Hello and welcome back to Earth Steward, the home-based ecology and spiritual growth publication with photographs depicting our fabulous South African flora and fauna.
Yesterday I submitted a draft for the first chapter of my dissertation. The overall topic of the paper has to do with Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical entitled Laudato Si, which deals with the current ecological crisis. I devoted the first chapter to finding an approach which resonates with me, and happily, found one in the person of Ilia Delio—a neuroscientist and theologian whose radical ideas about science and religion I find exciting and inspiring.
I tend to become obsessed with people whose brilliant minds come up with novel visions of the future. The reason, I think, is that a childlike part of me loves to imagine that I can help make their vision a reality. I’m like a kid who pictures herself as a superhero who is on a mission to save the world!
But it doesn’t surprise me, given an experience I had as a student at university. I was in a Christian fellowship group, a bunch of students who were eager to develop their careers and make a difference in the world. Our leader, Trevor, was a lawyer, which meant he was keenly attuned to the issues of the day. Those were, to his mind, apartheid and conscription. I remember many a long discussion around the subject of conscientious objection, for example, because it affected so many of the male students. We were always being urged to make our faith relevant, which I found hard to apply because I didn’t yet have a sense of my own strengths.
My Christianity at the time was very Bible-based. Knowing what Jesus said about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, setting captives free, giving sight to the blind, and helping the lame to walk, I interpreted Trevor’s challenge to mean that I should participate in the fight to end apartheid or address the needs of the oppressed. Moreover, I envisioned this in terms of heroic actions. This left me feeling troubled, since I had always been introverted and more interested in reading and writing than making an impact in the world. As for my other roles, how did leading worship in church fulfil the great commission? Or creating a comfortable home for my family? Or acting in pantomimes with an amateur dramatics society?
It’s crazy how certain ideas stick in the mind. I was fixated on relevance as it related to society’s needs. I simply couldn’t accept that relevance could also relate to my own needs, the needs of my children, and those of my local church. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of “relevance” is, “The degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening”. In other words, if what is happening is motherhood, then being relevant means investing time and energy into raising my children. Relevance is never about the actions themselves, just how useful or appropriate they are to the situation I am in.
Now that my children have grown up and left home, relevance means something different again. Working in the area of Christian spirituality and ecology, my attention is drawn to the uncertainty facing people around the world in regard to climate change. No longer can we ignore the loss of biodiversity, extreme weather events, melting ice caps, sea level rise, droughts, crop failures and population migration—not to mention the precarious state of economies around the world. The threat of economic and social collapse is real. Despair is rife among young people. The quality of life we have enjoyed in recent decades will not be around much longer. The earth is damaged and we will soon be required to grapple with what that means.
Ilia Delio, the theologian I mentioned at the start, wrote a provocative article on her blog in 2019 called "Warming, Warming, Gone! Who Will Survive Climate Change?”. In it, she criticised the church for continuing to teach that we, as humanity, are exceptional and God-like, have been given the earth for our use, and will live out our eternity in heaven. She writes:
“I would like to speculate on how things might have unfolded if the Catholic Church accepted the Copernican model of heliocentrism in the sixteenth century, human evolution in nineteenth century, and the Big Bang universe in the twentieth century. What would religion look like if Thomas Aquinas was replaced by Alfred North Whitehead or Teilhard de Chardin? How might we relate to a God who is dependent on us, becoming ever-more divine? What would church look like if we knew ourselves to be entangled with one another and all creatures of the earth? How would we pray? Who would Christ be in an unfinished universe? These unanswered questions have led to deeply repressed religious drives in the human person today. Western religion has simply refused to accept the insights from modern science as the basis for theological reflection. The Catholic Church skirts around the issues of evolution and quantum physics and the Protestant churches run a spectrum from evangelicalism to liberalism. Science is a deeply neuralgic issue for religion. Whitehead wrote in 1925: ‘Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. . . Religion will not regain its power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.’”
To me, Delio, Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin are superheroes. They are the relevant spokespersons for our day. I, as a student of theology, am simply a recipient of their knowledge and experience, but that is a privilege in itself. I am grateful to have the opportunity to reflect on their ideas in the light of what is happening in our world.
Not only that, but their perspective on evolution makes complete sense to me. Julian Huxley said that the human person is “nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself”. That means each of us is contributing to the future of our earth by experiencing life and processing what has happened to us. What could be more relevant? If we want to change things, it is up to us to learn from our mistakes and do better. As we evolve day by day into more responsible people, so our planet will have a better chance of surviving and thriving in the eons up ahead.
This is fascinating. It sounds a great topic for your dissertation, really novel and challenging.