Religions united to preserve the 'divine milieu'
The Catholic Register
March 28th, 2004, page 10.
As the earth gets hotter, stormier, more crowded and less biodiverse, humans are beginning to rethink their relationship with the Earth.
Increasingly, people are realizing that religious traditions, with their potential to shape attitudes and provide the interpretive stories of who we are and where we are going, play a vital role in shaping that relationship.
This is the conviction of a group of Canadian academics who gathered this month at the University of Toronto to launch the Canadian Forum on Religion and Ecology (CFORE).
Supported by the Harvard Forum on Religion and Ecology (the largest international multireligious project of its kind), CFORE is a modest attempt to foster collaboration among religions and other disciplines so as to stop the ecological ruin we are creating.
The launch of CFORE certainly gives us cause to consider why such a forum is necessary today. Certainly, the Church, since Vatican II, has always urged Catholics “to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions.”
But today, with the growing magnitude and complexity of the environmental problems, the message CFORE is sending is clear: Though necessary for solutions to environmental problems, religions are not adequately equipped to find the solutions on their own.
Dr. Heather Eaton teaches at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. She is the founder and co-chair of CFORE. She points out the benefits of collaboration in more concrete terms. Eaton believes that many world religions have a sense that we live in a divine milieu. She uses a term coined by Teilhard de Chardin, which expresses the notion that God is not only transcendent (beyond the created world) but also immanent (within the created world).
There is much evidence for this within the Christian tradition itself. St. Basil the Great, for instance, wrote, “If you open your eyes to the beauties of the earth, they in their turn will augment your belief in God.”
And the 14th-century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, wrote that every creature is a word of God. More recently the Canadian bishops’ pastoral letter on the Christian Ecological Imperative affirmed nature as, “a continuing revelation of the divine.”
In this manner, the forum offers a unique perspective on environmental issues, especially as it hopes to influence public policy in Canada.
Eaton underlines that when we change the earth’s climate or bring to extinction countless of species each year, “it is not just a question of loosing a human resource base.” Instead, she says, Canadians will get the sense that “destroying our natural world is really diminishing modes of divine presence on earth.”
Eaton believes CFORE is tapping into an ecological consciousness that has been growing steadily for the last few years. Kenneth Kraft, one of the world's foremost scholars on Buddhism and Ecology, delivered CFORE’s inaugural lecture. He admits that the term “religion and ecology” would not have been used ten years ago.
Already within the last few years, Canadians have seen similar interreligious and ecumenical collaboration on ecological issues. KAIROS, the Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiative has an ecological program, which works on the critical issues of climate change, biotechnology, water and sustainability. And the inter-faith organization Faith and the Common Good is working with the David Suzuki Foundation to help Canadians renew and deepen their relationship with the earth.
But the road ahead, Eaton admits, is uncertain. Many religious questions remain unanswered. For instance, when asked how to get the average Christian, Buddhist or Jew to become ecologically engaged, she was at a loss for ready answers.
Further, Eaton points to the difficulty that lies within some religious traditions that place well-being of humans above, and to the exclusion of, the well-being of other animals or earth systems as a whole. Such human centredness, she points out, certainly an aspect of Christianity, “has prevented people from embracing the complex earth community out of which we emerged and to which we belong.”
“We are the only species that’s destroying our ecological niche and calling it progress,” she laments.
Perhaps this is where the forum has already proven helpful. Kenneth Kraft offered the participants a fresh approach to revisioning human-earth relationships. The Buddhist way is to see all beings as interconnected. Humans know that they will die when their lungs stop working. The Buddhist perspective, he points out, recognizes that the forests are our lungs outside our bodies. What happens then to the divine milieu when we destroy our forests?
Simon Appolloni