You know how sometimes when you know something you just know? On a cool, crisp day last fall, I had a sudden, convicting realization about the deep culpability of a misguided Christian theology in the destruction of our natural world.
It stems from what I believe to be a profound misunderstanding of a single word in the creation narrative in the first chapter of Genesis. The word is “dominion.” Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may have dominion over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’”
In the middle of the last millennium, when the Christian nations of Europe began to expand their empires and colonize around the globe, they misinterpreted this word as “domination.” With an inherent belief in their own supposed racial, cultural, technological, and religious superiority, they took the Genesis account as license to dominate the globe, its people, and resources. Rather than seeing themselves as a part of the network of creation, caretakers and stewards in a garden they did not plant, they used the Genesis narrative as a pretext to exploit, destroy, exhaust, and bend the planet to their ego desires.
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This sudden insight hit me hard with grief and guilt over the culpability of my faith and my forebears. But this week I was reminded of an ancestor in the faith whose life is a counterexample. Saint Francis, whose feast day is Oct. 4, and who we celebrated at Grace with an outdoor blessing of the animals service on Sunday, is one of the best-loved saints on the Christian calendar. Saint Francis’s life of radical poverty and his unique understanding of the siblinghood of all created things shook the wealthy and powerful medieval Catholic church to its core. Despite this, Francis’s sainthood was so clear that he was canonized just two years after his death in 1228.
Francis did not see himself as separate from the natural world. One story relates that he once ran naked through the woods in a snowstorm crying out, “Embrace me, sister cold! Envelop me, brother snow!” He trusted God’s provision to extend as much to himself and his fellow humans as to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, just as he believed that God’s salvation extended to the natural world as well as to humans. Francis is famous for preaching the gospel to the birds and animals, who reportedly listened to him!
While we might not embody it in quite the same way as Francis, his ethic is crucial to reversing the damage done by previous generations’ theological mistake. Hiking in Las Posadas nature reserve recently with a parishioner on a redwood cone-collecting expedition, we discussed how European settlers’ misunderstanding of indigenous land management with fire has helped create the explosive and dangerous conditions of today. The understanding of fire, grizzlies and wolves, for example, as separate and dangerous enemies, has vastly altered the ecology of the west over the past century and a half. Seeing nature as an object from which to extract supposedly limitless resources has brought us within view of a future in which the planet is uninhabitable.
How could we, instead, like St. Francis and native Californians, live as an integral part of a delicate, resilient and complex network of life? What would it mean to act as caretakers of a planet which does not belong to us, but which we are called to steward on behalf of God and future generations?
The Episcopal Church on a national level has become convicted of the church’s role both in theological development and action to reverse the climate crisis and the degradation of our planet. At Grace, younger generations are leading our experiences of unity with and care of creation. This summer, the children planted and cared for a “Good News Garden” with dual emphasis on habitat and food for God’s human and non-human creatures. A youth group member recently founded an environmental ministry to develop sustainable practices for the congregation.
A misinterpretation of scripture helped create the crisis we now find ourselves in, but young people of faith, like Francis, can lead us into a future of reintegration and healing, if we will follow.
The Rev. Amy Denney Zuniga has been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church, 1314 Spring Street, St. Helena, since 2016. Grace has services every Sunday in person at 8 and 10 a.m. with a live stream at 10 a.m., as well as services and meditation opportunities throughout the week. For more information or to join Grace’s Enews list, go to Grace-episcopal.org. She may be contacted at revamy@grace-episcopal.org.
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October 05, 2022 at 09:00AM
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Thursday Pulpit: Caring for creation - Napa Valley Register
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