Editorial and Contents of Issue 3

Spirituality

Contents

Message in a Bottle: The Spirituality of the Welsh
Oliver Davies

Constructing a Local Theology
Clive Pearson

Aboriginal Ceremonies and Teachings: A Women’s Perspective
Janet Silman and Melody McKellar

Hindu Spirituality and the Environment
Harold Coward

Liturgizing the World: Religion, Science and the Environmental Crisis in Light of the Sacrificial Ethic of Sacred Cosmology
Vincent Rossi

An American Indian Theological Response to Ecojustice
George E. Tinker

Lifestyle: Exploring Community Life at the Morning Star Center
Miriam Mason

Viewpoint: Pity the Poor Mad Cow
Carol J. Adams

Bool Reviews

David Major
Michael Poole, Beliefs and Values in Science Education

John Butterfield
Roger S. Gottlieb, This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment

Celia Deane-Drummond
Rosemary Radford Ruether (ed.), Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism and Religion

Ray Simpson
Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Markus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery

Michael Colebrook
Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics

James Stewart
Patrick Huddie, Songs of the Universe and Other Poems

Stephen W Need
Andrew Pearson, Making Creation Visible: God's Earth in Christian Worship

Jonathan Clatworthy
Michael Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics

Editorial

At a time when myriad forms of spirituality are on offer to the public, and when dazzling books on spirituality sometimes appear to have taken over the bookshops, it makes sense to ask why a journal like Ecotheology should join what might be thought a passing trend. It takes no small act of discernment to steer a way through the smorgasbord of current spiritualities: but it is a task worth achieving for many reasons.

First, spirituality is no longer seen as a pathway to holiness which regards earthly and material realities as inferior, or as obstacles to a relationship with the Sacred. Spirituality today is far more interested in integrating body, mind and spirit into a relationship with God. Secondly, spirituality is closely woven with the discovery of story and identity—identity as a person and in community. Thirdly, spirituality can be seen as a powerful tool or resource in the struggle for justice. In this moment of preparation for the millenium there is a call from many quarters for a prophetic liberation spirituality which is committed to the struggle for justice for the poorest communities across the globe. In Britain, under the inspiration of the Jubilee laws of the Hebrew Scriptures, which proclaim freedom from slavery, a cancellation of debts and a giving back of land to poor people, there is now a new call for a covenant with the poor, a call issuing from groups committed to anti-racism, justice and peace, and the eradication of sexism and heterosexism alike.

It is to this prophetic liberation spirituality that ecotheology must turn. Ecospirituality is also about the discovery of story and identity. But ecospirituality recognizes the universe as the ultimate sacred community, the earth story as being the literal ground of there being any story at all. Ecospirituality understands the sacred story of the earth as the cosmology, the world-view so frequently absent from many spiritualities. In this sense ecospirituality is the most prophetic of all spiritualities. Like all liberation spiritualties, it is also centred on the struggle for justice, putting ecojustice, the survival and well-being of all the earth’s ecosystems, at the heart of its concern. This issue concentrates not just on ecospirituality in general but on the spirituality of indigenous peoples in particular. If liberation theology believes in dangerous memory, it follows that an ecospirituality dangerously remembers the communities of indigenous peoples—the 200 million today, and the many who have not survived the West’s exploitative actions throughout history. Across all the continents of the world there are indigenous peoples—even in the West—who have struggled to reverence the earth and who know their dependence on her for survival. Ecotheology dangerously remembers through the words of indigenous peoples themselves. Thus, in this issue, George Tinker makes a powerful critique not only of Western rapacity and destruction with regard to American Indians and their territories (ecocide and genocide go together) but also of the very categories in which Christian theologians speak of God, Christ and creation. Traditional understandings of these words, he writes, express a privileging of humanity over and above all living things. Using Christian theological concepts, together with a privileging of time over the sacredness of space, how is it possible to recover a sense of the sacredness of all life, two-legged, four-legged, winged creatures, together with all living things? From Canada Janet Silman and Melody McKellar speak as Christian ministers with Indian blood and show how women enter into sweat-lodge rituals, finding a positive way to experience a woman’s monthly cycle not given to them in Christianity.

The idea of story and identity finding an ecological grounding is movingly described by Clive Pearson in ‘Constructing a Local Ecotheology’. He writes of New Zealand—although he is now in Sydney, Australia—and of the ancient link between the land, local geography and identity. For New Zealanders identity has far more to do with the land than with any philosophical anthropology. This desire to ‘sing a new song’ is expressed in many hymns that, in an explicit ecological lyric, call to ‘the Great Spirit of God to speak to the soul of Aotearoa’.

The theme of an indigenous spirituality which respects the earth is a strong feature of Harold Coward’s article on ‘Hindu Spirituality’: but again, the fruits of this are being seriously undermined by Western materialism and the new demands being made on resources. I have myself stood in the desert near Jodhpur in Rajasthan and watched a large pipeline carrying water to the city of Jodhpur through villages which themselves had no water.

Is there no redeeming feature in the West? Oliver Davies, in ‘Message in a Bottle: The Spirituality of the Welsh’ shows us that in the precious heritage of Welsh ‘Celtic’ spirituality, there was a time in Britain when people reverenced the earth, did not despise the body or sexuality, and lived according to its—the earth’s—rhythms. (And this can be compared with stories of the Celtic saints of Lindisfarne and Iona, Ireland, and other parts of pre-expansionist Europe.) In the poems he cites, he is reminding us of the power that poets and artists have to express a theology of beauty, and to evoke a response of wonder which can be transforming. Vincent Rossi, in an attempt to challenge the rampant consumerism that has become the West’s defining identity, takes us back to the Eastern Orthodox traditions of St Maximus Confessor: though this is not the sweat lodge of Indian tradition, in a strange way there is a similarity. Could this be one of the genuine indigenous traditions of Christianity, where land, person, community, identity and justice are actually drawn together in the great cosmic hope of Resurrection? Both traditions speak—in different ways—about the power of ritual in enabling a person to enter into their cosmological story, to recover a sense of sacred time and space, and to actually experience the power of transformation. But the crucial point of Rossi’s article is that only through participating in the ritual of eucharist could we—Euro-americans—be empowered to take on an ethic of sacrificial life-style—and only this can save the world. A small glimpse of what this life-style might mean is given by Miriam Mason in her inspirational account of life in the Morning Star Ridge Community.

Will we listen to the spirituality of indigenous peoples (even if in the space of one issue we have been able only to give a few examples) before it is too late? Thomas Berry has written that we are at a new revelatory moment. As the West has learnt from Greek philosophy, from Hebrew Scriptures, from Oriental mysticism, can we learn from indigenous peoples the terrible burden that Western life has put upon the earth, and what exactly our presence has been? The crisis that dominates environmental ethics at the moment is that we are very well aware of the damage our consumptive life-style is inflicting on the planet. We cannot plead ignorance. But we lack the power to make an adequate response. Only the recovery of the experience of living the sacredness of the earth’s story within every fibre of our being will empower us. Qualities like nurturing, caring, sensitivity and compassion lie at the heart of feminist spirituality: but these are not only qualities between humans but between all living things. In practising compassion and nurture for the earth we discover her compassion for us. And when we are touched at the depths by the power of compassion our desires, our eros is for the wellbeing of the whole. We discover our true centredness, our heart’s desire, in the fulfillment of the earth’s own story.

Mary Grey