Beauty
of the Earth
by
Anne Rowthorn
"There
is a true yearning to respond to the singing
river and the wise rock," as Maya Angelou
so eloquently reminded us in her poem entitled
"On the Pulse of the Morning". The
singing river calls us to sit on her banks and
to heed her call to wake up to the beauty of
God's creation. The stinking garbage piled six
feet high on Tirana's main street, the foul,
polluted air of midtown Manhattan, the
clear-cutting of a Brazilian rain forest call
us to repentance. The fresh green pastures of
Ireland, the purple mountains of Wyoming, the
waving Kansas wheat fields, the dove call at
dawn, the wind-song of a crisp March day
summon us to a new day of love and gratitude,
of care and healing for God's creation.
This
is the time to wake up to the new day, the
time to plant and the time to heal. This is
the time to build up and to laugh and to
dance. This is the time to sow seeds of health
and wholeness. This is the time to embrace and
to cherish, the time to look into our
brother's eyes and see the vastness of the
sea; the time to look on our sister's heart
and hear the pulsing rhythm of the universe,
to stand in awe before Earth and all the
stars.
There
is a Buddhist term, mindfulness, which quite
simply describes the energy to experience the
present, to witness deeply everything that is
happening in the current moment. Mindfulness
is to be aware and alive to what is going on
within and without.
My
thinking has evolved considerably since the
first time I taught a new course in ecology
and justice at the Hartford Seminary 1991. I
began with just two convictions. First, that
Christians had a clear mandate to care for
God's creation and that there was plenty to
support that responsibility in traditional
Hebrew and Christian scripture. Thus there was
no need to look anywhere beyond
Judeo-Christian tradition to develop a
theology of ecology. Second, that the
examination of the major issues of ecology
(pollution of water, land, air and space;
population and poverty; the depletion of
natural resources; the interaction of military
power and environmental degradation; the
relationship between the global economy and
the environment; environmental racism) would
be enough to engender a heightened awareness
of a planet in peril and encourage the
students to take corrective action.
And
so the course met and students diligently
researched their assignments as the weeks
rolled on. The topics engaged them and,
through lively sharing of insights, we all had
our consciousness raised. But I also began to
notice a slight, unspoken sense of growing
frustration. I asked why that should be.
"Yes, we can take action," they
said. "We can and we will call our
senators and members of congress as issues
affecting the environment come up on the
federal agenda. We can boycott the products of
companies who dump their waste irresponsibly
and support those with clean records."
They could do all of that and they did. But
they wanted more. They wanted to celebrate
through prayer and song the wonders of God's
creation. They wanted to repent for the ways
they and their lifestyles had contributed to
the disfiguring of creation. They wanted to
offer their concerns for the environment to
God. So quite spontaneously, one day, we began
singing lines such as "For the beauty of
the earth" and "Morning has broken,
like the first morning." Later, we wrote
our own prayers and adapted others.
We
fell into a pattern of devoting the last half
hour of every class to some sort of worship
built upon the environmental issues we had
been examining that day. This was an entirely
unexpected but nurturing evolution in the
course.
As
time went on, I collected prayers and readings
relating to creation and I continuously
searched for more. Visiting a new city or with
a few hours to spare, I'd visit the public
library. I explored
university libraries. At
Iona, a small island off the west coast of
Scotland, I got in touch with my Celtic roots
while pursuing my goal. The Celtic
Christianity of the second and third centuries
speaks with uncanny clarity to those of us
poised on the edge of the third millennium.
Missionaries did not eradicate the indigenous
religious rites -- so focused on the natural
world -- that they found in these windswept
lands. Rather, they built Christianity onto
the pagan foundations. The result is a
pleasing wedding of traditions. Celtic
Christianity thus opens to us a view of the
cosmic sense of God's presence throughout all
of creation; in the land, the rocks, the
mountains and hills. God in the waters and in
the eye of the storm, God in and through,
under and over, every thing and being in the
universe. It is no accident that Ireland's
earliest recorded poem, written one hundred
years before the birth of Christ, begins
"I am the wind ...."
Then
I took my first trip to Japan. In Kyoto alone
there are some two thousand Shinto and
Buddhist temples or shrines. They are
literally everywhere -- in residential
neighborhoods, on street corners and
commercial areas, in markets, along roadways,
and in places of natural beauty. I got a
powerful sense of the holy in Japan.
This
impression clashed sharply with my
expectations of high-tech, super-power Japan
which, along with the United States, is one of
the world's worst despoilers of the
environment. There is another Japan that I was
privileged to discover. This is the Japan of
high, lush mountains, crashing waterfalls and
clear streams; the Japan of cool bamboo
forests and luscious tiers of verdant rice
paddies. Here true holiness is to be found.
This holiness, felt walking through the Kurama
Temple in Kyoto, convinced me that my sights
had been far too narrow in collecting only
Christian sources.
It
was a chilly but sunny day during the Golden
Week Festival and, with my companions, I had
taken a little wooden train up to the foot of
Kurama Mountain. We walked through the pretty
village of Kurama, over the stream, and
through the giant vermilion torii where
the temple path begins. A Japanese temple is
more than buildings; it is woods, gardens,
ponds, waterfalls, and streams. It is giant
gongs, incense, candles, and prayer boards. It
covers anything from a city block to an entire
mountain, and may be a mix of Buddhist and
Shinto artifacts. As we climbed Kurama
Mountain, we passed the shrines, some with
incense burners, others with water slowly
dripping into cool stone basins.
At
the main temple building I came across an
explanation...in which the
spirit of the moon is understood as love, the
spirit of the sun as light, and the spirit of
the earth as power. As I continued my walk down the back
side of Kurama through the bamboo forest, I
knew that I had literally had a mountain-top
experience. A door had been opened, and before
me lay a treasure trove. I was filled with an
insatiable desire to discover the wealth of
readings affirming the goodness of creation
from other traditions of the world to add to
the Christian sources. Through them I had an
inkling that my Christianity would continue to
deepen and that I might arrive at a more
global sense of wonder at what God -- the God
of a thousand names and faces -- is doing to
call the people of the earth to honor,
cherish, restore, and protect this fragile
planet.
A
splendid path had been set out for me. I have
discovered many treasures in the National
Library at the Georges Pompidou Center in
Paris. I was drawn to the ancient Hindu vedas,
composed sometime between 3000 and 2000
B.C.E., poems of wonder and praise celebrating
the gifts of nature and humankind's
relationship to the natural world. I studied
the Tao Te Ching, written some twenty-five
hundred years ago by Lao Tzu. We know almost
nothing about this poet, yet he expresses in
stark simplicity the idea that human beings
are to fit into and blend with creation and
not the reverse. While these works were not
new to me, I read them with a new depth of
understanding. I also identified a number of
ancient and modern literary treasures from
Japan, Korea, the Philippines and especially
the Chinese landscape poetry of the Tang and
Sung Dynasties (618 to 960 B.C.E. and 960 to
1127 B.C.E.). Tang and Sung poets display a
range and richness of expression. They were
grounded in the belief that knowing the
position of the human being in the totality of
the universe is the height of wisdom.
The
contemporary Japanese author Ki no Tsurayuki
said, "When we hear the warbling of the
mountain thrush in the blossoms or the voice
of the frog in the water, we know every living
being has a song." It is a song of the
ten million sounds of the earth and all the
stars. The Christian theologian David Tracy
said "there is a new form of spiritual
journey, new for Christianity and for all the
traditions.... The new search is likely to
become that of more and more religious
persons. Stay faithful to your own tradition;
go more and more deeply into its
particularities; defend and clarify its
identity. At the same time, wander
Ulysses-like, willingly, even eagerly, among
other great traditions and ways; try to learn
something of their beauty and truth;
concentrate on their otherness and difference
as the new route to communicality."
 This
article is excepted with permission from the book:
Earth
and All the Stars
by Anne Rowthorn.
©2000. Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New World Library, Novato, California, USA,
94949. www.newworldlibrary.com
Info/Order this book.
About The
Author
Anne Rowthorn is a
passionate environmentalist who has spent most of her life working for
causes that promote peace and justice on this planet. She is the author
of five books, including Caring for Creation Currently
she teaches at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, a post-graduate
educational institution. (Morehouse
Publishing), a book about the environmental crisis.
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