A Life-Line:

What i think we need for the twenty-first century is what might be called a mysticism of ecological praxis. The liberation theologians of the twentieth century and their European counterparts came to recognize that Christians committed to the cause of political liberation need to be both political and mystical. It is only the mystical that can enable us to hope against hope, to act with integrity, and to love in the political and the personal spheres in times of adversity and failure, up to and including death. Edward Schillebeeckx sums up this when he says that authentic faith, or the mystical, seems in modern times “to be nurtured above all in and through the praxis of liberation.” In this experience there grows the awareness that God is revealed as “the deepest mystery, the heart and the soul of any truly human liberation.” He points out that the political form of love of God and neighbor knows the same need for repentance and conversion, the same asceticism, the same sufferings and dark nights, as is the case in contemplative mysticism. He says: “Without prayer or mysticism politics becomes cruel and barbaric. Without political love, prayer or mysticism soon becomes sentimental or uncommitted interiority.” .

The challenge to find the living God in solidarity with the poor of the Earth remains an enormous challenge for Christian faith in this coming century. . . [C]ommitment to the poor and commitment to the well-being of life on this planet must go together as two interrelated dimensions of the one Christian vocation. Ecological conversion is not opposed to, but intimately involved with, conversion to the side of the poor. And ecological conversion, like conversion to the side of the poor, will need to involve both the political and the mystical, and the discovery of the mystical precisely in the political.

What then would a mysticism of ecological praxis look like? SEE tomorrow’s THE ALMOND TREE.

~ from Denis Edward’s book Ecology at the Heart of Faith: The Change of Heart that Leads to a New Way of Living on Earth, p. 117.

ARTWORK: Kathy Conzelman. Used with permission. See Kathy’s photos here.