Experience shows humans tend to care for what we know and love, those we know and love. So the summons to life, the summons from and for life, the summons for survival — no longer ours, but that of our children and grandchildren and the well-being of seven generations hence which is a foreign concept to most except First Nations people — calls for more people to fall more intimately and deeply in love with the natural world and to live as if creation mattered, to live in kinship with the entire earth community, and to stop living as if humans were the sun around which Christian theology, let alone all life and living, revolved.

It’s easy not to care. It’s easy to be indifferent about that or those with whom we have no contact, no hands-on experience, no emotional connection, no up close and personal relationship, and therefore no sense of a commonweal and shared fate. This cultivation of care should manifest in how we learn about both other humans, especially those unlike us, and the other-than-human world. Let’s stick here with the latter, the natural world.

We can’t begin this education early enough in life. Scientist and nature-writer Rachel Carson famously wrote in her classic The Sense of Wonder: “If a child is to keep alive his[her] inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he[she] needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him[her] the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.“1 Parents with children still at home take note. For the rest, if for whatever reason, we didn’t do this when we were parents for our children, grandparenting is a great time and opportunity for this, as are aunt-ing and uncle-ing.

We have long since passed the day when every public and private school throughout the world beginning in Pre-K and running through grade 12, should be mandated to have a curriculum not merely on stewardship and earth-care but on forming a healthy, mutually enhancing, responsible relationship with the natural world. It’s the one class that should assign homework every night: go out in your backyard, your neighborhood woods, a nearby park. Be still: look, listen, smell, touch, savor. Then “Ooh!” and “Aah!” How is it that my now grown children got to high school with only one week (their favorite I might add) of “out-door” school? Today, every indoor school needs to be an ongoing outdoor school. And it is inexcusable for any school identifying itself as “religious” not to have such a commitment and offer the consequent programs to actualize that commitment. The ecological devastation caused and perpetuated by humans is a spiritual crisis after all, not merely an environmental crisis.

[ASIDE] Any religion, spirituality, or faith community that claims the Divine can be experienced somewhere and in someway without also acknowledging the real presence of God in the depths of nature, without recognizing the sacramental nature of nature itself, is not only unbiblical but, I believe, automatically and necessarily delegitimated. It was the evolution (devolution?) of a warped, dualistic theology contending this world is “a big, bad, ugly, evil place” that indicated or implied humans need to be saved from or saved out of it that allowed Christians for centuries to turn a blind eye to the desecration of the earth, the same earth that so hospitably and generously sustained these same people. It is interesting to note, that the end zone bible verse favored by many, namely, Jn 3:16, actually begins with words that seem to have been passed over in the memorization and edification of the verse: “. . . God so loved the world.” Maybe those who have a rapturous image of folks being beamed up by Scotty (God) while mumbling something about “my Lord and Savior” have it wrong. Maybe it is the physical universe and earth (κόσμος, cosmos)** that has been faithful to God and therefore will not perish but will be spared the destruction at the hands of humankind. I write this with only a slight smile and wink of the eye.

Equal time should be split between learning about nature and learning from nature. For anyone who thinks the idea of learning from nature is some kind of Birkenstock, foo-foo, silly, environmental conspiracy theory, think again — or think for the first time. Ask any scientist worth his or her salt, if they have learned anything from nature — from migrating birds, whales, butterflies, polar bears, deserts, trees, wetlands, fallow land, coral reefs, glaciers, starfields, blackholes. Especially in the early grades, less time should be spent learning facts and more time given to letting natural fascination and feelings emerge, more right-brained than left-brained. Learning should be oriented not merely toward learning about creation but encountering the mystery of creation, not just toward respecting nature but toward reverencing it, toward eliciting natural human awe, and toward falling in love. Although I have used the following quote elsewhere, it bears repeating. It also is from Rachel Carson:

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.2

Matthew Fox, the chief spokesperson for creation spirituality says something similar and equally evocative. He writes:

It is when you get excited about the goodness of things that you are prepared to act. Again I will use the phrase falling in love. We have anthropocentrized falling in love–we think it is something you do to find a mate for the rest of your life–but I propose that we can fall in love several times a day for the rest of our lives. You could fall in love with the galaxies–there are one trillion out there! Every day you could fall in love with one galaxy and still, on your deathbed, leave many virgins for the next generation! You could fall in love with species of wildflowers, of which there are still ten thousand on this planet; you could fall in love with fish and plants, trees, animals, and birds, and with people, especially those who are different from us. This capacity for being in love has no limit, and it is all about experiencing blessing.3

In this regard, the children of the earth have something to teach those of us who have lost our sense of the incomprehensible surprise of being, and being here on this resplendent earth. The young do not have to be taught to be enchanted by nature. We are necessary for insuring that children have enough time in nature to build a rapport with the non-human community which is essential for adults as well. The type of learning we need to facilitate comes by way of experiencing being in nature, with nature, as part of nature, realizing nature lives as much in us as we live in nature.

We learn to care and love when we are connected to something or someone. So we need to educate toward this connection at the heart of which is an intuition of the preciousness and sacredness of all creation. If we don’t do this soon–as in yesterday, last week, last year, okay, at least tomorrow–and unapologetically, thoroughly, and continually, we have doomed generations of innocents to precarious lives for the sake of our modern and post-modern collective selfishness.

The planet presently suffers for these basic reasons: human arrogance, ignorance, irreverence, greed, and selfishness. One of the great historical ironies, one of the most tragic human travesties and blasphemies is how white europeans, mainly those self-identifying as Christians, even those claiming to have been fleeing religious persecution, came to North America and quickly deemed the indigenous people “savages” and their God illegitimate. Oh my! It’s too devastatingly sad and ridiculous to even say, “What a joke.” More like what a tragedy, what a sin, what a moral failure, what a crime, what a log in the eye as a land once flowing (not with milk and honey) but with the great bison and plentiful salmon runs and luscious green forests were invaded by the ruination of the incarnation of the six-killers, the five listed above, topped off with that unhealthy masculine favorite past-time–violence.

Woe are we and the earth for the mockery of Manifest Destiny — the destiny of those wielding power and privilege over against the destiny of destruction and death for anyone or anything in the way. The terrible tandem of the worship of progress and the shriveling of soul without counting their cost in the form of the enforced regression it foists onto so many humans and other-than-human life forms. The second captain first pick always choosing information and knowledge over wisdom and discretion, private interest over the common good. The disinterest in, if not the disgust with awe, humility, reverence, modesty, fairness, compassion, mercy, justice, wonder, care for the weakest, protection of the most vulnerable all deemed by the powers and principalities of the dominant culture as anathema when, in reality, they are human and ecological virtues without which we will surely perish.

Learning how to live honorably, responsibly, and justly together on this earth, caring for it as faithfully as it has cared for us, cannot be framed with any integrity as an issue of conservative versus liberal, blue versus red, religiously persuaded versus unpersuaded, this hemisphere versus that hemisphere, east versus west, north versus south. It is time for those who reverence the earth as God’s beloved creation, those who are grateful for the life it secures for us, those who cherish the plethora of life forms on this planet, those good, decent, neighborly, and kind people of the world, to band together on behalf of the earth community against the individual and corporate power brokers of our time who unequivocally put their own selfish greed and need, flaunts and wants, big business, big guns, big oil, big walls, big egos, big bank accounts before the health of the planet and the well-being of humankind, especially the most vulnerable whose voices are not listened to or heard. Our spiritual practices and earth-sharing virtues written above in bold blue are the antidote to the vices written in bold green.

Nearly 60 years ago Pope Paul VI said, “If you want justice, work for peace.” Civil rights advocates for even longer have chanted “No justice, no peace.” No peace is not a threat of violence. No peace means the human and more-than-human community will never know the fullness of shalom–which is more than the absence of violence–until and unless justice reigns. It is the just relationships required for a community to live together in a healthy, holy, and humane network of mutual care that brings lasting peace.

* Well, I started this in the morning, but I’m a slow typist.
** κόσμος, cosmos always carries with it the idea of “order” and “arrangement.” It’s opposite is chaos. Often in scripture it refers to the universe, or all of creation, including all the inhabitants. Sometimes it is unclear if the author might mean this planet, though biblical cosmology was different than what we know today. In some cases, the word conveys something negative or evil, contrary to the view of creation as good, blessed, and cause for Divine delight depicted in Genesis 1.

1 Rachel Carson, A Sense of Wonder
2 Ibid.
3 Matthew Fox, “Religion As If Creation Mattered,” Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life, p. 41.

Photo: (Top) NASA, A composite of 370 photos over the last two decades of the center of the Milky Way.

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