We have a dream for the planet
Dr Austen Ivereigh, address at St Martin’s in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, 25 October 2021.
“For a long time we carried on thinking we could be healthy in a world that was sick. But the crisis has brought home how important it is to work for a healthy world.”
So begins Pope Francis in the section of our book, Let Us Dream, in which he speaks of the urgency of ecological conversion. The crisis is the pandemic, which is the topic of the book: how we can come out better from it.
Almost everyone says we need to come out better, to do things differently from now on; yet many seem fondly to be returning to the status quo ante. But Francis says in the book you can’t do that: that from a crisis like this you can only come out better or worse, and the attempt to go back only deepens the crisis, like “climbing on mirrors”, as the Italians say (arrampicarsi sugli specchi). So when I suggested the book, I asked if he could teach us how to come out better: what’s the process? How do we avoid the temptation to backslide?
His answer uses a time-honoured dynamic of conversion known in Latin America as see-judge-act.
Change begins with honest looking, with seeing things as they are. You open up the mind and the heart to the peripheries, to see the world a little as God does, attentive to pain and longing. You hear the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth.
Then you discern the signs of the times. You say: what is this pain telling us? What do we need to hear? You begin to see where the Spirit of God is quietly but tenaciously prompting, allowing us to reimagine a different future for ourselves and for our human and non-human family. And you become conscious of the forces stacked up against that future, the bad spirit if you will, which tempts us to turn us back and into ourselves.
And finally, you allow God’s dream for us to take on concrete form in our imagination, “that place where intelligence, intuition, experience and historical memory come together to create, compose, venture and risk.”[1] It is when we dream together that a new future can be imagined. All great changes in human history are born like this, in the human heart, from the grace of interruption that every crisis offers us.
In speaking of his dream for the planet, Francis is emphatic and urgent, but also humble. The Catholic Church came late to this. Even when he produced Laudato Si, his great teaching on integral ecology of 2015, Francis was quick to express his indebtedness to the Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew for lighting his path. (It was Bartholomew who began the movement of religious leaders advocating for the natural world three decades ago.) On October 4, standing with Archbishop Justin and Bartholomew, Francis quoted the patriarch: how care for creation “is a way of loving, of moving gradually from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and dependence”.
In Let Us Dream, Francis describes his own ecological conversion, sparked late in his life by the stories of fellow bishops from Amazonia back in 2007. His eyes started to open, began to see the connection between what was happening to the earth and to the poor, how the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth were the same, and that Mother Earth, resilient yet fragile, was the poorest of the poor because of how we had treated her.
He came to understand this awareness as coming from God, because it was, he said, like drops on a sponge: gentle, silent, insistent. He saw more clearly the unity and interdependence of humanity and the created world, the way “everything is connected”. And he realized that the loss of this awareness was what had got us here, to the precipice we’re all talking about now, when the damage to the earth threatens life itself.
Romano Guardini called this mindset the “technocratic paradigm”. With the rise of industry and technology came the power to create surpluses, and all the advances that came with it, of education and leisure and urban life; but also a mentality of domination. Francis writes in LUD about “a humanity impatient with the limits that nature teaches”, with a mindset “intolerant of limits: if it can be done, and it is profitable, we see no reason why it shouldn’t be done. We begin to believe in power, confusing it with progress, such that whatever boosts our control is seen as beneficial.”
Because we can, we should; whatever makes us richer or stronger or more dominant is good. We come despise weakness and limits; we create a “throwaway culture”, in which first material things and nonhuman creatures are treated as expendable, then human beings. Francis calls this libido dominandi what Christianity has always called it: sin. “The sin is in exploiting what must not be exploited,” he says in LUD. “Sin is a rejection of the limits that love requires.”
With Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Justin in Rome, Pope Francis issued a joint appeal to world leaders in advance of Glasgow. “Biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and climate change are the inevitable consequences of our actions, since we have greedily consumed more of the earth’s resources than the planet can endure,” they said. “But we also face a profound injustice,” they went on, for “the people bearing the most catastrophic consequences of these abuses are the poorest on the planet and have been the least responsible for causing them. We serve a God of justice, who delights in creation and creates every person in God’s image, but also hears the cry of people who are poor. Accordingly, there is an innate call within us to respond with anguish when we see such devastating injustice.”
They said they believed Scriptures and saints could help, because they allow us to grasp “both the realities of the present and the promise of something larger than what we see in the moment.” The rich and foolish man who stores great wealth of grain while forgetting about his finite end; the prodigal son who takes his inheritance early, only to squander it and end up hungry amidst a drought; the people who take the apparently profitable (for some) route of building on sand, rather than building on rock for our common home to withstand storms. These stories, this wisdom, this tradition, allow us to navigate the storm of climate change, to see what is happening, choose a better way and act accordingly.
This will involve repentance (facing up to what is happening) as well as sacrifice and change. “We must choose to eat, travel, spend, invest and live differently, thinking not only of our immediate interest and gains but also of future benefits”, said the church leaders in Rome. But this is Good News, because the world we are now being invited, even forced, to reimagine can be, should be, must be a healthier one. More caring, more joyful, more fraternal.
How does this happen? Let’s dig a bit more deeply into the origin of this crisis. What Francis sees is that the “depersonalization of power” — the technocratic paradigm — has eroded our bonds of belonging. Ours is a crisis of belonging. Hence our fear, our anguish, our lonely expressions lit by blinking machines. What are those bonds of belonging? Firstly, with our Creator; secondly, with the created world, including our fellow human creatures; and thirdly, with our fellow human creatures. All of these relationships are born of gift.
See, all the really valuable things in our lives, in our world, we have not earned; we have been given them. Those we love; the world we inhabit; all its fruits; our skills, our education, our abilities — and all their fruits. All is gift. But we empty these relationships of their giftedness when we apply to them a transactional, utilitarian mindset. Love and care drain from them. It is the same sinful mindset we see in abuse — abuse of power, sexual abuse, abuse of conscience — to which our generation has awoken so strongly. “The sin is exploiting what must not be exploited, in extracting wealth — or power and satisfaction — from where it should not be taken,” says Francis. So when you start to look at it, you see that behind the damage to creation is the same thing that damages us.
So much for the sin. What of the redemption? The call is to rediscover this understanding of gift, and the values that flow from it — values in the literal sense, of “what we value”, what we organize our lives around. Says Francis in LUD: “We are born, beloved creatures of our Creator, God of love, into a world that has lived long before us. We belong to God and to one another, and we are part of creation. And from this understanding, grasped by the heart, must flow our love for each other, a love not earned or bought because all we are and have is unearned gift.”
How do we get to this? How do we put back the gift into our belonging? To live as Jesus did, not just onand off the land, but with the land, with the poor, resisting the technocratic paradigm by displaying another way. By the way we choose to live, lightly to the earth, caring for others. By the way we act when we see ourselves as fellow creatures of a loving God, along with the lions and the lizards and the oceans and the hills. By the way we act as citizens with moral obligations that reflect the value we place on these because they are gift.
This much is true. We will only care for what and whom we love; and we will only love that which we see as sacred. That is why, for all the good it has done us, science can only take us so far. We know what is happening, what must be done, and what are called to do. But do we have the will, the motivation, the call, without what in the Christian tradition is called conversion, a new way of seeing and heeding?
Conversion means not just new lenses and fine, prophetic words, but concrete actions and visible signs.
It means an economy with the task not just of GDP growth but access to work and regenerating our land.
It means a politics not just about short-term electoral wins but that can set ecological regeneration as agreed long-term goal of our economy.
It means a society no longer organized around the myth of individualism and the self-made successful person: for no person who succeeds has made their own success, but is the fruit of an inheritance, the commons, which is the inheritance of all, but unequally distributed.
It means a culture that takes seriously the idea of solidarity, of fraternity, of community, of participation, listening, and service, in which the poor are not just fed and clothed but sit at the table with us, in a shared enterprise.
All of these add up to what Pope Francis calls an integral ecology. Maybe it’s ecology “plus”. Caring for nature, and for each other, as fellow creatures of a loving God.
Finally, he means this is a challenge not just from the Churches but a challenge to the Churches: to our congregations and institutions to act with their neighbours to build sustainable, resilient and just communities, reducing carbon, and so on. But it also means a culture of care and listening to penetrate our culture at every level of the Church — which is why he has launched a worldwide synod.
And let me end with this further dream, which begins with stating a simple, startling truth. The Churches are the largest non-state property managers worldwide. If we add up all the property and landholdings of the Catholic Church alone the world — every parish, school, hospital, charity, monastery, university — we have the world’s third largest country, after China and India. Now add in the Anglican Communion, and other Churches; how big is that country? Now add in the commmunities of faith in general … how big is that country? As big as China?
Let’s dream together. What if every acre of spare land, every fallow field, every barren space, were turned over to rewilding, trees and wildflowers? What if these were combined with composting and regenerative horticulture to create nutritious organic veg, created by the community for the community? What if St Martin’s was once again really in the fields, or at least had fields that captured carbon?
What kind of sign would that be, to a world desperately searching for another, healthier way to live? Together, let us dream.