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Spiritual and Sustainable: Religion Responds to Climate Change

2016; Wiley; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/cros.12173

1939-3881

Jim Antal, Margaret Bullitt‐Jonas, Tim DeChristopher, Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman, Lama Willa Miller, Munjed M. Murad, Dan McKanan,

Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration

Dan McKanan: This session will begin with a series of TED talks from climate activists from a variety of faith traditions. Then we will move into conversation among the panelists, among all of us, and then we separate out into smaller groups for more focused conversation. I am so thrilled to see such a large gathering of people here today and I am thrilled especially that people come from so many different context; students, staff people, faculty here and activists in many, and many faith communities and organizations throughout the area. I am excited about the potential we have to build alliances to develop relationships with mutual support and to hold one another accountable and inspired in all of the work that we do. Before I begin introducing our speakers I do want to join in many expressions of thanks for Leslie MacPherson Artinian. This conference is her brainchild, she has worked diligently for many years to take the wonderful work that Roy and Ralph have done in anchoring the environmental practices of the Divinity School and connecting those to the research and teaching, the people in the faculty do, their explorations and learning that students do and the actual institutional change that all of us are responsible for contributing to. It is Leslie's vision that holds these together here, and we are very grateful thank you. I guess with that, I will start introducing our speakers. I will introduce each of them in turns so you will have who they are fresh in your mind. So, our first speaker is Dr. Willa Miller right here on my left. Willa is currently the visiting lecturer on Buddhist Ministry here at Harvard Divinity School as many of you know. We have a deep commitment to Buddhist Ministry here and Willa is participating in the alliance to make that possible. She is a Lama in Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Founder and Spiritual Director of Natural Dharma fellowship here in Boston and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. She is the author of three books, Everyday Dharma, Essence of Ambrosia, and The Arts of Contemplative Care, so a real leader in the emerging field of ministerial formation in the Buddhist tradition. This year she organized and hosted an eco-dharma conference, putting together 35 teachers and practitioners from every major school of Buddhism to discuss the issue of global warming. Willa. Willa Miller: Thank you Dan, I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to be with this community of good and caring people at Harvard Divinity School today. It is a joy and privilege to be among those who care so deeply about our beautiful and endangered planet and its inhabitants, the winged, hoofed, clawed, scaled, and finned creatures who share these ecosystems with us. The gathering in this room is an expression of what the world needs today. Small communities coming together to discuss this critical issue that affects us all, climate change and environmental degradation. But this gathering is not only about discussion, it is about metabolizing the truth, feeling together, and finding mutual support and empowerment in the face of a critical global emergency. It is about leaning into the truth together and thinking deeply about what we can do. I do believe it is these kinds of gatherings the possibility of thinking deeply together in community that yield the most promise for changing the world. We cannot go it alone. This is time to connect to discuss and to process in community. It is the time to make a commitment to a sane and sustainable life that leads a legacy of real care for our children and for our grandchildren. In the few minutes that I have here I want to talk about what I think religion might bring to the table when it comes to supporting a more sustainable world. The most critical environmental issue we face on this planet today is global warming. Global warming threatens entire species, it threatens the balance of our oceans, it threatens our ecosystems our entire natural world and it even puts the human future itself in peril. When we think about the causes of global warming, we turn to the assessment of systems, thinkers, and analysts and discover a list that looks something like this, reliance on fossil fuels, consumer culture, corporations, population growth, global alienation, and inability to connect and unite between countries, capitalism, social denial, amass, and willingness to face the facts, lack of prioritization by the public and political leaders. This list is doubtless incomplete, but it gives us some idea of what the analysts are thinking and seeing. When we look at a list like this? The forces we are up against seem massive and the solutions posited are consummate in scale, reliance on sustainable energy sources, placing attacks on carbon, massive cooperation between nations, the passing of laws restricting factory emissions, and so forth. Massive systemic change is what is needed; the forces that play are huge and multi-dimensional. They require massive cooperation between nations, cities, countries educational institutions, individuals, and corporations. This problem solution model focuses primarily on externals; because there are massive external challenges, the solution it seems must also be massive and external. I am not here to debate this point because I think it is obvious that global change will involve the externals and that is deeply desirable. What I would like to challenge is that these solutions are all that is needed. If the root cause of global warming was due to the failure or limitations of our external infrastructures, then external solutions alone might work but what if the massive external breakdown of our planet was also a symptom of something else, a pattern that is deeply personal entrenched in human DNA or if you prefer the human heart. When I try to imagine how the Buddha would have looked at climate crisis, if he were alive, I imagine he would have looked deeply into the human psyche. The Buddha traced human suffering including societal suffering to deeply entrenched psychological roots. He identified three of these; desire, aggression, and ignorance, which give rise to close cousins—greed, fear, and apathy and many other complex human mind states such as jealousy, pride, and doubt. So in all identified 52 of these. What I would like to note about this is simply that the Buddha, were he alive today would consider interiority. I would venture to say that all religions have this in common. They encourage prophesies of exploring inner life and draw on resource and strength of the human heart, our thoughts, and our emotions to create a pro-social interiority. So what do we, as religious or spiritual practitioners and leaders have to contribute? Well for one, we have to contribute processes of exploring the inner life interiority. So we can begin to think about if you are a religious leader how are you encouraging people to engage in the inner life or if you are practitioner or spiritual practitioner, then how are you engaging in your interiority with respect to this issue. Second ethics, all religion have ethical systems and sets of values. So from the perspective of that as religious practitioners and also as leaders, we can encourage ourselves and our community to think deeply about our values and our ethics with regard to our relationship to earth and its ecosystems. We can even think about bringing in ecosystems maybe our system of ethics does not include that. So how can we bring that in? How can we include it in some conscious way? Third, religions engage in liturgy and ritual, aspirations are powerful, rituals are powerful. Their symbolic acts demonstrating in the street or engaging in non-violent action are also symbolic acts. So we can begin to think about how are we engaging in ritual liturgy in our community and how might that connect to this issue; perhaps we bring our congregation into the temple of the natural world now and then or perhaps we engage in peaceful demonstrations. And fourth, we might think about our theology. We live a life of ideas, and in religion and in spiritual traditions, we explore the nature of the truth. So what truths are we including in our discourses, within our community, do those truths include a relationship to climate change? So to sum up what I am introducing to this panel is simply the idea that perhaps, first, we need a global shift. Second the shift cannot be merely about actions collective or individual. Third what is needed for a sustainable future includes a cognitive and emotional shift, a shift in how we understand ourselves, how we understand our relationship to others, how we understand and feel about the natural world. And, fourth what we need is not just a paradigm shift, but a shift of consciousness. Spirituality and religion have long played a part in the formation of human values, the stance of the human heart toward community and compassion, the possibility of the transformation of the self on an interior level. This move is not a minor one. Spirituality has potentially catalyzed a shift of consciousness, a shift toward greater love for our planet and increased awareness of our interdependence, a respect for the sacredness of life and the grit to enact real change. Thank you. Dan McKanan: Thank you so much, our next speaker is Shoshana Friedman who teaches at Boston's Jewish Community Day School and is Rabbi in residence at Congregation Shirat Hayam in Swampscott, Massachusetts. She is also a singer-songwriter who issued her first album, Guesthouse, last year and a medical clown with the Hearts And Noses Hospital Clown Troupe. In all these activities, she seeks to bring hope, resilience, and Jewish tradition to bear on global ecological crisis. Rabbi Friedman. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov used to say friends do not despair when a difficult time has come upon us joy must fill the air. We must not lose our faith in living, we must not despair. When a difficult time is upon us, joy must fill the air. Thank you, when I was a child singing this song in synagogue gave me great hope and I hear it now as a clear call to keep joy and hope alive in the midst of this crisis that we are facing. We must not lose faith in living, we cannot despair, and the difficult time is indeed upon us, so joy must fill the air. I want to highlight three of the hopefully many gifts, but I like three of the gifts that Judaism has to bring to the table of inter-faith climate change work and these three are; a lot of experience with paradigm shifts, the connection between the environment and human action and the Jewish cycle of time specifically the cycle of rest and renewal. So paradigm shifts, when the second temple was destroyed by Rome long ago in 70 of the Common Era, the Jewish community suffered catastrophic violence and loss of the way of life and in the chaos a man named Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai was smuggled out of burning Jerusalem in a coffin.Thus, safely out he brokered a deal with the Romans to give the Jews a place called Yavne in the land of Israel and rabbinic Judaism was born. Out of the ruins, Judaism took death the coffin and somehow made it part of the plan to survive, whether after the destruction of the temples, the expulsion from Spain, and emancipation in modernity, the Tragedy of Shoah, the Holocaust or the Founding of Israel, the Jewish people have had to reinvent how we live while maintaining integrity with who we are over and over and over again. We have had to radically rethink ourselves and our conditions of living. What does it look like to live in entirely new way? To relate to community in a new way, to relate to land, material resources, people who are not in our group in a new way. I am so delighted to follow a revered Buddhist teacher because I wanted to bring in this little story that in 1990s His Holiness the Dalai Lama recognized that his people were facing a dramatic, cultural, religious and political challenge in exile and he brought a group of Jews to advise them. He called on us as experts in continuity in crisis and now we as a human collective have our own deeply challenging crisis of continuity and if we can rise to this challenge of paradigm shift I believe in a deeply spiritual way, absolutely of course we have a much better chance of survival. God says to Israel when you really listen and hear my directions, your earthly needs will be met at the right time appropriate to the season. You will reap what you planted for your delight and health, also your animals will have ample feed, all of you will eat and be content. But be careful, watch out; don't let your cravings delude you. Don't let your cravings become your gods, don't debase yourself to them, because the god sense within you will become distorted, heaven will be shut to you, grace will not descend, earth not yield her produce. Your rushing will destroy you and earth will not be able to recover her good balance in which god's gift manifest. Therefore HaShem god says may these values of mine reside in your hearts and souls, so that you will be more aware of them and you & your children may live heavenly days right here on this earth. The land of Israel like the modern Middle East lived on the ecological edge. This text came out of a land where the right rains in the right times would lead to abundance but drought could lead to starvation. The top soil was thin, yearly harvest was uncertain. Yet this vulnerability gave rise to a tradition with great wisdom and respect for the thin balance that is to live well on a piece of land. If we are in right relationship to our natural world spiritually as well as materially, then our weather will support our needs and if we are out of balance it has drastic consequences for us, our children for non-human creatures. When I read this paragraph now I don't think of geographic Israel, though certainly she in grave danger from climate change, but I think of our whole planet. The vulnerable weather that the Torah speaks of has now expanded to the whole world and it has, of course never been so clear how our actions impact the weather. In Judaism, the cycle of land and the cycles of time are intimately connected. My teacher Rabbi Dr. Nehemia Polen teaches what is called the Shabbat Dance and the dance goes like this. 1,2,3,4,5,6, rest and 1,2,3,4,5,6, rest Repeat forever….. In the creation story in genesis god dances this dance, six days of creating and seventh day god rests and while god does it on a mythic cosmic time scale and however we understand time in our mythology. We people count days six days of working and on Shabbat which comes from the Hebrew root that means to cease, we just stop it all and we rest. Shabbat is a time to refrain from purchasing, from travel, from stress, from technology, and in our fast paced consumer age she is an important Jewish offering to the environmental toolset. But, we actually can't stop anymore at Shabbat, the Torah teachers that land also rests. That land does the Shabbat rest, every seven years during the shmita or sabbatical year. Shmita comes from the Hebrew root “to release,” and the most recent shmita actually started this past Rosh Hashanah this past Jewish New Year in mid September. Biblically it is a time when deaths were forgiven, land was not cultivated and radically anyone could harvest what they needed for the day from anywhere including so called private property. But the contemporary environmental Jewish community has been re-envisioning what the sabbatical year could mean to us today. So many ideas have come out and so many interesting events and initiatives have started, sustainable agriculture reconnecting to local watersheds and landscapes sharing economy where people do skill shares, working for economic and environmental justice. All of these ideas, we need to bring shmita values to life in a modern world and not just during sabbatical year, but of course all the time and I love that this dance of the 1,2,3,4,5,6 rest. I love that this dance is danced by God in our creation story by people on a weekly basis and by the land on a yearly cycle. This dance and the fact that we divine and nature are all doing it is one way of asserting so strongly in our tradition that we are so connected and in sync in these sacred rhythms. I will conclude with a teaching from an early Jewish rabbi recorded in a text almost 2000 years old. It is the best metaphoric description of our global situation that I have read yet. Rabbi Tarfon said the day is short, the task is abundant, the laborers are lazy, the wages are great and the master of the house is insistent. It is not up to you to finish the task but neither are you free to desist from it. And I am going to read that one more time. Rabbi Tarfon said the day is short, the task is abundant, the laborers are lazy, the wages are great and the holy master of the house is insistent. It is not up to us to finish the task and neither are we free to desist from it. Thank you. Dan McKanan: Our next speaker is speaking to us remotely. He is Munjed Murad and oddly enough the person speaking remotely is one of the people who is lodged right here. Munjed is a Doctor of Theology candidate here at Harvard studying Comparative Theology with Frank Clooney. His particular area of focus is Muslim and Christian approaches to the environment. The topic he previously studied with Marie Evelyn Tucker and John Grimm at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. This year Munjed is coordinating the yearlong lecture series on Religion and Environment at The Center for the Study of World Religions. So keep your eyes open for the individual events that make up that series. Now the magic of technology. Ralph: Hello everybody, my name is Ralph DeFlorio I am the Director of Operations here at the Harvard Divinity School. On the first day of autumn and I am with Munjed Murad, and Munjed is a student a doctoral student here at the Divinity School. He is a junior Fellow of the Committee for the Study of World Religions. He is an Islamic scholar and also has an undergraduate degree or a Master's degree from Yale University in forestry. So if there has ever been anybody that's well suited to talk about sustainability in religion here we are. So I would like just have you talk a little bit about your journey from Yale and forestry program to the Divinity School. Munjed Murad: Yes my interests at the Yale School of Forest Environmental Studies and here at the Harvard Divinity School have been on religion, the environment and it is unfortunate that I can't attend this conference addresses a topic that is dedicated to very much so academic career and outside of it, but I am glad I can be there in spirit and by video as well. Ralph: With Islam and how it intersects with sustainability. Could you talk a little bit about that may be the historical context and what it means today? Munjed Murad: Yes, so Islam has always maintained a sacred view of the nature. The question sustainability comes today because we aren't in a balance with nature and the Islamic view of nature was always one of oneness, a oneness of the natural and of the supernatural together no clear demarcation between the two and sustainability comes about in that maintenance of harmony between humanity, nature by means of science and understanding god through nature. Ralph: So you feel like we have been a little bit disenfranchised from god through science. Is that the way the things have progressed or regressed? Munjed Murad: Well, Yes, regressed that's also a good word for it. So the sacred was always in nature for all the traditions. That statement about there being no clear demarcation between the natural and supernatural is quite applicable to pretty much all sacred traditions. It is a fascinating pattern, that Buddhist of the East and the Native Americans of the West, no clear demarcations was held between the natural and supernatural. You have some exceptions over history for good reason, but it is an interesting phenomenon only with say the renaissance onwards, do we see a divorce between the natural and supernatural and later a denial of the supernatural altogether and that I would pass it as at the heart of environmental crisis today. Ralph: And one of your points I think that was really interesting for me to understand in your wonderful paper was there is a way back. There is a way with the climate crisis that we have to sort of refocus and get reengaged with this connection between religion and environment. I wonder if you could sort of talk about that a little bit more. Munjed Murad: Yes, well let's first address the problem. The problem is rooted in a world view that no longer sees the sacred in nature, partly because they no longer sees the sacred at all and in no longer seeing nature for sacred qualities, no longer seeing it connected to the divine in anyways whatsoever. one cannot but treat it as physical property and that you can see, least destructive world view in which a tree no longer symbolizing transcendence of the absolute in its trunk and infinite in its branches, no longer being that rather now a source of paper, esthetic scenery, and so forth Ralph: It is a commodity. Munjed Murad: It becomes a commodity; you can see what that does, what would happen to nature on a civilizational scale. So the problem is routed in the denial of the supernatural of the sacred and so a solution must involve a reintegration of the sacred into our worldly view into our understanding of what nature is as primarily that's a way of seeing things. That should be our thought process that, then should in turn inform our practices which involves a sacred science of nature primarily because the sciences today no longer compared to Babylonian astronomers, compared to Islamic chemists who at the same time were alchemists, no today just supposed to done, there is no longer a recognition of the sacred and no longer a treatment of nature as the sacred. So we need a sacred science. Then in addition to that an active involvement from the part of churches, mosques and so forth religious communities and things regarding natural environment, because if you leave it to those who have no religious affiliation and there are contributions that are strong and good contributions from them. If we leave it to their hands alone then you will never get to the point of seeing the sacred in nature from the sacred capital as us as us. Ralph: So lot of it is education and using Islam in your case as the traditional path to reconnect and so that's a lot of work. Munjed Murad: It is, it is, it is a lot. It took a lot to get us here and it will take a lot to get back. If one can say it is a lot but it is all necessary. It is a lot but it is necessary. Ralph: We are all in this together. Munjed Murad: Yes, and it is quite doable. It starts first of all with just seeing and understanding things differently. Most of it a time it is not that hard of a process. Ralph: Hopefully we will get there. Thank you very much. Munjed Murad: Thank you very much. Dan McKanan: Our next speaker is Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, PhD who has 25 years of experience as a parish priest and spiritual director and now serves the Episcopal diocese Of Western Massachusetts as Missioner for Creation Care. She serves on the Board Of Better Future project, a non-profit dedicated to growing grass-roots movement to address the climate crisis. Her most recent book, Joy of Heaven to Earth Come Down, is a collection of daily meditations on the sacredness of the natural world for use and advent in Christmas time. Margaret is particularly interested in how spiritual practices such as contemplative prayer support our intention to be agents of healing and justice in the world. She taught courses on this topic and prayer more broadly at the Episcopal Divinity School just down the street here in the Cambridge. Margaret. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas: Thank you, I get to see the trees, these symbols of the transcendent. When we think about climate change, we often focus on the outer landscape such as how the rising level of green house gases affects the planets oceans and continents, its animals, plants and human societies. Gazing at the landscape outside us we know that the news is grim. The web of life is unraveling. As Bill McKibben succinctly puts it; our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. What about our inner landscape? How we doing? That's the question that interests me here, given what we know about the crisis in which we find ourselves, what happens to the emotional and spiritual dimension of our lives? How do we face our fear and grief without being overwhelmed? How do we move out of denial and despair into a life that is filled with purpose and even joy? What will sustain our spirits as we struggle to sustain the earth? And you know we need people, we need lots of people who are willing to face and able to face the most challenging even devastating facts. People who are learning how to enlarge their reserves of courage, faith, and hope, people who will step out to bear witness in very concrete ways to the god, in whom we live and move and have our being and who entrusted the world to our care. So here briefly here is a three part framework for the heart. A way of holding the climate crisis in a way that helps us to respond wisely and creatively to the challenges we face. I will sketch a spiritual journey in which we cultivate an awakened heart, a broken heart and a radiant heart. We begin with an awakened heart. What is an awakened heart? It is heart that is more and more deeply, more and more frequently, more and more consciously attuned to love. A person with an awakened heart is someone whose heart is repeatedly touched by a boundless love that seems to well up from nowhere or that unexpectedly shines out from the world around. A person with an awakened heart is someone who is learning to see themselves and others and all creation with eyes of love in each and every moment. That's when we perceive the beauty and preciousness of god's creation and we experience gratefulness, wonder, amazement, awe. We discover how cherished we are as creatures that are part of creation. Experiencing and claiming our god given preciousness is a powerful antidote to the messages that we hear that human beings are a cancer on the planet, a virus taking down life. I understand the anger and deep frustration behind such statements. The anger that is evoked by the enormous damage that humans are doing to the ecosystems on which all life depends and it is true that our industrial economy based on fossil fuels is acting like a cancer that takes down life. But the only way forward is not feed the voice of self-hatred, but instead to listen to the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our hearts and that alone can guide us to a new path. As I see all the worlds religious practices from mindfulness meditation to practicing gratitude. Our disciplines we have been given to help our hearts awaken. As we walk forward with awakened hearts, we experience broken heart and of course none of us wants to move into this second stage of the journey and there are many reasons we fear and repress our grief. As Joanna Macy, the Buddhist eco philosopher points out we don't want to feel pain, we don't want to look morbid, we don't want to bring other people down, we don't want to seem weak or emotional, sentimental, and yet we do feel pain for the world. We can't help it, no one is exempt from it because we are part of the whole and suffering in one place ripples across the planet. So as you consider the suffering caused by climate change, where do you feel the grief? What are the tears that you need to shed? What is breaking your heart? And how do we open to the pain of our precious world without drowning in it? The divine love in which we participate does not close itself off from suffering. But enters it at shares it and touches it with love, for Christians, the symbol of that divine sharing in our suffering is the Cross of Christ. So as a Christian I go and pray to the Cross, I believe there that everything in us, all our pain, our anger, our grief, our guilt, all of it is perpetually being met by the mercy and love of God. One way or another all the world's spiritual traditions teach us that there is no escape from suffering and that paradoxically, a broken heart can be the gateway to hope and even joy. Now comes the third part of this spiritual framework, filled with love, because day by day our heart is awakened and wide open to our suffering and the suffering of the world, we want the love that is flowing into our lives to pour out into the world around us. We have been cultivating an awakened heart, we are accepting a broken heart. And now we want to express what I am calling a radiant heart. We want our lives to bear witness in tangible ways to the love that has set us free. And what you and I feel, sent out to do can take many forms. Commitment to care for the earth will affect the world what we buy and what we refuse to buy, what we drive and what we refuse to drive, how we heat our homes, how much we reuse and recycle, how ardently we join hands with other people to push for the enormous systemic changes that are required if we are going to save life as it has evolved on this planet. Yet just because we are very busy doesn't necessarily mean that we are manifesting a radiant heart. I've got to say, maybe it is just me but for example: sometimes I get super busy because I have lost touch with my basic preciousness. I think that I must prove my worth and demonstrate my value. And then I say to myself, Margaret, remember that you are cultivating an awakened heart. Let yourself rest in God's goodness, breathe in God's Love, recall how loved