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10 The Ecological Model and Christian Spirituality This selection, from the final chapter of Super, Natural Christians, deepens and expands upon some of the ideas introduced in the previous chapter, above. It explains how the organic, ecological model translates into a Christian praxis and spirituality of nature. Offering a “community-of-care” ethic, it suggests some initial ways in which our love of nature and ecological concern might be enacted among Christians and in the church (though, overall, the book, like most of her work before this, presses the reader more to new thinking rather than new action). The closing section on “horizontal Christian sacramentalism” anticipates the call to a sacramental Christology she issues in her next book, Life Abundant. Source: 1998:164–75 Extending Christian Love to Nature A Christian nature spirituality is Christian praxis extended to nature. It is treating the natural world in the same way we treat, or should treat, God and other people—as subjects, not objects. But, we have to admit, we seldom act this way. Only the saints seem able to do it: recall Francis of Assisi who let things be what they are—wind is wind, death is death—and as they were he both loved them and saw them as signs of God. Francis’s way was “to commune with all things, respecting and reverencing their differences and distinctions.”1 What is often shocking to contemporary Christians about Francis is that he treated nature this way, as subject. Christians have always tried to treat other people as subjects; the subject-subjects model has been the model of how we ought to relate to God and to other people. God is the ultimate Subject whom we are to love with our whole heart, mind, and soul simply because God is God. We 127 should not fuse with God (the Christian suspicion of mysticism) nor objectify God (the Christian insistence that God is to be loved for God’s sake alone, and not out of self-interest). Likewise, we are to love our (human) neighbors “as we love ourselves,” in other words, as subjects who have interests, wishes, and needs that are their own. We are to love them disinterestedly, for their own sakes, not for ours. One of the main contributions of the ecological model to Christianity is the extension of its own subject-subjects thinking to nature. For most contemporary Christians, the line stops with human beings. PostEnlightenment Christians have bought into the subject-object arrogant eye when it comes to nature. What the ecological model offers to Christianity is a way of extending its own most basic affirmation on how others should be treated—as subjects—to nature. If Christians were to embrace the ecological model, they would not be doing something radical or discontinuous with their historical faith. On the contrary, they would simply be extending that faith to include nature. If we are to love God with our whole heart, mind, and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves, how, in continuity with that model, should we love nature? The answer is: with the loving eye, with the eye that realizes that even a wood tick or a Douglas fir is a subject—that each has a world, goals, intentions (though not conscious), and modes of flourishing that make them good in themselves and not simply good for us. Surely, this is what the Genesis verse means: “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good” (1:31a). This is an amazing statement. God does not say that creation is good for human beings or even, more surprising, good for me, God, but just good, in fact, very good. God is saying that nature is good in itself—not good for something or someone but just plain good. It is like a parent saying to a child, “I love you just the way you are,” or lovers saying to each other, “I love you because you are you.” God’s pronouncement here is an aesthetic one: appreciation of something outside of oneself, in itself, for itself. Even God can recognize that something exists outside of the divine self—and that, as such, it is good! Because the Genesis material is often accused of being a foundational antinature text, we need to substantiate this reading. The writer of the first chapter of Genesis leaves no doubt but that the goodness of creation is its message: it is repeated seven times in the space of thirty-one...

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