Passages to ponder from John E. Carroll’s book Sustainability and Spirituality:
As most now know, ecology is the study of “oikos,” the home, our home, the only home we have. It is the study of Earth, including ourselves and our place in context within and as a functioning part of Earth. The very important principles of ecology…might be put forth as:
1. Everything is connected to every other thing.
2. Nature knows best.
3. Everything must go somewhere.
4. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Carroll also presents these principles in geologian Thomas Berry’s terminology:
1. Everything carries its own uniqueness and individuality, and each reality is distinct (that is, differentiated.)
2. Everything carries the whole numinous divine dimension of the universe within itself.
3. Everything is bonded to everything else.
Carroll further explains Thomas Berry’s teaching:
Seeing the universe as not mechanistic but spiritual, as not merely physical or material, Berry sees the adoption of this sense of the universe as sacred as being the most important work of our time…Berry believes that nothing can ever be separated from anything else, that you can feel isolated but that you can never be isolated. That is why the bonding of things is so powerful; it is the primary law of being.
The only way to live is with the ever-renewing processes of Nature, in an integral life. It is intimacy which is important, not stewardship or veneration. The universe is a subject, not an object – if we don’t accept that, we’re doomed. We must, therefore, reconnect our sympathetic rapport with the natural world and recognize that the world has a spontaneity; it has a soul. Diversity is precious and sacred; the primordial sacred community is the universe, as opposed to the human alone; our first obligation is to have reverence for everything; and the path to the Creator is through the created.
Carroll’s book tells the many stories of communities that have been living out the principles of ecology and the understanding as all of creation as sacred, toward lives of sustainability. One of those is the story of Genesis Farm, begun in New Jersey by Sr. Miriam Therese. For her, living these principles of sustainability includes understanding:
our need for Nature as a vehicle to worship God
the role of the natural world as an assist to the capacity of the human to image and become like God
the necessity of the human to return to her bioregion, her home
the centrality of a sense of community, for it’s only in having each other that people survive
the capacity to see the interiority of the other as revelatory, a type of purity of heart, for when you see God you do not abuse
the entrapment of accumulation
the awareness that agriculture is a priestly activity, that the healing of the soil, the creation of gardens, becomes a role, a priestly one
the importance of attunement in order to bring oneself into obedience to the cycles, the seasons, to weather, nature and so forth
that if the Earth is malnourished or devitalized, how can the food we grow carry the spirit dimension into us
