Earth and nature
Six Unitarian women and men reflect here on the relationship between humans and the natural world. They explore the spiritual roots of our present ecological problems. They also share their own thoughts on the place of open-minded and practical religion in helping to reawaken our sense of connectedness to nature.
Unitarians today continue a radical tradition of questioning conventional attitudes and beliefs, testing them against the experience of mind and heart. By recognising how received religious and cultural ideas about nature continue to influence us all for good or ill we may better be able to embrace necessary changes in our patterns of living. We can balance legitimate human needs with those of other species sharing our common home.
Matthew Smith - Editor
A major principle of Unitarianism is the right of the individual to follow the guidance of the spirit. For many this has meant a closer identification with nature oriented theology than is the case with mainstream Christianity.
Some find value in the teachings of those Unitarians of the last century who believed that to revere nature was to revere God. Rev. Richard Acland Armstrong (1 843—1 905), for example, spoke of God speaking through "mountain and valley, cliff and cataract."
Others may find their inspiration in the writings of people such as the mediaeval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Her poetry pulsates with a rapturous, sensuous love for the earth which does not encourage a running away from the natural world but an embracing of that which evokes joy, awe and love.
A modern phenomenon in Unitarianism is the interest in pre-Christian spirituality in Britain which revered the forces of nature and sought a unity and connectedness with the whole of life.
With such nature-inspired elements, the placing of the earth at the centre of the spiritual life is an obvious consequence. This can be evidenced by the increased stress on ecological themes in Unitarian public worship in hymns, prayers and sermons. Some congregations build a whole service around some ecological theme or even celebrate an annual 'Earth Holy Day'.
For many the words attributed to Chief Noah Seattle, have a deep significance:
"This we know. The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. ,,We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves,"
Vernon Marshall is minister of Old Chapel, Dukinfield, and Wilton Street Chapel, Denton.
Whatever I can appreciate of God (however I understand this), or of value and concern, is to be sought in this world. I find it through what I can experience by my senses - what I can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. So the sacred is available in the details of everyday life. Some people talk of the world as "God's body", and I respond to this.
It is a religious requirement to try to live in such a way as not to cause unnecessary damage to this world, nor to prevent other people from enjoying their fair share of the earth's resources. I try not to waste these resources and avoid unnecessary consumption, though my Western lifestyle makes this difficult. This means using my car as little as possible (I have not yet managed to change my life enough to do without it), thinking twice about what I buy, reusing envelopes and plastic bags, recycling what waste I can.
Where possible I buy goods which have been produced in a way that is sensitive to the environment and fair to the producers. I use Traidcraft or Oxfam tea, coffee, muesli etc., and recycled toilet rolls and paper. For years I avoided South African fruit, and now I try to take the advice given in The Ethical Consumer about which brands to use or avoid. I am a vegetarian. Shopping and eating are both expressions of my religious concern.
Gardening helps to make part of the environment beautiful and is also a source of spiritual renewal. If I feel distressed, depressed, or overburdened, a couple of hours' work in the garden usually brings a sense of consolation, and grounds my spirit in the underlying creativity and rhythm of existence.
People, like plants, come in various forms; we all have much in common, but we also have our individual needs and gifts. Some plants spread vigorously and have to be cut back in order to give others room to grow. This is a salutary parable for privileged Westerners.
Ann Peart, a life long Unitarian and former teacher, is minister of Brookfield Church, Gorton, Manchester.
The facts about the plight of the earth are well documented, but our political and economic structures have yet to learn the error of their unsustainable ways. Behind these structures are ordinary people like you and me who benefit from the system and complain if we are asked to make sacrifices.
Our civilisation now has a profoundly flawed relationship with the planet. This has grave implications for the future and a severe impact in the present, with the world's poor paying the price for our wasteful and destructive ways. We need to focus on those spiritual resources which could yet restore humanity's vision and the earth's fortunes. Most cultures see in the universe the work of a ultimate or divine reality, and teach that our wellbeing depends on maintaining a right relationship with the creation and the divine power that called it into being.
In the Judaeo - Christian tradition the true relationship of humanity with the earth is best stated in the Genesis creation myth, where Adam created out of the same 'dust of the ground' as all the plants and animals is given a specific task: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to care for it." Thus humanity's role is to be earth's gardener and curator, with the responsibility for looking after those who share this garden-planet with us.
The theme of our intimate relationship with a sacred creation recurs throughout the Bible: from God's covenant with Noah "and with all living creatures" (Gen. 9:12—1 7) through Psalm 104's hymn of praise for God's handiwork, and the prophet's vision of cosmic harmony in the Messianic age (Is. 11: 6—9); to Jesus's lyrical invocation of "the birds of the air .... the lilies of the field" (Matt. 6: 26—30), and Paul's perception that nature is transparent with the divine "to the eye of reason" (Rom. 1: 1 9—20).
The message that creation is sacred and that we must be its good stewards should be incorporated into our worship, our politics, our economics and our individual lifestyles.
Cliff Reed is minister of Unitarian congregations in Bedfield, Framlingham and lpswich, Suffolk.
I grew up in a small village near the river Rhine in Germany, a rural setting in the southwest of the country. We marked the turning of the year with festivals maypole dances, Summers Day, Harvest festivals and Midwinter celebrations. It never occurred to me then that I might consider nature as separate from my life.
Now I live and work in London a huge urban metropolis and often I do feel removed from nature.
I do not see human beings as the ultimate crown of creation. Life forms do not constitute a pyramid with humans at the apex, but rather a circle where everything is connected and interdependent. We could not live without the rest of nature, but nature can carry on without us!
Anne Cameron writes, "We all have a right to live on this Earth. We have the right to be free and to live in balance with nature, a part of nature, not apart from nature. We have the right not to be separated from our Mother, and we have the duty and obligation not to have our Mother destroyed ..." We need a holistic approach with the goal of establishing a balance among all the different communities that comprise the living body of our Mother earth,
I do not subscribe to the dualist presupposition which makes a division between spirit and matter, mind and body, culture and nature. I believe earth based spirituality can help heal this perceived split by celebrating the cycle of life, birth, growth, maturity, decay, death and rebirth as it manifests in the seasonal round of the year, in the phases of the moon and in human, plant and animal life. Celebrating the cycles of nature is very important to me. Together with others, I have reclaimed ancient rituals at the solstices and equinoxes affirming my connectedness to the changing cycles of the seasons. By attuning to the passing seasons my life takes on a new vitality.
Ingrid Tavkar is Social Responsibility Officer at Unitarian Headquarters in London.
Revelation can be found in the ongoing miracle of Life, as well as in inspired scriptures. There is symbiosis, cooperation and even altruism in the relations between animals and different species. In spite of wasteful and harmful changes or mutations, the creative advance to purposeful complexification goes on.
I am drawn to the Process Theology of AN. Whitehead, C. Hartshorne and Teilhard de Chardin which offers the prospect of an evolutionary advance— God as a persuasive lure towards universal harmony:
Order from disorder; light from darkness; good from the disharmony of evil.
For Whitehead things which are temporal arise by their participation in things which are eternal. God is not before all creation, but with all creation. We are co - creators with God.
Perhaps that which transcends us is within us. The spirit, order, harmony, and reality behind Life itself cannot have powers, qualities and a manifestation of personality less than our own.
Following Albert Schweitzer's 'Reverence for Life', we are in a spiritual relationship with the universe, and in harmony with it, To quote from the wisdom of the East, "There is true knowledge, learn thou it is this. To see one nameless Life in all lives, and in the separate, one inseparable!"
The march of evolution from single celled creatures towards mind and spirit transcends the finite— and our finite understanding.
James Hayden is a retired architect, ex-serviceman and lay Unitarian living in Canterbury.
Although his roots were in Unitarian Christianity, Ralph Waldo Emerson's own theology was pantheistic, having been greatly influenced by Plato and the Hindu scriptures. Consequently he saw the world both as an emanation from God, within whom "every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other...and to which every part and particle is equally related" and also as "one vast picture which God paints on eternity." All created things therefore have an equally important role.
Even though we may be unconscious of it, the doctrine of creation which belongs to our inherited or adopted faith makes a great difference to how we value and relate to the world around us. A God who creates the world out of nothing is essentially apart from that world. A God whose very substance forms the universe is totally involved in that universe. He cannot punish or destroy any part of it without doing violence to himself. Neither can we. It seems to me that only this second option, pantheism, can lead to a true concern for the natural world. Once we realise that all matter is divine, that all living things are divine, then (and only then) will we respect them.
Those of us with a traditional Western religious background are used to seeing human beings regarded as being of greater value than animals or plants, and this worries us. We may be less aware that we have also inherited the corollary that spirit is superior to matter and that physical things are to be subdued, controlled or, at best, 'saved'. Both these value judgements are implicit in the doctrine of creation 'exnihilo' which the Church Fathers developed. Christianity teaches us to see Christ in all people. Can we go further and say that God has become incarnate in, say, a donkey or a tree?
Unitarians are in a position to evolve a theology which could form a basis for a moral code which would include our relationship with the natural world as well as with each other. "Man and Nature are indissolubly joined...l do not wish to throw stones at my beautiful mother." (Emerson, Nature, 1836).
Rosemary Arthur is a Unitarian lay preacher living in Yorkshire.
Brighton Unitarian Church, New Road,
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