in the Gulf of Mexico this spring.  What we are seeing in the Gulf is the wreckage of our industrial world. We could point to a thousand other locations where this wreckage is occurring, but few are as emotionally wrenching and as intimate for us here in the United States as is this one.

And we are clearly not getting the message the Earth is sending us.

So the conversation, the reflection keeps shifting to a greater sense of urgency. In May, scientists affirmed that 2010 will be the warmest year ever recorded.  Remember global warming and climate change?  What, does our society think this has gone away just because conservative pundits and local TV meteorologists have dismissed it? No, instead the science grows more certain, and more urgent. Seems the impacts of warming are coming at us at a faster pace than predicted as recently as the 2007 report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

We will continue to seek out opportunities to meet with groups, and to offer workshops and presentations on the crisis and the spirituality that can carry us forward. Just since the start of the year, I have had the opportunity to lecture for a liberation theology honors class at Marquette University, speak at a Sunday forum for the First Unitarian Society in Milwaukee, lead a reflection day for the local spirituality center, the Center to Be, participate in a 3-day meeting/retreat in St. Louis with the Integrity of Creation Committee of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, continue to meet with and offer support to the Peace and International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, just to mention a few highlights.

I also participate on the leadership team of the Center for Sustainability of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Center, where the focus right now is on connecting farms and schools, healthy foods with inner city communities.

This summer, I will participate in the biennial gathering of Sisters of Earth in the Bronx, participate in the gathering of the Midwest Regional Collaborative for Sustainable Education here in Wisconsin, attend the summer institute of The Well in La Grange IL, speak at a Unitarian Congregation in Illinois – just a few things on the agenda.

And there’s keeping up with this website, the news, and the other writing I’m doing (a new book, for one, in its incipient stages). We are also participating in a couple of internet communities, among them, WiserEarth, an international community of tens of thousands of groups large and small.

So, this is a lot.  I don’t mind saying that we could use financial support right now to ensure that this work continues .  If you are able to help, we would be so grateful.  Just click on the ‘Donate‘ button to make a contribution via PayPal, or to get the address if you are sending a check.

Please let us know what you think of what we write here, what your own thoughts are about our planet’s grave challenges and what spiritual and cultural resources we will need to live through the crisis and create while we are doing so a new sense of the human, of the meaning of the human journey, on this marvelous, resilient, but deeply wounded planet.

Thanks for all you do for the vibrancy of that ‘new creation.’

Margaret Swedish

Well, Friends, there is a lot to talk about here at our project, lots of catching up to do and things to tell you about.  When I returned to my home town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2 1/2 years ago, after 26 years in the DC area, the question for me was whether or not this idea could get legs here, as they say.  My hope was to plug in to groups already working towards a new human community based on the principles of an integral ecology, and to do this from the vantage point of faith and values.  From there, we hoped to foster a reflection on this crucial question: how do we develop a spirituality of ecological hope to address the ecological crises of our times .

The heart of the matter for us is this:

We are living in a state of ecological overshoot. We are already living beyond the biocapacity of the planet.  The earth is no longer able to absorb the damage we are doing with our economies of extraction, consumption, and waste.  This crisis is not only economic and political, it is also ‘spiritual’ in the sense that it reflects certain values that shape our worldview, frameworks of meaning that fuel the dynamisms of the economic lives of humans.

We challenge those frameworks and their assumptions.  We do this in writing (like this website and my book), in various kinds of presentations and reflection days, and in working with communities to articulate a spirituality of ecological hope, new frameworks of meaning, values, ways of life, that are consistent with what we have learned about our planet and our cosmos, what we have learned about the impact and the place of the human within the story of evolution, within the biosphere and atmosphere of our precious Earth.

Part of our intention here is to create, or foster, in the greater Milwaukee area and upper Midwest a community of folks and a program that begins to articulate this ‘spirituality.’ Since hope is not a pie-in-the-sky dream world, but must be based on something real, such a spirituality needs to have roots in a commitment to actually live it.  Embracing a spirituality of ‘ecological’ hope would mean making a commitment to a way of life whose values, frameworks of meaning, and deep reflection would foster the healing and regeneration of the ecology of the whole, the eco-communities in which we live, including the human communities living under great stresses from poverty, injustice, violence, and an aggressive competitive economics of growth capitalism.

(c) What hope might look like

A fundamental aspect of what we do in this project is to help us all recover a sense that we are part of the whole of our ecological reality, that when we overshoot the Earth’s limits, violate the planet’s natural organic integral processes with massively destructive policies of extraction, consumption, and waste, with modes of human development that are disrupting and destroying habitats required to nurture healthy living systems, we are in effect tearing out from under us the ground of our own being.

In the past year, I was privileged to be in many different communities helping to lead interfaith programs, speaking in parishes and at conferences, leading discussions and reflections, that focus on 2 general themes: 1) the roots of the ecological crisis created by industrial and post-industrial societies along with the economic and social values that support that way of life; then, 2) alongside this deepening awareness of crisis, our discovery of the vastness of the universe in space and time and our place within the story of its unfolding.

These two ‘awarenesses’ are at the base of a great deal of disorientation, anxiety, and fear that have become pervasive in our human community.  They describe in broad strokes the dynamics of the great transition in which we humans find ourselves.  They also invite us to delve deeper than ever into the meaning of the human, offering us a path out of the crisis by embracing the truth of this one round finite world of which we are a part and outside of which we do not exist.

Apollo 8 NASA image

These workshops, presentations, reflections are a source of inspiration and energy for this project.  They also keep on creating it, shaping its directions and content.

In 2010 we will, of course, be doing more of this.  We will also be working towards establishing in this area more of a ‘presence,’ a space where this dialogue and reflection can deepen, where the conversation can continue, where together with others here, and with folks from other communities and eco-centers in the midwest, we can challenge the values that have supported the dynamics threatening the life-giving ecosystems of the planet.

For those of you whose spiritual roots lay in the Christian world, JustFaith Ministries in Kentucky will soon release an 8-week module, a course of study and dialogue, based on my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, published in 2008 by Orbis Books, Maryknoll.  I will announce the release when it happens and include information on how you can obtain the materials.  This is coming very soon!

Now, needless to say, like any other non-profit, we depend for our existence on donors.  Our sponsoring organization is the Center for New Creation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.  Your donations are tax-deductible. If you are able to make a contribution to our work this year, please click on the ‘DONATE‘ page.  If you contribute by check, please make the check out to the ‘Center for New Creation.’

Spirituality and Ecological Hope is a work in progress.  It is being created in the process of creating it, with input from many, inspired by the experience and insights shared by the folks engaged in the reflection.  We look forward to articulating this ‘new creation’ further in the year ahead.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Margaret Swedish