An Earth That is Community

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Four, Number Two
November/December 1994

WE ARE STRUGGLING TOWARD AN EARTH THAT IS COMMUNITY

We are at a time in human and Earth history when the human species is having to embed itself within the context of Earth that is community. To see ourselves in relationship to the rest of the community, not in control, not as the only species that is important, but entering as a member of the community — that is a very new and different stance for the human.

In an earlier period of human evolution, the primary questions were Who is the Divine? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Immense questions, and in a comparatively short period of history, all great world religions were founded to help humans answer those great questions.

It is not those questions now that grab the human at the gut. Nor is it the question of the human-human relationship. We have a sense of one humanity.

Now the question at the core of our journey is, What is the human in relationship to Earth? Fr. Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest who has been trying for several years to engage the Christian community in this question, has summed up our situation:

There is deep resistance to looking at this larger context. There is a fear, especially in the social justice community, that if your are concerned about the larger community context of life, you have drawn back from the human. Our task is to face that question, asking what is the appropriate role for the human in this time in history?

There are signs on every side calling humans to a new posture in the community of life. If the religious community does not take up this question, who else will? It is a change in our basic cosmology, our understandings about the origins of the universe, which changes our perceptions about God and the relationships of the human. These are learned only if we engage in this question together.

It is hardest to do in the realm of religious tradition. Here I find two streams of thought. One says there has been a misreading of our biblical tradition. We need to go back to our biblical roots and reinterpret with a new grid.

Most of us learned our cosmology through our religious tradition. Genesis placed us in a spatial world. Out of that story we humans came out on top. The natural world was made for us. Not only the religious tradition, but also the humanist tradition of the last several hundred years has cemented that for us. There is excellent scholarship now going on, recasting that position. This stream of biblical exegesis has a tremendous contribution to make.

The second stream is more difficult, especially for religious traditions, because we are learning, in dialogue with the scientific community, a whole new cosmology, the unfolding of a single universe story. The beginning of the universe was not just a physical burst, but there was a psychic and spiritual unfolding as well. (Women call it the birthing forth. Men call it the bang.) Otherwise we would not be spiritual beings. It has been a sacred journey from the beginning. It is a creative journey and each epoch is asked to be faithful to its moment. We are now entering a whole new Earth Time.

Never before has the Earth been so impacted by one species. It is our religious task to learn from the Earth community. The forests and ozone layer have things to teach us — humus, human, humility. Virtue in our time is to accept our role. We are not in control. We need to help one another to move from stewardship to partnership to friendship with the Earth community, and to celebrate this glorious life-giving planet.