A public talk on ‘God’s Creation – Our Responsibility?’ took place on Friday 14 September as part of Eco-Congregation Ireland’s inaugural conference.
Prof David Horrell, Dr Alastair McIntosh, Rev Peter Owen-Jones and Dr Anne Primavesi each spoke for 10 minutes on different aspects of the topic. This was followed by an open forum chaired by Gabrielle Stuart RSM.
Dr Alastair McIntosh has written the following summary of what he said:
It has pleased me very greatly to see the cross-denominational representation at this first Eco-Congregation Ireland conference. If I might be a little cheeky and tongue in cheek, we’ve got everyone from ‘God’s only elect’ to ‘the one true faith’! And is that not wonderful? You really have to wonder if the Spirit is not moving here. I mean, here we are, in a Roman Catholic centre, but it is the King James Bible that is prominently on the table. These are good signs.
They’ve got me thinking too about a metaphor for the work of Eco-Congregation. One of the ways in which the old Protestant versus Catholic divide has been caricatured has been in terms of justification by faith versus justification by works. We all know it’s much more complex than that on both sides, and I think both sides would hold today that the one is in a symbiotic relationship with the other. But I’ve been sitting here and seeing it like a metaphor in this way. It is easy to think that as eco-congregations we have to try and fix the world’s problems by multiplying works. One of the strengths of the Protestant criticism of works was that it reminds us to be humble. We’d be fooling ourselves if we thought we held the keys to life all in our own hands. It would be hubris, and so a theology of faith is important. At the same time, as St James said, faith without works is dead, so we need both in what the biologists call symbiosis – a kind of higher working together – but what does that look like?
I was raised in a Presbyterian tradition and there is a story from my island, the Isle of Lewis, that sheds some light on this reconciliation. It is told in a book called Lewis in the Passing by John the Miller of Habost. He recounts that when he was young, in the 1930s, there was a terrible epidemic of tuberculosis sweeping the island. A young woman lay dying in her bed. Her mother was penniless. The young woman called out for food and her mother had to say: “My dear daughter, I am sorry, but we have nothing in the house.”
In her despair the mother went to the doorstep and stood and looked out across the moor and the sky. She saw a man walking along the road and as he came closer, she withdrew, so that he would not see her tears. The man walked past, but after a little while he turned round and came back and knocked on her door.
“Here is a pound,” he said to her. “The Lord directed me to give it to you.”
Now, that story is so simple, but I think it takes the debate between faith and works, both in the work of eco-congregations and in theology, to a completely transcendent level.
At the one level, it is a brilliant way in which he managed to avoid leaving her with a sense of obligation that she could probably never repay. It had not been him who gave the pound – it was the Lord – end of story.
At another level, what we see here is that the man’s action has been raised to a level where it is at one with the movement of the Holy Spirit. As Second Peter has it, we become, in effect, “participants in the divine nature.” As Paul put it, it becomes a question of not us in the small ego sense, but Christ within us as the greater Self that we Quakers speak of as “that of God within.”
In Eco-Congregation it is not our task merely to replicate the “works” of the secular world. To do that could drain the energy of the parish, which is why some ministers and priests are uneasy about it. Our task needs to do what works we can bear, for sure, but more than that, to understand them as a form of sacrament. To raise them to a level that becomes an expression of faith. To be both practical and spiritual at the same time.
That way, the parochial or parish work as para and oikos – as “alongside the home” – becomes not drained by the ecological demands of our time, but sustained by it. It leads us towards a mystical union of faith and works. That union is realisation that God gives rise to all things, and sustains them, and that we are participants in that great and on-going creative process which is, ultimately, the work of love. The work of realising the Communion of the Saints in relationship with all of Creation. In other words, I’m suggesting the work of ecology is central to the work of being and becoming what in the Christian tradition is called “church”. What we do is a question of constant discernment of how the Spirit is moving us, and to a relaxing of ourselves into that life of the Spirit.
Now, what I have written here is written down in a hurry after I said it, and what was said was spoken without script and so I’m giving a health warning that it may be a bit rough at the edges. It may be doctrinally not quite right – we Quakers are rarely very strong on that – but I leave it with my reader, and hope that from whatever tradition they are coming, it might provide a little food for spiritual deepening and appreciation of what is good within one another’s traditions.
There was one last thing about that which came up in a different part of the conference. How do we respect such differences in our traditions when they might conflict with our own? How do we work beyond denominational limits? My answer to that is, when home on Lewis recently, I went in for a cup of tea with the minister of the Free Church manse in Callanish. His name is the Rev Calum Macdonald, and he has previously had a significant influence on me even though I’m not one for five point Calvinism.
As we sat down he looked at me and said: “The old people often say that there is one thing that the Devil cannot counterfeit in the human heart.”
“What is that?” I asked.
He said, “It is a word that we call in Gaelic the miann. It means ardent desire. They say that the one thing the Devil cannot counterfeit is the ardent desire for God.”
Wow! It blew my mind and has done so ever since. We may have good reason to disagree between our denominations and different faiths on theology. But if the miann is there, it carries us beyond those limitations. It lifts us into the realm of the Spirit. I do believe that is the key to how people of faith the world over can work together for a different world.