In Annie Dillard’s reminder that we are just set down on the earth and no one knows why, she continues her reflection by making an intriguing suggestion: we could “explore the neighborhood . . . to discover where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, even if we can’t learn why.”[1] Would it make a difference how we should live if we understood where we live? The answer seems obvious—yes, of course. And yet when we ask the question of how to live well, we often limit our context to ourselves, or at most to ourselves and God. How to live well? is considered one of those big questions that religion or spirituality deals with; hence, it is a question about our “inner life,” while economics, medicine, science, and technology deal with our “outer” or ordinary life.
I would like to suggest that this division of inner and outer lies at the base of much that is wrong with contemporary analyses of how to live well. We need to look at the full context of where we live if we are to discover how to live well. We will attempt to do this in three steps. First, what would a spirituality for the planet (and not just for human beings) look like? This is a necessary step in widening our vision of where we are as we try to determine how we should live—we cannot leave out 99 percent of the world in our search for the good life. Second, we need to take a hard look at “the state of the planet,” especially in regard to ways we deny what is plainly before our eyes: the deterioration of the basics that support human and all other life. We do not need another reminder, full of facts and statistics, of the dire planetary status. Rather, we need to open our eyes and be willing to acknowledge “where we live.” To do this we will look at four experiments to internalize the plight of the planet—experiments in thought, feeling, morality, and art. Third, what steps might the religions take in developing a spirituality for a planet in need? What particular insights do the religions afford that are both contrary to current interpretations of our place in the scheme of things and helpful in forming our response? We will suggest that kenosis, self-restraint, giving space to others, pulling back, saying “enough,” recognizing the interdependence of all life-forms: these are a few of the words that attempt to describe the special—and challenging—religious contribution to the economic and ecological crises of our time.
The current fascination with “spirituality” versus “religion,” with spirituality seen as inner and personal, while religion is institutional and traditional, is yet another indication of the narcissism of our culture. However, a 1977 definition of spirituality by the Scottish Churches Council claims it is “an exploration into what is involved in becoming human,” and “becoming human is “an attempt to grow in sensitivity to self, to others, to the non-human creation, and to God who is within and beyond this totality.”[2]
Spirituality is not about a one-on-one relationship with God, but about growing in relationship with others, including the natural world. Spirituality is communal, learning about and caring for the world. And what is our world like these days? If we were to answer the question, Where are we? two main crises would surface immediately: global warming and the economic recession. Since climate changes are happening much faster than thought even a few years ago,[3] the urgency of the situation is evident. In less than two decades the Arctic Ocean will be free of ice all summer, melting permafrost and releasing methane gas, which will further accelerate global warming. Researchers fear tipping points with irreversible temperature rise, and its terrifying effects.
The economic crisis has retreated a bit since the dire days of spring 2008, but the possibility of further global economic meltdown is still with us. And there is little optimism about finding a way forward to ensure that another Great Recession does not occur. These two crises point to a dilemma deep at the heart of where we live—we are living in la-la land, a place that has no relationship to the finitude of our actual home, planet earth. We are living beyond our means, both financially and ecologically. We are consuming with an insatiable, and unsustainable, appetite.
We need to change our minds and change our behavior. Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, puts it this way: “What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall—when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’ What if we face up to the fact that unlike the U.S. government, Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts?”[4]
One way we can begin to change our minds and our behavior is through a communal spirituality. The poet Robinson Jeffers says that we should “fall in love outward”; we should fall in love with the world rather than “inward” with ourselves.[5] For some, spirituality is about the individual—how might I live serenely and happily? But what would a “communal” spirituality look like—one that was good for both the planet and all its creatures?
The religions—the wisdom traditions—might have something to teach us. They move us from individualism to community, for they are not just about “me and my well-being.” Rather, they are tough-minded and objective, insisting on global kinship—that all creatures have the right to the basics of existence. How can you get more revolutionary than that? Such a revolution would involve immense changes in the lifestyle of us well-off North Americans. Some have suggested that the religions encourage people to be good “stewards” of creation, and I agree. However, most religious traditions suggest much more: most make the radical suggestion that to find your life, you must lose it, that sacrificing for others is not just for the saints but for all of us, that when the basic necessities of life are limited, they should be shared fairly. John Hick claims that the function of the main religious traditions is “the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness.”[6] And Gandhi claimed that “worship without sacrifice” was one of the seven deadly sins.[7]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that at seven years old he had two passions—for the world and for God—and he could not imagine giving up either one. Must it be beauty versus duty, an either/or, or is there another way? What is the character of the spiritual practice for just, sustainable living? What kind of spiritual practice is called for?
Both God and the world call to us to “fall in love outward” (Robinson Jeffers), not inward. One is not duty and the other love; rather, both call for our attention and do so primarily by focusing on the world. Spirituality is not a one-on-one inner relationship with God; rather, it is meeting God in the world, in both its beauty and its pain. An incarnate God directs our attention to what God loves—the world, all its creatures, human and otherwise. We are constituted by this call outward, this call to pay attention to the beauty and pain of the world. It is “who we are” (made in the image of God who loves the world). We are not first of all selves who then respond to a call to love the world; rather, this is who we are—world-lovers—which always means world-bearers, for both nature and the neighbor are the “new poor” in our time.
So, it is not God or the world, but the world in God. We must love nature as it is: physical, needy, interdependent, vulnerable. If we find God in the world, then we have set the context, the place, where we meet God. This perspective militates against an individualistic, spiritual relationship between God and the soul. It unites mystical spirituality—our personal relationship to God with the world—with the needy body, which must have the basics for flourishing. Finding God in the world means as well that our use of energy becomes important, for nature and its many creatures can only live by energy. Hence, mundane things like transportation, heating and cooling systems, concrete for buildings and roads, food production (whether local or brought from afar) become the way we love God. Loving God and sharing energy are one and the same thing. This kind of spirituality leads not only to delight and joy in the beauty of the world but also to kenosis, limitation, self-restraint, ecological economics, a sense of finitude, the need to share space, as we come to realize who we are in the scheme of things.
Is this religious insight of the transformation from self-centeredness to reality centeredness simply wild, crazy idealism? Is reality anything like this? The evolutionary, interdependent story of reality that we are presently learning from the sciences suggests it is. Nature is the grandest, most intricate, most complex system of give-and-take, of debt and payback, of borrowing and lending, and of sacrifice (albeit unwilling sacrifice). Everything—from one-celled organisms to mosquitoes to whales to human beings—lives within a vast system of exchange, whether they know it or not, whether they want to or not. We give and take constantly at every level of existence, simply to exist at all. Every breath we take is borrowed, and our lives depend on being able to borrow more and more breaths every moment for the rest of our lives. Nature says this is the way the system works: if we live at all, we live off each other.
A good example is an old-growth forest. When I moved to Vancouver, I was introduced to them for the first time. I did not know anything like them existed. The forests back east do not have the complexity and bizarre qualities of old-growth forests, which are a mess—literally, a mess. On first view, such a forest strikes one as a tangle, a jumble of trees standing lying down or half-way down; caves, holes, and openings; ferns, mosses, and lichens; mushrooms, rocks, and epiphytes; springtails, crustaceans, and dragonflies; water dripping, running, standing; trees on top of other trees, trees with bushes growing out of them, trees with holes and knobs and twisted limbs like pretzels. An old-growth forest is seemingly chaotic, but it works, it sustains billions of different forms of life. Its haphazard quality is part of its genius: anything that is successful, that can find a way to live, is okay. Animals and plants live with, inside of, on top of, beneath, partly inside and partly outside one another. It is often impossible to tell what is what: where does this tree begin and this other one end?
The best example of this marvelous messy muddle is the phenomenon of the “nurse log.” Nurse logs are lying-down trees—some would say dead trees—that, having lived several hundred years as standing trees, have now begun a second career as homes for other trees. The body of the nurse log provides a warm, nutrient-rich birthplace for young saplings of all sorts to grow. And it is not just seeds from the nurse tree that grow on a nurse log, but anything and everything. All are welcome! The nurse log can live another several hundred years as the giver of new life from its body. Sometimes one sees ghost nurse logs: big empty holes under the roots of trees where a nurse log used to be. The new tree stretched its roots around the nurse log and still retains this odd position after the nurse log disappears. With the hole between its roots, it is a visible sign of the tree that nurtured it.
Life and death are mixed up here. What is living and what is dead? Is the nurse log dead because it is no longer standing up straight? Scarcely. Is the sapling living because it has new leaves? Yes, but barely, and only because it is living off the nurse log. It all works by symbiosis—living off one another. Nothing in an old-growth forest can go it alone; nothing could survive by itself; everything in the forest is interrelated and interdependent: all flora and fauna eat from, live from the others. The nurse log is but a clear example of what occurs everywhere in such a forest.
The recognition that we own nothing, that we depend utterly on other life-forms and natural processes, is the first step in our “rebirth” to a life of self-emptying love for others. The religious insight that we should move from self-centeredness to reality centeredness is not contrary to the way nature works; rather, it is an intensification of it. In fact, self-centeredness and reality centeredness are not total opposites; rather, recognizing that all life is interrelated and interdependent is the basis for a new view of the self, one that does not try to hoard everything, one that recognizes that others beside oneself truly exist and need resources in order to live. The religions say that the self is found, is “reborn,” when it acknowledges the ultimate nature of self-giving, by sharing space and food with others. Many call such sacrifice for others contrary to reality, but nature’s brutal exchange system, in which everything is borrowed and payment exacted, is a preparation for the further, total step of self-emptying. What is distinctive about human beings is not we that we escape the economy of debt and payback, but that we can not only recognize that this is the way things work, but we can take it one step further and give when we see the balance sheet to be unfair to the weak, the oppressed, the needy. The debt-and-payback system is not merciful or fair or compassionate, but human beings have the capability of making it more so, of sharing when they have too much, of sacrificing for others, of limiting their wants so the needs of others can be met.
At the heart of most religions is a message, an invitation to a marvelous, messy, muddle where we must live in and with and off of one another—if we live at all. Like the plants and animals in an old-growth forest, we are interrelated and interdependent. We live or die together. Along the way we find some nurse logs, those people and places of exceptional warmth and nutrition, who give us the extra help we need. We also can become nurse logs to others. But like any forest, we can be clear-cut, made into a lifeless, sterile, straight superhighway; we, our world, can also become a desert, where few can thrive. Or we can welcome the good news that all of us, all human beings in our incredible and delightful diversity, as well as all other creatures and plants in their awesome differences, are invited to the feast table of planet earth.
In sum, we are not called to love God or the world. Rather, we are called to love God in the world. We love God by loving the world. We love God through and with the world. But this turns out to be a kenotic, a sacrificial love.
The stakes for “climate change deniers” are high; if they can convince the world that global warming either is not taking place or is occurring at a reasonable pace, then we do not need to revise our complacent estimate of the state of the planet. A group of British climate scientists, who sent some ill-advised memos, learned how high the stakes are for the opposition. From these ill-advised memos the deniers were able to elaborate the myth that the entire 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report was questionable and was not the “inconvenient truth” Al Gore had claimed. The falsity of these efforts has itself been denied in several carefully monitored studies, but the damage is done. Even though the substance of the UN report has been upheld, people who want to deny climate change (and who doesn’t in their heart of hearts?) have found “evidence” to support their wish.
It is very difficult to accept what is now clearly before our eyes: study after study has shown that our planet is sick at the structural level, the level where health is necessary if the planet is to provide the resources for all life-forms to flourish. The authors of a 2009 essay titled “Planetary Boundaries Breached,” published in Nature, mention nine key “planetary boundaries” that must be respected to avoid catastrophic environmental damage. Three of these boundaries (climate change, biological diversity, and nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans) have already been breached, and since all nine are linked, the other six (such as land use and freshwater use) are already compromised.[8]
No matter how blue the sky may look or how green the grass is in our particular square mile of planet earth, we need to see that appearances are deceptive. What is necessary now is that we raise our vision beyond the superficial picture of planetary health that wealth, air conditioning, pollution controls, and zoning laws give to some privileged corners of the earth. And we must be willing to acknowledge what our brothers and sisters in developing countries see more readily—that extreme heat, unusual flooding, and violent storms are warning signs that the structural health of the planet is in danger. Our ability to “deny” what is before us lies in part with the inner/outer split mentioned earlier—we assume that how we live is not connected with where we live, except in the most superficial way. We do not think, deep down, that we are really and truly interrelated and interdependent with all other life-forms and that their health determines our own. At most, we imagine that while some people will suffer from economic and ecological meltdown, we special human beings, the ones with education and some wealth, can escape.
But what if this inner/outer, us/them kind of thinking is false? We have lived so long with this picture of ourselves—as subjects inhabiting a world that is our object and our resource—that it is difficult to imagine it might not be true. In this picture, each of us is the “center” of the world (at least to the extent we can make it so). But what would it be like to imagine the world differently, not as subject versus object, or us versus them, or superior versus inferior, but “all together”? But how are we all together? There have been many different ways of imagining this. Much of the Christian tradition has seen all spiritual beings (God, angels, the human soul) as together while the fleshly aspects of human life (and the earth as a whole) are excluded. But what if we refused this inner/outer, spirit/world split and imagined a “democracy of life”? Since all interpretations of the world at a level beyond mere description are necessarily based on models, what if we worked with the model of democracy rather than empire, or subject-object, or hierarchy, as the basis of our thought experiment?[9] There is good evidence from a wide variety of fields—philosophy, theology, the sciences, and others—that the old model is neither satisfying for human life nor beneficial for the planet, and that a new model is emerging. One way to summarize this shift is with Alfred North. Whitehead’s well-known statement that “we find ourselves in a buzzing world amid a democracy of fellow creatures” (italics added).[10] We need to internalize the world as “process” not “product,” a process of which we are a part, not the whole. I am not suggesting “deep ecology,” a collapse of the human into nature; rather, I am attempting to imagine a more complex, nuanced, and profound relationship among all beings. “In short, an ecological politics of everyday life is about engaging in a form of ‘feeling life’ . . . where the boundaries between self, body and environment are made less certain.”[11]
Contemporary ecological, evolutionary science is certainly telling us that this interdependence is the case, but it is very difficult to internalize. Let us engage in a thought experiment based on the proposition that there is no “environment” or “nature” surrounding us human beings, but simply one reality we all inhabit, whether we be caterpillars, leaves, camels, or people (rich or poor). One way to interpret the last three hundred years of Western consciousness—from the Enlightenment to postmodernism—is a growing awareness that the line between “us” and “them” has been stretching to include all of “them.” When Immanuel Kant said that one should always treat another rational being as an end and never simply as a means, the moral circle was implicitly limited to men of status similar to Kant—the question of women, let alone children and primitive peoples, was not addressed. And certainly there was no whisper of concern for nonhuman life-forms (including the majestic red cedar, the glorious hummingbird, or the land and water). Ethics was limited to behavior between rational men. We are now approaching a very different limit—a time of no moral “limit.” Everything is interconnected.
Philosopher Bruno Latour has imagined such a world. Its primary characteristic is that there is no “environment,” no external world that is our playfield. Rather, there is “one world,” a cosmos, a totality of things, all of which are “insiders,” members of the collective who have voice. Hence, “we must connect the question of the common world to the question of the common good.”[12] In other words, the two key moral questions are: “How many are we?” and “Can we live together?”[13] Here there is no nature versus human beings, but rather one world; here we must internalize the environment, which we used to think of as “another” world. In this view, when ecological crises arise, they do so as a result of what Latour calls “a generalized revolt of the means”; that is, those parts of the collective whose “voice” has not been heard, who have been utilized solely as means: “no entity—whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood—agrees any longer to be treated ‘simply as a means, but insists on being’ treated also as an end.”[14] This is not sentimental embrace of the lowly creatures whom we have previously abused; rather, it is the hard-headed implication that the world really is one process, which will not work efficiently or productively if its parts are not valued as subjects (in some sense) rather than mere objects.[15] The deterioration of the “whales, rivers, and climate” taking place before our eyes is ample evidence that this way of imagining the world is anything but sentimental. It is horrifically factual. What Latour is attempting is a “political ecology,” a common world of humans and nonhumans in which politics and ecology apply to all: a radical democracy in which all have a voice. Rather than making us “free” of our attachments to others, this view will deepen our acknowledgment of those “numerous crowds of aliens who have become full-fledged members of the collective,” an attachment that is not sentimental, but one that is “always trembling because it has left outside . . . a spider, a toad, a mite, a whale’s sigh . . . some unemployed person, some teenager on a street in Djakarta.”[16]
Needless to say, this view of the world and our place in it is neither easy nor comfortable; it will demand not only the expertise of all fields of human endeavor, but also a change at the level of our most basic sense of who we are and where we fit in the world. This widespread acknowledgment that the imagination must help us entertain another alternative is well expressed by Václav Havel. “What could change the direction of today’s civilization? It is my deep conviction that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It is not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behavior and a new set of values for the planet.”[17] At the very least, experimenting with new models of the human-world relationship plays a key role: it will not solve the economic and ecological crises we face (no one “solution” is at hand), but it opens up the possibility of “thinking differently,” which plays a part in acting differently. The power of imagined constructions is all too evident in the enormous influence of the consumer model of the human-world relationship. So why deny that alternative models, were they to become deeply imbedded in our consciousness and our behavior, could play a similar role?
We have been imagining a different world, a world in which democratic practice rather than empire or subject/object describes its mode of operation. In this world, everything has a voice, humans are not set apart from all others, and the lines between “them” and “us” are fuzzy in intricate, sometimes delightful, sometimes scary ways. We live with, in, for, above, beneath, through all these others. How does that feel? Does our thought experiment result in something we would like—perhaps even love? Bracketing for the moment all the many ways that nature, the world, impinges on human desires and needs, does not please us, and can in fact threaten, harm, and kill us, is there also a dimension of the democracy model that is deeply appealing?
There is a considerable contemporary literature on what has been called “nature-deficit disorder,” which is the result of what biologist E. O. Wilson calls our inability to fulfill a basic human need—“biophilia.” He claims that human beings are hard-wired to pay attention to and delight in other forms of life. He says that “we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted. . . . To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained.”[18] Or as David Abram suggests, “nature-deficit disorder” is the ways “whereby the human mind came to renounce its sensuous bearings, isolating itself from the other animals and the animate earth.”[19] What should be obvious is that our “roots,” what makes us human (our peculiar ways of perceiving and communicating), come from the world in which we evolved. “The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and proved by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.”[20] Abram says we need to “turn inside-out,” freeing ourselves from encasement within the human sphere, acknowledging that we are touched by and in turn touch our kin, other animals, and the earth itself at all levels of our evolution, including our minds. Unless we acknowledge this connection, we engage in what Gregory Bateson in 1972 called an “epistemological fallacy,” thinking of the mind and nature as separate.[21] This is hardly a novel or radical statement, for since the Enlightenment and Cartesian philosophy, the West has thought mainly in terms of subject-object dualism, with humans not only out of “touch” with other life-forms but also claiming that these others are merely resources for our needs and entertainment. The basic link between mind and nature, however, is not only at the heart of many religions (Buddhism, Christian mysticism, native spirituality) but is evident also in the arts (Romanticism in poetry, painting, and music) and in some forms of present-day psychology (Theodore Roszak and the notion that personal health and planetary health are connected). In spite of the overriding hegemony of inner/outer, mind/body, spirit/flesh thinking, there is a strong undercurrent of alternative interpretation suggesting that we can and should entertain a different model for understanding where we are and what we should do. This would be a model closer to democratic process, in which we human beings and all other creatures and systems of the earth exist in a set of interrelationships and interdependencies so profound, so total, and so intricate that both the earth’s continued sustainable existence and our health and well-being—as well as our joy and delight—rest on acknowledging this alternative.
The considerable support for an alternative model coming from the sciences, arts, philosophy, psychology, and religion also “feels right.” Again, a little imaginative exercise: ask yourself, Where do you feel good, right, happy? My answer (one that I would have given when I was seven years old as well as now, in my late seventies) is “on a trail.” Any trail will do—the ones in the Canadian Rockies are marvelous, but the ones in my neighborhood park (which I now navigate with walking sticks, given back injuries) are fine also. The minute I get on a little opening in some woods that leads around corners to more woods that await me, I feel a sense of both excitement and pleasure. I feel as if I “belong” here: I am the right size—not too big or too small, big enough so I am not overwhelmed but small in relation to the trees, which humble me and make me realize my relative insignificance. When I read that I evolved in and with the earth, I not only believe it but also feel it—yes, it seems right! I never feel this way in a city made of skyscrapers, swarming with people, and only decorated with nature—a few monoculture trees and flowers. Is there something primordial about my “trail” feeling? Is it perhaps biophilia? That hard-wiring in us causes children to reach out to pat a caterpillar (while ignoring the komodo dragon on the TV screen) and for us adults in our “second naïveté” to acknowledge that we too are more interested in the caterpillar than the TV dragon.
What I have been trying to do with these thought and feeling experiments is to loosen the hold of the predominant model of subject/object, human/nature, and to entertain the possibility that a different model—one in which all have a voice and the goal is sustainable well-being—might guide our actions. I have suggested that not only do the sciences support such a model, but so do our “guts,” our sense of what is right and feels good. In a society that increasingly makes it more and more difficult to exercise our primordial biophilia—a society in which children are deprived of the chance to run free and feel the earth between their toes—is it any surprise that adults should feel nature-deficit disorder? Hence, what now appears, from our economic and ecological crises, to be a necessity—changing the basic model with which we understand ourselves and the world—is also something we want, that might give us joy at the deepest level of our personal existence. “Where we live” turns out to be “where we want to be”—in, with, for nature, the world, which is also in, with, and for us. We have been living as “misplaced persons” for several centuries; it is time for us to come home and rejoice in the comfort that only home can give.
However, the realization immediately follows that our new thinking and feeling involve new forms of behavior, of action. The acknowledgment that we might live in a democratic process with all other beings and planetary systems means that our former way of utilizing these others simply for our own benefit is impossible. It is not only immoral or unethical, but also unimaginable, because it does not fit with our current understanding of the world. We are trying to understand the world differently, not as subject versus object or superior versus inferior, but as all together. Our thought experiment from earlier—“a democracy of life,” in which no part is only a means to other parts, but in which each and every creature and process has its intrinsic merit and place—implies that no one being, individual, or species is the center. In a democracy, there is no center; rather, needs and contributions are balanced for the good of the whole by all its parts.
How can people be helped to move from self-centeredness to reality centeredness? Does realizing that reality is put together differently than one supposed lead to changed action? Not easily, and certainly not totally, but a thought experiment can raise the possibility, open the question, invite alternative views. To say that reality is more like a democracy, where “everyone counts,” than an empire, where only the king counts (and where all of us human individuals fight to be the king, the center, the Only One), raises radical questions. Morality in such a world is neither a spiritual nor a mental affair, but is a deeply physical and mundane matter. It is, first of all, about who gets to eat and who does not. (Recall Latour’s questions, How many are we? and, Can we live together?) In other words, the moral question becomes one of space, place, and energy, for these are what bodies need in order to live and flourish: a place to build a dwelling, space to grow food, energy to raise the next generation.
Just as an earlier generation faced the Second World War as the quintessential issue of their day, so climate change is ours. During that war people all over the world mobilized, sacrificing their comfort and often their very lives in order to avoid what they believed was a threat of disastrous proportions. We are faced with another such threat, one perhaps even more dangerous in terms of the long-term health of the planet, for it involves the very basis of physical existence—space and energy, habitation and food, clean air and arable land, a viable climate for the flourishing of life.
In other words, the crisis facing us is one of geography, one of space and place and habitability. It is not about time and history and human meaning; rather, it is physical, earthly, worldly, fleshly—the basics of existence. Christianity has often focused on time, history, and human meaning; for example, salvation has been understood to be individual human beings’ eternal existence in another world. But an “incarnational” Christianity, a Christianity that believes in an incarnate God who loves the world and inhabits the world, is radically mundane. It is not possible to imagine “every creature fully alive” (Irenaeus) on planet earth in the twenty-first century. If we continue living as we have been—and if more people join the high-energy lifestyle of us privileged ones—we are headed for disaster. Climate change is telling us loud and clear that the size of our population and its increasingly excessive energy use is raising the temperature of the planet to the point where disastrous effects will occur: excruciating heat, the melting of glaciers and the rise of the oceans, violent storms, the loss of arable land and clean water, the decline of biodiversity, the intensification of diseases, the increase of wars fought over food and water, and so on.
But, as with all serious alternatives for understanding and acting on a new view of ourselves and where we fit in the scheme of things, it is the internalization of the alternative that is difficult. Imagining a different world is one thing; acting on it is quite another. Often it is the artists, novelists, and poets who help us the most at this point. Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist and essayist, has attempted such an internalization of a democratic-versus-empire view of reality in her book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.[22] In this book, she retells the Scrooge story for the twenty-first century, for now it is not only the poverty-stricken of England who cry out for justice, but the entire planet is making its cry heard through ecological disaster and economic meltdown. Atwood makes the astounding claim that not only are we not the center, the Only One, the kings of our domains, but we own nothing, not even our bodies. Her retelling of the Scrooge story begins with a curious event, which she recounts in the opening paragraph of her book.
Canadian nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill presented to him on his twenty-first birthday. It was a record kept by his father of all the expenses connected with young Ernest’s childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor for delivering him. Even more oddly, Ernest is said to have paid it. I used to think that Mr. Seton Senior was a jerk, but now I’m wondering, What if he was—in principle—right? Are we in debt to anyone or anything for the bare fact of existence? If so, what do we owe, and to whom or to what? And how should we pay?[23]
At the close of the book, after the three spirits of past, present, and future have shown Scrooge horrendous pictures of ecological decay and financial greed, gradually raising his conscience, he exclaims: “I don’t really own anything. . . . Not even my body. Everything I have is only borrowed. I’m not really rich at all, I’m heavily in debt. How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?”[24]
Atwood has told the story of a man who has a “conversion,” a basic change in which he moves from seeing himself as an exceptional human being at the top of a pyramid of less-privileged human beings (as well as billions of life-forms that are simply resources for his lavish lifestyle), to realizing that he is radically and totally dependent on all these others. Scrooge comes to realize that the very world he thought he owned—the vast resources of nature—is the world from which he and all others receive the “gifts” that allow life to exist—the free services of nature that support the food that is grown, the homes we live in, the water that sustains us, the very air we breathe minute by minute. A complete turnabout has occurred in which subject versus object, superior versus inferior, make no sense because that is not the way the world is put together. As Atwood comments: “Maybe it’s time for us to think about it differently. Maybe we need to count things, and add things up, and measure things, in a different way. In fact, maybe we need to count and weigh and measure different things altogether. Maybe we need to calculate the real costs of how we’ve been living, and of the natural resources we’ve been taking out of the biosphere. Is this likely to happen? Like the Spirit of Earth Day Future’s, my best offer is Maybe.”[25]Atwood leaves us with this question, having coaxed us into identifying with Scrooge as he experiences the lessons from the spirits of past, present, and future about the planet’s ecological and economic deterioration. In her retelling, the old Scrooge has become Scrooge Nouveau. He has a corner office and owns a corporation, but his wealth is stretched by supporting four ex-wives as well as the lifestyle of his present wife. “But it’s not his fault that he’s a self-centred narcissist: he grew up surrounded by advertisements that told him he was worth it, and that he owed it to himself. He’s on his fifth Mrs. Scrooge now. She’s twenty-two, a stunning girl with very long legs. He owes it to himself because he’s worth it.”[26] Atwood sucks us into Scrooge’s story, because, as she notes, while some people ask, What would Jesus do? we aren’t very much like Jesus, but we are a lot like Scrooge. Indeed, that is the pedagogical power of art: to tell a story or paint a picture that draws us into the depths of the most difficult human questions through the delight of a well-told tale. So, we are left with the spirit’s answer of “Maybe” to Scrooge Nouveau’s question of whether there is any hope if he “makes amends,” lives as if he owns nothing and begins to pay back all the gifts he has received.
That scary “Maybe” should haunt us all. The future is not certain—maybe we will not wake up, have a conversion, realize that the way the world is put together is closer to a democracy than to an empire (of which each of us is ruler). We have entertained a thought experiment on an alternative interpretation, imagined how it might feel to live within such a construction, and considered the moral implications of this new view. So far our resources for such an alternative model have largely been the sciences, philosophers, ecologists, and artists. We have been looking at our present context, not to more fully describe the ecological and economic disaster, but to move us to the next stage of beginning to imagine, interpret, feel, and moralize within an alternative paradigm. And as we do these things, a narrative emerges in which words like restraint, sharing, limits, boundaries are central, and words like limitless, expansion, growth, development, which have ruled our personal, political, and market lives for centuries, move to the margins. What is happening? Are ordinary people as well as economists and business leaders beginning to question the individualistic, consumer-oriented, growth-obsessed model? Before turning to our final source for insight on our present context—the world’s religions—let us make a brief detour into a few examples where this new language of restraint is beginning to be found.
Restraint and individualism are polar opposites: On the one hand, restraint insists that since there are many of us, all of whom need the basics for existence, we must restrain our own individual desires (the democratic-process model). On the other hand, individualism claims that each of us human beings is the center (the empire model), worthy of unlimited goods and services. People in high places have supported individualism: Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that “there is no such thing as ‘society.’” There are just individuals and their families. (Presumably these “individuals” are all human.)[27] And Larry Summers (former chief economist of the World Bank as well as president of Harvard University) wrote as follows: “There are no . . . limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind anytime in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limits is a profound error.”[28] These absurd statements by the highest-placed political and academic leaders lend credence to what many would like to believe: that the carrying capacity of planet earth is boundless and that as long as “growth” occurs, all will be well. What they refuse to acknowledge, but which every householder knows who has to meet monthly budgets, is that you cannot live beyond your means: no matter how generous the credit card companies will be for a while, eventually you must pay. Curiously, however, contemporary market economists are in such deep denial that they fantasize about infinite growth for a planet of finite resources. The simple truth, which ecological economists insist on, is that population multiplied by lifestyle determines the carrying capacity of any ecological system. Since all life depends on exchanges of energy, the amount of available energy determines the number of life-forms that can be sustained. Moreover, the level of energy use (the amount of energy each life-form requires—the energy use by a well-off human being versus one at the poverty level) must be factored in.
In order for us to internalize the need to change from assuming unlimited growth to understanding the need for limits and restraint, we need to contemplate a few examples of the level of energy use involved in “growth.” For instance, China’s recent growth of infrastructure to accommodate rapid production of all levels of transportation is an instructive case.
All of these objects—the skyscrapers, highways, railways, subways, bridges, airports, planes, automobiles, and appliances—have one thing in common: They rely on a colossal hoard of raw materials and massive infusions of energy for their construction, operation, and upkeep. Every large building requires tons of steel and concrete, along with plywood (to hold concrete in place when poured), glass, and copper (for electrical wiring); every highway needs mammoth supplies of concrete and asphalt; every car needs steel, chromium, aluminum, and glass plus oil for propulsion; every computer and appliance needs a regular, reliable flow of energy.[29]
This description could be repeated for every massive building and production venture taking place in every corner of the world. Michael Klare, an expert on resource geopolitics, claims that a new chapter in the history of international politics has begun, “one in which the pursuit and control of energy resources would be the central dynamic of world affairs.”[30]
Another way to help internalize our need for restraint is to consider the importance of “natural capital.” While market economics focuses on financial and manufactured capital, it fails to appreciate the “capital” on which it all depends—the natural world.[31] “As biologist E. O. Wilson has commented, the multitudinous diversity of obscure species don’t need us. Can we say with certainty the same about them?”[32] Natural capital is so present, so ubiquitous, so “invisible” that we forget it is our lifeblood. “Few if any human-made substitutes can truly supply the diverse array of benefits that flow from nature. We can’t manufacture watersheds, gene pools, top soil, wetlands, riverine systems, pollinators, or troposheres, let along an entire ecosystem.”[33] When we think of nature’s “gifts,” we often limit our thoughts to the obvious resources of trees, water, soil, minerals, and so on, but even more important are the “services” that nature supplies, such as climate. We cannot do without them. Climate, one of the most important nonlinear systems on which we depend totally, can maintain its dynamic equilibrium up to a point—but only up to a point. Then, as we are experiencing, even small shifts can throw the system into disequilibrium, causing immense disruptions. It turns out that natural capital is the sine qua non of existence—ours and all other life-forms. Moreover, natural capital is not interchangeable; that is, one factor does not compensate for another. “Drinking more water will not make up for lack of clothing if you are freezing, just as having more clothing will not satisfy hunger.”[34] The basics of existence: clean water and air, healthy soil, food, forests, and so on, are “limiting factors,” things we can’t do without; and yet contemporary market economists do not even consider them in what they call “capital.” Hence, a tax shift is needed in order to match price to cost. “The present system is dissociative. People now know the price of everything but the true cost of nothing. Price is what the person pays. Cost is what society pays, here, now, elsewhere, and into the future.”[35] Again we see the disconnect between individualism and restraint: as long as only price is counted, the focus is on individuals (what particular individuals are able to pay), and restraint is not necessary. However, when society, the planetary community, the democratic process, is the focus, the true cost demands that we figure in what the others, now and in the future, must pay.
Our experiment with considering a different model for human presence on the planet has resulted in some sobering conclusions: individualism, the heart of the old model, turns out to be highly dangerous to the well-being of the planet. Is it also unsatisfactory for human beings in their own lives? What if it turns out that the new model of reality that we have been considering is not only better for the planet and all its life-forms but for human happiness as well? That might be a surprising turn, but one worth considering as we look now at what the religions have to offer our reflections on restraint, sharing, limits, and boundaries. In most of the major religions, one finds at least a whisper that one must lose one’s life in order to save it. What an odd thought that is!
“The bishop of London, Richard Chartres, once noted that St. Francis, the 13th century Tuscan advocate for the poor and a lover of nature, came from a wealthy family and was, by the standards of his day, a heavy consumer. A conversion experience convinced him to abandon the life of nobility and embrace a bare-bones lifestyle as a pathway to God. Chartres sees a lesson for people of faith. ‘We move toward God by subtraction, rather than accumulation,’ he says, a consumption ethic embraced by many world religions.”[36]
This statement is radically countercultural—in fact, in our culture, almost heretical. And yet this “heresy” is at the heart of most religions traditions, as the following chart suggests.
Selected Religious Perspectives on Consumption [37]
| Baha’i faith | “In all matters moderation is desirable. If a thing is carried to excess, it will prove a source of evil” (Bah’u’llah, Tablets of Baha’u’llah). |
| Buddhism | “Whoever in this world overcomes his selfish cravings, his sorrow fall [sic] away from him, like drops of water from a lotus flower” (Dhammapada, 336). |
| Christianity | “No one can be slave of two masters. . . . You cannot be the slave both of God and money” (Matt. 6:24). |
| Confucianism | “Excess and deficiency are equally at fault” (Confucius XI.15). |
| Daoism | “He who knows he has enough is rich” (Dao De Jing). |
| Hinduism | That person who lives completely free from desires, without longing . . . attains peace” (Bhagavad Gita ll.71). |
| Islam | “Eat and drink, but waste not by excess: He loves not the excessive” (Qur’an, :31). |
| Judaism | “Give me neither poverty nor riches” (Prov. 30:8). |
Interestingly, none of these perspectives is ascetic, none calls for hair shirt and ashes, none demands fasting or starvation. Rather, they are recommending moderation, which, however, appears to be reached by being “free from desires.” The path is by way of “subtraction,” not “accumulation.” What odd sort of logic is operating here? Flannery O’Connor, the American Southern novelist, commented that for people who are deaf, one must shout, and for people who are blind one must write in large letters. Our society certainly is in need of loud words and big letters when it comes to such things as moderation, restraint, and sharing resources. We don’t know how to say, “I have enough.” To reach this place of moderation, however, involves a conversion, as the story of St. Francis illustrates. It involves a disorientation, a disruption, a shock that jolts one awake from one’s slumber induced by the comforts of conventional, consumer culture to consider a different way of being. For example, Jesus’ parables, his typical way of teaching, usually begin with an ordinary story of ordinary people doing ordinary things (like laborers in a vineyard who agree to a wage set by the landowner) who then find a disorienting shift (as the laborers do when the landowner gives the last person to appear for work the same payment as those who have worked all day). They grumble: “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (Matt. 20:l2). The workers (and other listeners to the story) are left to figure out what has happened to the convention of “fairness.”
Likewise, with the goal of restraint in mind, many religious traditions call for the logic of shock. Franciscan writer Richard Rohr notes that in order for people to undergo the conversion necessary to support a lifestyle of restraint, a kind of suffering, of self-denial, is usually necessary. He writes that “the bubble of order has to be broken by deliberately walking in the opposite direction. Not eat instead of eat. . . . Silence instead of talking, emptiness instead of fullness.”[38] In other words, kenosis, self-emptying, is a way to get to the goal of moderation. A special gift that the religions bring to the conversation of how to live sustainably on our planet is not just to call for restraint but to show the way to get there. One of the most difficult problems we have encountered in responding to the economic and ecological crises facing us is the conundrum that while we know what we ought to do, we do not do it. And we do not know how to do it. The religions say that one way is to shock ourselves into a new way of being in the world. John Hick, an eminent student of religions, claims that “the function of post-axial religion is to create contexts within which the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centeredness can take place.”[39] This succinct definition of religion is also a highly charged one: what is more difficult for most of us than such a transformation, a shift of focus away ourselves as the center of “Reality”? This is especially so if “Reality” is described as a response that “produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.”[40] This seemingly innocuous statement, when translated, results in the universality of the Golden Rule: “to treat others as having the same value as myself.”[41] Thus, at the heart of most religions is the simplest as well as the most difficult of all moral injunctions, and as Hick notes, we call someone a “saint” whose journey on this path from self-centeredness to reality centeredness is more advanced than the rest of us, sufficiently advanced that we marvel at them.[42]
Thus the heart of the religious contribution to our problem of how to live differently is attending to a different logic: the logic of self-emptying as the way both to personal fulfillment and to public restraint. As another student of religion, Karen Armstrong, puts is: “Above all, the habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule ‘all day and every day’ demands perpetual kenosis. The constant stepping outside our own preferences, convictions, and prejudices is an ekstasis that is not a glamorous rapture but, as Confucius’s pupil Yan Hui explained, is itself the transcendence we seek.”[43] She also notes, “Religion is not an easy matter,” for it takes tremendous effort to “drive us out of ourselves.”[44] Religion is a practice, what the Jewish rabbis called migra, essentially a program for action. One must engage this central teaching of gradually substituting reality centeredness for self-centeredness imaginatively, ritually, and ethically, becoming so involved with it that it effects profound change.[45] In Buddhism, the search for anatta, or no-self, “required Buddhists to behave day by day, hour by hour, as though the self did not exist. . . . By far the best way of achieving anatta was compassion, the ability to feel with the other, which required that one dethrone the self from the center of one’s world.”[46] This strange connection between self-emptying and personal fulfillment as well as public harmony and well-being is the key, I believe, to the special and perhaps unique contribution of the religions. Most religions do not emphasize belief in a distant, supernatural being, but rather recommend a practice of living differently than society usually supports and commends. The religions are saying, “There is a better way.” But curiously, this better way involves giving up something—namely, the centrality of the self. As Armstrong summarizes the point: “The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably are ingrained in our thoughts and behavior but are also the source of so much of our pain [and could we add, “as well as the world’s pain”?]. The Greeks would call this process kenosis, ‘emptying.’”[47]
The central thread running throughout my reflections so far is the gnawing question of how to live well on planet earth in the twenty-first century. As we go deeper into the question and its possible answers, we are struck by the necessity of looking at where we are living. It is necessary to realize the particular and grave situation that climate change and the economic meltdown have presented to us. Thus, in this chapter I have focused on a spirituality or practice of right living for the whole planet and not just for ourselves or our corner of the world. I have also looked at “the state of the world,” not only in terms of the appalling facts and figures about our planet’s resources and the needs of its inhabitants, but more particularly at what this information suggests for an alternative model of understanding our place in the scheme of things. I have experimented with this new model at the levels of thought, feeling, morality, and art, and concluded that it demands a different way of living from the conventional market model. Finally, I considered what the religions might offer us in our attempt to live differently in the world, and concluded that the overwhelming problem that faces all plans for living differently is the disconnect between belief and practice. That is, while we can imagine different and better ways of living in the world, we do not seem able to change at the fundamental level necessary to actually bring about a just, sustainable world for all. I have suggested that at the heart of many religions is the curious advice that to find one’s life (and abundant life for the planet), one must lose one’s life (as presently understood). Put most brutally, one must die in order to live; or at any rate, the narcissistic self, the greedy self, must die in order to find a new center for living.
Since right belief does not automatically lead to right action, what are we to do? The religions suggest that a radical disorientation is needed, and they attempt to express, to teach, this new way through parables, models, and especially lives lived. By following the clues in the lives of exceptional people—those called saints—one begins to understand, internalize, and perhaps to act in new ways. The saints “scream” at us, the hard of hearing, and become living parables of a crazy, revolutionary, countercultural response to the reality they see before them: the world as radically interrelated and interdependent (an insight that contemporary science is also telling us). Thus the small practices of the saints are inductive, empirical examples of the big picture—John Woolman’s wearing white clothing as a protest against dyes shipped on vessels manned by slaves; Simone Weil’s refusing to eat in order to identify with the starvation rations of the conquered French during World War II; and Dorothy Day’s practicing “personalism,” the ethical stance that required one to serve the needy who were directly on one’s doorstep. Through these modest—and perhaps ridiculous and “unsuccessful”—practices, one gets a glimpse of how the kenotic way of being in the world contrasts the imperial, market-oriented, consumer way. Kenosis, self-emptying, is not an ascetic, world-denying practice of the saints; rather, it is a catchall term for the way the world works: it works at all levels through restraint, pulling back, sharing, reciprocity, interrelationship, giving space to others, sacrifice. This way of being in the world is the opposite of self-aggrandizement at every level, from the personal through the public to the planetary. Self-emptying at the personal level, democratic process at the public level, and interdependence at the planetary level are all from the same root, which claims that we owe our very existence to others, that the system works by a wide range of complementary terms ranging from payback to sacrifice, from restraint to gift, from death to new life. It turns out that looking at “where we are” is central to answering the question of how to live well on planet earth. Hence, how to live well at a personal level is commensurate with living well at the political and planetary level. We live in one world, all of us together, and there is one appropriate way of being, stretching from the simplest organism to us human beings.
I have asked in this chapter how we can develop a spirituality for the whole planet, a planet characterized by climate change and economic disparity. And we are all asking this question at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Then why turn to three individuals from other centuries with different issues and different personal stories, when our dilemma is public—indeed, cosmic?
As I have noted, the distinctive characteristic of human beings (in contrast to other animals) is that we not only “discover” the world in which we live but also consciously help “create” it. This is the case whether one lives in the fifth, the eighteenth, or the twenty-first century. We must always ask, Where are we? And the answer to that question is a combination of what the world is and what we would like it to be. The saints of each generation are those people who embody the deepest, most hopeful incarnations of how to live well on our planet at any particular time. In the details of their life stories lie hidden the aspirations of their fellow human beings. Their lives are capsules containing the most profound wisdom of their times in this strange human journey of discovery and creation to live well on planet earth. They do not tell us how to live but show in this and that particular case how someone did it in a different time and place, with different realities to discover about our planet and different creations to deal with the issues of their days. The lives of the saints are “case studies,” wisdom in a nutshell, a microscopic instance of the macroscopic human problem of how to live well on planet earth.
Thus we turn to the lives of three individuals to glimpse some hints of the perennial human problem, as Barry Lopez states it, of how to live a more compassionate existence, blessed and cursed as we are with a conscious mind “fully aware of the blood, the horror, inherent in all life” but nonetheless “making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.”[48]
18-3. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, 2007. ↵
18-4. Thomas Friedman, “The Inflection Is Near?” New York Times, March 8, 2009. ↵
18-6. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 300. ↵
18-8. “Planetary Boundaries Breached,” Nature, September 24, 2009. ↵
18-17. Václav Havel, “Spirit of the Earth,” Resurgence (November–December 1998): 30. ↵
18-18. Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 139. ↵
18-19. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1996), 261. ↵
18-36. Gardner, Inspiring Progress, 123. ↵
18-39. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 300. ↵
18-43. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 328. ↵