Blessed are you, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental
categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth; triple abyss of
stars and atoms and generations: you who, by overflowing and dissolving our narrow
standards of measurement, reveal to us the dimensions of God.
—Teilhard Chardin, “Hymn to Matter”

Much of my reading, writing, contemplation, and action these days centers on ecology, sustainability, and spirituality. While it’s entirely possible I read too much about these things, my interest in the natural world and our relationship to it have pressed me into a continuous dialogue with my self about how an Ignatian Christianity partners with my ecological beliefs. I have been wondering, for instance, what is Ignatius’ stance (and therefore The Society of Jesus’ stance) on ecology? And, is sustainability a fundamentally Ignatian principle? Having attended a Jesuit university through college and graduate school, I learned that Ignatian spirituality invites each spiritual seeker to find God in all things, inviting him or her to spiritually encounter God’s beauty and divinity through his or her experience of God’s creation. Through this encounter and relationship with the created universe, we experience salvation through God. In The Spiritual Exercises Ignatius wrote, for example, that,

Man is created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul…Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it… (Sandie Cornish)

To be perfectly honest, this language is problematic for me, and appears to be contrary to the what I thought Nature was about—an opportunity for relationship and community with God through Others—other species, other races… But in this passage, it seems to be suggested that creation is merely instrumental to our salvation—that it is an object we can manipulate as we see fit in order to gain our own ends—and is not an inherent dimension of salvation itself. However, I was encouraged to learn that the General Congregation of Jesuits had themselves been discerning the ecological dimensions of this First Principle and Foundation of the Exercises. In “We Live in a Broken World” (1999), a document by the 34th General Congregation of Jesuits (GC 34) in which the Jesuits examined Ignatian ideals and ecology in the context of The Spiritual Exercises, they explain that while we may have the ability to use the things of creation to help us to our own ends—to praise and honor God—we are not justified in the mistreatment or misuse of these things—ever. As Fr. John Fitzgibbon S.J., Dean of Professional Studies at the University of San Francisco explains, the world is “holy gift,” and as such, it must never be misused or irreverenced. God dwells in the world (and beyond); thus, the world is sacred—God’s Spirit of Creation is alive in everything: “It [flames] out, like shining from shook foil” and “gathers to a greatness” (Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”).

What Ignatius meant in the First Principle and Foundation, then, was not that we become indifferent or ambivalent to nature and the sacred plants, soil, elements, species, and atmosphere of Creation; rather, what he meant was that as with any object (anything that is not “me”), we should keep our relationship with it only if it enables and inspires our reverence and service to God (and thus to one another). If objects do not inspire us to serve and love, than we must leave them be (but we must not destroy them). What matters most is the kind of relationship we foster with the things of Creation; what matters is whether our relationship with creation is healthy or unbalanced. As most of us know, for example, a piece of gold is neither good nor bad—it is a part of God’s creation. What can be bad is how we relate to gold, and what it inspires, or does not inspire us to do, how it does or does not inspire us to behave or live. If gold tempts us to sinfulness, it is not the gold that must be destroyed, but rather our misguided relationship with and use of it. So it is with all of Creation. We must let it live, and foster its holy life—attending instead to the temperance of our own powerful desires.

And this train of thought has lead me into many reflections about our current relationship with God’s creation, particularly in the Western world, wondering how we could ever have really thought that this mysterious, exquisite planet was simply put here for us to use exploitatively and exclusively for our own personal (species’) gains and ends? Currently, our planet is beset by an enormous host of ecological threats—threats that bespeak a terribly disordered relationship between humans and God’s creation: global climate change and increasingly violent weather patterns; the destabilization of world fossil fuel supplies and a progressively more vulnerable global food supply; alarming losses of biodiversity; the domestication of practically every remaining wild, open space; the devastation of arable, fertile soils by erosion, desertification, and industrial farming methods that rape it of its health and fertility; growing shortages of clean, potable water and an increasing toxicity of rivers, lakes, streams, and oceans; and a wanton overuse and exploitation of ecosystems, non-human species, and planetary resources:

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod… (“God’s Grandeur”)

The world I see at work out there is one where the preservation of ecosystems and species does not fit into dominant cultural ideologies, practices, or economies. In a document from the United Nations’ Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems, it is reported that, “half of the planet’s (original) forests are gone, 80 percent of grasslands and 40 percent of the planet’s land surface suffer from soil degeneration, and 70 percent of the planet’s major marine fisheries are depleted. They add further that, “The world’s freshwater systems are so degraded that their ability to support human, plant and animal life is greatly in peril” (Hartman 1). In 24 short hours, “business as usual” costs us 200,000 acres of rainforest destruction, the release of 13 million tons of toxic chemicals into our environment (into the air, water, and soil that we breathe, drink, and eat), the extinction of 130 plant or animal species due to human actions “(the last time there was such a rapid loss of species was when the dinosaurs vanished),” and the death of 45,000 people by starvation—38,0000 of them children (Hartman 14). This is the collateral damage of one day—of each day of business as usual according to standard Western capitalist economic practice.

The world I live is in an ecological crisis, and this crisis has been caused, by and large, by the way the Western cultures look at and relate to the created world. As bad as it may sound, what my culture sees when it looks outside is more often “real estate” than it is creation and gift. Outside there are “economic opportunities” rather than emotional, physical, and spiritual relationships to be explored, experienced, reverenced, and shared. When we see a beautiful flower more often than not we long to pick it and take it with us, rather than simply allowing it to exist in its own right, giving beauty, comfort, shelter, and food to other observers and species who might encounter it. And so with the planet as with the flower. Theologians, environmental writers and activists, scientists, and ecological persons across the world are uniform in calling our crisis one of the spirit, and hence, of the heart. Industrial societies have become alienated from the natural world and the fundamental ecosystems that sustain life on the planet. In “The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide“, Mark I. Wallace, professor and Chair of Religion at Swathmore College writes: “The environmental crisis is a spiritual crisis because the continued degradation of the earth threatens the fundamental goods and values that bind human beings to one another and all other forms of life. At a very deep level we no longer feel our common kinship with other beings as the basis for earth-friendly action and commitment. We have lost that primordial sense of belonging to a whole web of life that our kind and otherkind need for daily sustenance.” Therefore, this spiritual crisis,

is explicitly a religious problem in the sense that the promulgation of particular theological teachings has lead to the ravaging of earth communities—for example, the idea in the Genesis creation story that God, a heavenly being far removed from our planet, created human beings as God’s viceregents to exercise “dominion” over the earth. If God has given the earth to us as our private possession, then why not do with it what we want to? Lynn White, in a now famous essay, writes that Western Christianity’s attack on paganism effectively stripped the natural world of any spiritual meaning by replacing the belief that the Sacred is in rivers and trees with the doctrine that God is a disembodied Spirit whose true residence is in heaven, not on earth (2). …By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. (3)

Clearly, we need to find our way to a new understanding of the spiritual and physical importance of the natural world.

As Christian theologian Max Oelschlaeger points out in Caring for Creation, “We are the environmental crisis, and it is primarily our philosophies, economies, and governments that motivate and direct the devastating onslaught against the earth” (3), as well as the way we interpret some fundamental aspects of our religious doctrines. A re-examination of our theologies along with our cultural ideologies, as many have already noted, is absolutely necessary. Some of our traditional religious assumptions have not served us well, nor have they well-served God or God’s creation. As Pope John Paul II has already told us, it is our “obligation to consider the consequences of human decisions for the environment on a time scale that includes future generations” (Promotio Iustitiae 70 (1999)). As Catholics, this means we have an obligation to practice sustainability, which requires both our restraint and our full creativity. If we were to take the Gospels seriously, heeding God’s command to love thy neighbor as thyself, or genuinely follow the wisdom of Matthew 25:14-30, where we are taught to use our talents both creatively and productively by using them sustainably until the master returns to claim the increased fruits of our labors, we would passionately pursue and embrace a sustainable economy, culture, and way of life that was no longer wantonly wasteful in its polluting resource and energy practices, that was non-toxic, low-carbon or carbon-free, and healthy for ourselves, our neighbors, and all of the creatures that help sustain life on this planet.

One of the primary concerns of the most recent General Congregation of Jesuits (GC 35) this past year was globalization, which refers to the way that the world is now a “global village”, so to speak, where all peoples (and species) are interconnected economically, culturally, and environmentally—the lives of billions of people on the planet now interpenetrate with one another. And as the Society of Jesus discussed globalization, it was with the realization that the environment is at the core of global concerns. The ecological misdeeds of one people, for instance, often cause great suffering and injustice in other places (and for other species); ecological disease or distress in any one area of the world may produce enormous social atrocities—caused by things like drought, crop failures, polluted water, resource wars, or natural disaster—and these atrocities can reverberate throughout the entire world. Ecology, they are finding, is the core context of basically everything else, which isn’t surprising considering the natural world is the core context of our human lives—without it, we simply do not exist.

Working for world peace and social justice means, hence, the undertaking of careful, sustainable, and peaceful “stewardship” of the Earth. This is what GC 34 reiterated almost ten years ago—that God is not merely present in all creation, God is actively working and laboring for us through creation, and so we are called not merely to reverence and respect the living world, we are also called into deep intimacy and communion with it. A relationship of communion with the natural world would look radically different than the kind of relationship we currently practice with the Earth. I think this important re-reading of the First Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises is, then, an enormous step toward healing the fractures between human culture and religious ideology and the Created world by pointing out our moral and ethical call to sustainable ways of living within the world. Sustainability is, I’ve found, at the very heart of Ignatian spirituality; and, it is the most potent medicine to heal our planet. Now, how do we begin this work…?

Photo: “Now the Lord had planted a garden…” by circuit rider from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

Related posts:

1. An Ecological Change of Heart