Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
This week from Margaret Swedish:

If we have learned anything by dint of our ecological crisis, surely it is the title of this post.  If any mirrors can honestly reflect the human predicament, they are those that hold up before us the images of this damaged planet.

Logo: Interfaith Earth Network

For as we have damaged the planet, so have we damaged ourselves. The pollution and destruction, the harm to our fellow species and intricate ecosystems, reflect back to us our wars and greed, our competition and lack of solidarity, the hurt and hunger of our fellow human beings.

So as we come to this holiday, and however we celebrate it from our different traditions and heritages, one of the most essential things we hold in common is this need for healing, for regeneration, for learning how to live again within the vibrant life of this planet.

We can’t go back to a planet before the industrial age; but we can begin to lay down the presumptions and violence of that age, to step back from its logic, to recover a sense of ourselves as part of an earth community that wants to live as an integral whole, to see what might yet unfold in the story of creation, of evolution.

We can’t go back to a planet before the industrial age, but we can ensure that the story does not come to an abrupt end, that it continues to reveal itself in and through us and future generations.

So we wish you much peace. And we wish us all hope – not just any hope, but the ‘radical hope’ described in Jonathan Lear’s important book: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation:

I would like to consider hope as it might arise at one of the limits of human existence…What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts to understand it.

What hope might look like - (c) used with permission

It is hard to see what hope will mean given the world we have made, what it will look like, what the other side of the ‘cultural devasation’ will look like, what it will mean to survive, and even flourish. That is what makes our hope ‘radical.’

…as sure as the sun will emerge from the darkness and once again spread its warmth across the northern hemisphere.

However you celebrate these days – and I hope you do celebrate or honor them in some way – may you be filled, washed, refreshed, renewed by this indefatigable human trait, this unwillingness to surrender hope.

Remember that business about light in the darkness. Without darkness, we cannot see the light.

Finally, this verse from one of my favorite poets, Alicia Ostriker:

today the grey-lit overnight snow
makes everything peaceful, even ourselves.*

Photo: Margaret Swedish

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*From ‘How can we speak,’ The Book of Seventy, Alicia Ostriker, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press