Thanks to Rex Hunt for drawing our attention to this paper from Ian Harris and SOFiA New Zealand.
From SOFiA, Sea of Faith in Aotearoa (New Zealand) Newsletter, November 2022.
The Inaugural Sir Lloyd Geering Lecture (slightly shortened)
[Ian Harris’s career straddles the worlds of journalism and the church. Born in Christchurch, he grew up in a Methodist parsonage and gained an honours degree in English at Auckland University. Since then he has headed the English Department at Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga, Indonesia, edited the New Zealand Methodist, been assistant editor of the Auckland Star, served as Director of Communication for the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand, and been editorial writer on Wellington’s the Dominion.
In 1990 Harris was instrumental in founding the Ephesus Group in Wellington, which explores new ways of understanding and expressing Christian faith in this millennium. In 1993 he became the first chairman of the New Zealand Sea of Faith Network’s steering committee. Harris’s prime interest is in reimagining the Christian way in a secular society, as reflected in his newspaper columns, his books Creating God, Re-creating Christ and New World New God, and in The Ephesus Liturgies series written with his late wife, Jill. He lives in Days Bay, Wellington.]
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…And now here I am with the Sir Lloyd Geering Lecture, conscious of standing proudly on his shoulders, and hoping to do justice to him and his legacy.
“Spirituality”
My topic is Spirituality for an Eco-human Future. “Spirituality” can carry a range of meanings. When the word was first used in the 1400s it had none of the connotations it has today. It referred to the upper echelon of the church – the cardinals, bishops and abbots, a power collective sitting alongside the king and the nobles who together lorded it over the common people. There was royalty, there was the nobility, and there was the spirituality.
Today, spirituality refers to a person’s interior experience. It’s totally subjective. It’s an aspect of our awareness that we can’t readily explain or pin down, but has to do with our feelings, our yearning for “something more” beyond our work-a-day routine. It’s an experience that gives meaning and direction to our lives. It’s life-enhancing. At best it carries a sense of oneness with the totality of the life around us. There’s a touch of sacredness about it. Bring all these together – the inward, the life-enhancing, the reaching beyond, the connectedness, the sacred – and you’re getting close to a spirituality for our time.
To make my position clear, I shall be tackling the subject from the standpoint of a secular Christian – that is, one who accepts that our understanding of the world is vastly different from that in which Christianity evolved, and therefore requires a fundamental rethinking of old assumptions and doctrines about God, the world, and our place in the magnificent – and sometimes scary – adventure of life.
And don’t be put off by that word “secular”. I don’t mean “secularist”, which implies a wholesale rejection of spirituality and religion. I use the word in the true sense of the Latin saecularis, meaning “belonging to a generation or age, of this time and place, relating to the here and now, not a world beyond”. A religious way of life should always be grounded in the secular here and now.
Creation?
The only setting we have for an eco-human future is the planet we inhabit, often referred to as “creation”. A word of caution here: “creation” is a religious word that implies a creator, a grand designer with a grander purpose. In the modern world, however, there’s another explanation of our origins that’s much more promising for thinking theologically about the world as we know it today.
So let’s begin by seeing if we can arrive at a perspective on “creation” which grows out of the Judaeo-Christian heritage that’s shaped life in the western world, yet which also does justice to the huge explosion of knowledge that has occurred over the past 400 years. Because, let’s be clear, those years have radically changed just about everything under the sun – from home life, health care, education, work, to technology, agriculture, travel, religion, you name it. Wherever we turn, we experience the world very differently from the way our grandparents did. Few of us would want to turn the clock back on this knowledge explosion and what it offers.
Yet cumulatively, it’s those very changes, along with a rapidly expanding population, that have brought our world to the brink. Humanity, long thought of as the pinnacle of creation, does seem to be slowly, blindly, defiantly, destroying the earth’s ability to sustain us. Industry as we’ve come to know it carries massive risk for the future of the human species.
A growing number of prophets have warned of the pressures that human activity is putting on the planet’s systems and resources. Among them are Rachel Carson, Arnold Toynbee, Martin Rees, Thomas Berry,Brian Swimme, locally Lloyd Geering and Dave Lowe, climate scientists, United Nations panels, ngo’s – there’s a host of them, all calling passionately for humanity to turn away from destructive technologies, life-styles and values. Turn away: the biblical word for that is “repent”.
Sketching the scene all too briefly, homo sapiens has taken the biblical advice to be fruitful and multiply so much to heart that the world’s population has mushroomed from around 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8 billion today. We’ve added 2 billion since 1998 and are set to add another 2 billion by 2050. Each 2 billion is equivalent to another one-and-a-half Indias. India’s population is growing much faster than China’s, Africa’s faster still.
More and more people need more and more of Earth’s resources not only of food and water, but oil, iron, coal, copper, rare earths, and when the market’s booming they’re extracted as if there were no limits. Well, there are limits. No one’s making any more of them. The question is how long we’ve got before they start running out.
Meanwhile advances in farming and industry have produced not only the standard of living we enjoy in the West, but also technologies that pollute air, water and soil on a grand scale, deplete the ozone layer, warm the oceans and make them more acidic, and generate climate change. In the name of progress and economic growth, developers raze rainforests, destroy long-established communities, and wipe out whole species of life.
A multitude of organisations campaign to reverse the process, but governments seem readier to listen to economists arguing for growth at all costs ahead of ecologists pleading for sustainability. Remember the Rio+20 sustainability summit in 2012? One observer commented: “Rarely has such a large elephant laboured so long to give birth to such a small mouse.” The Paris summit in 2019 did only a little better, the 2021 Glasgow summit likewise, and still emissions are rising steadily, outpacing all the efficiency gains we’ve notched so far.
Governments promise much but continue to dither. A Guardian investigation revealed in May this year that the world’s biggest fossil fuel corporations have 195 projects on their books, most of them already under way. Each would detonate carbon bombs of at least a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. “Unchecked greed,” says the Guardian, “is driving us ever closer to the abyss.” And it is undermining life on Earth.
Thomas Berry, an American monk and eco-theologian, dismally sums up: “Our ultimate failure as human beings is to become not a crowning glory of the earth, but the instrument of its degradation” [The Dream of the Earth, p50] A new word has come into the language to describe what’s happening here: “ecocide”.
