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. Read the rest of this entry »
Join us April 1, 4-8 PM, at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, to become part of a movement to deepen and strengthen Christian commitment to environmental justice! Download a flyer here for all the information and help us get the word out.
From 4-6 PM, we will gather to listen to speakers on issues particularly important to environmental justice in Los Angeles: parks and wilderness conservation, local food availability, and air pollution — and learn about how these local issues are connected to national and international ones. We’ll have plenty of time for question and answer, and each speaker will conclude by suggesting concrete action and advocacy. We’re excited to welcome our speakers:
Juana Torres, The Sierra Club
Andrea Azuma, Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, Occidental College
Andrea Hricko, Keck School of Medicine, Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center
After a break for food and networking from 6-7, at 7 PM we welcome our keynote speaker, Christian environmentalist, activist, authorBill McKibben, who calls for a new environmentalism based on a commitment to justice and an understanding of the interconnectedness of all creation, in his new book Deep Economy. Bill is the author of The End of Nature, one of the first books on global warming, translated into over 20 languages, and has written on sustainability, overpopulation, and the need for community in response to globalization. Deep Economy: Wealth and the Durable Future, will be available for sale at the event.
This event is FREE and open to all; there will be a freewill donation. Contact at (213) 989-1630 for more information, or to help as a volunteer. We look forward to seeing you there!
Our next action, to protest global warming and show our care for the earth, is April 14. Our tree care and meditative hike is one action of a nationwide protest in over 1000 locations. Check it out on our Events page — and RSVP online!
Almost 50 people — many of them new to PCU — came to join us on our first Reflection Hike, part of our Eighth Day environmental justice project. The diversity of the group was the best part! People came from Orange County and Long Beach; from West Hills and Claremont; from Echo Park and Covina; from Lake Avenue Church and All Saints Pasadena; from Fuller Seminary and the Episcopal Urban Intern Program. Our youngest hiker was only fifteen months old, and our eldest was over seventy.
In many ways, the hike was about gratitude and community as much as about being in the great and glorious world. I have seldom felt so blessed in sharing a place of great spiritual meaning to me with such a wonderful group of people. At every stream crossing — and there were at least five — people held out hands, stood on rocks, guided others across the water until all were safely over. After traveling through the cold, shaded canyon, we came out into the cup of light at the head of the falls, ate together, prayed together, laughed together, and planned for the future.
At the very top we took turns scrambling over the slippery rocks to look down into that bright, vertiginous fall (everyone will remember my extreme anxiety that no one should fall off the cliff, since this would bode badly for future hikes), and then gathered for the prayer. Juan showed us how to offer tobacco in the tradition of the indigenous peoples, and each of us took part. We each took a moment, in our own language, to offer a prayer of thanks to God — for our community; for the mountains; for the fresh air and clear water; for our ancestors and predecessors who had lived in and preserved this place for us. Reverend David Farley from Echo Park guided us along the path with a tin whistle, and PCU Board Member Reverend David Larson led a spontaneous prayer. Juana Torres of the Sierra Club led us in a Spanish and English prayer and response.
Visit our full slideshow to see more great pictures — and if you came on our hike, feel free to us more pictures to add to the collection.
We’re already planning future hikes in Orange County and in the Santa Monica Mountains — contact Jennifer at if you want to help organize them!
As a former passionate Catholic (still passionate), I was disturbed and disappointed, though not surprised, to hear about the newest decision on homosexuality offered by the American Catholic Bishops. In a paper ironically entitled “Happy are Those who are Called to His Supper,” the words used to invite the congregation to the Eucharistic feast, gay and lesbian Catholics are explicitly invited not to come to the table — that is, not to present themselves to receive Eucharist. I can think of nothing more hurtful and demeaning than this for a devout Catholic. And as the final insult — as though to rub salt in the wound of being cordially invited to leave God’s banquet — this was wrapped in rhetoric of love and an explicit intention to offer better pastoral care to gay and lesbian Catholics. With pastoral care like this… Read the rest of this entry »
This is DEFINITELY going to increase the spam quotient of our blogsite, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. And what we need to do is talk, yet again, about the religious and moral aspects of that most basic and most complex of human realities.
Some reports from the front line:
Reverend Ted Haggard is now the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals and the former head of the megachurch he founded in Colorado, because he gave in to the “darkness” of his desires for a same sex relationship by three years of soliciting a male prostitute for drug enhanced sex.
Despite popular myths about sexuality in this modern world, the first world-wide epidemiological study on sexual behavior, published in British medical journal The Lancet, shows that average worldwide age of loss of virginity has remained steady (between 15 and 19), that rates of sexual promiscuity are not tied to rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and that married people have more regular sex than singles. In fact, some two-thirds of African unmarried men and women — despite the raging epidemic of AIDS on that continent — are sexually inactive, supporting the case that the highest risk group for infection in Africa is young married women.
Statistics from the World Health Organization show that over half a million women each year die from complications in pregnancy and childbirth, and that some 120 million couples cannot get the contraceptives they would like to be using; yet support for family planning is very low on the agenda of governmental agencies.
The United Nations has released a new study on the global epidemic of violence against women, much of it sexual — a pandemic of rape, murder by intimate partners, sexual slavery, and genital mutilation, which we barely notice anymore because it’s simply the way things are.
The Vatican is considering a relaxation of its rules on condom use in certain circumstances in order to save married women from AIDS infection via their husbands. (LA Times)
Measures to add state constitutional amendments which define marriage as between a man and a woman are on the ballot in eight states, and are expected to pass — but narrowly. (New York Times)
The worldwide Anglican communion continues to be split by divisions over gay and lesbian inclusion in the church. In a strange-bedfellows moment, the movement against gay and lesbian Christians is vocally fronted by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria and other church leaders largely in Africa, and funded and directed by superwealthy conservative Americans, such as Howard Ahmanson. (The Observer)
So: Gays and their evil desires are at the root of all the problems of marriage and religion, while women the world over can simply fend for themselves. Money and resources should be directed to keeping gays and women powerless. This will make everything in the world better and, furthermore, is God’s will.
I’m a fairly ecologically responsible person, I think. I recycle, for lack of a better word, religiously (my office mates will attest to this!). I live in a very small house (by American standards), don’t eat meat, buy organic food, and I didn’t start driving a car until a little over a year ago, which should count for something. Much to my disappointment, though, when I took the online “ecological footprint quiz,” I found that, if everyone lived like me, our problems would be far from solved. In fact, if everyone lived like me, we would need 3 additional planets to provide enough resources for all of us.
Actually, I am doing very slightly better than the average American, but that’s not really the issue. We don’t have 3 extra planets lying around just now, and the reason we’ve managed to scrape along with just one to this point is that the vast majority of the world doesn’t live like me — in fact, a large proportion of the world’s people live in poverty. This touches on the complicated connection between environmental sustainability and economic justice. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve ever wondered how old you’d have to be to understand global warming, I have an answer for you: sixth grade. That’s my guess at the age of the girls who attended our first screening of An Inconvenient Truth this past Sunday, at Holy Faith Church in Inglewood. One of the best experiences I can imagine having was sharing the energy and intense focus of these children of Nigerian immigrants, who gasped as they saw the graphs of temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide go up on the screen, and whispered “oh, no!” when Al Gore explained, “This is what it will look like when our children are my age.” Read the rest of this entry »
Just a couple of weeks ago, while I was vacationing with my family in North Carolina, I picked up the New York Times and learned all about the pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a conservative evangelical institution, who told his congregation that the work of the church is not to endorse particular candidates or particular public policies — that the growing association of Christianity with anti-gay, pro-militarist public policy perverts the work of the church as a whole and the spiritual lives of individual Christians. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s difficult, sometimes, to take the long view of things in making decisions. That’s clearly apparent in our foreign policy, but even more so in how we are carelessly destroying the physical world that every one of us, rich and poor, depends upon for the very basics of life — air to breathe, water to drink, earth to give us food. The past century of industrialization has blended with capitalism and globalization to create a planet-wide system of exploitation and destruction which has provided many North Americans with comparative wealth and a very comfortable physical lifestyle. No one did it on purpose; but as we see what this system has wrought, we need to start doing things on purpose now. Read the rest of this entry »
The South Central Farm was still in existence at 8 AM this morning, when I turned my security post over to another volunteer protester and staggered off towards the Blue Line to come to work. However, it might not be in existence by the time you read this. The farmers are under an eviction notice, and, along with Julia Butterfly Hill ensconced in a tree, dozens of farm supporters are staying on the land, waiting to protest in the only way left when the eviction notice is finally enforced. Read the rest of this entry »
Join us April 1, 4-8 PM, at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, to become part of a movement to deepen and strengthen Christian commitment to environmental justice! Download a 
If you’ve ever wondered how old you’d have to be to understand global warming, I have an answer for you: sixth grade. That’s my guess at the age of the girls who attended our first screening of 
