The Kingdom

Lent Lecture - Winchester Cathedral - April 2000: 

Where Goes the Environment? - Entering the Kingdom at a time of crisis.

My aim this evening is to go beyond "environmentalism," and to go beyond "stewardship." These concepts are quite inadequate in the face of the current situation. What is needed, what we can offer to the world, is the transformation of humanity to a spiritually rooted path of sustainability. The need for this challenges us to rethink our basic ideas: we must rethink what we might mean by "environment" — and in the process necessarily rethink our concept of "god." (Here, when I spek of "we" and "our" I am assuming that most of us in this hall are connected in some way with the Christian faith tradition.)

I want to start with just a brief review of some of the main issues concerning the future of this planet, or which we are a part. Much of this will already be known to many of you, but it is wise for us all to be reminded of it, before we move to looking more deeply at the nature of the challenge that this poses in a theological context.

When we look at environmental problems. it’s easy to not see the wood for the trees (or the planet for the forests). So let me start by stressing what the fundamental problem is in all this: it is growth, coupled with taking from the earth without restoration. History repeats itself time and time again: we take more and more of some resource, whether it is oil, or firewood, or fish, or forests, until disaster stares us in the face; we then attempt to put on the brakes, too late, perhaps managing to stabilise ourselves just on the brink of disaster, and so we mover closer and closer to the point where everyone of our resources - food, clean water, freedom from disease are all teetering on the brink of collapse.

We could list many environmental problems, but I’ll mainly focus, quite briefly, on global warming as an illustration of this pattern.

This is the degradation that is having the most immediate, obvious and catastrophic effect. It is a phenomenon that is easy to address, though like all environmental issues it still being evaded rather than tackled as a central problem.

Though there are layers of additional complications that one needs to go into before taking political decisions, the core idea is very simple. Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide; carbon dioxide lets sunlight in but traps heat radiation; so the earth get warmer. There continues to be debate about precisely how much warmer the earth gets, and exactly which parts of the earth suffer most. But the debate must not blind us to the basic facts, which are that the average temperature of the earth is increasing, by about 1 degree every 30 years.

Over 99% of qualified scientists in the area have now reached a clear understanding through computer simulations in great detail, continent by continent, of exactly how this is caused by the precise mix of gases that we are releasing into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide. Only 2 or 3 scientists, all employed by the oil industry, would contest this.

Can we halt this trend? The basic problem (others complicate it) is carbon dioxide

The top line here is the science, the divisions below are the politics. The key point is that the norm of what is acceptable and desirable for carbon emission per head of population is being set by the developed countries. The developing countries aim to catch up with this: if we are giving the message that our usage is acceptable, then their drive to catch up will swamp our own emissions entirely; if we work systematically towards lower emissions, and help developing countries financially to do likewise, then the rise can be checked. 

The increase in temperature has a whole range of consequences. The most obvious is that the sea level will rise. 

Some of this is due to ice melting, but the main factor is just the fact that water expands as it gets heated. As the sea rises, so low lying countries will become flooded. by the mid century, 36 countries (island states) will be entirely destroyed; large parts of Bangladesh will be under water; the southern part of china will be under water. 1/3 of the worlds crop growing area and 1B people will be at risk. Just to recall: we regard the displacement of 1m people as a major catastrophe. We are talking about 1B people being displaced. We have to ask, where to?

The second consequence is the change of climate. It turns out that the arid regions become hotter and drier; 

The deserts spread; a large part of Africa, down to Zimbabwe and Zambia, become at risk of sever water shortages, eradicating a large part of the maize-growing part of Africa. Meanwhile the wetter places become even wetter. Control of water resources will become a key factor: many commentators have predicted that the wars in the future will be wars for water.

Other effects are more unpredictable. We are unsure whether the ocean circulations will be disrupted, or whether the incidence of hurricanes will continue to increase, as they have over the last decades; but this is thought by many to be likely.

The key point in all this is that it need not happen. The short term solution is very straightforward and simple: by increasing our efficiency in the use of energy (insulation etc) and increasing the proportion of energy we get from renewable sources such as wind and water power, emissions can be cut by 1/3 by 2025. . In the short term there is no need to change our lifestyles that radically, there is no need to alter economy radically. All the calculations indicate that making more efficient cars and houses will create jobs and increase the quality of life. But so far we have done almost nothing.

In 1988, 12 years ago, the first major international conference on climate change declared the humanity "is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war." But the world did nothing.

Can we morally continue with practices which will destroy whole nations under water within the next 30 years? Action needs to be taken at an international level - essentially, to persuade America to act - but action can start with individual countries, and action in individual companies can start with us.

The case of genetically modified foods is an excellent example of the inadequacy of government control in the face of commercial interests, and the effectiveness of consumer pressure. The dangers are very clear, and very straight forward - and have been known for at least ten years. There are two dangers. The first is that side effects may make the food toxic or allergenic. There are examples of this from manufacturers (by genetic modification) of tryptophan, soy beans and yeast.

The second is the way in which genes migrate from one species to another. There are examples of this where herbicide resistance genes in potato and rape migrated to weeds within a single growing season.

The basic underlying problem is that the biotechnology have, for their own purposes, been spreading a completely outdated science, in which it is assumed that genes stay put at one point in the chromosomes of one organism. IN fact genes move around within the genome of a given species, and jump between species. The whole gene-pool of life has evolved into a complex and intricate balance, full of its own safeguards and feedback loops. By introducing fields full of wheat carrying bacterial genes we are blowing wide open that whole delicate system. Of course we might get away with it … but past experience suggests that whenever we try anything like this with the balance that exists, the results are disastrous.

The supreme irony was the way in which Monsanto claimed that genetic modification could reduce world hunger - when in fact all its policies were designed to destroy indigenous farming practices and enslave farmers into economic dependent on Monsanto for buying seed. Now in India there is, quite rightly, a widespread boycott of these products which are designed merely to milk the poor countries of all they possess.

It was only when consumers realised that they were being hoodwinked and manipulated for the gain of rich companies

I only want briefly to mention this. Species become extinct all the time - it’s a natural process. Atnd there have been many episodes where the rate of species extinctions rises, so that often a large proportion of the species may become extinct over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. We are now in one such period, where species are being extinguished through our own activity. Attention focuses on the majestic and the cuddly ones - we may, with effort save the Tiger, the horned owl, the grey whale. But this will have no effect on the 20 or 30 thousand other species which we obliterate each year - at a conservative estimate. We are likely to remove half of all the species on the earth within less than a century - an event with absolutely no parallel in the entire history of the earth.

It seems almost blasphemous to quantify this damage in material terms, in terms of loss to us - though there are such losses in terms of the ability of our environment to maintain enough diversity to withstand all the other onslaughts that we inflicting on the environment. But the main point for me is immense tragedy of it, the arrogance with which we drive to extinction so many amzing and beautiful creatures, with no thought or regret.

As I explained earlier, the fundamental problem, underlying all these separate issues, is that of our commitment to an economy that depends on continual growth, coupled with methods of production that take from the earth without restoration. In combination these two are obviously unsustainable. We can debate about whether the timescale on which we can continue is 30 years or 60 years, but there can be no doubt that something must change radically within the lifetime of our children. I hope that we all now realise that there is no option here: it is not a question of whether to change, but of whether to change now in a deliberate controlled, democratic fashion, or to wait until change is forced on us by economic collapse, social collapse, and global devastation on an unprecedented scale.

Neither is it an option to assume that economic forces will automatically bring about the necessary adjustments in a way that is morally acceptable. All the evidence is that the free interplay of economic forces serve only to shift the suffering from the rich to the poor. Those at the margins of society are living where the waste is dumped, where the seas flood in, where the infrastructure fails, whether we are talking about the poor in one country or the poor countries of the world. Like the Incas who slaughtered sacrifices by the thousands to appease the sun god, we could sacrifice victims by the billion to appease the god of free market economy; but can we do this as Christians?

The alternative is that of freely chosen change. And this has both a technological and a spiritual dimension.

Just as it is immoral to ignore the problem, so it is immoral to refuse to use some of the most powerful means of solving the problem. Without technology we have almost no hope of rescuing the situation. The question is, whose technology, in the hands of which power? Genetic engineering is a brilliant technology which can be used to produce cheap insulin for managing diabetes, enzymes for medical diagnosis, .... But if it is left to the multinational corporations seeking to maximise their profits, it will be used to release potentially lethal genes into the environment. In order to maximise energy efficiency we need new ways of generating power, new ways of transmitting it, new insulating materials, lighter weight materials for transport vehicles in order to use less energy ....

And it is not just the more traditional forms of technology and engineering that are needed. In understanding the ecology of our environment we need to apply to the full the latest mathematical tools for modelling ecosystems on computers, so as to be able to understand as far as we can the complex interactions between different species

We need all this: but it is not enough - for two reasons.

The application of technology to the environment has always had unexpected and damaging side effects. The reason for this is the enormous complexity of the interactions of life, of species which have evolved together for billions of years. As a result, and ecosystem is an interlocking network of thousands upon thousands of chemical and physical interactions, each engaging with hundreds of organisms responding with the all the complexity that nature has built into them. It will be centuries, if ever, before we approach an intellectual understanding of all this. The application of technology alone will in all probability reproduce the same errors as in the past: creating the desired effect, followed by the emergence of a harmful side-effect in an area so far removed that we don’t notice it, until it has deeply taken root and poses a problem greater than that which the original intervention was trying to resolve. Technology alone is not enough: What can be done to avoid this happening every time?

I have suggested we need to operate democratically, that the people’s of the earth can live on the earth in a way that leads to good. But our experience has been that we don’t. Given a choice between driving a smaller car, or walking to the shops, and saving the peoples of Bangladesh from flooding, the vast majority of Americans choose to drive the gas-guzzler. Given the choice between turning up the heating and putting on a sweater, the majority of Britons turn up the heating. There’s nothing evil about it - it’s just a reflection of the whole mind-set, the whole world-view, in which we are all brought up. Technology alone is not enough: What can be done to get out of this mind-set which stops us adopting the right technology?

The answer to these questions about what more is needed, beyond technology, has already been spelled out by many influential writers. Al Gore, a future candidate for President of the United States, wrote in his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance":

… it may now be necessary to foster a new environmentalism of the Spirit …no wonder we have become resigned to the idea of a world without a future. The engines of distraction are gradually destroying the inner ecology of the human experience. Essential to that ecology is the balance between respect for the past and faith in the future, between a belief in the individual and a commitment to the community, between our love for the world and our fear of loosing it ¾ the balance, in other words, on which an environmentalism of the Spirit depends.

More explicitly, the Christian author Thomas Berry writes in "The Great Work"

any recovery of the natural world in its full splendour will require not only a new economic system but a conversion experience deep in the psychic structure of the human.

"Environmentalism of the spirit," "deep conversion experience" ¾ nothing less will suffice. Yet this is part of what Christians already know as the Kingdom, as it is expounded in the parables of Jesus. So let me explain what this means to me. The Kingdom is an alternative way of ordering the world, and of situating ourselves in it — the kingdom is a new relationship with god and with the world. In the gospels Jesus is presented as saying that this new relationship is within reach (it is "among/within you") and yet it is not obvious to our ordinary thinking ("my kingdom is not of this world"). It is hidden from ordinary thinking (like "a treasure buried in a field"), so that it looks superficially quite insignificant ("as a grain of mustard seed"). Entering into this relationship requires a different way of thinking, from which standpoint it turns our to be far from insignificant: it involves such a radical shift in our being that it is like being reborn. It is both subtle and revolutionary.

This is familiar to Christians. What is new in the situation at the start of this millennium is that the environmental situation forces us into an enlarged concept of what this entering into the Kingdom really is, into a concept which becomes accessible to all humanity, not just to Christians. In fact, only an inclusive, global concept of the Kingdom is adequate to the global challenge posed by our relation to the environment. In other words, just as the times demand of us that we offer an inclusive concept of the Kingdom, so in responding to this demand we ourselves can rediscover and rethink the nature of the Kingdom presented in the gospels.

I want in the rest of this talk to explore the meaning of "the Kingdom" in different language from usual - more inclusive and more specific. I want to think of it as being embodied as a spirituality of connectedness.

What do I mean by "spirituality" here? What I mean is a way of living - or more specifically, a way of responding to the world in all its dimensions. We have lots of ways in which we respond to the world: intellectual, physical, emotional or social. But over and above these, not reducible to any of these, is a basic human faculty of intuitive response, as a whole person, to the meaning whole world. I suggest that everything that we call "spiritual" or "spirituality" has its roots in this human faculty. The theistic faith traditions speak of this faculty as an openness to god, and this is how it is experienced; but it is not restricted to those who use this language.

And what of "connectedness"? What I have in mind here that profound connection between each part of the universe that was revealed in the physics experiments of Freedman and of Alain Aspect. They discovered that, whenever two particles interacted with each other, then subsequently there was a close harmony established between them, so that they responded in to measurements made on them separately as if they were a single system, even when they were separated by tens of kilometres. Following this, the biologist Mae-Wan Ho discovered increasing evidence that this sort of connectivity preserves the integrity of living systems, and is responsible for the connections between organisms like shoal of plankton, which respond in a coordinated way. We are realising that the world, and the living world in particular, is linked together in a pulsating web of life. Connectedness means, for me, being in touch with the basic fabric of the biological and physical world.

A spirituality of connectedness, then, means - at least - our full, self-giving entry into an intuitive participation in this web of life, that links the smallest cells to the most distant stars. We all have the capacity for this response to the world, which is the core of what it is to be human. It is something we long for inside. I’m suggesting that now, more than at any other time, we need to pay attention to it, and to teach others to pay attention to it. We need to teach to the world a spirituality of connectedness, as a realisation of the Kingdom.

So let me return now to the shortcomings of technology, and how this spirituality provides the answers.

I discussed the impossibility of understanding intellectually the complexity of the web of interconnections in the ecosystem, as a result of which our interventions in the environment are doomed to failure, as a result of which we fail to notice the malevolent side-effects of our interventions until it is too late. But we are spiritual beings, which, I am suggesting, means that we are potentially responsive to the fundamental web of relationships which gives meaning to our place in the world. Our responsiveness makes up for the limitations in our intellectual understanding. We, like all other species, have evolved to respond to the environment, although we have tried to cut ourselves off from this responsiveness, from our spirituality. If we open ourselves to it, however, then we can supplement our intellectual understanding by this intuitive response.

What is this like in practice? A hospital consultant once described to me how patients with damage to the parts of their brains in charge of muscular coordination had to re-learn to walk as an intellectual exercise. They had to learn to transfer their weight, then lift one leg, then move it forward while keeping balanced, then shifting the weight again ... It could be done, and it was a great achievement, but it could never be true walking. Our technological interventions in the environment are like the walking of a brain-damaged patient: we walk as if we had no inner sense of the way the whole thing hangs together, so we have to calculate each move and hope that nothing is left out of account. But we do have an inner sense what is happening. We have an inner sense that feeding sheep’s brains to cows is wrong. We have an inner sense that when the skylarks are fewer then something is wrong. Our inner sense can be misguided, which is why the technology of ecology is so important, as a parallel check; but when technology is harnessed to spirituality, then we can walk.

We need to learn again how to walk, just as if we had been reborn. What is this like? It is opening to the divine, to the sacred, not just in general, but as embodied in the natural world. It is approaching the whole of nature as if before the burning bush: seeing each plant, each hill of the landscape, as holy ground, and removing the shoes of our materialistic scepticism before we walk.

And in walking we can start to experience the joy of being truly human. Of existing in the way for which we have evolved to exist. Not that there is a single way of living that we can label "natural", but that every successful way of living, whether in the city or in the country, whether physically based or intellectually based, must be built on the foundation of this - our underlying spirituality. This is the reason why people would want to embrace a way of living that preserved the earth. If we pay attention to our connectedness with the whole, then we can delight in letting our attention flow out to embrace the whole - delighting, and at times mourning, with the flourishings and dying of the earth. We can sell environmental attitudes through joy, not through duty. Indeed, more than this: we start to live out, one step at a time, the spiritual reality that if we act from love, then what seems to be the loosing of self is in fact the joyful finding of ourselves.

The introduction of the idea of a spirituality of connectedness transforms the notion of environmentalism into something much greater, and more attractive. From this perspective, I want to question that word "environment". The environment is something that surrounds us humans; it is the enabling context for our actions and our flourishing. The word "environment", by bringing humans to the foreground and everything else to the background, suggests that the only purpose of the environment is to make things good for us.

But in a spirituality of connectedness, we see that our flourishing depends on the flourishing of the other-than-human world as well. My joy in the world depends on the joy of the skylark, and on the harmony of the whole. From this viewpoint, the other-than-human world is not our environment, but our community.

And then we realise that is precisely what we have learned in our theology. The world is created not for the sake of humanity, but for the sake of god. The sun, moon and stars are chiefly praised, in the psalms and by St Francis, for their showing forth the glory of god, not for their convenience to us. The product of each day of creation was declared good: good in its own right, good as a world of perfect beings in their own harmonious existence; good rather than useful. And the peoples within a Kingdom are not separate - the Kingdom has to be a community, which we now recognise as a community of all beings, human and other-than-human.

What then, will it be like to address the problems of the planet, not as "environmental" problems, but on the basis of a spirituality of connectedness, from which perspective we see ourselves as part of a community of beings?

The guiding virtue within a community is justice. Not that perversion of justice when it degenerates into punishment or even retribution, but the longing for the restoration of shalom, the longing for the establishment of a living order in which every being is awarded the dignity and right that belongs to them as creations of god. It is the justice described by Simone Weill, when she depicted how it was justice that brings the judge down to be alongside the downtrodden, pleading with them and raising them up to their true status, a justice that she sees most truly fulfilled in Christ. It is the justice described by the prophets, a justice that restores harmony into a fractured world.

We have learned over the years the meaning of this justice in the human community, and we recognise it clearly when we see it in action - in Desmond Tutu, in Aun San Suu Chi. Now we are struggling understand justice in the cosmic community. To see justice also in the context of putting right a world where species are being down-trodden, pushed to extinction. To see justice in action in the Chipko women in India who hugged to themselves the trees that were about to be put to the chain saw, jeopardising their lives because they knew that enough was enough, and that justice belonged to trees as well as to themselves.

There is a second dimension of the Kingdom that I want to mention here. I have already described how entering the Kingdom, because it is responding to the core of our humanity, is a matter of finding our own freedom . But in addition, caring for the environment through a spirituality of connectedness, is becoming instruments of Shalom, of "the peace of god". Not, I must explain, in the sense of "the peaceable kingdom" where the wolf lies down with the lamb, but in the sense of the right ordering of the world, which includes the wolf having the lamb for breakfast. It is becoming the means whereby god acts through us, as individuals and as community. We need to ask, is this also something that Christians can offer from their tradition as a way of life to the wider world? I think it is - and I want to argue that, in offering this way of life as instruments of Shalom, we are challenged to rethink our concept of god.

Let’s look at how we can explore this idea, starting first from a non-theistic perspective. We can reflect that we are a part of the web of life on this planet, the planet that has been called Gaia, a planetary web that has evolved to coordinate the responses of all beings in such a way as to preserve the harmony of the whole. Once we take our place within this dynamic community, then our responses are co-ordinated with the responses of other beings. We can call upon the plankton, the tides, the wind, to help us; we can, and we must, call on the Wisdom of the whole to help us where we must fail in our unaided efforts. So we are offering to the world an invitation to join with Wisdom, the great Wisdom of the universe that delighted in creation before the foundation of the world. The kingdom of god will include, at least, Holy Wisdom as expressed through the life of Gaia, engaging with the Wisdom of our own bodies.

In the light of this rethinking of the Kingdom, and in the light of a rethinking of god’s action through us, how do we, each one of us, see our actions and responsibilities in the world?

There is a theology which sees the entire created world as itself the image of God (Ibn Arabi) or the body of God (McFague), and this accords well with the spirituality that I have developed. I give justice to the tree, to the plants, to the reptiles; I respond to the call of Wisdom. And yet my ultimate responsibility is to be, as fully as I can, a human within the community of relationships that is the Kingdom. What does being human mean? After god created each order of beings, god created humanity "in our own image." Many writers have interpreted this to mean that, in humanity (speaking only for our planet, because I know no other) creation has become conscious of itself, and in this respects particularly fulfils its destiny as image of god.

This is a controversial point among those concerned with the environment. There are those who would say that there is nothing whatever special about humanity. That we have no significant gifts that are not shared with the apes, with the dolphins, or with the whales. When we look at our behaviour on the earth we may indeed see a great change in comparison with the other species, but at first glance it is a pathological change, a change in which our species has become a cancerous growth on the earth. Is this the only characteristic special to humanity - our unique capacity for destructiveness? If so. then we can give little assent to being "images of god".

I’m inclined to think, however, that this is too pessimistic. Our main evolutionary step - the part of our brain called the neocortex that sits on top of the brain that we inherit from more primitive species, does, I believe, represent a significantly new evolutionary step. Through this brain we can not only be aware of our world, but we can actively model ourselves and our world, and so project our being into the world through our actions in a way that is fundamentally new in evolution. Out projection into the world has become lethal because it has become divorced from our spirituality - but this can change. We could indeed have a role in the planet that is distinct and benevolent - though not superior to the roles of any of the other beings.

Each other creature is subject to the slow process of Darwinian evolution. We humans, through the particular form that self-consciousness takes in us, have now become active players in the evolution of the planet: it is our chosen actions, not the interplay of natural selection, that will play a crucial role in the next phase of the evolution of life on earth. "Where goes the environment?" - for the first time the answer now lies with you and me as well as with Gaia.

We forget how powerful we are, not just collectively, but also individually, in this interconnected world where the flapping of a butterfly’s wing can raise a cyclone at its antipode.

. I’d like to remind you of the well known poem by Marianne Williamson, which Nelson Mandella made famous when he quoted it:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves,

"Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?"

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There's nothing enlightening about shrinking so that

Other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.

Through our power we can blunder into destruction, and through our power, if it is exercised with spiritual insight, we can be instruments of universal peace. The difference lies in the degree to which I open myself to the world - And to god. I mean - to describe the ultimate ideal - in the sense of opening to the world in an unconditional way that might go beyond every finite aspect of the world, and of opening myself equally unconditionally to the response within me, which itself reflects the world and might go beyond every finite aspect of myself. It is this that is specifically religious.

In so far as I can begin to do this, I start to see, in addition to my own vast unrealised potentiality, my own insignificance in the face of the whole. Yet these two are not contradictory, but are precisely the same: my potentiality is great precisely to the extent that I am connected with the whole, and precisely to this extent my potentiality is in fact not mine, but belongs to god. We can act so as to bring justice in the world only in so far as we see ourselves as both divinity and dust, both mobilising to the full the creative power of our intellect and our technology, and also fulfilling our deepest humanity in acknowledging that all we are comes from a universe that is immeasurably greater than ourselves, in which there is played out a wisdom of which we are the tiniest spark. If we can do this, then we can have trust that the environment will start to become the Kingdom.