I’m curious about your question because the entitlement of belonging is also behind eco-nationalism where people feel really close to a particular place but thereby feel entitled to exclude other people from that place. How could an all-encompassing sense of sacred earth – one which has reciprocity, service and love at its centre – be the answer to our climate crisis?

While we were walking around the room considering deep ecology I also had a sense of how humans have always historically looked at the skies and feared destruction – the cuban missile crisis, the ancient Greek Gods who could destroy our harvests – does reverence and fear always go hand in hand for our collective human imagination? I am feeling very tiny in the deep time of human kind at the moment, in a way which is both comforting and detaching.

There is another quote by Wendell Berry: ‘there are only sacred and desecrated places’ which strikes me. How can we make our waterways sacred again so that people do not drop litter into them? How can we make malls sacred places where people connect to the people who made the clothes they are connected to?

Looking forward to more big conversations together soon!

Bridget

The one place that I have truly found home and a sacred place is, in fact, within myself. Once I can block out distraction and invite God in, I find myself accepted, nurtured, valued, free to express myself and challenged too. Similarly, I find home in the Sacraments (my love of Eucharistic adoration is very Anglo-Catholic, but where else can one sit in relative silence amongst others doing the same, have a visual focus on the Divine, be removed from almost all distractions and freely express whatever is on one’s heart?). I particularly love confession – once I remind myself that God knows not only everything that I am about to bring to Him but WHY I did it, what would help me not to repeat my mistakes and how to gently push me towards greater relationship with Him, I am free to open my heart to His mercy, to take counsel from His priest and to be forgiven. All I have to do to find this sacred place is to put aside the fear of what I am about to say, remembering that He knows already and that I am afraid only of admitting my shortcomings to myself!

My theology of the earth must, therefore, recognise that everywhere is sacred since God created it and enters into it whenever one of us asks Him to be within us. Having felt that release of confession and absolution, I must also advocate for people of faith to call individuals and corporations to account for the damage that they are doing to the earth, to show them the true consequences of their actions and to ask them to be truly contrite in order that they may re-establish their relationship with our planet and try to do better in the future – God already knows and is willing to forgive and help them; they need only admit it to themselves and wish to make progress and our sacred planet will be given a little more life with each change that they make.

Many denominations have a pro-life stance, borne out of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or the Jewish ‘Pikuach Nefesh’ (do not harm a soul). Personally, I espouse these only up to the point where they cause more harm (for example, an unborn child that has no chance of living outside the womb or a pregnancy that would likely kill or significantly harm the mother both fall into an area where conscience and not legalism is the more appropriate guide for me). What, I wonder, would be the result of applying some of these principles more broadly? What if we were to consider damaging our planet without good reason or mitigation (i.e. felling an acre of trees in order to provide solar or wind energy farms or taking an unneccesary flight but offsetting the carbon it generates) as a form of killing? In fact, destroying the very means of sustaining life on earth a little at a time probably should be equated to killing, as should exploiting workers in order to make greater profit. The only difference here is that we are collectively responsible for the corpses here and no individual or corporation can be directly blamed, so there is no outcry.