One Heart: Earthseed meets "Laudato Si´"

  

Reading a papal Encyclical is a trying experience, even if the Pope in question is Francis and the news has just broken that Francis supports the legal recognition of civil unions for gay people. In his concern for the environment, refugees and immigrants, and justice between the global north and south, Pope Francis is more progressive than any of us would ever expect a Pontiff to be, and the encyclical Laudato Si´: On Care for Our Common Home resonates with these urgent concerns. But if Francis and his church can come this far, why not further? We read a critique of Laudato Si´ by Beatrice Marovich which argued that, despite its successes, it remains a patriarchal text, committed to an unnatural heteronormativity and unable to acknowledge the "religious biodiversity" it uncovers.

Still, the linkage of the "cry of the poor" and the "cry of the earth" in Laudato Si´ of broke important ground in international discourse around the climate crisis, opening anew debates about the role religion might after all play in responding to the ecological crisis. Invoking the legacies of his namesake, Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis argues that indifference to environment degradation or to global injustice will inevitably lead to indifference to the other.

We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with other people. Every act of cruelty towards any creature is “contrary to human dignity". We can hardly consider ourselves to be fully loving if we disregard any aspect of reality ... Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth. (§92)

Attempts to address the environmental crisis or the crisis of global poverty in abstraction from the other are doomed to fail, Francis insists, not only in practice but also in theory. To really face the challenges of the Anthropocene we need a truer understanding of our "one heart," a fuller understanding of the "reality"  which it calls us to love and our special place in it - an "integral ecology" which is also an ecological (and theological) anthropology. 

Laudato Si´ is a little hard to parse here. An instruction to the Roman Catholic faithful, larded with references to the Christian scripture, councils of bishops and papal predecessors, it is also addressed to people of all creeds and none, for whom none of these are authorities. Though Francis seems to think that only through acceptance of a common father will we really know ourselves to be the brothers and sisters of all of creation, much of his argument professes to stand free of theology. What about those references to our "one heart" - and to "reality"? If Francis isn't demanding that we sign on to his religion, is he nevertheless suggesting that some kind of religion is needed if we are to respond fully to the cries of the poor and the earth?

We focused on a section called "The Mystery of the Universe" (chapter 2, part 3), which offers a layered alternative to the view of reality Francis thinks undergirds our "throwaway" relationship to nature and each other.

Nature is usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled, whereas creation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all (§76) ... [T]he world came about as the result of a decision, not from chaos or chance, and ... did not emerge as the result of arbitrary omnipotence, a show of force or a desire for self-assertion. Creation is of the order of love. (§77) ... A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power. (§78) ... The Spirit of God has filled the universe with possibilities and therefore, from the very heart of things, something new can always emerge. (§80) ... The sheer novelty involved in the emergence of a personal being within a material universe presupposes ... a particular call to life and to relationship on the part of a “Thou” who addresses himself to another “thou”. (§81) ... When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of “might is right” has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity ... [c]ompletely at odds with ... the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus. (§82) ... The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator. (§83)

This is Christian theology, but offered more generally as a template for ecological conversion. The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor demand that we abandon a "might makes right" approach to reality. This in turn requires that we accept this reality not as arbitrary but as a work of love. It shares a source and a goal, and we, while only a part of it, have a special contribution to make. Can we muster that?

It's a lot to ask, and Christian theology - only a part of which has only very recently become ecologically minded - has much to answer for. Francis acknowledges some of that but, as Marovich shows, perpetuates much of it too. His rhapsody to the "mystery of the universe" comes right after this: "A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable" (§75). As it becomes clear that for Francis unacceptable spiritualities prominently include those which question traditional gender roles, Laudato Si´ vision starts to feel narrow and inhospitable. In fact heteropatriarchy structures the whole understanding of "reality": the two genders are the template for every genuine encounter with otherness, and so for love.

Can anything be salvaged from Laudato Si´ for those of us who know that nature isn't gendered in so binary a way, and have learned from ecofeminism that the devaluing of the poor and of the earth is grounded and prefigured in the binarism devaluing of women? One student found a way. "Wherever it says 'God' I just substitute 'Change.'" For, as we learned from Earthseed, the religion established in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower,

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

This revision works better than you might expect. Earthseed too is an ecological conversion, a recognition that the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor demand that we abandon a "might makes right" approach to reality. This in turn requires that we accept this reality not as arbitrary and but as a work of love. It shares a source and a goal, and we, while only a part of it, have a special contribution to make. As we direct Earthseed's "destiny" back from the stars to the reality of our fragile earth through the reciprocal process of shaping God, we'll need to rethink what we mean by love. Perhaps this will finally let our hearts be whole.

(ML)

Picture source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/19/rising-tide-why-the-crocodile-like-gharial-is-returning-to-indias-rivers-aoe