Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Sacred-Land Theology: Green Spirit, Deconstruction, and the Question of Idolatry in Contemporary Earthen Christianity

 Sacred-Land Theology: Green Spirit, Deconstruction, and the Question of Idolatry in Contemporary Earthen Christianity M A R K I . WA L L A C E I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. —henry david thoreau, ‘‘Walking’’ This pneumatological materiality, far from effecting a spiritual disembodiment, a flight from the earth, suggests in its very birdiness a dynamism of embodiment: lines of flight within the world. —catherine keller, Face of the Deep Christianity often acts like a ‘‘discarnate’’ religion—that is, a religion that sees no relationship between the spiritual and the physical orders of being. Historically, it has devalued the flesh and the world as inferior to the concerns of the soul. In the history of the church, the earth was considered fallen and depraved because of Adam’s original sin in the Garden of Eden; many early theologians rejected marriage as giving in to sexual pleasure; and greatly revered saints and martyrs starved their bodies and beat themselves with sticks and whips in order to drive away earthly temptations. Pseudo-Titus, for example, an extracanonical exhortation to asceticism from late antiquity, urges Christians to cleanse themselves of worldly pollution by overcoming fleshly temptations: ‘‘Blessed are those who have not polluted their flesh by craving for this world, but are dead to the world that they may live for God!’’1 Christianity has been conflicted about, and at times at war with, the genuine human need to 292 兩 e c os p i ri t reconcile the passions of worldly, physical existence with aspirations for spiritual transformation. In fact, however, Christianity is not a discarnate religion. On the contrary , beginning with its earliest history, Christianity offers its practitioners a profound vision of God’s fleshly identity through its ancient teaching that God at one time embodied Godself in Jesus—God became incarnate. Long ago God poured out Godself into the mortal body of one human individual, Jesus. But that is not all. Christians also believe that since the dawn of creation, throughout world history and into the present, God in and through the Spirit has been persistently infusing the natural world with divine presence. The Spirit is the medium, the agent, or, in terms more felicitous for a recovery of the Bible’s earthcenteredness , the life-form through which God’s power and love fill the world and all of its inhabitants. Through green Christian optics, we see that the gift of the Spirit to the world since time immemorial—a gift that is alongside and inclusive of Jesus’ death and resurrection—signals the beginning and continuation of God’s incarnational presence. As once God became earthly at the beginning of creation, and as once God became human in the body of Jesus, so now God continually enfleshes Godself through the Spirit in the embodied reality of life on earth. In this sense, God is carnal, God is earthen, God is flesh. In this essay I take up the question of Christianity’s earthen identity by way of a biblically inflected, nature-based retrieval of the Holy Spirit as the green face of God in the world.2 Taking my cue from the Bible’s definition of the Spirit according to the four cardinal elements, I begin with an analysis of how the Spirit reveals herself in the scriptural literatures as a physical, earthly being who indwells the earth—even as the earth enfleshes the Spirit.3 To make this point I develop a case-study of the Crum Creek (a local watershed near my home and workplace) as a Spirit-filled (albeit degraded) sacred place because it continues to function as a vital if threatened habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. But if it is the case that the earth embodies the Spirit’s power and love for all things, then whenever this fragile, green planet—God’s earthen body, as it were—undergoes deep environmental injury and waste, it follows that God in Godself also experiences pain and deprivation .4 Since God and the earth, Spirit and nature, share a common reality, m a rk i . wa l l ac e 兩 293 the loss and degradation of the earth means loss and degradation for God as well. This model of sacred-land theology raises two troubling criticisms that I will seek to address here. On the one hand, some environmental deconstructionists question...