About Green Spirituality
Adapted article by Marian Van Eyk McCain, from the book GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness
“When our love of the Earth and our astonishment, our marvelling, our wonder and reverence for the vastness and mystery of the universe becomes the focus of our spiritual lives, rather than some far off, dreamed-of heaven, then just as the Earth feeds our bodies, she also feeds our souls.” ~ Marian Van Eyk McCain
I have walked many paths in my long life. At various stages of it I described myself as a Christian, a Buddhist, an atheist, a humanist, a Theosophist or simply as a spiritual seeker. These days, however, I rarely bother with labels (except ‘crone’, ‘elderwoman’ and ‘greenie’, all of which definitions of selfhood I now wear proudly, just as I wear my wrinkles). When it comes to spirituality, though, for the last twenty years I have been – and will no doubt continue to be – what I now call a ‘GreenSpirit’: one of those people who celebrates the human spirit in the context of our place in the natural world and Earth’s own evolutionary journey.
I mention evolution because cosmology plays a huge part in this green spirituality. Humans, after all, have always needed their creation stories in order to make sense of a mysterious and awesome universe and nowadays, thanks to science, we have a more amazing and awesome tale to tell than ever before. We need no longer rely on supposition, imagination or wishful thinking. Our creation story can now be based on truth, a truth that is indeed stranger and more amazing than any fiction we could have dreamed up. It is a story of the journey of our Earth from a whirling fireball to the beautiful, alive, blue/green/gold planet it is today and which it will – if we humans can manage to change our consciousness enough to stop trashing it – continue to be for many more million years.
This radical vision we call GreenSpirit brings together the rigor of science, the creativity of artistic expression, the passion of social action and the core wisdom that exists within the spiritual traditions of all ages. Attracting those of many faith traditions and none, GreenSpirit is an ever-growing network of individuals who believe that human life has both an ecological and a spiritual dimension and – more importantly – that these two are inseparably linked.
Our mission is to explore the unfolding story of the universe and to promote common ground between people, all over the globe, in the context of this vision. We seek to redress the balance of masculine and feminine in ourselves and in the wider culture and to befriend darkness as well as light. And we enjoy creating ceremonies and celebrations which connect us more consciously with the cycle and seasons of the Earth. The human desire for rituals, rules and celebrations is also, like creation stories, an ancient and persistent need. But as the level of human consciousness expands and evolves, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the rigidity of society’s traditional religious institutions. And the material world offers only the worship of money and the ritual amassing of consumer goods. At the same time, there seems to be an ever-deepening awareness of this deep need for spirituality in all our lives (as witness the popularity of so-called ‘New Age’ ideas, worldwide).
This yearning for an authentic and truly meaningful spirituality is happening right alongside the increase in ecological awareness. I believe this is no random coincidence. GreenSpirit is the place where those two things connect: the ecological awareness and the spiritual yearning. When the two come together – the ‘greening’ of our lives and the longing for those lives to have more of a spiritual dimension to them – a spark is created that lights up the whole sky. GreenSpirit is not a religion. However it does bear a certain resemblance to religion, in that it has the same three main aspects one would find in most religions:
– a body of wisdom,
– a sense of the sacred
– a community of like-minded people who share a belief system.
Unlike most religions, though, it has no standard set of ritual practices. Neither does it have a priesthood. People can be GreenSpirits and continue to practice whatever religion they feel at home in – or none at all. They can follow any one of dozens of spiritual paths, from Advaita to Zen, and be GreenSpirits at the same time.
I suppose what unites this group of people could best be described as an attitude – a particular kind of orientation to life, to the world, to the universe in which we live and of which we are all a part. It is like a new pair of spectacles. You look through them and you see the same world that was always there yet now it all looks different. Because to see the world through GreenSpirit eyes is to see everything as ecocentric (Earth-based) rather than anthropocentric (human based). This is a very big and very significant change. Most of society and most of its institutions – including most of its religions – remain stubbornly and arrogantly anthropocentric. That is one of the reasons why so many things have gone so badly wrong. More and more, we have put our human needs above the overall needs of the planet.
Not that we are any more innately selfish than any other animal. Let’s face it, beavers would probably chop down every sapling from here to the horizon if they had the opportunity to do so, and feel no guilt about it. But because our clever human brains have given us the power to override all those natural checks and balances that have kept any one species – including beavers – from upsetting the system, we pose a greater threat to that system than any other creature before us, as we are now beginning, belatedly, to realize. Especially since, having killed off all our top predators, our numbers keep increasing.
Since the world’s resources are finite, we cannot continue to grow and multiply and consume without destroying everything and thereby destroying ourselves. So even from a purely pragmatic point of view, our behaviour and our ways of thinking need to change if our species is to survive. Only by changing the way we see the world and by changing the way that we have been relating to our fellow creatures and to the Earth can we hope to prevent ourselves from damaging our planet’s ecosystems beyond repair and sending our own species – as well as so many others – to extinction.
To live in the world from a GreenSpirit orientation is to see oneself as being of the Earth rather than on it – a cell in the body of a living planet – and to see the planetary ecosystem as a whole (rather than humans) as being of central importance in everything and at all times.
However, a GreenSpirit way of seeing the world is not based purely on the pragmatic need to develop a sustainable way of life for humans in order to prevent ecological collapse. It also grew out of a hunger of a different kind. That is the hunger for meaning, for a deep sense of connectedness and for a spiritual dimension to everything we do and feel and experience – the way we live, eat, work, play, celebrate and carry out all the functions of our day. Only when that deeper meaning is restored to our lives can we ever feel completely whole and happy. And only then can we do our part to change things for the better, working from the heart rather than the head, doing our part from passion and love of the Earth rather than from duty, fear, coercion or political correctness.
Many people may not even realize they have lost this sense of meaning and connectedness, so immersed are they in their world of objects, of concepts, of trivial preoccupations and mass-produced entertainment and so caught up are they in their frenetic, modern lifestyles. It is only when we slow down and look more deeply into ourselves that we might notice a hunger there for something we can scarcely name.
That hunger can assume strange forms in some people, such as alcohol or drug abuse. It is like a treasure hunt in which the seeker has been tricked into seeking treasure in all the wrong places. The same applies to most other addictions, including the addiction to consumerism which our Western societies now have in epidemic proportions.
This hunger for lost connectedness can also find us looking longingly at some of the world’s last remaining indigenous peoples and imagining that in them small reservoirs exist of some primordial wisdom that we lost touch with a long time ago. This may or may not be so – we tend to sentimentalize such things – but at least we are on the track of something important. For that wisdom we find in so many indigenous cultures, is often about the bond between humans and the Earth.
However, although a study of other, more Earth-based cultures might give us clues as to the direction we need to take in reclaiming our lost sense of the sacred, let’s not look back wistfully and romantically at some imagined golden past. The green spirituality I am describing is one designed for now, for the twenty first century and for the future. Our species may have come dangerously close to destroying our world through our ignorance, our greed, our misunderstanding of the true nature of our beingness, but finally we are beginning to understand what we need to do to put ourselves back on course and steer ourselves forward to safety, to sanity, to right relationship with the universe that birthed us. I believe that GreenSpirit can provide a way out of our current dilemmas and into a joyous, sustainable, peaceful and harmonious future.
“I go in Nature as a pilgrim for the renewal of my spirit. Walking in Nature is my meditation and my prayer. The magnificent trees and majestic hills are my temples and cathedrals. I don’t look above the sky to seek heaven; my heaven is here on Earth.”
~ Satish Kumar
(photo © inLite studio/shutterstock.com)
“To understand Gaia, to let her into our lives, we must fall in love with the Earth. It’s that simple.”
~ Susan Meeker-Lowry
(photo © Danm12/Shutterstock.com)
GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness brings together the words and ideas of contemporary writers from a wide range of disciplines and wisdom traditions to create a comprehensive manual for eco-spiritual, green and sustainable 21st century living. Contributors include environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan, economist David Korten, cosmologist Brian Swimme, Wellness guru John Travis MD, ‘Resurgence’ Magazine Editor Satish Kumar, ecologist Stephan Harding, ecopsychologist Sandra White, radical priest and educator Matthew Fox – and more than twenty other inspirational writers. It is available through bookstores or online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Endorsements, contents list and short extracts
Marian Van Eyk McCain is a retired transpersonal psychotherapist, an author and freelance writer and co-editor of GreenSpirit magazine.
www.marianvaneykmccain.com