A House on Fire

Ecology and Religion

Rev. James Parks Morton (USA)

The Very Reverend James Parks Morton is a good friend of Shumei. An Episcopalian priest, he is the founder and President of The Interfaith Center of New York, and Dean Emeritus of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Each year Rev. Morton gives an address at Shumei America's National Center in Pasadena. The following is based on a transcription of a speech he gave at the National Center on March 11, 2007. The text has been edited for Shumei.org and the March/April, 2007 issue of Shumei Magazine.

It is no longer news that our world is in an era of radical social, environmental, and spiritual change. Today is often nearly unrecognizable from yesterday. Today and tomorrow can be so different. And today's sense of religious ecumenism and interfaith cooperation, together with the very best science, call us to drastic action for the sake of our global environment. These are now seen as prerequisites for our survival. And so my question is, why have these concerns for ecumenism or interfaith, in religion and environmental survival, become so crucial?

I want us to go back to basics. Basics like, what is religion? What is ecumenism or interfaith? And why are we so close to a deadly crisis in the environment, with global warming and melting glaciers? What do the words ‘religion’ and ‘ecumenism’ and ‘global environment’ really mean? And so we go back to basics.

If we look at the meaning of the word ‘ecumenism,’ you might be surprised. ‘Ecumenism’ comes from the Greek word, ‘oikos,’ or the Greek verb, ‘oikein.’ ‘Oikos’ means ‘house’—our home. And the Greek verb ‘oikein’ means ‘to inhabit.’ The big Greek word, ‘oikoumenikos’ means ‘the inhabited world’ —our ecology—our ‘oikos–logos’—our environment. It means the total home in which we live. The idea goes from house or home, to world. Now we have to ask, what is ‘world?’ The meaning of ‘world’ is ‘universe,’ our Earth, the planets, the moons, the stars, the galaxies, indeed the whole cosmos. The whole creation is our home. And that is what is threatened. We are threatening our home, the place we live—our ecology.

Now, secondly, let us look at the word ‘religion.’ ‘Religion’ comes from a Latin word, ‘religio,’ or the verb ‘religare,’ which means ‘to connect’ or ‘to knit together.’ That is the basic meaning of the word ‘religion’: to connect, to knit together, to bring together. And so when we put together the words ‘religion’ and ‘ecumenical,’ we knit together the entire cosmos. Religion is what connects, and the environment is what we need to be connected to. These words are very, very close, and that is the basic thing I want us to deal with here.

So the primary definition of ‘religion,’ is a knitting together, a bringing together. This is in contrast to what so many of us think of religion, which is just believing in something. But if religion is an action word meaning ‘connecting,’ we are in a very different place. So my own definition, and what I try to do with religion, is to connect people to each other. All people together, getting them together, celebrating their cosmic togetherness, which is what the environment is.

This understanding of religion is new to me. This was not what I always thought religion was.

When I began my professional journey, some fifty years ago, I switched to a spiritual path from architecture. I was trying to be an architect. And the core of my spiritual quest was social justice. My big heroes were the French worker–priests and an incredible American woman in New York City by the name of Dorothy Day,1 who is Catholic. She started in the Bowery, one of the worst parts of New York. There she made places for street people to sleep, and she started soup kitchens. This is fifty years ago. The worker–priests and Dorothy Day were my absolute idols—along with an Episcopal priest, Father Paul Moore of Jersey City.

When I became an Episcopal priest in 1954, I wanted to be in a place of absolute poverty where there was very real social need. So my wife and I went to Jersey City in New Jersey, which was about the poorest part of America at that time. Nowadays, the place is very fancy and all gentrified. But back then, it was very, very poor and mostly inhabited by black and Hispanic people. Most of the white people had moved out. That is where we went. And then we went to Chicago in 1964, where I ran a new institution called the Urban Training Center. The purpose of the Urban Training Center was to train clergy or religious people to work in the inner city, to work with the poorest of the poor. That is what it was all about. And we had courses to develop skills for people to work with and understand poverty.

Our first courses were one month long. Religious leaders from all over the country had to sleep in Chicago for one whole month. The first three days of the training was something we all loved. It was called the ‘plunge.’ Well, we had to do something to get our trainees to ‘jump’ into the inner city. So, we told all the men (most were men in those days) to wear their old clothes, not to shave, and they only could bring two things with them, a toothbrush and their Social Security card—nothing else. No wallet. No wristwatch. We gave each of them three dollars, then said, “You're gonna live on the streets for three days, and then we'll see you.” It blew their minds. It was a real plunge. But when we met together after the three days, the sermons that those men preached about what they had seen, what they had really experienced in their gut, started them on another path. That was eight years in Chicago.

Then, in 1972, I was called by Paul Moore, now the bishop of New York, to become the Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. It was a huge, a very beautiful sort of spiritual oasis in the middle of New York City, right in between Harlem and Columbia University. For the next twenty–five years, I was at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It became a center of a new kind of spirituality. In Chicago, I had worked with Dr. Martin Luther King. Jesse Jackson2 was on our staff. That was the kind of ‘plunged’ reality we brought to the Cathedral. It was a remarkable part of my life. But another change in my life also came while at the Cathedral. It was different from what had happened to me in Jersey City and Chicago. The spiritual awakening that came to me in New York was a crossroads in my life. And the interesting thing is that this spiritual change concerned my sudden understanding of the word ‘environment’ and the word ‘ecology.’

I had never really thought about the word ‘ecology.’ ‘Poverty,’ yes, but never ‘environment.’ I had not yet made the connection between the three words I started out with, ‘ecumenism,’ ‘religion,’ and ‘ecology.’ And that connection is what happened to me at the Cathedral.

The question is, who made me see the light in this new way? It was not the religious people. All of my religious stuff with poverty and with holy people never touched the environment. Never! I did not even know the word “ecology” or “environment.” And I was well educated. I went to Harvard, I went to Cambridge in England, and I went to a seminary in New York. I spent all those years in the inner city and I never once heard the word ‘environment.’ I never heard the word ‘ecology.’ And that is what happened to me in New York. And who were my teachers? Not clergy, not religious people, but scientists. Scientists became my spiritual teachers. The great microbiologist Rene Dubose,3 who created one of the first antibiotics, became a great teacher of mine. He preached in the Cathedral. And he preached both about poverty and the environment. And the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson4 became a great teacher, as well as a whole slew of environmentalists, such as John and Nancy Todd, Mary Catherine Batsen, the Lovins, and the astronomer Carl Sagan,5 a big atheist, who was one of my closest friends. He taught me about the stars.

So suddenly I began to understand that at the heart of theology was creation. God created this cosmos. And that is where, in a sense, all theology begins. It begins with the created world, the world that God made. That is how all of the holy books begin: in the beginning, God made the world and the cosmos. He created the environment, He created the world in which we live. And then the fascinating thing came to me that the words ‘theology’ and ‘environment’ were almost the same word. Because ‘ecology’ like ‘ecumenism’ means ‘the connecting of things,’ and ‘religion’ also means ‘connecting.’ So the connecting of human beings with the stars, with the planets, the air, the lakes, bringing all that into one connection, suddenly came to me. That is what religion is all about! Of course, it is about our being brothers and sisters to each other, but we have to see the rivers and the soil and the air as our sisters and brothers too. We all live in this house together, and the house is the creation, the ‘oikos.’ That very new understanding of religion—that religion and ecology are almost the same thing, that religion and the environment are dealing with the same stuff—is what totally changed my life. And so, what I really did at the Cathedral that I was most proud of was with these environmentalists—with these scientists—these became my bedfellows—the people that I worked with all the time. The thing I was proudest of was our bringing together scientists and environmentalists and religious leaders. Carl Sagan, Al Gore6 and I created the Partnership of Religion and Science, bringing those two groups together. Then we created a second thing, which was called the National Partnership of Religion and the Environment. Both of these were based at the Cathedral. And we have had five world conferences on this subject.

The first was held at Oxford University in England in 1988, and the second was held in Moscow in 1990. President Gorbachev was head of the Russian world at that time, and he sent five people to our first world conference in Oxford. He was so excited that he asked, “Can we have the second conference in Moscow?” Al Gore was very central in speaking at both of those conferences. In Oxford, we had four hundred people, but in Moscow we had twelve hundred people from all over the world dealing with religion and the environment. Our third conference was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and that was with the United Nations World Conference on the environment. The fourth was in Japan, at Kyoto in 1993. And our last one was in Konya, Turkey in 1997. So what we did was to try to open people's brains, religious people's brains, to the deepest part of their religion that tells us we must save our home, which is the environment. If we do not save it, we will die.

My quarter century at the Cathedral spanned a time of amazing changes. A tremendous re–visioning, a re–understanding of what it means to be a human being. Today, all these years later, we are still in the throes of change, and wondering what it means to be human. But if you think with me of the number of tremendous changes, shifts, in our minds and in our hearts that have occurred over these last now thirty–five years, it brings into focus the reality of change. When in history have there been so many popular movements of discovery about who we are and how we ought to behave toward each other?

In these thirty–five years, we have had the civil rights movement, the women's movement, we have had the movement for consciousness about sexual freedom and responsibility—and we have seen the despair that is often on the flip side, suicide and disease, if we are not serious about these new freedoms. In these thirty–five years, we have had an absolute turnaround in communications with computers, so that the time and distance of communication have been eliminated. With our computers, we are in instant communication with everyone else in the world. That is new! Computers can make us truly religious because they can join us to everybody instantly. We do not have to wait years—only seconds to be in touch with someone in China or Japan or Africa or wherever. So, the world has been transformed in a very short period, just thirty–five years. And everything that I was used to thinking about as the way the world was, suddenly has been changed.

I used to think that New York City was the biggest city in the world, but it is not. The biggest cities now are Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, Karachi, Mexico City, and Beijing. I used to think that there were not very many young people in the world, that most of the world was middle–aged. But today, the huge majority of people are under eighteen. The world is full of kids, babies. And it is getting more and more that way. We used to think that we were defined by our region, where we came from, and the city we came from, the nation we came from. We were very much defined by our tribe or our class or our race or religion. But now, that is no longer the case. We are all global citizens, a hodgepodge of wandering people. You know something else that is very new today: the reality of refugees, people who are wandering around the world, living outside without homes, displaced. We have got three million displaced people in Rwanda and Burundi alone. We have four million displaced people in Sudan, three million Palestinians, and three million in the former Yugoslavia, and another two million in Afghanistan. Think how many Iraqis right now are displaced.

Another thing that is so different in our minds today is the reality of First Peoples, the people who were here originally. In America, that means Native American. They were the first people here. And then everybody else invaded. But suddenly, the First Peoples are people that we now respect, and that is very new.

Another new beginning is our relations with one another. We now understand that being human means having many colors, many traditions, and many ways of seeing things. And this leads to new levels of communication, new ways of joining with each other. In other words, our religion can be deeper and deeper as we recognize each other's differences. Now that is wonderful, but it is also very new.

I will end with what I said at the beginning. Why are these words ‘ecumenism,’ ‘religion,’ and ‘global environment’ really prerequisites, necessities for our being able to survive on our home planet? What do we have to do to fulfill these urgent needs? Well, this urgency is again almost the essence of religion. In the past, when we were faced with something terribly important, we usually did not get it through our heads until something terrible happened, like an environmental cataclysm or the ice age or a Hiroshima or a global stock market crash.

Well, we have got to see that the only alternative to a horrible thing happening is to develop a sense of urgency. In other words, our house is on fire, the global icebergs are melting, the seas are rising, we are in a crisis. But it is the religious people's job, it is our job, it is the job of all our different kinds, whether we are Hindus or Buddhists or Christians or Jews or Shumei members. Whoever we are, it is our job to give this crisis we are in, this environmental crisis that is a truly religious crisis, a sense of urgency. And we can do it. But we have got to see first that it is our job. If we are religious, if we have sampais, if we have high masses, and seders, we have to do it. If we are religious people, then it is our job to save our house, which is the environment. Because our house is on fire.

Footnotes:

1. Dorothy Day (1897—1980) was an American journalist and socialist known for her campaigns on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, human rights, and pacifism. In 1933, she co-founded, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker Movement, today a worldwide organization dedicated to helping the poor and fighting for social justice. Among her writings are her novel “The Eleventh Virgin” and her autobiography “The Long Loneliness.” A rather salty progressive, she often found herself at odds with her religion's establishment (and ‘establishment’ of any sort). However, in 2000 she was declared a ‘Servant of God’ by the Roman Catholic Church, which is viewed as the first step toward being officially proclaimed a saint. She once said, “Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.”

2. Jesse Louis Jackson (b. 1941), is a civil rights advocate and Baptist minister. Twice a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s, he was at the time only the second African American to run for that office. Today, he remains an important leader of the American Christian left. Rev. Jackson once said, “Never look down on anybody unless you're helping them up.”

3. Rene Dubose discovered the first antibiotic, Gramicidin, a form of penicillin specifically for human use, in 1939. It was employed widely during World War II and became famous for its remarkable healing powers. Since then it has been used and overused to treat many infectious illnesses, including strep throat, salmonella, gonorrhea, and Chlamydia.

4. William Irwin Thompson (b. 1938) is a poet and cultural philosopher. He is best known for his books, “The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture,” “Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science,” and “Gaia, A Way of Knowing.” In 1972, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association, now located in Crestone, Colorado, an alliance of scientists, artists, scholars, and contemplatives devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture. Between 1992 and 1996 he was the Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Mr. Thompson now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he devotes himself to research on literature and the evolution of consciousness. He recently completed an extensive poem on Western Civilization, entitled “Canticum, Turicum.”

5. Carl Edward Sagan (1934—1996) is one of America's best-known astronomers. He popularized the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and astrobiology, and became world-famous both for writing popular science books and for his work on television. He is best known for promoting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Sagan published over six hundred scientific papers and popular articles, and authored, co-authored, or edited over twenty books.

6. Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. (b. 1948) served as the 45th Vice President of the United States under the William Clinton administration. A teacher and businessman, today he is best known as an environmentalist. He lectures widely on the perils of global warming, and in 2006 starred in the Academy Award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

back