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Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 42, Number 3 • Fall 2003
Drilling in the Cathedral
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By Larry Rasmussen Abstract: Utilitarianism, alienation, consumerism, and oppression are major forces endangering Earth’s well-being. Over and against these morally and ecologically destructive forces are practices and ideas rooted and nourished in both ancient and modern religio-moral institutions and traditions. As powerful voices of faith calling the present to account, sacramentalism, mysticism, asceticism, and prophetic liberative practices offer Earth-honoring ways of life that draw from shared wells and deep-running waters. Key Terms: sacramentalism, utilitarianism, ecology, mysticism, creation, consumerism
“How can Christianity call itself catholic, if the universe itself is left out?”2 --Simone Weil Consider two vignettes. On February 15, 2003, more than a hundred cities hosted “apparently the largest coordinated one-day popular protest in the history of the world.”3 The prospective U.S.-led war with Iraq precipitated this ample coalition of the unwilling. Millions marched, on every continent, including Antarctica!4 Digital technologies made the nimble organizing possible. Fluid combinations of social networks and communications dissolved barriers of time and place and mobilized international civil society. Sociologists even spoke of emerging “heterarchies” displacing “hierarchies.” The creative power of such instant community remains to be seen, not to mention its staying power. Transborder community could set as quickly as it rose. But what was seen everywhere in those pulsing ranks was a certain icon. A marbled planet, captured by Kodak in a God’s eye view from space, appeared on placard after placard. It will not fade in coming years. Few marchers would have known the Russian Orthodox proverb: “Earth is the icon that hangs around God’s neck.” Many sensed just such status, however. Each placard had room for but a few words, arced over bent horizons of sea, land and sky: No War on
Iraq; No War on the World; Not in Our Name. Otherwise the message was the fragile planet itself, still beautiful “beyond the singing of it”5,6 but endangered by a species that, without wincing, thinks itself the trustee. That image was first transmitted by astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell in 1968. Dostoevsky, picturing Alyosha’s rapture in the monastery yard, may have voiced their experience even better than they: “The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth…The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth came in contact with the mystery of the stars.”7 The astronauts chose their own words, however, and on Christmas Eve, as the distant jewel disappeared below moon’s horizon in a quiet earthset, they read from an ancient account: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” Simple cosmic poetry. Millions marching across the planet, worrying over war and God’s icon, is the first vignette. The second is less dramatic, but not less important—the Bush Administration’s energy policy and the fate of its centerpiece, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Thomas Friedman, feeling compelled to swerve from his regular column on “Foreign Affairs” to join a domestic debate about drilling in this wilderness, put aside the economic calculations that usually preoccupy policy works in Washington. “I’ll let the experts point out the irresponsibility built into the Bush budget,” he writes, and
Larry Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, New York. He has authored and edited several books including Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Orbis, 1998), Ethics for a Small Planet (SUNY Press, 1998), and Earth Habitat: Ecoinjustice and the Church’s Response (Fortress, 2001)