What is our great gift to be? What is our great work to be? These questions were posed by Rev Peter Owen Jones when he spoke at choral eucharist in the chapel of Trinity College Dublin on Palm Sunday.
Owen Jones, a Church of England vicar, who is also an author and TV presenter (including fronting the widely-acclaimed BBC series Around the World in 80 Faiths), said that “our great work” is to become healers: “It is to heal, to heal the divide, the rift which human-centred theology has brought about; to wake, to waken, to see again, to feel again, to become conscious of the sacredness of all life.”While “wandering” the planet, experiencing 80 different faiths around the world, Owen Jones said it became quite clear to him that “with each day we draw closer to the precipice of catastrophe”. He said, “The triple factors of population growth, pollution and the current economic imperative of ‘more’ are a recipe for oncoming disaster. This disaster is not just human; whilst it is human-made, it affects all life.
“We, all of us, are currently overseeing the greatest number of species extinctions for millions of years. We should be in tears, we should be weeping, weeping at the loss of just one life form. We should be on our knees at the permanent loss of any life form.
“Our consciousness is numb, has been numbed. We need to wake up from what is a profound state of disconnection. We need to begin to feel again. When Christ was describing the lilies of the field, the wild flowers, as being more beautiful than King Solomon in all his finery, was he seeing them or was he feeling them? In all he said, in all he was trying to teach us, he was trying to teach us to see, to connect with what we are looking at, to become emotionally involved in the great and wondrous beauty of creation.
“It is not a theological statement – it is a declaration of consciousness, being open, of oneness, oneness with God, who is at one with all life, with all thought, with all imagination, with all dreaming. And the very idea that we should even have a society based, underpinned, by economics is incredibly dull and dangerous, dehumanising. Consumerism needs us to be in a constant state of agitation, a continual state of craving – ‘I need more, Give me more’. And this has meant that we cannot feel the tragedy of another extinction taking place on just another day.
“And it would appear that Christianity has fallen silent, completely entombed in the mind, imprisoned in its theological constructs … Unlike the Old Testament, there are no instructions within the New Testament on how we are to treat the environment. And with a few notable exceptions, St Francis of Assisi and some of the much earlier Celtic Christians, western Christianity has evolved into a myopic, anthropocentric salvation system centred entirely on human beings. The salvation of the planet and of all other species, all other life forms, are separated, dislocated from a religion that speaks of my salvation, my prayer life, my human relationships, my propensity for sin, which is why western Christianity has blessed (pretty much) a form of progress which has been so toxic to all other life forms on earth.
“It is time to wake up now. It is time to wake up, wake up. It is time to learn to love again, to become open to an awakening that the natural world, as Christ saw it, is resonant with the oneness of God. Then we need to start to treat it in that way – as a great gift. Each life given is a part of us and we are a part of it. St Francis saw this and expressed this relationship as one of family intimacy – brother sun, sister moon – and, as we know, the birds responded to his teaching.”
Owen Jones posed the question, “Can you imagine a dominion of love, human love, on this planet? Can you imagine being human and not being part of the great dreadful dominion, the reign of terror, of domination, which we have practised for too long now? And this means, as St Francis saw, as Christ understood completely, being vulnerable, being fragile. This is what Christ meant when he said we are at our strongest when we are at our weakest. And when he was faced with the cross he was mild, he was not strong, he was mild.”
Owen Jones said that we need to understand that salvation is meaningless if it did not include the salvation of all life. “Wake up! Learn to love again,” he exhorted. “This is our great work, which begins always in prayer – that salvation is always connected through love to all the lives that it touches – every life, every form of life.
“The future lies pregnant always in the present …. We are at the greatest point of change that we have faced since we learned to make fire. Mostly the future is presented to us – quite rightly, I’m afraid – as a place which we need to fear, and currently we do need to fear.
“But there is another possibility, and it is that we are being challenged not to see our lives in terms of economic growth (how dull is that?) … but really at this point to become more beautiful, more open, more generous, more loving than we have ever been. And we stand in the balance now.”
To listen to Rev Peter Owen Jones’s complete sermon go to http://www.tcd.ie/Chaplaincy/sermons/2010%2003%2028%20-%20Peter%20Owen%20Jones.mp3.