Passionist and Climate Change

It was Thomas Berry who first spoke of “The Passion of the Earth”.  Climate change is becoming the fiercest example of the suffering implied in that term.  Berry noted that the spirituality of the “memoria passionis” first expanded its range by seeing the sufferings of the poor and disenfranchised as sharing in the archetypal sufferings of Christ.  In continuity with the Gospel’s “what you do to the least of my brethren you do to me”, it became over time, an issue of spiritual solidarity to recognize not just the sufferings of Jesus, but also of the “crucified ones” of our society.  They too are worthy of our compassion as well as our commitment to relieve their distress to the extent of our abilities.  This spirituality has historically generated myriad examples of creativity when com-passion inspired action: nursing and healing, teaching and mentoring, lobbying and legislating, sacrifice and solidarity of life situations (e.g. L’Arche).

The creativity of Catholic spirituality, and indeed Passionist spirituality, has to this point faltered somewhat in its attempts to expand its horizons to the “Passion of the Earth”.  The object of the desired com-passion feels distant from our emotional lives and cold in its impersonality.  Those who have been inspired by Berry’s insight have pursued scientific avenues of understanding human/earth relationships.   These findings are so new that they have barely emerged over the horizon established by age-old tradition.

Our solidarity with all life, from bacteria to trees to chimpanzees is beyond dispute scientifically, yet beyond the ability of our common sense to appreciate it.  Our solidarity with rock and lava, gas and water is beyond dispute scientifically and yet requires the vast expenditures of expert personnel and scholarly papers in international conferences to nudge our common sense even to acknowledge it.  Our solidarity with the sun, our home star, and all other stars and galaxies is beyond dispute scientifically, but rarely emerges in day-to-day consciousness except in the spiritual disciplines of those who pioneer the spirituality of human/earth relationships.

No wonder then that those who speak of “Gaia”, either as a scientific theory (that the Earth is best understood in the paradigm of a living organism), or as cultural icon (borrowing a kind of personhood, such as was attributed to the ancient Greek Goddess), are relegated to the significance of a sub-culture.

And all the while, the Earth endures progressively more intense suffering.  Even the very success of the spirituality of the “crucified ones”, intensified as it is within the Passionist Congregation in this new century, can be seen as paradoxically working against the emergence of reverence for the “Passion of the Earth”.  That is because our social reality, proceeding with a common sense that is deaf and blind to the scientific insights illuminating the human condition described above, proceeds on the assumption that human persons live, breathe, pray, mature and die as though none of it affects who they are and none of it need effect new behaviour.  But the suffering of the Earth eventually exposes this disconnect.  That is the importance of climate change to our culture and to our spirituality. In can be seen as the flip side of Gaia. More than any of its distinct dimensions: the pollution of water, the vehemence and unpredictability of violent weather patterns, the increase of toxins and diseases, the failure of traditional crops, the increase of desertification, the death of the seas, etc., climate change — understood as the whole complex of the altered physiology of the Earth — seems poised to break through the impasse. Climate change reveals Gaia.

 

As recently as March the 8^th, 2009, Thomas L. Friedman tried (quite successfully, I think), to break through to a new common sense about our “growth economy” when he wrote:

“We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese….

We can’t do this anymore.”   [Week in Review, p.12, New York Times]

 

But spirituality has an even bigger task.  Human suffering generated by such an economy is real, but ultimately “collateral damage” of an even deeper suffering.  A “flow-thru economy” could solve many of the human side effects of a non-sustainable economy, but it is a long way from realistic recognition of the “new human” (biologically, physically, cosmologically) required for what Berry calls a “mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship”.  That can only be initiated and sustained by a spirituality able to feel com-passion for the Passion of the Earth, which in turn can be expected to develop myriad creative responses toward its healing. 

 

Thomas L. Friedman quotes the Australian environmental business expert, Paul Gilding:  “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”   He remarks:

[Gilding] has a name for this moment – when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once – ‘The Great Disruption’.” 

Perhaps such an economic disruption, because it can lift the opaque curtain of current common sense about the limits of Earth’s compliance with our growth economy, can lead to further, deeper revelations about the web of life that knits our solidarity with the Earth.  However, it seems to be too late.  Fast on the heels of this Disruption is what might be described as the “Gaian Disruption”.  That is because, sadly, our spirituality, detatched as it is from our earthling identity, is building up the Passion of the Earth just as feverishly as the “productivity” patterns of our economy portrayed by Friedman. 

 

It may well take this Gaian Disruption to open our eyes, finally enabling us to extend our com-passion. Passionists can join the vanguard of those who are beginning to discern this “turn to the Earth”.  We may even be able to bring some leadership to what is already a most difficult era of Earth history, progressing inevitably to more suffering and death.  Every expression of positive creativity we can manage because of our spiritual solidarity with the Earth will contribute to the productivity of the whole Earth community and its healing.

 

Healing — we have already passed the possibility of restoring the Earth.  Too many species have been extinguished.  Too much interference has crippled the Seas, too much poison has toxified the atmosphere.  It may be within the creativity of the Earth to generate another Cenozoic age, but for the foreseeable human future, we will be at the mercy of the spiritual and ethical wisdom we can acquire in what Berry terms an Ecozoic Age.  Everything else will be an untrammeled Gaian Disruption. A Passionist spirituality open to the Passion of the Earth enables a specific hope.  Within that solidarity we can establish “mutually enhancing relationships”.

 

One Response to “Passionist and Climate Change”

1. William says:

   November 1, 2009 at 7:09 pm

   “Let the earth bring forth vegitation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it” And so it happened: the earth brought forth every kind of plant that bears fruit with its seed in it. God saw how good it was. (Gn 1 vs 11 NAB). . . Then God said “let the earth bring forth all kinds of living creatures: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals of all kinds”. . . (vs 24).
   Translated from the original Hebrew the terms “bring forth and “brought forth” are the same as “childbirth”. What a metaphor! – the earth is a mother. At a point in the creation story, the earth has received God’s life-giving Word and becomes participant, co-creator, partner, with God. This does a great service not just to our traditional understanding of God as Father but the creation, what we call the universe, as God’s partner in creation. In a certain way way we could say that God is our Father and matter (from the Latin root “mater”) is our mother. We have two parents and we bear the image of each.
   We see this metaphor of earth-mother again and again in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Might we also say in this context, that Mary, in Luke’s annunciation narrative has the distinction of being the the womb of the earth, the portal for the entry of the God-Man into the world?