CULTIVATING AN ECOLOGY OF THE SOUL

We are in serious trouble. Our human and global future is threatened. Major cities worry about electricity for air conditioning and poor air quality. Wild fires devastated Florida's landscape. Lives and homes were lost. Tourist kept away. Lack of rain resulted in the loss of crops in Texas, the loss of income to farming families and migrant workers and families, and created dust bowls. In short, the relationship between worship and an environmental ethic is not just the agenda of neoliberal, greening-of-America romantics. If we take the eucharist seriously, then we have to consider that our redemption and creation are integrally linked.

In Eucharistic Prayer III we pray: "Father, you are holy indeed, and all creation rightly gives you praise. All life, all holiness comes from you, through your son, Jesus Christ our Lord, by the working of the Holy Spirit." This prayer acknowledges that all creation -- rocks and rivers, sky and seas, animals and humans -- praises God. When we offer the eucharist, we thank God for liberating us from personal and social sin and for restoring harmony to creation.

Human life means little if humans are unconnected from God, the creator. This disconnection is called social sin. Human life is isolated if humans lack relationship with the grandeur and concreteness of creation. We depend on creation. We use the elements of creation in our sacraments. We place bread and wine on the eucharistic table. We use oil to anoint the sick, christen the newly baptized, and ordain clergy leaders. We depend on the availability and purity of water. Water symbolizes life in baptism. How terrible if our water were so irrevocably polluted that it became only a symbol of death!

Jesuit Father Drew Christiansen writes about the underlying source of the environmental crisis. It is "the anxiety that drives a global economy and society in a vain quest for material security. That anxiety is found in the frantic pace of economic life: the instant movement of capital, the sale and dismemberment of business enterprises, the downward mobility of workers, the high salaries and sudden obsolescence of young professionals, and the desperate radicalism of western ranchers and lumber workers in which they claim the right to exploit public land without concern for the common good."

The rhythm of public prayer at the eucharist "frees us from all anxiety" and teaches an ecology of the soul, that is, a balance, an equilibrium, an equipoise between several values of human life. Christiansen says, "(P)ersonal ecology requires a balanced growth in the enjoyment of different aspects of life: basic needs, culture, esteem, participation in the common good, the spiritual life, growth in charity, and so on. Likewise, social equality demands the sharing of advances on those several fronts across society."

Family and church tables will be barren and spoil will be fed our children and elders unless we cultivate relationships: with one's contemplative and political self, with neighbors threatened unto death by the heat, with other human communities in the world, and with nature. Leave any element out and the ecology of the soul gets blown away.