"Alienation: Exile from the Garden"

Back to the Basics: Caring for Creation
Genesis 3

When I was back in Ohio in July, I wanted to take Patrick to a little creek near our house that I remember wading in when I was a child. The creek is a small wonder — overhung with a canopy of young trees that form a green tunnel; dragonflies that dart millimeters above the water; groups of tiny minnows that flit so quickly through the creek you're not sure you just saw them. It was a place of beauty and wonder for me as a kid, and I wanted Patrick to have the same experience.

And we did. Although a housing development has replaced most of the woods I used to walk in to get to the creek, we found it quite unchanged. In fact, Patrick was enjoying himself so much that he decided to "swim" in this creek. We took off his clothes, and he laid down in the approximately six inches of water in the creek. He wasn't going to be able to swim, but he didn't want to anyway. He just wanted the feel of the cool waters on his body.

Later, back at home, I began to wonder if perhaps Patrick should have taken a bath after his little swim. Just what sort of pesticides or herbicides might be in that creek, I wondered? There's a lot of farming around here, and certainly the waterways carry agricultural runoff. And what else might have been in there? My anxiety level went up a bit: Did he get water into his mouth? Did he drink it?

Patrick survived his creek swim with no rashes or vomiting. But I was left with a lingering sadness that even in my childhood home — where horse-drawn buggies and plows are the norm, far from the exhaust-filled, industrialized area I now call home — even here, the waters may not be safe for a child to swim in. Is there no place on Earth we haven't harmed, I thought? The air pollution in the "pristine" Kings Canyon south of Yosemite is worse than in New York City thanks to the smog from the Central Valley. Is there anyplace untouched by us and our mess? Is there nothing left of that Garden we first called home?

If today is a typical day in our Garden, we will lose more than 180 square miles of rainforest, what one biologist calls the "lungs of our planet." Today, the human population will increase by a quarter of million people. Today, 73 tons of topsoil will be eroded. Today, 1800 tons of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons will be added to the atmosphere.[1] "Today, the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare."[2]

This outer devastation is mirrored by an inner diminishment that Thomas Berry mentions in the reading we heard: We no longer live in a universe. When's the last time you looked up and saw a night sky strewn with stars? Most of us live in a world of computers and cars and Ipods. These are wonderful devices, but they can't match the feel of cool creek water on your skin. When's the last time we felt that? Sixty years ago, there was a big swimming hole near where I used to live in Oakland. The swimming hole was formed by the waters of Sausal Creek, waters that have now been forced underground into a concrete culvert. If kids go swimming now, it is in a chlorinated pool surrounded by cement. No dragonflies or minnows or tree canopy here.

Whether we realize it or not, we have lost a sense of being connected to a greater cosmos. Whether we realize it or not, we've lost a sense of communion and kinship with the earth that sustained our ancestors. We feel alone in the universe in a way that would have been unimaginable to those who came before us, and still is to indigenous people.

How did we get here? How did we so badly mess up our Garden Home? How did we become so alienated from the earth? Thomas Berry talks of three defining moments in our cultural history that have led us to this place of alienation, that have led to our exile from the Garden.

The first of these moments occurred when Christianity met Greek philosophy, most notably the work of Plato and Aristotle. In doing so, Christianity — unlike Judaism — adopted the idea of the dualism of soul and body. Now bear with me as we get a bit academic. This idea of dualism is really important because it undergirds a lot of our thinking in the Christian West. But to explain it you have to sound a bit like a college professor — God forbid!.

Dualistic thinking considers the human soul to be a different essence than the body. The soul is an entirely spiritual or intellectual substance and the body is the inert matter that holds this spirit. Plato believed that the human soul first lived in the world of Ideas, an absolutely spiritual world. On entering the human body, the soul becomes the "master of the body," the thing that guides the ship. Christianity adopted this dualistic belief and expanded it by talking about a soul that departs the body and enters a heavenly realm after death. For both Plato and this form of Christianity, then, only the soul or spirit is really real. The body is just a temporary vessel.

Interestingly, in Judaism, this dualistic thinking never took root. That's why there's almost no mention of an afterlife within Jewish theology. Soul and body come into the world together, and they leave the world together.

It didn't take long for a hierarchy of value to get built around this dualism. Since the soul is eternal, it is good. Since the body is just temporary, it is bad. Women, animals and "dumb nature" became identified with the "bad" part of this dualism — the body. Men were identified with the "good" part of this dualism — the soul, or spirit. The perfectly disembodied, pure realm of intellect. Not that messy body realm, where things happen that we can't control. The body — and the women, animals and nature associated with it — became something to control, to subdue, to be "used" for the higher purposes of the spirit. So, that's dualism.

The second defining moment was the Black Death in Europe in the mid 1300s. In two years, one-third to one-half of the population of Europe died from the bubonic plague. We can not comprehend what it would be like to live through this. The closest we have is the first period of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s. Needless to say, such a cataclysm had a major impact on Western consciousness.

European civilization responded in two broad ways. One, Christianity began to embrace a strong redemption-based theology. To be redeemed and saved out of this world of suffering became the entire aim of the Christian message. Gone was the idea that we, and creation, are fundamentally good. Gone was the idea that the whole creation is the place for God's saving activity within history. Nope. We get right with God so that when we die, our soul can be with "Him" in heaven. What happens in and to this world doesn't matter. What happens to the natural world doesn't matter. What happens to our bodies doesn't matter. It is only our eternal soul that matters, and where it is going. This, as we know, is still the fundmanetal view of salvation for much of Christianity, and it has its roots in this period.

The second response to the agony of the Black Death came from the secular community, which sought to remedy the terror of natural events by studying the processes of the earth. If only humans could begin to understand natural processes, we might be able to exert more control over them. Eventually, this response helped bring about the Enlightenment — which celebrated human reason — and the scientific revolution.

Of course, this has been a wonderful development. We can't even fathom a world without the benefits of this revolution, and we wouldn't want to. But this scientific worldview also helped create a consciousness that saw us as the subjects and nature as the object — an object to be studied prodded, made to yield its secrets. An object that we can then control and dominate for our own use. And we did this. We live in a world unimaginable to a person of the 13th century because we gained knowledge about how the natural world really works.

But, as we've been finding out for the last few decades, there are severe limits to this knowledge. We have enough knoweldge to make a pesticide called DDT but not enough to know what releasing vast amounts of this chemical into the environment might to do ecological systems or human health. As it turns out, they cause cancer and kill birds. We have enough knoweldge to produce chloroflourcarbons but not enough to know what happens when we release them into the atmosphere. As it turns out, they thin the ozone layer that protects us from the sun.

The Earth is such a complex, interconnected life system that we make a change here, and a change over here happens that we can't anticipate. We can't dominate the Earth because we can barely understand how the whole thing works. And we've gotten into a lot of trouble for assuming we can. We thought we'd eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and be lords of the universe. But we find ourselves, instead, in exile from a Garden we are helping to destroy.

The last defining moment was in the late 19th century. In some sense, according to Berry, the destiny of the human community and of planet Earth were determined during this critical time. These were the years when we transitioned from an organic economy to an extractive economy. So just what does that mean?

In the 1850s, we were still largely a rural, agrarian country. Because we had to, we lived within what Berry calls "the bounty of seasonal renewing productions of the planet's biosystems." "But as soon as we established a way of life dependent on extracting nonrenewing substances from the Earth — oil, natural gas, metal — then we could survive only so long as these endured." Peak oil, anyone? Our petroleum powers our cars and airplanes and plows, makes up the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow the vast majority of our food supply, and produces the plastics that make almost everything. And most experts predict it's going to be virtually gone in 40-50 years.

What's more, transforming these substances into something we can use release terrible contaminants into the environment. The process of refining petroleum, for instance, releases toxic residues we still don't know what to do with. When I lived in Montana, we used to visit Butte, proud home of the largest Superfund site in the country. It's a sad, wrecked place. After extracting massive amounts of copper from the soil, the mining corporation left, leaving huge, gaping pits of toxic stew that have been meessing with the health of the residents and the ecosystem there for decades.

Another problem with this extractive economy is that it uses technology to turn renewing resources into nonrenewing resources. So, instead of allowing the soil to replenish itself through natural cycles, we exploit it by using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides to such a degree that we exhaust the soil or make it toxic. Using advanced fishing technology, we've so depleted marine resources that they are no longer able to renew themselves. Jerome's brother had to quit fishing 10 years ago because the cod he had been fishing for were, for all purposes, gone. They had been fished out, extracted.

So here we are — with a dualistic consciousness, a head full of just enough knowledge that we can really mess things up, living on a planet that's being mined and fished and fertilized and extracted almost to death. We have become, in geneticist David Suzuki's words, a "superspecies" — a species capable of disrupting the functioning of the Earth in such a way that its basic life support systems are imperilled.

In the story from Genesis, God says to Adam and Eve after they had eaten from the tree of knowledge: "Now they have become like one of us." We have become like God. We have this power to fundamentally change the planet, and we have. We have eaten the fruit of the one tree forbidden to us. And now, like Adam and Eve, we stand east of Eden, outside that Garden, wondering what happened to paradise.

We have some choices standing outside this garden: We can deny we are even here. There's a lot of that going on. We can look west and long for the lost garden, in a paralyzed grief. I don't know about you, but I feel that in myself at times. Or we can try to understand what happened, how we got here. And we can turn east, toward an uncertain future, but toward a morning sun that still comes bearing dawn.

Amen.

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[1] From "Healing Our World Commentary: The Great Deception" by Jackie Alan Guiliano, on the Environment News Service website, Feb. 8, 2002

[2] David Orr, in "What is Education For?" in Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, Winter 1991

"Original Blessing: Our Garden, Our Home"

Back to the Basics: Caring for Creation
Genesis 1 (excerpts)

[Four demi-altars have been set up, one each for Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The earth altar consists of, in part, a large pot of soil. The air altar has a hanging dream-catcher. The fire altar has a burning lantern. The water altar has a small fountain.]

(Go over to earth) Do you know stuff grows from this? Did you know that you could plant a seed as small as this and it could turn into a plant that has bears buckets of these? (Pluck a tomato and eat. Pass around?) Or that a seed put into this stuff could grow into this. (Dahlia) Or that a seed could turn into a tree that can grow as high as a 30-story building? What is in this stuff that is so powerful? We really don't know. We can fly people to the moon and back, but our understanding of the first inch of soil underneath our feet is pretty limited. One teaspoon of forest soil can contain 40,000 species of bacteria and 20,000 species of fungi. The majority of these organisms have not been identified by scientists — maybe 5%. Much less do we understand how these organisms interact with each other. And yet, our life depends on this. Basically everything we eat comes from this amazing substance — whether it is the plants themselves or the animals who eat the plants.

God created the earth and it was good; indeed, it was very good.

(Go over to water) Do you know that this substance flows in deep rivers underneath us, and occasionally comes to the surface of the earth where we can swim in it or use it to wash dirt off our bodies? Do you know that it sometimes pours down from the sky? Do you know that if you are thirsty, you can drink this and feel a lot better? Once, Jerome went on a hike, alone, in the Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico. He was carrying enough water to get him through the day. He planned to camp where there was a spring, so he could refill his jugs. But there was no spring there. During the night, he kept dreaming of water. He hiked out the next day, delirious, in the 95-degree heat, and finally got to the ranger station where he walked up to a faucet, turned a knob and out came water. We are about 60% water. The Earth's surface is 74% water. As far as we know, no life has ever evolved to exist without it, and wherever there is water, there is the possibility of life.

God created water and it was good; indeed, it was very good

(Go over to air.) We don't think much about air because it's invisible. We can't see it. But astronauts who have traveled above our atmosphere can see it in a new way. One astronaut said, "You see a thin, thin layer just above the surface of the Earth, maybe 10 or 12 kilometres thick. (That's 6-7 miles.) That is the atmosphere of the Earth. That is it. Below that is life. Above it is nothing." The first thing we do when we are born into life is gulp for this air, and during the course of our life we will take about 350 million lungfuls of it. Breathing air is so important that our bodies have taken over this function from our conscious control. We breathe whether we want to or not. You know what happens when you hold your breath. Your body starts demanding it pretty quickly — your heart pounds, blood vessels in your head begin to bulge. And then you breathe the air, again.

God created air and it was good; indeed, it was very good

(Go over to fire). The first words the Creator utters in our Scriptures are: "Let there be light." Fire is the energy of creation. It starts everything up. It gets the whole ball rolling. Every morning, the fiery engine that drives the Earth and all life rises over our heads. Our sun is just one small star in a cosmos that contains billions, and we get just a tiny sliver of its radiation. But it is enough to run a planet. When that sun rises, all life rises, too, so that we can receive its energy. Flowers turn toward the light of its fire, reptiles and cats warm themselves in it, trees and plants start to eat this sunlight through photosynthesis. When we eat those plants (or the animals that ate them), we eat sunlight, too. We take this energy of fire into our bodies.

God created fire, and it was good; indeed it was very good.

Welcome to our world! For fire, earth, air, and water all come together in varying proportions to make up me, and you, and this beautiful garden we call home. They are the building blocks Creator God uses to create life. And they form a garden that is unmatched in its diversity and complexity, in the "gorgeousness of its self-expression" (as one cosmologist put it). So far as we know, there is no other place in the universe like our planet Earth. We are the garden spot of the cosmos.

Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and priest puts it: "Earth seems to be a reality that is developing with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. This can be seen in the coloration of the various plants and animals, in the circling flights of the swallows as well as the blossoming of the spring flowers; each of these events required immense creativity over billions of years in order to come forth as Earth."

This, then, is our Home, this garden that exists simply to celebrate the joy of existence. This is our Original Blessing. Our foundational story, our creation story that we heard today from Genesis reminds us over and over again that the essential nature of this home is good. Sun? Good. Moon? Good. Stars? Good. Oceans? Good. Plants? Good. Creepy-crawly things? Good. Animals? Good. Us? Good.

I wonder if we heard that growing up? I wonder if our families, our schools, our churches, spoke to us of the fundamental goodness of creation, of the fundamental goodness of ourselves. I wonder if they told us that long before there was sin and the fall and Adam and Eve and the snake and the expulsion from the garden, there was Original Blessing.

If we didn't hear that in our churches, well, that's odd, because this blessing is where God begins. In fact, in God's time (which is to say, in cosmological time), sin is a relatively new invention. There were 19 billion years or more of history and God's creative activity before human beings appeared on the scene and invented sin. So, it's hardly original. I'm not saying that sin isn't real. It is. But it's not the place God starts, and it shouldn't be the place we start.

Instead, we begin here, with the unimaginable blessing of creation. And this is where we start as we begin this series together. Many of us realize that big changes are coming. Our First World way of life, made possible by vast quantities of cheap oil and other natural resources, is coming to an end. The Earth just can't handle us anymore. I know that many of us have felt for some time the increasing urgency of the need to make changes, and of the possibility of this unimaginable blessing of creation somehow disappearing, or at least being irrevocably changed.

There's this amazing document called the Earth Charter, which was created by a large global consultation process, headed up by Mikhail Gorbachev, and finally ratified in 2000. It was originally started by the United Nations and it has since been endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals. This is what is says in its preamble, "We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. We must form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life."

It's a pretty amazing time to be on the planet, folks. We've been born in a rather exceptional time in history. A time of great choice. A time that holds great peril and great promise. While this time presents technical and intellectual challenges for us, it is foundationally, I believe, a spiritual challenge. The consciousness that made possible the destruction of the Earth must give way to a consciousness that sees the Earth as a "communion of subjects, not a collection of objects" to use Thomas Berry's language. (repeat) This movement into a new consciousness and a new relationship with our Garden Home is the Great Work of humanity at this time in history. Yeah, it's really that big.

As we begin this journey together, may we carry in the core of our being the goodness of earth, the goodness of fire, the goodness of water, the goodness of air, the goodness of us, of each other. May we feel their support, their inspiration, their blessing as we do this Great Work together. Amen.