How many times have we circled this fire, a prayer upon our lips?
How many times have we gone to the water’s edge to give thanks for these gifts?
And we will rise again, we will rise again. My people will rise again, We’ll rise.
So many times I’ve looked out across the ocean,
wondered what is it all for?
An apology letter to future generations about the state of the environment and a commitment to make it better.
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Environmental stewardship is defined in Wikipedia as “…the responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices.” Inasmuch as most business on the planet is controlled by a small number of corporations, these are the words that must apply to these biggest of multi-nationals: responsible, protection, conservation, and sustainable practices. Would that they did.
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All human effort is navigation. Human striving—confronted by the wreckage of the past moment, the state of the soil, the demands of both—finds orientation from a compass with two arrows: moral and physical. I was always interested in ethics, but it took a while for me to notice that the moral spins out from the physical more often than the reverse. “Each of us is made by—or, one might better say, made as—a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things,” writes farmer-poet Wendell Berry. “The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts.”
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Good stewardship of the Planet is part of the movement for “Eco-justice”: leaving the resources in the ground; insuring a legacy of life for future generations; treating the Planet as an autonomous organism, whose continuing survival depends on the health of its interconnected systems: the earth, the air, the fire, the water.
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When it comes to things like Earth Stewardship, we progressives think that because we hold the value so highly our actions will automatically conform to our aspirations. But this is seldom the case. In part, we fall short of our most noble aspirations because we are ignoring a big part of the issue. We forget that we are not nearly as rational as we believe, but are shaped by invisible core beliefs that thwart our genuine desire to act differently.
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The film tells the story about Mayflower United Church of Christ’s work to become carbon neutral by 2030. It offers powerful insights into what it takes to move a community into a more harmonious relationship with the natural world.
read moreFebruary 25, 2015 Pacific School of Religion, a multi-denominational seminary in Berkeley, California, announced today that its Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to adopt a policy to divest the institution from investments in fossil fuels. Pacific …
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For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies
For the love which from our birth over and around us lies
Lord of all to you we raise this our hymn of grateful praise
1. The earth may be our mother but we can be her mid¬wife or her funeral director.
2. Nature is a web of interdependency not a series of separate hierarchical layers.
May the fire in us nurture the Earth and not consume its life.
May the fire in us consume our greed and save this sacred Earth.
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Our prayers igniting, cast out into the shire
and the song of our struggle
came straight from the fire,
it goes:
holy holy grandmother, we sing
wash us clean of our pain and suffering
give us strength for our new beginnings
From my deepest grace I sing
wash away, it will wash away
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
Come, let us think like mountain rocks,
Come breathe the song of scented breeze;
Come join the atoms’ quantum dance,
Come weep with all the fallen trees.
All life’s many cycles
Rest within God’s circle
And reveal Earth dying and yet living.
Every living being on this planet and indeed this universe is interconnected in a deep and meaningful way. We are literally made of the stars, we breathe the air that the trees cleanse for us, and we are in a symbiotic relationship with every creature in this web of life.
read moreIn the midst of all this one might well ask: What has happened to the Christian prophetic voice? the voice that says: no, you can’t do that. Christians lately have a tendency to accommodate culture, either by draping the cross with the American flag, or by pretending that new philosophical/theological theories are the answer to the world’s problems. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible had a different take on the divine will. They walked into the king’s court and the king’s chapel, and proclaimed what they believed was the word of God: you cannot do that! We may not like to use the word sin anymore, especially when thought of as “original”. So let us put something else in its place. We are parochial, we do create our own little world, we do put our interests above those of others. And it will haunt us. The eternal now is upon us, and it is time for the Church, progressive and otherwise, to join those prophetic voices that the the world so desperately needs to hear, those voices that cry out: you cannot do this!
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