Ecological Conversion, by Nicholas Collura

S U M M E R “Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars.

Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings.

Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things.

All nature is at the disposal of humankind.

We are to work with it.

For without we cannot survive.”

—HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

Summers are a time for planting and regrowth. Tilling and preparing the soil helps prepare for the fall harvest. The planting and harvesting seasons are essential for providing us with the food that will nourish and sustain us through the long, darker days of winter. Without this nature cycle, we cannot sustain our ecosystems, bodies, or beings.

Each year summers are getting increasingly hotter. We have seen more floods in the south, increasing wildfires in the west, and heatwaves across the country. How are we to plant and prepare for the next season if we are constantly fighting fires, droughts, or evacuating from floods?

In a world in crisis, it is hard to identify our role in actively stopping the climate crisis. Reveling and relishing in the beauty of God’s creation can be difficult when we struggle to breathe, grow, plant, and live. However, when we do get a chance to marvel at the stars on a hot summer night or hear the cicadas chirp their songs late into the evening, and when we can feel the warmth of the sun while digging our toes into sandy beaches, we are given a gentle reminder of our interconnectedness to the earth that bore us and continues to sustain us. In this season, let us reflect on how we can bring out regrowth in our lives through planting something that will cultivate life for ourselves and our communities.

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Ecological Conversion

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BY NICHOLAS COLLURA

e might, perhaps, make coffee when we wake up. Shower, respond to texts and emails.

Breakfast quickly, or not at all, or in a leisurely way, and then get in the car if we are commuting to work or prepare ourselves for Zoom calls if we are working from home. If this is a day of leisure or if our week is more unoccupied, perhaps our routine will feature more time in bed or in front of the TV. What else do we do as the day unfolds?

Prepare meals, care for our pets, reach out to friends or family, work, play—all of this accentuated if we are raising children in its midst.

This may not be a normative experience for everyone, but as we imagine the elements that make up our routine, we can still scrutinize our little itineraries and ask ourselves: How regularly do we touch the natural world?

And by touch, I mean touch―with some part of our body. I hope we all have a window to let in fresh air in the spring and

let in natural light in the silver-skied winters. That, already, is a start, given that our life is so circumscribed by technology and rooms, and the protective safety―in times of distancing or quarantine―of walls. Maybe some of us are fortunate to have dogs who insist that we take them into nature, rain or shine. But more than that, does our nose touch flowers, do our hands graze tree bark, and do we ever feel the earth beneath our feet?

Inattention to our embodied connection to the planet carries many consequences. A pernicious dualism between us and the rest of creation can arise when we sequester ourselves from other living organisms: We can imagine ourselves a superior lifeform, and we can treat the natural world as material to be exploited.

Even an ethical responsibility and concern for creation can suffer from this dualism if we see ourselves as the protectors of nature but not as part of it, so that our spiritual practices (including practices of self-care) are divorced from our activism and our consciousness as a whole becomes less organic.

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We may even be closing down avenues to the divine and impoverishing our religious imagination. On retreats I have led, I have sometimes asked participants, “Who can share a spiritual experience you’ve had with an animal or in a natural landscape?”

I am not sure I have met anyone, yet, who has not been able to provide an example of one or the other. By the way, I say this as someone who is unapologetically a “city person” and neither of whose thumbs is remotely green. Temperament is one thing; spiritual essence is another.

And all of us belong to a moment in history in which eco-spiritual renewal is necessary. So many people are finding patriarchal, anthropomorphized images of G*d to be alienating, and at last we have a language to name the suffering inflicted by dualism writ large (like structural racism, sexism, ableism, and speciesism). The poet Rilke anticipated this a hundred years ago, “We must not portray you in king’s robes, you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.” In place of imperial images, organic ones. (Not incidentally, the etymology of the English word “holy” comes from the Germanic word “whole.”)

But the crises of the pandemic, climate change, and biodiversity loss are accelerating an epochal and salutary shift in our religious nature. Paradigms (in labor practices, in historiography, in the economy) are changing all around us: Can our religious paradigms follow suit?

There is much that gets in the way, and it is not just our built environments. The power of fear, the sway of uniformity, is strong. We may find ourselves transferring the innate human desire for wholeness, for belonging, to social institutions that keep us in a tribal mind space. For instance, I hear from people at workshops all the time that they are afraid of being labeled as “pantheists” or “tree-huggers.” The judgment attached to these words is quite fearful, indeed.

It’s an attitude born, I think, of a bias towards cerebral experience. So accustomed are we to rehearsing the right “ideas” about G*d that we have lost the felt experience of sacred connection. It’s a vicious spiral: Centering even social experience in our minds (through the “metaverse,” for instance) reinforces the notion that knowledge of G*d is intellectual, not experiential.

This cerebral bias can infiltrate even a spirituality that yearns to “find G*d in all things,” because the word “God” still feels necessary as a doctrinal reassurance that we aren’t a heretic or a pagan.

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Many religious traditions are in a funny tension in this regard.

The Catholic faith in which I was raised is “sacramental,” “incarnational,” and yet very squeamish about the body and its most basic and obvious longings, just as it’s also very doctrinal and academic. The Jesuit Adolfo Nicolás astutely observed that the Western appropriation of Jesus of Nazareth often only honors one third of Jesus’ self-proclaimed identity (Jn 14:6): We are very good at relating to him as “the truth,” but do we encounter this messianic figure anymore through the literal practice of pilgrimage—of walking—or in tracing a “way” through a forest?

Or in celebrating with our entire bodies, in encountering the breathing “life” of other beings?

Here is an interesting intersection with justice concerns: In order for us to celebrate our relationship with creation, we must be liberated from a lot of baggage that institutions, even well-meaning ones, continue to carry into a century that will demand a very different ecological approach than the ones that came before it did. But if we can be courageous enough to overcome the cognitive bias and concern for our religious image, it can rejuvenate the pastoral circle: “See, judge, act” (where vision and judgment are, we must admit, a little heady) can become “touch, experience, respond,” a somewhat different set of words for knowing and loving.

Photo -Unsplash © Nine Koepfer

For instance, I underwent my own conversion to the work of faith-based organizing one day when I found myself near Bartram’s Garden, a quiet idyll in West Philadelphia, after work.

I decided to stop by and wound up lost in a reverie by a gentle brook. The first phrase that came to me was a line from T.S. Eliot: “The still point of the turning world.” The second phrase was a question: “Would you fight for this?” Organic belonging and the stirrings of a response came together.

It so often comes back to images of the divine. In my work as a chaplain, my patients will often ask, “Why me? I have been a good churchgoer all my life—why have I been given cancer?”

The logic here may be tenuous, but the experiential cry for meaning is very deep. It isn’t easy, after all, to accept a change in an image of God that we received as children. It isn’t easy to allow the puppet master God to die in order for the G*d of love to live.

Ecological conversion from limited ideas about G*d will take no less courage than the work of the dying person. But the emergence of new life from the compost heap of the old is a motif held in common by gardeners and by believers in the Resurrection. In fact, the Risen Christ was mistaken, at first, for a gardener.

Did I read this article indoors? If so, could I take it outside and re-read it, reaching out sometimes to touch the ground, to round the circle between my thoughts and my earth-body?

Or could I sit by a plant that is helping me in its small but crucial way to breathe, and thereby connect the experience of my brain, my eyes, my lungs?

This could be the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way I do other things, as well. I may also intuit that my own journey is not an isolated one; it’s part of a large-scale evolutionary process to which the natural world is always, silently yet unrelentingly, inviting itself.

Nicholas Collura is a spiritual director and visiting retreat director at St. Raphaela Center in Haverford, PA. A boardcertified chaplain, he directs a pastoral care team for a Catholic hospice organization in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and co-coordinates EcoPhilly, a faith-based organizing initiative dedicated to creation care in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

His website is www.nicholascollura.com.

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