This Ignatian Life

For the last several weeks I’ve been trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that has me so disquieted. Unless I’m sleeping, I feel agitated and restless, unfocused and withdrawn. It’s almost like the furor of autumn marched right into my heart and mind and decided to take up permanent residence. The worst part about it is the way it obliterates my concentration, which has withered to the same brittleness of the dry, rusty leaves I have been watching the wind tear from the trees and disperse; …I feel my mind scatter widely with each curled leaf…

And like those fall trees I so love to contemplate, all of my energy is compelled to withdraw from the outward trappings of my life, retreating from limbs and flowing down or in, like sap gathering to feed the inner core of my body. I’ve been watching my own leaves, those showy figures of self-containment, identity, and expression, drop off like so much detritus (to be consumed, I suppose, by my roots). So much shedding! Outside and inside—shedding so vigorous I can’t think what will be left once this agitated wind dies off—

I notice that as this happens, as my concentration grows increasingly frail, so too does my sense of self, which is beginning to bust open, blow away—becoming less definable, less reliable, more volatile. It feels like all the sudden, I can’t quite put my finger on what, exactly, I mean, or grasp who or what I’m for; or, in what way, precisely, it is that I should relate to or participate in the daily goings-on of life… I feel remarkably silent and internally absent from friends and family; I have a hard time listening patiently to those around me speak. I’m frequently filled with ambivalence. I’d rather be left alone to think and sit quietly as my interior sifts and sorts and slowly works to re-shape my sense of self, and so I find myself getting resentful about one thing after another that daily demands for me to concentrate on it, rather than on myself. What I want most is simply the permission to wrap myself up in the chaos of my mind as if in a warm cocoon of blanket—to be free, like Proteus, to permutate and transmutate until I can settle on a satisfying shape. I’d like permission to give over to whatever process it is that has overtaken me. I’d like the right to shed my “togetherness”—let everything fall away if it must—and not be made to feel sorry for it.

But the other temptation is of course to try to diagnose these feelings and label them as “problems”—using my logic and my discerning ability to root out the offending “weeds”, “distractions,” or thing that is (poisoning? choking?) obstructing my peace of mind and my ability to meaningfully interact with the world. I begin to wonder if I should be feeling guilty for feeling withdrawn—am I being selfish? How hard should I try to fight these compulsions? Is there some big problem in my life I need to discern? I begin judging my interior needs, and start to worry if these impulses I feel are symptoms or signs of my failings, my weaknesses, of things broken or harmed in my life. It’s tempting to write off my mood as “depressive” and “self-absorbed”—a passing thing that comes and goes. Or to tell myself it’s from sleep deprivation and stress (though there’s some very compelling evidence this is part of it)—yet, I think the mood and feelings are about something else a little more fundamental, too.

Rather than confront my interior situation and it’s “problematic” external manifestations (i.e. the fact that I need (would like) to be left alone for a handful of hours a day; and that I have shortened patience and a weak attention span when I’m in public) with the harsh and unrelenting spotlight of pure reason, or clinical psychology, or medical scrutiny, or diagnostic judgment of any kind, my heart requests instead that I examine it with the dappled sunlight that flickers through leaves in late autumn afternoon. In this way, under this golden kind of light and accepting observation, my heart and mind promise to help me understand what it is I am feeling.

I’ve spent weeks meditating on my irresistible attraction to and commiseration with fall and its shedding deciduous trees. I’ve come to see this shedding as a part of what Walt Whitman calls the “exfoliation” of life. In a short prose entry in Specimen Days entitled, “The Great Unrest of Which We are Part,” Whitman writes that there are “two impulses of man and the universe”: unrest and exfoliation. Both of these terms make good sense to me, particularly at this time of year. One need only observe what’s happening outside to see this truth figured in the vegetation—everything is dying away, sinking down, sloughing-off— The wind picks up and howls in the autumn and the world feels Nature’s unrest—its agitation before dying, its struggle with loss, or its restless desire to retreat and nurse the invisible buds of new life that must lie in darkness until Nature is once more ripe for them.

But less often do we consider, I think, this exfoliation and restlessness as a fundamental truth of human interiority in anything more than a proverbial sort of way—as if it were merely an anecdotal option for understanding things about ourselves that are really much more complicated. But the more I consider it, the more I feel it’s true: I am the autumn, as I am the winter, spring, and summer. Such a mundane thought, and yet if we really heeded the simple wisdom of our feelings, I think we’d change some things about the way we understand our psychology and our needs.

For example, why is it that we can all appreciate the way the wind whips the leaves from the trees in the fall? Why do we take pleasure in the turns of deciduous color—when we know it means the leaves and plants are dying? Why do we romanticize the melancholy of the fall season and call it beautiful when what it means is that we will have to stare at stark, barren tree branches for another four months—until the spring can redress so much nakedness? We know that a barren landscape weighs down our spirits. Yet we willingly accept this process, we decide (because we have no choice, really) to be patient with the immense process of nature’s chaotic and wanton self-abandon, her melancholy, her disarray, her unrelenting insistence for retreat. She pulls back from us, from the world, so to speak, to hide or sleep or restore her creativity. And we accept this. We know we must, because it is ultimately for the world’s benefit–this renewal and re-creation.

And I wonder why we see ourselves so differently? Am I not a kind of tree? I am made of the same molecules and star-stuff; I am every bit an organism who is part of the great eco-system of this planet—if I am uprooted from my earthly habitat, I too will die; the seasons and climate similarly affect me; and like all species I experience the same cyclical processes of exfoliation, decay, and renewal that every organism undergoes—even though I may not see the physical manifestations of this continual process. For instance, my organs are forever changing themselves…cells are dying away and being replaced constantly; in a few years, my organs will look the same, but they will be new, composed of different atoms entirely. In the matter of months or years I will have new skin, new eyes, a new heart, and perhaps without my realizing, a renewed mind. Change is reality and stability is partly a complicated illusion. Reality is always moving at the speed of light, even though we don’t perceive it. But we sense, we feel this constant movement and change—we know we must move and change with it, exfoliating, dying and re-manifesting: For “what is Nature,” Whitman wonders, “but change, in all its visible, and still more its invisible processes? Or what is humanity in its faith, love, heroism, poetry, even morals, but emotion? […] The processes of growth, of existence, of decay, whether in worlds, or in the minutest organisms, are but motion.”

In observing more closely the exfoliating tree and the restless movements of autumn, in listening to the way this season speaks to my heart and mind, I begin to understand that I am sharing in and performing Nature’s unrest—so much so that I can easily identify my sympathetic shedding of self-focus and present identity with the deciduous trees’ own struggle to understand themselves bereft of their identifying, self-expressive leaves (an anthropocentric identification, but no less useful, at least to me). The point is that I am continuous with what is happening outside—it flows into me and I into it. My mind strays and scatters uncontrollably with the wind. And I too want to retreat with the trees and plants— Yet, what I can’t understand is why, as a human being, I am held to such a radically altered sense of what is “natural”?

Clearly, by way of my humanness, I am expected to “overcome” my “seasonal affective disorder” (again, if I have any “disorder” it must be this one [SAD]) and be “in show” all year long, full-leafed and brightly colored—my leaves engaged with and tasting the world, nurturing and shading. But the truth is that no one can sustain a summer mind all the time, though our culture expects us to perform as if this was so. We ignore so much about our biology; we pretend as if we are not organic creatures. This is the real cause of illness.

But, for me at least, there is no real choice but to continue to struggle with this tension between my natural biology and organic needs and the cultural expectations I must also meet. I choose for “therapists,” however, my trees. They understand: Je suis l’automne! Je suis aussi beau!

Photo: “Fin d’autonmne!” by Denise Collette from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

Recently my husband and I installed a geothermal heating and cooling system for our home, and the decision to do so elicited in me somewhat of a panic. As the day for the drilling drew nearer, I began to realize that once the trucks started backing in and the drills began droning, forcing their way into two-hundred feet of quiet, dark earth, that I would be stuck here, in my home, for many more years to come. In short, those drills (and the money it took to get them in my backyard) represented two hundred feet of steel anchor situating us here—we were officially connected to a place—we had committed for the long haul.

Whenever a door of possibility slams shut, I get tense, which is not a good habit. The negation of an option feels a little bit like a wall has been erected somewhere close-by, limiting my mobility and freedom. Though it can easily drive me bonkers, I’m pretty skilled and living in-between decisions—in the realm of “infinite possibility.” I often feel like I can see countless alternate realities super-imposed upon one another, hovering just above my present life… and though all I need do is just pluck one of these many possibilities from out of the air, and allow all the rest to fade out of (potential) existence like dissolving apparitions, I continue wait, and decide nothing final. Choosing often scares me (when we’re talking big decisions), and so I let the possibilities continue to tumble over me like a sea, which is why living in-between isn’t wise—one can quickly lose footing on the present and get lost in dreaming, wondering if…if…if maybe only…perhaps if…?

We’ve only lived in our current house for about a year and a half now, but in that short amount of time we’ve managed to put a lot of time, care, sweat, and money into it; though by way of money, it’s had to be on a borrowed dime and a used shoelace. How we managed to convince ourselves of buying a geothermal system might actually be beyond the ability of most people to understand, then, given the modesty of our situation, but this was fundamentally important to our ideals (in-efficient buildings, especially residential homes, are far more damaging to the environment pollution and resource-wise than cars), and the numbers miraculously worked out (we had already been paying an arm and a leg for heating and cooling—our air conditioner and furnace were neolithic beasts). My husband had been dreaming and obsessing about the virtues and practicalities of geothermal, and I had been teaching my students the “evils” of carbon emissions for a few years—it seemed we had to act on the opportunity to live out our promise of good environmental stewardship.

But, this all as it may be, I was nevertheless plunged into doubt about whether our home was the “right” one to be financially committing ourselves to—was this the right living arrangement for us long term? Sure, when we bought it I loved it, but did I intend to be here forever? Wasn’t this an in-between home? It only has two bedrooms on the main floor, so what happens if we have another child? (I guess we could always “bump up” the attic and build a dormer). And while the kitchen appeals to me now, what about in 10 years? (But maybe we could get new cabinets). What if my neighbors move out and total hooligans move in next door? And I want a dog someday—we don’t have a big enough yard for that, and I can hardly fence it in. There’s no garage, and we probably can’t build one either—will I really be scraping snow and ice off my car for the next twenty years? (oh, poor me!)

And then…what if we can’t make all these changes? Wouldn’t it just be easier to move to a house that’s better suited to our needs for the next few decades—one that has a bigger yard and more windows and more social clout (and so on and so forth)? [This is the point at which I was underneath the waves—possibilities and indecision and just plain fear bowling me over and washing me out. And I was starting to feel a little bit of despair, because I worried we were creating a cage for ourselves—or at least for me. My husband could be happy in a 500 sq. ft. shack with no plumbing (no kidding), so the worry was really mine alone.] I was left wondering whether my compulsive worries were based more on sound logic or upon fearful reactions to the idea of committing to one place, and to a particular kind of life.

In his essay “Homeplace,” Scott Russell Sanders examines in some depth this problem I was dealing with: whether it’s better to be free to move about in order to improve our safety, comfort, and status—going when the impulse strikes and the winds of change begin to blow through the window; or, whether it is better to stay put and make the best of what you’ve already got. When the going gets tough, or maybe just plain boring, do we move on to new territory? Or do we reinvest in our relationship with the place we’re already in? This is a pretty basic tension in American life, for on the one hand, the “virtues of moving on are familiar and seductive, […our] nation founded by immigrants and shaped by restless seekers. From the beginning,” writes Sanders, “our heroes have been sailors, explorers, cowboys, prospectors, speculators, backwoods ramblers, rainbow chasers, vagabonds of every stripe. Our Promised Land has always been on the next ridge or at the end of the trail,” but “never under our feet.” Most of us have grown up believing that “movement is inherently good” and that staying in one place breeds intolerance, ignorance, and perhaps a kind of stagnation that leads to depression and the death of creativity, or, that most prized of American attributes: invention. Most of the people I know move frequently; in fact, until recently, we couldn’t keep close friends for more than three years at a time. We still don’t have many friends our age because our age-group is just plain transient; so, we decided to find more “stable” friends who have several years on us and who are willing to stick around for a while.

Which leads me to the reasons why my husband and I decided to stick around ourselves, and buy this house in the first place: we wanted to commit to our friends and be part of a community, we wanted to be part of progressive neighborhood, and live in a diverse area. By the end of the first month in our new home, we knew the first names of well over half of our neighbors, and by the end of the first six months had established good relationships or friendships with several families within a two-block radius. There is a vibrant community garden a few blocks down the street where we keep a garden plot for our family. Every Saturday in the summer we walk down there for a Children’s Gardening program and learn about growing food, or about insects, birds, weather, or ecology with our daughter. Our neighborhood is situated in the middle of town so we can walk or bike to many places we like to frequent. And, it’s a good neighborhood to live in if you like to know the people who live nearby. (Sounds good. So what’s my deal?)

Well, after much work discerning the root of my anxiety, I decided the real problem was basically that which Sanders had so eloquently laid out: I was (and am) torn by two opposing ideas about happiness in American culture, and I wasn’t entirely sure which idea best suited me—to stay put or to stay mobile. The narrative of travel and mobility is an attractive one—it appeals to my inner artist who needs freedom, newness, and continuous creative inspiration. However, the environmentalist in me thinks much of the harm that is done to our world and to each other arises from our cultural inability, at times, to commit to a place, a person, or an ideal, and to grow in intimacy with it/them. Intimacy is what makes us care about what happens to places, people, and ideals—we care because they really matter to us personally. As I began discerning this issue more deeply, I began to feel that the real cage and constriction in my life was fear, and a compulsive perfectionism (there’s always something better just ahead…); but really, I know life is what we make of it.

Just about any place can be a good place, provided we commit to making it so, individually and communally. I learned this when I lived in Ireland for three months while I was in college. I decided to follow the inner artist in this instance, and traveled there to attend art school for a semester. The landscape, topography, geographical location, sights, sounds, smells, the precise quality of the light—was absolutely perfect. I knew with every atom of my being that this place was an external representation of my interior longing. We were a perfect fit, me and Ireland. But, the love affair began to grow somewhat desperate as my desire to share this perfection with family and a loved one intensified. While I had found a place that held profound meaning for me personally, there was no community to make it a real home for me. This was a hard realization to stomach, but it’s stuck with me.

So as I began to reconsider where the joys are in my life now, my anxieties began to hush themselves. Family, friends, and a strong sense of community—these are what my heart finds meaning in, but they require that I stay put and invest myself in one place, and commit to the people I love. Rather than seeing those deep geothermal wells in the backyard as anchors in a negative sense, I choose now to see them as an umbilical chord and taproot—from them I intend to ground myself, grow deep roots  and identity here, branch out, and hopefully, produce some good fruit and create my own kind of Promised Land. And it’s this thought really sets me free.

Photo: “roots” by Hanssolo from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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)

“There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.

The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

—William Carlos Williams

I’m not sure about you, but I think about food a lot. Whether we realize it or not, food tends to organize our whole day, and in many cases, entire weeks or even months. How many of us plan our week around a grocery store trip or food budget? Or spend hours a week considering a menu for dinner guests or family, and then ponder how to obtain our food supplies in time? How many of us pace our morning or afternoon schedules precisely so that we have just enough time to swing by Starbucks for a tall mocha on our way to work? So of course I think about food; but only recently have I realized that I had not really been contemplating the centrality of food in my life—I hadn’t thought about the spiritual, moral, and ethical dimensions of what I eat. So, I’d like to take some time right now to reflect a little on just one of these dimensions—the spirituality of my eating practices.

We all know a stable, healthy diet is a prerequisite for good emotional and physical health, but I hazard to think few of us consider ways in which our diet is also an important component of our spiritual well-being. There is a sacred exchange that happens between the eater and the eaten—an exchange of life energy—an exchange of sacredness and spirit, the eaten providing its own life in order to continue the life of the eater. So, every act of eating is actually a moral and ethical choice. I am continuously ordering the world according to levels of importance—for instance, what is least important is deemed edible, which means I have decided that edible things are useful, but expendable. Or at least this is one way my culture has taught me to look at and understand food—or the nonhuman world.

But, skipping over for the time being the ethics and morality of our culture’s eating habits, or the development of our food taboos and religious rituals regarding proper food consumption which keep in check the tremendous and often destructive power of the human appetite, there is one very basic principle I like to keep foremost in mind when eating: one life is being exchanged for another. It doesn’t matter what I eat—steak, salad, chicken nugget, carrot…at root, life must feed life. Considering we don’t know how to make “life” from thin air, I’d say that the ability of the earth to produce life to sustain life is quite an awe-inspiring, and humbling mystery.

This principle has made me wonder, then, whether it isn’t just plain neglectful to eat flippantly, oblivious to the gravity of what is happening during this exchange. We eat the body of the earth in order to have life. While we consider the body of Christ to be sacred because it gives us spiritual life, no less sacred is the body of the earth, which is part of the body of God, for it is fully imbued by God’s Spirit. “We come from the land, sky, from love and the body,” writes Linda Hogan, “From matter and creation. We are, life is, an equation we cannot form or shape, a mystery we can’t trace in spite of our attempts to follow it back to its origin.” Thus, to be oblivious to the presence of food in our lives, and unmindful of its origin in the miraculous ecologies of water and soil, is to be oblivious to the presence of God at work around and within us. “Everything is Maker” says Hogan, “without respect and reverence for it, there is an absence of holiness, of any God.”

In “The Pleasures of Eating,” an important essay on the ethics of food production and consumption by Wendell Berry, an academic of eating ethics and agrarian ideology, Berry outlines what I have come to think of as a decidedly spiritual problem, which is that we no longer have any real connection with the food we eat. In losing this connection, we have lost, in my mind, a profoundly important connection with the sacred dimensions of the Earth, our own bodies, and with the God that is all life. Berry argues that our alienation from our food is not a freedom, as many often suppose (less time wasted in the kitchen cleaning up, right?). But not having to think about your food, where it comes from, or the processes that have generated, prepared, and delivered it, is not liberation. Instead, it leads to complete “obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and purposes, of the life of the body in this world.”

This train of thought has led me to re-consider a simple poem I came across by Robert Frost, in which he celebrates his experience of ripened blueberries:

Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!

Clearly, Frost is able to appreciate these small blue globes as something extraordinary and lovely through his sensorial experience of them. His body here is a measuring and equating device, providing him with a way to make meaning and “sense” from his experience of nature; in short, meaning is made through the dynamic relationship between his body and the earth. For example, he notes the berries are ripe by comparing their color with the deep blue of the sky, by comparing their size in relation to his thumb, and by attentively listening to and feeling their plump density as they drop one by one into his pail—these are the clues he uses to decide whether or not the blueberries are exceptional and ready to eat. Frost’s poem bursts with excitement in the same way the berries are ready to collectively burst with their own ripe perfection. And his close observation, experience of, and participation with the gathering of his own food brings him an obvious joy and gratitude for the blueberries and the world that created them.

I assume he has been blueberry picking before, because he expresses an awe that this entire clump or patch of berries is ripe at once, there are no green fruits. This knowledge, presumably gained from his previous experiences out gathering berries, has enabled him to feel genuine astonishment at the blue miracles before him, and has moved him to acknowledge this discovery by turning it into a poem. I can’t say I really noticed any of this the first time I read the poem, though. I wasn’t sure why he was so excited about ripe blueberries, and so the possible meanings of this short text just kind of passed me by.

Maybe the reason why I couldn’t appreciate the poem at first is because I’ve never had the opportunity to go blueberry picking, nor I have I made an effort to. While I know how to scrutinize berries in the grocery store, carefully holding their small plastic packages up to my nose as I inspect them for signs of mold or mushy brown splotches, I’m not familiar with the shape, size, or color of a berry plant. I am unfamiliar with its stages of growth, and I don’t even know how big to let the fruit get before picking it, except that I remember, more or less, how big the berries are that I see in the store (that must be as big as the fruits get, right?). I don’t know what a blueberry plant smells like, and I’ve never felt astonished to find a container full of ripe berries—all the same size and color—in the store. They are, more or less, always around aren’t they? At least, there’s always the frozen food aisle if all else fails… So I drop the plastic container, or frozen fruit bag unceremoniously into my cart and continue on my hurried way.

Wendell Berry says that once our industrialized food manufacturing has finished with them, most of us would never know that our “various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all came from the soil, or that they were produced by work” of humans, animals, insects, birds, bacteria, and on and on down a fantastically complex and elegant chain of food production—indeed, chain of life production. “The passive American consumer sitting down to a meal of prepared fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived,” writes Berry. “The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”

Thus, in allowing ourselves to be alienated from our food, unmindful of our eating practices, and generally severed from many of the core biological realities of our existence, we are, as Hogan warns, cut off from the miraculous, spiritual dimensions of the earth and the Spirit of life that makes it flourish. We forget that our bodies are created and sustained from the soil, water, air, and energy of the earth. The act of eating is so basic to our existence it is easy to think nothing of it, yet the simple act of mindfulness when eating can have a dramatic impact on our relationship with ourselves, with one another, with the ground of being (literally the soils that are our life—adamah), and with all of God’s creatures whose lives work in unison with our own to continue the cycles of life on earth.

So what can we do to reconcile these problems and cultivate a deeper spiritual awareness through our acts of eating? I’ll share with you some of Berry’s advice, and perhaps share a few of my own practices. To begin, the most important first step is to actively choose to be conscious of food, and to understand that “the health of the soil, plant, animal, and eater is a single concern.” Berry explains that, “Eaters…must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” This means that we have to be consciously aware of the effects our agricultural practices have on the soils, animals, streams and rivers, and consumers of agricultural products. If any one of these components is unhealthy, then the whole system will become unhealthy as a result. For example, it is important to consider that most cattle are fed alarming amounts of antibiotics to keep them from succumbing to illnesses that are caused by the grains they are force-fed. As grass-eaters, their stomachs simply are not designed to digest grain (corn) and so they bloat and get life-threatening ulcers. They also get numerous illnesses from cruel living conditions they are forced to endure. Another enormous concern is that the bulk of greenhouse gasses (over 50%) emitted in the world are produced by animal feedlots—methane released from putrid rivers of animal waste have a direct impact on global climate change.

Or you might examine the health of the fields in which we grow our food. Many of the farm fields in central United States have been reduced to a brittle sponginess because of industrial-scale farming practices. The ground has been so leached by over-farming and the continuous re-planting of crops with high nutrient needs (like corn and soybeans) that it can no longer produce high yields without the heavy application of fertilizers—chemicals that only further exacerbate the problem. These fertilizers and pesticides, in turn, run-off the fields and enter our streams and rivers, dumping out into the Gulf of Mexico where they have created a dead-zone that is roughly the size of New Jersey. These same chemicals also leech into the ground or make their way into major rivers, entering local and regional water supplies. And then of course we consume more of these chemicals when we eat produce grown with them, or when we eat animals that have eaten this industrially farmed produce.In short, what you and I eat matters tremendously, not just to us, but to a great many other people and organisms that are simultaneously effected by our food practices and eating choices. So, if you’re interested, some other ways Berry and others urge us to increase our mindfulness about food are as follows:

* Participate in your food production
* Prepare your own food
* Learn the origins of the food you buy—buy local, organic food whenever possible
* Deal with farmer when you can—look into local food co-ops
* Learn about the best farming and gardening practices
* Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience, of the life histories of the food
species you consume

But probably the most important way to begin to cultivate mindfulness is to eat with sincerity and gratitude, “conscious of the lives and the world from which food comes.” This practice of gustatory mindfulness will necessarily lead to heart-felt action. Perhaps we should seriously think about asking ourselves, “What and how would Jesus eat?” Or, if interested in how food is involved in social justice concerns, one should definitely ponder, “Am I eating like Ignatius?”

Photo: “Blueberries” by Kimberly Snyder © All rights reserved. http://www.flicker.com/photos/hootowl/ - used with permission