Recently I read a story in the Christian Century magazine about something that happened in September at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. It was included in a book review by Isaac S. Villegas of Mari Joerstad’s book The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape.
It seems that students at Union held a worship service in the chapel and decided to invite, as their special guests, some potted plants. The plants were not mere chancel decorations that day, as they so often are. They were guests of honor. And during the service, the students confessed to the plants – sweetly, tenderly, and remorsefully – their ecological sins.
They confessed all the ways they had taken nature for granted, the ways they had done harm. Although they had once climbed trees and found shelter in their branches, for example, they had not done enough to protect those trees as adults. Although they delighted in sunsets and walks on the beach and wintry runs down the slopes of mountains, they had also caused harm to the air, the sea, and the earth itself.
Throughout the service, the plants were addressed familiarly and lovingly as “you.”
Not long after that chapel service, the president of another, more conservative seminary took great offense. He decried the Union students’ treatment of the houseplants as “unbiblical.” “Plants are not beings,” he said. And “here [he raged] is the confusion that happens when the biblical worldview is abandoned.”
It seems, however, that he has rather a narrow understanding of what constitutes the biblical worldview. For a careful reading of the text shows that the land itself is a central character, the farmland and the furrows, as well as the wilderness. Mountains and hills rejoice. Forests applaud. Rocks and rivers grieve. There are even trees that fight alongside David’s army, like the tree beings in the movie Maleficent, or the Ents of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
Plants, it turns out, are, in fact, beings according to the biblical worldview. That is the very tradition that St. Francis so famously built upon when he spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Sister Water and Brother Wind.
And it was in that same tradition that the Scottish minister, George Matheson, once wrote: “Give me fellowship with the beast and the bird. Let me enter into sympathy with their hunger, their thirst, their weariness, their cold, their frequent homelessness. Let me give their wants a place in my prayers.”
This coming Wednesday, April 22, is Earth Day. This will be the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Back then we were still using leaded gasoline to power our cars and lead to paint our walls. It was an age of massive oil spills, raw sewage, toxic dumps and burning rivers.
Twenty million Americans – 10% of the US population at the time – took to the streets on April 22, 1970, to demand change. And that initial action led to bipartisan support for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and laws such as the Clean Air Act and later the Clean Water Act. The goal of Earth Day ever since has been “to unite hundreds of millions of people around the world to pressure world leaders to act on environmental degradation and climate change.
Of course, we cannot take to the streets this week. And so this year, for the first time ever, Earth Day will be digital. And you can be part of it. What can you do? You can take some time to check out the website: EarthDay dot org. There you will find an interactive map listing events that will be held this week all over the world. Events related to citizen science, faith, and policy. Panels and presentations, concerts and teach-ins. You can search by event type, by target age group, by date, and by language.
I would encourage you to spend some time today as a family exploring the options and choose at least one thing this week that you’d like to do together. And then make plans to get outside between this week’s April showers to commune with the fauna and flora of your neighborhood. Offer your greetings and your gratitude to the trees and flowers, to the birds and bunnies. Practice really attending to and loving the earth and all its beings.
As Dostoyevsky wrote: “Love all of God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything.” After all, what we love, we will work to save.
So may it be.
©2020 Rev. Wendy L. Bell
Reverend Wendy Bell
Wendy Bell was appointed Interim Minister of First Parish of Watertown in August of 2019, and served a two year term while we searched for a new settled minister.