By Martin L. Smith
I was taking a quiet day at a seminary a few weeks ago, and it set me thinking about the energy I brought to the launching of my own ordained life, almost 40 years ago. What were some of the first things I wanted to commit myself to? Not just in theory but in practice. I began to remember what it meant to me to become chaplain, in 1970, to the new wetland nature reserve that local volunteers were creating from old watercress beds near my parish. Maybe I was one of the first nature reserve chaplains at a time when ecological consciousness was dawning, just eight years after the publication of Silent Spring, the book that helped to launch the environmental movement.
Later I volunteered to devote my first vacation as a butterfly catcher to the great European survey of butterfly populations, one of those groundbreaking explorations of the effects of atmospheric pollution on wildlife. The survey needed volunteers who had no expertise or biases about butterflies to catch them randomly in their thousands so that experts could take a scientific tally of species distribution and numbers. So I spent some weeks darting around meadows in the Massif Central in France, and all over the vast marshes of the Camargue, swirling my net, and bringing my catch to my expert companions for counting and identification. I can remember the feeling at dusk, standing outside my tent, shoulders aching, watching the vast flocks of pink flamingos on the marshes, praying and wondering about what kind of future lay in store for them and us in the world we were relentlessly degrading.
Well, that was 40 years ago, and now the ecological movement is in full swing. My commitment back then was practical, mirrored today by the thousands of people who work hard to support or protect wildlife. Where would my commitment be now? I think it is up to me to respond more deeply to what might be called the mystical dimension of ecological awareness.
There is no lack of voices that witness to the pragmatic, the practices we need to embrace to forge a viable way of life for the planet. Schoolchildren can reel off recommendations for the habits we should adopt to reduce energy, waste and pollution. In the church we can’t be content with merely echoing what is commonly and publicly recognized as sound practice. And there is no lack of voices that witness to the need for new technological solutions. We are bombarded with programs and articles about the highly technical solutions that scientists are exploring to counteract the effects of global warming and inaugurate a new era. Economists propose complex schemes of offsets, researchers investigate ways of sowing protective substances into the atmosphere, and Christians as Christians have no special angle on any of it. So where might our contribution be one that is in fact intimately connected with our praying and believing?
One way is by forging a spirituality that is deep enough to help people change the way they experience the world around them. A faith centered on the Cross should give us deeper insight into human brokenness — alienation from the natural world, estrangement from the creatures that share our planet. This is the brokenness underlying resistance, indifference and apathy in the face of the ecological crisis. Christians might be the ones to help people recognize the terrible loss to the human spirit we have inflicted upon ourselves by creating an industrialized and technological culture that has contempt for the ecosystems. We need the spiritual resources of lament, God-inspired grief, and that is totally different from the fatal religious impulse to moralize and to berate and condemn people for their consumerism and selfishness. We need to help people recognize the depth of our loss, our emotional and spiritual numbness to the splendors and intricacy of the natural world in which we are embedded. A great philosopher once said, “By the little that now satisfies the soul, judge the extent of its fall.” How pathetic that the little pleasures that come through endless fiddling with our handheld electronics seem to be enough, when in reality we are victims of a tragic isolation from nature and from the daily beauties all around us that carry an infinite freight of meaning and bliss.
Through grieving comes the dawn of new possibilities, and unless the church is a healing environment in which people are coached to shed their insulation and be re-sensitized to the beauty of God’s intricate net of life, we have little to offer. Everyone knows we need to change many of our lifestyle habits. Everyone knows that the utmost ingenuity of our scientists will have to be deployed. But not everyone knows how to have their eyes re-opened and their hearts reconnected with the natural world. Do we, as bearers of the Gospel? Isn’t this another reason why spirituality is at the heart of mission?
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.