Inhabitance

Ecological Religious Education

Jennifer R. Ayres

• Editorial: Baylor University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781481311397
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología cristiana

Like other creatures, human beings are inhabitants of their ecosystems. But are humans good inhabitants? According to Jennifer Ayres, the way of inhabitance is stubbornly elusive. The work of understanding, loving, and tending God's world is constrained by patterns of alienation, exploitation, and systemic neglect and injustice.

Faced daily by evidence of ecological death and decay, Ayres determines that this important work of inhabitance is constantly threatened by ecological despair. Ecological despair stems from alienation from the natural world, acute and generational grief resulting from loss of home places, and, for many, an overwhelming guilt at having been complicit in the planet's suffering. In Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education, Ayres proposes a solution to this increasing alienation: the way of inhabitance. Just as other animals live and thrive within their ecosystems, so do humans live in a habitat created, sustained, and loved by God. This God perpetually invites us to become better inhabitants.

Many religious communities already cultivate inhabitance as a way of life, work that they consider to be central to their deepest theological commitments. Inhabitance examines a diverse array of such practices that foster more intentional engagement with the particular places in which people live. Ecological religious education, Ayres demonstrates, nurtures a disposition of loving commitment toward God's creation.

Inhabitance demands a willingness to love other beings and a willingness to courageously encounter the human and ecological suffering of the world and be fully present to that suffering. And even as humans live more lovingly, courageously, and attentively within their particular places, their lives are opened up to the deepest sources of human well-being—for when God's world around us flourishes, so do we.

1

Longing for Home

Becoming Members of the Household of God

“LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore”—“Praise be to you, my Lord.” In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.1

The Vatican’s first occupant heralding from the global south wasted no time in addressing the deepest ecological questions of our time. The very first encyclical penned wholly by Pope Francis issues an urgent call to Christians and, indeed, “all people of good will” to “protect our common home.”2 Pope Francis is not the first to evoke familial language to describe the planet and human beings’ relationship to it, but his extended reflections on this language in the encyclical draw readers’ poetic and emotional attention. The human vocation to tend the earth is sacred work that is as intimate as tending one’s own home and family. Home is where human beings learn to be their fullest selves and where they live into their deepest and most mundane responsibilities. Home is where humans share life together, where they celebrate, are nourished, grieve, and build futures together. And it is where they learn to love in the most vulnerable and unguarded way that humans know how to love. In some homes it is precisely this vulnerability and unguardedness that make possible deep wounding and harm, broken relationships, and experiences of alienation.

The theological claim that the planet is our “common home” demands a reimagining of human life and responsibility, the ordering and direction of human affections, and the very heart of Christian faith itself. From an ecological perspective, calling the planet “our home” and describing human beings as members of a common household reorients human life and identity. From a theological perspective, understanding the planet as full of divine creativity, action, and renewal expands how Christians live in relationship to a God of love and mystery. From a social and ethical perspective, a full exploration of the meaning of the image of “common home” must avoid simplistic and romanticized invocations of “home” in a broken and suffering world.

In sum, people of faith and conscience must rediscover how to be human in this world, in all of its complexity and wonder.

Theologians, biblical interpreters, and ethicists concerned about the state of the ecological context have often focused their energies on what humans should do, describing human responsibility to tend the land in various places and periods in history. The cultivation of ecological faith requires attention to these matters because they concretely and directly address the challenges of living out the human vocation of tending, stewarding, or serving the earth. But the cultivation of ecological faith also requires attention to who humans are.

Indeed, human beings at least partly derive their work and identity from their mythic origins in the very soil beneath their feet. By being born of the topsoil, they thus belong to it, just as they belong to their families, their communities, and the social groupings that shape them into who they are.3 Just as they belong to human communities from whom they derive their identities and moral responsibility, so they belong to the “land community,” which shapes their identity and gives direction to their moral responsibility.4 Some of these communities are suffering, and human and nonhuman members of these wounded communities cry out for responses of love and commitment.

In short, to be human is to be an ecological creature. An ecological theological anthropology is not solely an accounting of how humans act ecologically but instead is about how humans are, from the start, ecological beings. Human beings live and act as members, with varying degrees of consciousness, of an ecological web. Whether they perceive themselves as “members” or not, human living and acting can strengthen the ecological web, tend it, or harm it.5 In turn, human life is constrained and affected by the health of this ecological web. Pope Francis describes these bonds of interdependence as familial, employing the language of another, earlier Francis to cast the planet as a loving mother and a sister in need of care.6 This earthly family of which human beings are a part shares a common home. Together, human and nonhuman creatures are members of a household, a site of nurture and a site of obligation.

This anthropological and moral claim, the root of an ecological reconception of Christian faith, must be interrogated and expanded. While ecotheologians, biblical texts, and even environmental scholars alike frequently employ the image of the planet as “home,” the metaphor reaches limits when confronted with the state and scope of the planet, the human condition, and the present and future presence of a creating God. The tensions that arise at the limits of the metaphor, however, summon the moral imagination to the work of inhabiting God’s world well. The art of responsible and loving inhabitance demands not only human obligation but the whole self, including human affections and dispositions.

Ecological Faith

Human Beings Longing for Home

Sometimes, the terms ecological and environmental are used rather interchangeably. Describing the work of Christians to rediscover what it means to be human in this world as “ecological faith” is more than a semantic choice, but the semantics are illuminating. Ecology is derived from the Greek term, oikeo, which means “to inhabit.” An oikos is a household, the place inhabited by families. The term, then, literally might be described as “the knowledge (logos) of inhabiting.”7 The study of ecosystems, then, is the study of how living beings survive, thrive, adapt, and so on, within their habitats. Immediately apparent is the necessity of studying relationships between living beings.

Importantly, the living beings that make up an ecosystem include human beings in all of their creativity, suffering, and relationality. From the first, any account of ecological faith must acknowledge that some members of an ecosystem suffer more than others. Some members impact the ecosystem more than others. And when it comes to the human members of an ecosystem, these disparities correspond to the ways in which race, class, and gender influence relative social, economic, and political power. Human beings’ experiences of their habitats—their capacities to survive, thrive, adapt, and so on—are not monolithic. One of the advantages of ecological thinking with regard to instances of environmental injustice is that it is necessarily relational and systemic. It invites one to think about the connections between elements of the ecosystem, a way of thinking that extends to how we think about human and social systems. Ecological faith looks for patterns, relationships, and effects from the standpoint of an embedded member of the habitat.

Contrast this sense with the study of environment, a term derived from the French term virer (viron), which means to encircle. An environ is that which encircles or surrounds. While it is not necessarily the case that considering the environment as “surroundings” leads human beings to distance themselves from it and fail to appreciate the relationship that connects them to it, the etymological difference between environmental and ecological helps to clarify the human relationship to the rest of the ecosystem.8 Whether human beings understand their habitat as their surroundings or as a system in which they are embedded matters. Hence, the preference for the term “ecological faith”: it is a faith that turns on the capacities necessary to inhabit God’s world well. It is a way of life seeking to become loving, just, and responsible members of God’s household.9 Defining and contextualizing ecological faith thus requires attention to three dynamics: the location and architecture of the ecological household in which humans belong; meaning of human life in this habitat; and the art, disposition, and practice of inhabiting this household. The way of ecological faith is, in short, faithful and responsible inhabitance.

The Tension between the Big and the Small

One might conceive of inhabitance in an ecological household in a global or even planetary sense. Human beings understand themselves, in a general sense, as inhabitants of God’s whole household, the whole divine creation: earth and heaven together.10 The process of becoming reflective, knowledgeable, and responsible inhabitants, however, unfolds in a local sense. In other words, we become members of a particular household, knowing its other inhabitants, its architecture, and its spirit in the specific. One comes to know and love a particular place, up close and in detail. This tension between the large and the small, the universal and the particular, presents a bit of a quandary.

The admonition to focus attention so narrowly might seem somewhat counterintuitive. After all, who has not been struck at once by the vastness of the universe and the corresponding vulnerability (and yet, disproportionate power) of the human being? The fleeting awareness has the capacity to spark in human consciousness an apprehension that they are connected and indeed incorporated into something larger than themselves.11 Climbers, surfers, hikers, stargazers, and contemplatives describe similar sensory reactions to being in the presence of nature’s most evocative landscapes: panoramic vistas, crashing waves, silent and soft earth, canopies of stars. All of these images connote the vastness of the earth and, even more, the universe. Human beings are reminded by these experiences that they are actually quite small, young, and finite in relationship to this planet on which they find themselves.

Indeed, many a psalmist would also testify to the sheer enormity, complexity, and beauty of the earth:

O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

. . . When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them? (Ps 8:1, 3-4, NRSV)12

Profoundly, as small as humans are, they are deeply and inextricably woven into the earth, as well. Contemplation of the vastness of the universe has the capacity to reorient human conceptions of both the scale of God’s household and humanity’s place within it. Such awareness is the seed of humility and wonder. And yet, that same preoccupation with the vastness, the majesty, and the long endurance of the earth also, paradoxically, threatens to diffuse human moral vision. Awareness of the planet’s breadth and complexity might actually contribute to a sense of rootlessness. In other words, in apprehending the full landscape, one might very well lose one’s precise place in it. How can human beings grasp both the breadth of the landscape and their precise location within it? This kind of dual awareness requires ongoing and detailed attention to the particular places in which human beings find themselves, as Pope Francis observes:

The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God. The history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places which take on an intensely personal meaning; we all remember places, and revisiting those memories does us much good. Anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighbourhood square; going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves.13

While the “entire material universe speaks of God’s love,” humans know that love in the particular: a neighborhood, a spring, a home. When human beings understand a place as a “home” to which they are arriving or returning, they are saying it is a place to which they belong. It is a place in which the promise of recovering one’s “true self” beckons human attention and moral energies. Calling a place “home” inspires the desire to know it, as best as possible, with a “loving eye.” That is to say, by approaching the earth (and its particular places that are most familiar) with a desire to see, know, and love it, humans encounter it as a living subject with which they might cultivate a relationship.14 Poignantly, the identity-shaping power of home beckons even when it is far away or inaccessible, when the relationship to it is broken, when one is alienated or displaced from home. Anyone who has visited a homeplace after a long time away, or who has experienced the grief of losing a homeplace, knows what it means to love a place. It is to want to know it in intimate detail rather than in a disengaged abstract sense. Human beings must love in the specific to love the whole. It requires placing their bodies in a particular place, smelling, hearing, feeling, tasting, and, yes, seeing it.

Occasionally theology students bristle at the idea of knowing and loving a particular place well. “Should we not love and care for the whole earth?” they might ask. Especially among students in theological education (or pastors or young professionals, for that matter!) who understand their current locations to be quite temporary, the admonition to focus intently on where they are just now might smack of provincialism. Ecotheologians and environmental educators alike argue, however, that the reverse is t...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: To Inhabit the World
• 1. Longing for Home
• 2. Becoming Inhabitants
• 3. Religious Education for Inhabitance
• 4. Educational Practices for Inhabitance
• 5. Located, Dislocated, Relocated
• 6. Embracing Vulnerability
• Conclusion: Christian Hope in the Anthropocene
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index