MOST HONORED GREENING FORCE: CONTEMPLATIVE ECOLOGY AND THE LIVING WORLD
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I was raised in a lush corner of Northeast Ohio, where my childhood was awash in wonder. Each season bloomed with distinctive change and freshness. My brother and I spent hours outdoors each week, no matter the weather, paying attention to what caught our hearts, whether that was a bluebell, or the unusual limb of tree, or the scent of fall leaves, or the large fragments of ice beneath the surface of the snow. I felt God’s presence there, in big and small and intangible and tactile things.
Our Catholic parish had a clean, modern design with slate floors, thick raw wood walls, and large panes of glass which framed a forested landscape. As a teenager, during weekly Mass, my eyes were often drawn beyond the sanctuary. One morning in May, the sweet, mid-spring air seeped through the cracks in the building. When the wind rustled the newly opened maple leaves, I thought, “What on earth are we doing in here, while there’s so much beauty right out there?” Indoors, the rock and wood felt sterile, while the outer landscape felt enlivened with possibility. Indoors, the church was a patriarch. But outside? The earth seemed like a mother.
I imagined, then, what it would feel like to place my feet on the carpet of soft green grass, what it would feel like to kneel before the trees and touch them, what the music would sound like unbound, if our worship met the morning dew. Although I was bereft of theological language to understand my experience, my longing for the earth was neither misguided nor misplaced. I wanted the firm boundaries, like those between church and the world, or between devotion and instinct, to soften.
As a child and adolescent, I understood the natural world to be a marvelous place, filled with God’s presence, but it was also a world under threat, deteriorating in ways I could not fully see or understand. More than a decade later, environmental conditions have since worsened at the hands of industry, development, and systems of consumption and waste, while time to change course is running dangerously low. Water crises, massive wildfires, famine, the increasing loss of biodiversity, and carbon emissions are only a few examples of the broken relationship between human beings and the living world. Since those early childhood experiences, I graduated from divinity school, where I learned concepts like radical immanence, contemplative ecology, and viriditas (Hildegard of Bingen’s description for the spiritual, healing green force of vitality imbued throughout nature). Studying theology, philosophy, and ethics demonstrated to me how the relationship between people and the earth must be restored not only through policy change, but also through contemplative principles and practices.
Douglas E. Christie, in Blue Sapphire of the Mind, states, “Contemplative ecology can best be understood as an expression of the diverse and wide-ranging desire emerging within contemporary culture to identify our deepest feeling for the natural world as part of a spiritual longing [with] a growing desire to find a language and sensibility that can help us ground our efforts to respond to and preserve an increasingly degraded natural world in more than simple, utilitarian terms.” (1) As we barrel towards 2050, the deadline set by the UN for key countries to achieve net-zero emissions, theologies which instill a sustainable ethics of care for the environment are vital.
Christian contemplative theology challenges the myth of separation at the heart of the climate crisis. Christianity has long made distinctions between humanity and nature with violent and dehumanizing effects. Misinterpretations of the Genesis 1 phrase “dominion over” distorted responsibility for the natural world into domination of the land, creatures, and other people. Later on, edicts like the “Doctrine of Discovery” gave permission to the actors of empire to harm Native people (dehumanized because of their proximity to the land) and rob them of their land, ways of living, and cosmologies, which posited the living earth as communicative and a force shaping identity. Christian colonists considered these cosmologies heretical and their accompanying practices demonic. Dualistic thinking, manifest in firm distinctions between nature and God, the body and the spirit, the profane and the sacred, entrenched the idea that God is transcendent, apart from and above the world, and separate from creation, including us.
Christie examines this by reflecting on eros, which he argues, “raise[s] important questions about the habitual distinctions we make between ourselves and the living world, between spirit and matter, between the mundane and the holy… [and] the capacity to encounter the other, to enter into the life of the other, and to receive life back – then we need to ask whether we are prepared to imagine the boundaries dividing one world from another as perhaps being more porous than we habitually do.” (2) Seeing boundaries between ourselves, God, and nature as porous, requires us to see ourselves as more porous, too, and therefore, open to giving and receiving life and care.
Christie, describing the “shimmering beauty of the world,” writes, “learning to open ourselves to this porous space where the life of things can be felt as an intimate part of our own embodied lives might prove to be indispensable to our efforts to love and tend to the world.” (3) This raises the question: if contemplative ecology is both spiritual and practical, equal parts contemplative and actionable, then how should our Christian faith shift to better embody these principles?
Lisa Dahill, a Lutheran scholar, argues for “re-wilding Christian spirituality”: reforming the sacraments to make the line between human beings and nature more permeable. (4) “Living water is wild water,” Dahill writes, “I sensed how urgently Christianity and Christians and I needed to be baptized fully into these actual waters, these living waters.” (5) Dahill describes the importance of seeing nature as a sacred text, the “Book of Nature,” stating, “forms of outdoor Eucharistic life and for reclaiming primary attention to the Book of Nature alongside our attention to the Book of Scripture.” (6) If the entire earth is a sacred text, the mountains, lakes, forests, rivers, fields, and cities become not only the matter of sacrament, but deeply a part of Christian responsibility.
It is a hopeful vision to hold for the church, one which coheres with how behavior and systems must change in the secular world. Although this sensibility may seem thoroughly modern for Christianity, it bears classical roots. Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) wrote extensively on contemplative and ecological themes reflected in contemporary discourse. Hildegard was a mystic, Benedictine nun and abbess, visual artist, composer (in fact, the first-known composer), theologian, preacher, healer, doctor, herbalist, counselor, and writer. Hildegard recounts a vision of an angelic female figure who says:
I have kindled all the sparks of the living…I have properly ordained the cosmos, flying about the circling circle with my upper wings, that is with wisdom. I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon, and stars. And I awaken all to life with every wind of the air, as with invisible life that sustains everything. For the air lives in greenness and fecundity. The waters flow as though they are alive. The sun also lives in its own light, and when the moon has waned it is rekindled by the light of the sun and thus lives again; and the stars shine out in their own light as though they are alive. (7)
Hildegard describes the earth as communicative of the divine because of God’s indwelling in it. By doing so, she depicts a regenerative circle of relationality between God, matter, and living beings. Hildegard describes the profound mystery of God’s presence in the world. Just as God dwells in us, God dwells everywhere in the natural world, found in the soil, the water, the atmosphere, plants, trees, and animals. When we care for creation or engage in life-giving work, we connect with God, and we help to renew the connection between the living world and human beings. Contrary to Christianity rooted in separation, this theology considers the veils between seemingly distinct things thinner and the distinctions themselves more fluid.
The urgency of the global environmental crisis can lead us to privilege utilitarian thinking, which, of course, makes sense. The time remaining to reduce atmospheric carbon is rapidly diminishing, so we need practical, evidence-based solutions quickly. However, as people of faith, we also need to cultivate more complex ways of shifting the paradigm for ecological care in ways that improve our theology and spiritual formation. To protect and revive the living world, we must embrace the beautiful meshwork of our interconnectedness.
O most honored Greening Force,
You who roots in the Sun;
You who lights up, in shining serenity, within a wheel
that earthly excellence fails to comprehend.
You are enfolded
in the weaving of divine mysteries.
You redden like the dawn
and you burn: flame of the Sun.
—Hildegard of Bingen
Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind Notes for a Contemplative Ecology. Oxford University Press, 2013, 3.
Ibid., 243.
Ibid.
Lisa E. Dahill. “Rewilding Christian Spirituality: Outdoor Sacraments and the Life of the World,” Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril ed. Lisa E. Dahill & James B. Martin-Schramm. Cascade Books, 2016, 187.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 180.
Hildegard of Bingen. Selected Writings. Penguin Books. Kindle Edition, np.
