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Prayers as if the Earth Really Matters

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2876533

2164-0041

Arthur Waskow,

Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

more and more often, religious communities are bringing their prayer and practice to bear on a profound religious and spiritual question: radical dangers posed by the climate crisis to the web of human and more-than-human life forms on this planet.There are two ways we’ve found to relate prayer to the present crisis of our planet. One is exploring how earth awareness can enter more deeply into our formal prayer services. The other is exploring how public action intended to affect public and corporate policy toward the earth can become prayerful.“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote. One way to enhance earth awareness in the formal prayer of many religious traditions is to introduce new symbols and rituals into them. One extraordinarily powerful effort along these lines was undertaken at the Interfaith Summit on the Climate Crisis organized in 2008 by the Church of Sweden. The most moving aspect of the summit’s initial service in the Cathedral of Uppsala was the rolling of a large green globe made of moss down the center aisle of the cathedral—the symbol of no one religious community and a possible symbol for them all.A version of this practice has since been introduced into a number of multireligious services focusing on the climate crisis—especially several held by Interfaith Moral Action on Climate at the White House fence and Lafayette Park in 2012 and 2013. At those events, the participants passed an inflatable globe from hand to hand, singing verse upon verse of a familiar hymn remade with environmental language:It is both factually and theologically notable that this liturgy transformed an older hymn in which the refrain was, “He has the whole world in His hands.” That assertion—He is in charge of the world—is closely related to a major traditional metaphor in most Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayer. In that metaphor, God is King, Lord, and Judge, above and beyond the human beings who are praying. In regard to the earth, this metaphor crowned a series of hierarchies that emerged in ancient Greece and the Middle Ages through the concept of a great chain of being—a hierarchy from rocks and rivers up to vegetation, thence up to animals, and then human beings, and finally up to the Divine King and Lord.Today we know that the relationship between the human species and the earth is ill described by these metaphors of hierarchy. Not only do we know that what we breathe in depends upon what the trees and grasses breathe out; now we also know that within our own guts are myriad microscopic creatures that occasionally make us sick but far more often keep us alive and healthy. There is no “environment” in the sense of “environs” that are “out there,” not us. There are fringes (threads of connection), not fences, between us and other life, and sometimes fringes in our very innards.Though now we know that humanity has great power to damage the web of life on earth, we also know that we are strands within that web—not simply above and beyond it. What we do to the web also has an impact on us. The more we act as if we are in total control, the closer we come to “totaling” the whole intricate process. So those metaphors of ordered hierarchy are no longer truthful, viable, or useful to us as tools of spiritual enlightenment.If we are to seek spiritual depth and height, the whole framework of prayer must be transformed. How can we do this while drawing on the rich experience of prayer that spiritually enlightened many in the generations that came before us?If we look deep into the Torah tradition, we can find accounts that hint toward a very different metaphor and therefore a very different path of prayer. When Moses hears a voice speaking from the Burning Bush, the voice gives him two new names by which to understand the universe and God and by which to lead the liberation of the Israelites from slavery to Pharaoh. One of those new names is in Hebrew—Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh—that is, “I will be who I will be.” The world, we understand, is always becoming. Slaves can become free; a rabble of runaways can become a community. The other name, in the Roman alphabet, is YHWH. Much later in biblical understanding, we were taught that this name must not be pronounced and that instead the Hebrew word Adonai (“Lord”) should be used as a substitute for it. This practice greatly affected Christian prayer and practice, as Adonai became Kyrie, then Dominus, and later Lord.But if we do try to pronounce this YHWH without any vowels, what we sound and hear is not quite a pronunciation but a breath. A breath that appears not only in Hebrew but in every human language. A breath that appears not only in human languages but also in every life form on our planet. No living creature on our planet breathes in its own little bubble. We breathe each other into being. Into living. We breathe in what the trees breathe out. The trees breathe in what we breathe out.The metaphor that God is the interbreathing of all life is far more truthful than the metaphor that God is King and Lord. It brings together spiritual truth and scientific fact. It has only been about 250 years since human beings discovered that the great exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen between plants and animals is what keeps our planet alive. Yet this scientific fact echoes the ancient sense that we are all interwoven, interbreathing.Even to say the word “spiritual” is to teach the importance of this interbreathing. For just as the word spiritus in Latin means “breath” and “wind,” as well as what we call “spirit,” so the word ruach in Hebrew means “breath,” “wind,” and “spirit.” Much the same sense is expressed in many other languages.What would it mean, then, to reframe our forms of prayer around the metaphor of God as interbreathing? I will speak here from my own roots in Jewish prayer, but the basic question should arise in the prayers of all cultures.Let us start with what many consider the central affirmation of Jewish prayer, the Shema. Drawing on our new metaphor, we might hear the Shema saying, “Sh’sh’shma—Hush’sh’sh’sh and listen, you Godwrestlers! Our God is the interbreathing of all life, and the interbreathing is One.”In the traditional Jewish prayer book, the Shema is followed by three paragraphs of explication and affirmation. The second paragraph is devoted to the relationship between human beings and the earth. It asserts that if human beings follow the sacred teachings that indeed the Divine is One, then the rivers will run, the rains will fall, the heavens will bless the earth, and the earth will be abundantly fruitful in feeding human beings, in making the harvest abundant, and in making the land flourish.But the paragraph continues that if we follow false gods, if we carve the world up into parts and worship not the One Breath of Life but some substitute piece we have carved out—then the rivers won’t run, the rain won’t fall, and the heavens will become our enemy. We will perish from the good earth that the One Breath of Life, our God, has given us.In the last half-century, that second paragraph has been excised from many modern Jewish prayer books. The argument for removing it has been that it teaches a false notion of reward always coming from good action and punishment always coming from bad action. But that excision came before we understood how interwoven and fragile our relationship with the earth is, and how we might in fact act with such strength and arrogance as to wound even the rain and the rivers. In the current context of climate change, the meaning of the Shema’s assertion that the rivers won’t run if we follow false gods becomes clear in a whole new way. I’ve created a new translation of the three paragraphs that follow the Shema to highlight this reality (see facing page).Now let me go back to an earlier part of the traditional Jewish service that comes before the Shema. There are three passages in which the Hebrew word neshama (breath/soul) is central. Translated into English, the first says, “The breath my God has placed within me is clear this morning, as I wake.” The second says, “The breath of all life blesses your name, our God.” The third says, “Every breath praises Yah, the Breath of Life.”In order to pray so that the earth really matters, we might actually breathe these three different passages in three different ways. For the first, we might experience the breath coming into our own noses, mouths, and throats, and moving into our lungs to be picked up by our bloodstream. We might experience our blood bearing the oxygen to our brain, our arms, our heart and legs and genitals and skin—to all our organs that through their diversity make each of us into a One. This is my breath, and it comes from my God.The second passage invites us to see the breath of all life, praising the name of our God—no longer my God. For this passage, we might begin by experiencing how our breath—now mostly carbon dioxide—leaves our mouths and noses, how it moves into the air and atmosphere of all God’s creatures, how it moves into a plant and is breathed in by trees and grasses. Trees absorb the carbon to make new leaves and new wood, and then breathe out oxygen into the world, so that we can breathe it in. My free translation of it is above.And finally the third passage comes from the very end phrase of Psalm 150, the last psalm. It affirms that every breath praises, blesses, the God who is the Breath of Life. It uses one of the ancient names of God—Yah, as in Hallelu-Yah—the name that has the initial Y and the ending H of the YHWH name.The exercise I have described is a way of teaching our community that it is part of the earth, interwoven with the earth—neither its ruler nor the viceroy of a king still higher and more royal.With this new relationship with the earth in mind, we move to the moment in the Jewish service that affirms there is a minyan (a community, a quorum for prayer) in the room. Traditionally, this required ten male Jews at least thirteen years and one day old. Now, in many Jewish circles, ten adult Jews of any gender make a minyan.As we pause to say a welcoming affirmation—“Let us praise that holy Breath of Life which is indeed to be well praised”—we might in our new mode look from face to face around the room, pausing at each face to affirm what the ancient rabbis taught: “When Caesar stamps his image on a coin, all the coins come out identical. When the Holy One stamps the Divine Image on a ‘coin,’ each ‘coin’ [each human being] is unique.” So at each face we affirm: “This is the face of God. And this, so different, is the face of God. And this, and this, and this.”We affirm that each face—so different not only in its physical shape and look but also in its history and future—is the face of God, not despite their differences but precisely because of their diversity. For the infinite can be expressed in the world only through the many faces of diversity.As Rabbi David Seidenberg has uncovered for us, much of kabbalistic thought extends the Image beyond humanity to all life. So with the earth in mind, we might then turn to see the green faces of God—especially if there are windows in the congregation’s prayer space, looking out upon the trees and grasses. Someone might say, “We invite into our minyan these green faces of the holy Breath of Life, for no minyan could live and breathe if these green faces of the Holy One were not breathing into us what we need to live.”There are many other moments in the service when this new metaphor takes on a fuller meaning. In some ways it seems more accurate within our prayers than does King or Lord. For example, as we celebrate the way in which the Red Sea was blown apart for the Israelites to walk through into freedom, the action of a great wind, the wind of change, seems a more accurate metaphor for the force that forced the sea to split than does the metaphor of King.And in the Alenu prayer, in which traditionally we bow and bend before the Royal Majesty, we can indeed bow and bend and let our bodies wave and move in the great wind of change.Finally, the Kaddish that appears as a bridge between sections of Jewish prayer addresses God as “Shmei Rabbah,” the Great Name. One way to understand the Great Name is that it is the Name that includes all the names of all the beings in the world—all species, mountains, rocks, and rivers (like the fifty thousand names in the Vietnam War memorial in Washington that make up one “great name”). Asking people to envision and mention individual ones of these names helps the whole community to begin weaving these names into the Great Name, and thus heighten awareness of how all the earth is interwoven.“I felt my legs were praying,” Rabbi Heschel once said upon returning from the great march in Selma, Alabama, for equal justice in regard to voting rights. In the current age of impending climate change, how can we bring this sort of prayerfulness into our own activism?One resource is the intertwined religious stories of Passover and Holy Week, which speak in powerful ways to the danger facing the earth—and though there is no analogous festival in Islam, the Exodus story and the story of Jesus are major aspects of the Qur’an, as well. As a result, many interfaith and multireligious groups have drawn on the stories of Passover and Holy Week tradition by recalling that the arrogance and stubbornness of Pharaoh brought plagues upon the earth—all of them ecological disasters—as well as oppression upon the human community.Building upon that foundation, some have held public religious gatherings to lift up the symbols of Passover and Palm Sunday—matzah and palms—in calls to act against the plagues of global scorching brought on by the modern Carbon Pharaohs of coal and oil. In doing so, they have marked the matzah as a call to urgent action—what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of Now”—and the palms as witnesses of fresh green life renewed. Some have carried these religious celebrations into the city streets with marches interspersed with vigils at local centers of “pyramidal power.” And some religious communities have gotten arrested at the White House to demand urgent action against Tar Sands pipelines, carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants, and more.Eco-Jewish activists have in similar ways reconfigured many Jewish festivals as direct actions to protect and heal the earth. Some have reshaped Tu B’Shvat, the “Re-Birthday of the Trees,” as a time for protests and civil disobedience to protect ancient redwoods and the Everglades from corporate depredation. Others have drawn on the tradition of Chanukah, the celebration of the miraculous fulfillment of one day’s supply of sacred oil to meet eight days’ needs, as a spur to energy conservation. Some have celebrated Hoshana Rabbah—the seventh day of the harvest festival of Sukkot that is traditionally set aside for invoking rain, honoring the seven days of Creation, and praying for salvation from insect swarms, droughts, and other natural disasters—as a day of protest against the corporate poisoning of the Hudson River with PCBs. And some have observed the laments of Tisha B’Av over the destruction of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem by defining the universal temple of today as the earth itself, and gathering at the U.S. Capitol to lament the ongoing destruction of Temple Earth and demand action to save it.The reframing of Jewish fasts and festivals in this way has been especially attractive because the Jewish festival cycle is closely keyed to the dance of sun, moon, and earth. Many of the festivals, therefore, can be understood as universal at heart though clothed in Jewish history and culture. Probably for that reason, these actions, drawing on uniquely Jewish ceremonies and practices, have often attracted members of other faith traditions and secular eco-activists to take part.As the experience of religious communities grows in exploring this whole area of reframing festivals as forms of public action, there has begun to emerge a pattern of spiritual practice in each event: first, public celebration of the earth; then, mourning for its wounds and dangers; and last, a commitment and covenant to act on its behalf and to challenge whatever power centers are worsening its wounds.This three-fold pattern echoes many powerful evocations of spiritual depth: prosperity of ancient Israel in Egypt, slavery, and Exodus; the Promised Land, exile, and return; celebration, crucifixion, and resurrection; and Siddhārtha Gautama’s life of royal luxury, his discovery of suffering, and enlightenment.This process of reframing festival observances as actions to protect the earth has only begun. It is likely that much more richness of spiritual imagination and political adeptness will be brought to bear as religious and spiritual communities keep facing the planetary crisis.