November
2007
Our World, Our Work
Living in the world is to live in physical space — our souls within our bodies, our bodies within the world. Our community, our work, our justice, and our love and compassion are lived out through our relationship with the physical reality of creation, the mystery of incarnation that’s also at the heart of our faith.
That’s why it’s such an amazing and inspiring reality to look around and see how people of all faith traditions are waking up to the truth that we are responsible for the health of all the world as we navigate our own lives — the health and well-being of other human beings, of other forms of life, of all creation. We live that out in our daily choices, and in our commitment to justice and care for all that is.
In the past few months, with many other members of PCU, I’ve had the opportunity to hear speakers from a wide variety of faith traditions on the relationship of self to world, and particularly of self to environmental crisis. Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, meditated with us on the need for compassion towards self as the basis as compassion towards others and towards creation — and the need for self-discipline, loving self-discipline, in our relationship to our battered world which is so close to collapse. Xioayi Liao, the founder of Beijing Global Village and one of China’s leading environmentalists, also emphasized that the boundaries we place between our souls, our bodies, and our environment are false ones. We need a spiritual and very bodily love of our physical selves for healthy souls; our bodies and our souls are degraded as we degrade our environment, ignore community, neglect our own health, and focus only on accumulation, convenience, and status. Living within the physical world, and taking responsibility for our relationship wiith it, is not a matter of ignoring personal self-discipline and self-love; it is a matter, instead, of choosing disciplines of joy, awareness, and compassion for self and others.
Our Christian tradition is not bereft of this teaching! Although we often forget it, in the scriptural tradition we inherited from our Jewish roots, there is no hard and fast distinction between body and soul as we think of it today. The body and soul are one, animated by the breath of God. And we learn consistently from scripture that our own health, the health of our communities, and justice and care for the earth and for the other life-forms with which we share it are deeply interconnected. We learn from Jesus’ emphasis on physical healing, and from the physical resurrection, that the body and the physical creation are of great concern in the spiritual realm. We cannot neglect any piece of our body-world creation without degrading our souls and risking deep injustice and — more and more frequently in our modern world — environmental disaster.
This week, explore some of these connections online!
- Rev. Wilfredo Benitez offers a photographic meditation on our degraded shores
- Read about the effects of environmental racism and toxic waste in the report issued by the United Churches of Christ. What color is toxic waste?
- And our 2008 annual dinner speaker, Van Jones, writes about changing the elitism of the historic environmental justice movement.