On the Radio National Religion Report last week, a story about the new "season" for the Uniting Church, called "A Season of Creation". Over the next few weeks, there will be Forrest Sunday, River Sunday, and (in other years, apparently,) Storm Sunday.
Lets look at some of the suggested liturgies for this.
"Minister: Christ, we come into your presence today to worship in this sanctuary called Earth.
Congregation: A planet filled with your presence, quivering in the forests, vibrating in the land, pulsating in the wilderness, shimmering in the rivers.
Minister: God, reveal yourself to us in this place, and show us your face in all creation.
Congregation: Holy, holy, holy, Earth is filled with GodÂ’s presence."
Hmmm. Reflecting on God's majesty via the majesty of nature is no issue. But the form of expression here is pretty cringeworthy, isn't it? What with all the "vibration" words. And asking God "to show his face in all creation" is a bit of a risk, as some of his creation may well illustrate the issue of "natural evil", which is a not insignificant one for many people, causing some to lose their faith entirely.
Worse to come:
"Rev. Rowena Harris: We invite the farmlands to sing with us.
Congregation: Wheatfields, orchards and vineyards, red gums, gardens and wetlands.
Minister: We celebrate the song of the soil.
Congregation: Sing soil, sing.
Rowena Harris: We invite the ground to stir deep below.
Congregation: Lifegiving microbes restoring the soil, beetles and worms preparing our food.
Minister: We celebrate the song of the soil.
Congregation: Sing, soil, sing."
It's one thing to sing with St Francis of Assisi "all creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing..." when it stirs imagery of anthropomorphic creatures praising God (think "The Lion King"). But this liturgy seems to invite microbes to join in. Just the good ones, or is smallpox invited too?
Now a bit of group apology:
A small piece of rosemary, eucalyptus leaves or some other fragrant symbol of remembrance may be given to the people as a reminder of our past connection with creation.
As we rub this fragrant symbol in our hands we remember the countryside
where we have worked and played.
"O God, we thank you for the beauty of creation and the gift of
land.
We remember and confess how we have poisoned and polluted the soils in our
garden planet.
Christ, once buried in Earth, hear our cry.
We regret that we have forgotten Earth and treated this garden planet as a
beast to be tamed and a place to be ruled.
Christ, the hope of all creation, we lament our failings."
A Confession. A symbol of how we have poisoned the soils of our land may be
raised in the sanctuary. This symbol may be bleached animal bones or some
other symbol meaningful to the local community. This symbol may be
deposited on the red soil of the Earth bowl in the sanctuary.
"We have killed living soils with excessive chemicals, turned fertile fields into
lifeless salt plains and cleared rich lands of wildlife.
Christ, the source of all life, we are sorry. We are sorry."
Sounds like it might build up to include some nudity and ritual sex under the full moon. But no, despite a careful look through the Season of Creation web site, I can't find any.
The John Howard point about apologies is pertinent here: there isn't a hell of a lot of point in apologising for a "wrong" you haven't done yourself. The most that a city reared person can apologize for is eating fruit from a farmer who may have, or may not have, failed to followed good farm management advice or laws.
These are just a few extracts from some of the liturgies, but with every one I read I have issues.
Clearly, there is have no problem with Christians liking trees and (some) animals. Everyone does. While most of "evolutionary psychology" is a crock, it's probably a fair call to say that a certain fondness for nature is in built into our genes.
Catholics have St Francis of Assisi, and even had a decent go (via Teilhard de Chardin) at trying to absorb evolution into its theology. For the protestants, the Bible has sufficient comments about nature to enable arguments that humans were both given nature to "rule" over (presumably to eat and use it) and to protect it. But the details of any theology of ecology are rather like a Rorschach Test, telling us more about the people doing the theology than the nature of God.
The biggest problem I have with putting Nature on a pedestal, from either a Christian or secular environmentalist perspective, is that it contains a specious assumption that there was a "perfect" nature to start with. But such an idea is really only consistent with Creationism and a belief in a pre-Fall paradise on earth, which are hardly likely to be matters of belief which the great majority of Uniting Church people (and no secular environmentalist) would accept.
If you don't believe in creationism, you presumably accept the scientific history of the Earth which shows, at best, an extreme callousness on the part of the Almighty towards the preservation of species. The earth and its inhabitants has been hit by "natural" environmental disasters so many times, how can you argue that the particular state that humans have found it in for the last 50,000 years or so is the "ideal" state that has to be preserved? Indeed, the environment has even changed a lot (without human intervention) over that period that humans have been around to know it.
A corollary to this assumption is that, if only we would leave it alone, all of nature would be fine. At its most extreme, some environmentalists love trees and animals so much they would prefer to see humankind fizzle out so that Mother Nature could do its own thing, as it would until the next asteroid hits the planet and kills hundreds or thousands of its species in one foul swoop.
(I should mention that the only other way of seeing God's hand in the past destruction is to think that it was done to allow humans to evolve. Guess I have to grant that it is possible, but only in the same way I have to grant that full blown creationism, including the making of those decoy fossils in the earth to allow the devil to tempt us into believing evolution, is also possible. In other words, it's possible, but exceedingly unlikely, that God would push asteroids into the earth as a way of preparing it for humans. Even if he did, he clearly hasn't bothered to prevent other natural disasters from killing humans since we arrived on the scene, which seems a bit mean.)
In short, I believe that the only really credible way of viewing nature for the modern person is (if Christian) to assume that God does not interfere, or if he does, it has become all but impossible to discern when or how. (An exception for the resurrection has to be allowed.) For the modern atheist, the logical view is the environment is ever changing and "nature" can't be trusted to ensure our well being.
So how can anyone come up with a convincing practical theology of environmentalism? God must want us to eat some living things, and Jesus seemed pretty keen on sheep and feasts too. So, his rule can't be all "hands off".
Where are the limits of interference in God's book? I don't believe there are any.
As I said before, not everything idea life has to be based on your religion, and it is perfectly acceptable to argue certain environmental matters on aesthetics alone. There are also pragmatic reasons for preserving species (the widest of which is probably not to destroy any species because you can never quite tell in what way it may become useful in future.) But working out what God today ordains you can eat or not eat, let die out or preserve is impossible. Does God want us to preserve all deadly viruses and parasites?
So let's leave it as a secular issue. And be skeptical of environmentalism in its semi-religious aspects, because at its core, it has an idealizedd view of nature that does not bear scrutiny. It appeals because the aesthetics of nature make everyone feel that more of "untouched" nature would have to be good, but plays scant regard to the practicalities of humans needing shelter, food and "things". It is also easy to love a tree; they rarely hurt you, and when they do it is really your fault for standing too close anyway.
For a Christian church to want to identify itself with such a movement is therefore missing the main point of Christianity, which is all about the eternal salvation of humans and relationships between humans. Encouraging church goers to become highly involved in environmentalism would be making the same mistake as encouraging them to spend all their time on social justice issues: it makes membership of the church more dispensable because secular humanists can be just as devoted (often more devoted) to such causes as church goers. It would, despite the belief that it makes the church more "relevant" to modern people, have precisely the opposite effect.
So give up on this stuff, Uniting Church. It will only hasten your demise.
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