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Jesuits for Climate Justice have recently issued a statement and asked people to add their voices to an urgent advocacy campaign [link] .
In the accompanying letter, they highlight the need for three areas on which we need to act if we are to mitigate the devasting effects of climate change:
- Make the Loss and Damage Fund effective.
- Cancel climate debt.
- Call for a just energy transition.
The directness and simplicity of these proposals belie their challenge. To be effective, they require us to think and act differently: a capacity to break out of the hyper-dynamic of personal and national self-interest. The three proposals require us to repair and develop those economic, political, and social international structures that will establish the security and the good of all, not just the privileged and powerful few.
We know from our own histories how the rapacious exploitation of natural and human resources only offers short-term gains and leaves behind a burnt-out country and impoverished people: the ‘collateral damage’ in the insatiable drive for economic profit and power. To close our eyes to the immediate and long-term effects, we need to make an act of faith in the underlying myth that somehow, markets are an instrument for salvation. They are governed by the ‘providential logic’, a mysterious ‘invisible hand’ that demands constant innovation of ever-better systems whose goal is securing the great benefit of wealth. Wealth and the power it buys – social, political and technological – will ultimately deliver us from all the threats to our material well-being.
A seductive reductivism is hidden in this ‘mythos’ of modern economics (socialist and capitalist).
It reduces everything to the material and offers it as the ultimate source of our happiness and completion. Even the spirit is translated into the ‘immanent transcendent’, the experience which moves us beyond ourselves, but these apparently non-material goods are ones that we produce as well. In fact, economic systems go beyond the production of necessary goods to become hyper-economies of desire.
Desire is infinite, so we are trapped in a cycle of consumerism that shapes identity.
Like the slaves in ancient societies branded by the mark of their owner, so are we ‘branded’ by our purchases so that all can see to whom we have paid tribute. It creates the illusion that we have freedom and can make unlimited progress to the ever-greater goods that we are encouraged to imagine. These systems capture our imagination so that we become blind to the destruction they create and the strange inertia that overtakes our will to change them.
II
All around us, we see the effects of climate change. Like the tolling bells of ancient cathedrals once used to signal an imminent threat, report after report rings out. In our 24-hour news cycles, their warnings become translated as ‘natural disasters’, quietly absolving us of responsibility; their urgent cries are muffled so as not to disturb our consumption patterns or, they are heightened to panic us into more intense consumer activity. Yet, underneath the evaporating headlines, we know that all is not well. As we watch trillions poured into wars and conflicts and governments align to secure their borders, we know that there is the capacity for a formidable will to mobilise people and resources. Yet, despite the hopeful aspirations and optimistic rhetoric of past COPs, we see that climate change and the multiple disasters that follow it continue to grow.
Water is the most basic necessity for life, but the world faces a growing water disaster. For the first time in human history, the hydrological cycle is out of balance, undermining an equitable and sustainable future for all. The most vulnerable are the first to suffer, “More than 1,000 children under five die every day from unsafe water and lack of sanitation. Yet no community or economy will be spared the consequences of a water cycle that is out of kilter — itself the result of our collective actions over decades.”[1]
The United Nations Environment Programme (2024) Emissions Gap Report 2024 maintains that our current policies will most certainly lead us to an over-shoot the 1.5 C target of the Paris Agreement 2015 (COP 21). The failure of harvests, the loss of bio-diversity, and the political and economic pressures as large populations are forced to migrate to survive are already being felt. Yet, the news is filled with the great technological achievements of short suborbital ‘tourist flights’ where the minimum cost for a ticket is estimated at ¼ of a million dollars (economy class?).
It is increasingly clear that ‘climate change’ is not only an environmental crisis. It is a crisis in us: our political and economic systems, to be sure, but also in our spiritual, intellectual and moral imagination. We not only need to act in a new way, we need to think and imagine in a new way as well. Laudato si’ recognised this when it called for conversion, allowing us to shake off the myths that hold us captive and begin to discover a new sort of freedom and purpose. If our act of ecocide is to be halted, we need a collective conversion of heart and desire as well as one of knowledge and will. This is the work of building a new order, one that recognises and supports the delicate inter-relationships that make all life possible.
III
If, in our history, we can read human nature’s destructive and exploitative capabilities, we also learn that there is nothing inevitable about it. The ability to turn these same capabilities into the service of the community of life and the welfare of the ‘common home’ is always a choice which we have the power to make. It is precisely in this choice, the possibility of a ‘deep and lasting change’, that the demonstration of our human freedom lies. To exercise it is also to accept the responsibility that freedom confers. So much in our cultures wants to convince us that we can have freedom without responsibility and that the consequences of our actions can be conveniently attributed to other sources. Other ages shifted the responsibility onto the gods or the stars, and our own has its own determinisms that can absolve us.
‘Conversion’ is a reclaiming of our freedom and the responsibility for our actions that it brings.
A ‘deep conversion’, which involves all of us and recentres us within the communion of all created things, is not easy but is a work through which we grow into the fullness of our own grace. It begins not only when we accept the need for radical change, not only in ourselves but in our systems, their goals, and consequences. Like AA, we need to accept that we need to reach out to a power ‘greater than ourselves’. Christians will recognise this as an opening to receive the undeserved grace of God. It does not matter how we name the source; what matters is that we acknowledge our need and that we cannot do it alone. When we can accept this we can then begin to enter into the paradox in the life of St Francis. The more we recognise our own creatureliness and dependence, the more we grow in humility. Far from diminishment, we come with ever-deeper gratitude to all created things; they cease to be objects for use and become ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, contributing to life in all its teaming complexities. We become more human, not less; more free, not less; more at home in this world, not foreigners raiding its goods and taking its life.
The Christian tradition has sometimes been accused of feeding our present crisis by instrumentalising our relationship with the natural world or seeing it as an obstacle to our spiritual growth. Wherever religion in any form has these fundamental assumptions, it can only generate a sort of hostility to the natural world, which has to be subdued, contained or tamed. Even when religion no longer shapes the culture, one can still detect these attitudes playing out in modern technological and scientific forms. I do not believe that the ‘conversions’ which we need to meet our current environmental crisis can be achieved and sustained without drawing upon the spiritual resources and wisdom that are also contained in our religious traditions. In addition to Francis of Assisi, two other Christian mystics (among many) can help us discover this new way of understanding and being in ‘our common home.’
The first is Julian of Norwich, and the second is Ignatius of Loyola. Many other Christian theologians and mystics in the traditions of the East and the West have much to teach us about creation and our place in it. I choose these two partly for brevity but mainly for their accessibility.
IV
Julian (1341- c.1416) lived as an anchoress in the English town Norwich. An anchoress was a woman who chose to lead solitary life apart from society to dedicate themselves to prayer and asceticism. Effectively, they were hermits in the same tradition as the desert fathers. They lived in a permanent enclosure or ‘cell’ usually attached to a Church.
As was the case with Julian, even though an ascetic solitude characterised their life, they were often sought out for advice and spiritual counsel.
We know of Julian through her book of ‘shewing’, which recorded a series of visions about the passion of Christ and her understanding of them. The ‘shewings’ are now known as ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ and must rank as a great treasure of the Christian mystical tradition. So far as we know, Julian does not seem to have had formal theological education. Yet, her writings reveal a profound theological and spiritual understanding of God as Love and the mystery of redemption. Julian’s language is personal and affective; she has no hesitation in speaking of Jesus as our ‘mother’ to bring out all the modalities of love that can be found in God, ‘And our saviour is our true mother in whom we are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed.’ (Long Text 57; also 59)
Central to the Christian understanding of creation is that God creates ‘ex nihilo.’ This in no way undermines the status of creation; in fact, it confers a unique character on it. There is no necessity in God’s act of creation; it is a pure gift that flows from God’s own goodness. This is why all created things are an outflowing of God’s goodness or blessing. The very living diversity we witness is, in some way, an expression of the Divine creativity at work in all things. Creation, then, is not only a manifestation of God’s power but of God’s love. Christ is a double confirmation of this, for all things are created in and through him, and he redeems all things – we are created in love and saved by it. In this sense, too, Julian sees that action of the Trinity. For Julian, this sense of the enfolding of God’s love is deeply part of her experience of our own bodies and the whole of creation (Long Text 5). She does not separate the act of creation from the act of redemption; both are the gift of life we receive from God in Christ.
We are so intimately part of God’s good work of creation that we have the power to make or mar it, to frustrate the purpose of creation in preserving and nurturing us and glorifying the Creator.
There is, however, for Julian a sense that God’s love so permeates all things that we can be secure as a child is secure in the arms of a mother, ‘I understood three ways of seeing motherhood in God: the first that he is the ground of our natural creation, the second is the taking on of our nature (and there the motherhood of grace begins), the third is the motherhood of works, and in this, by the same grace, an enlargement of the length and breadth and of the height and deepness without end, and all is his own love.’ (Long text 59, the image is developed in 60).
There is much more that Julian has to teach us about God, creation and our place within it, but these brief highlights may serve our purpose well. Julian brings about an affective change in us by drawing us into the wonder and the depth of Divine Love. Once we begin to enter into this affective reciprocity, we not only experience a new relationship with all created things – the famous ‘little thing’, the hazel nut – but we open our interior eyes to its meaning. All is the sign and the proof that we are loved and held in all the dimensions of our being and existence. Creation is truly our home because it is where God has chosen to dwell. Standing in such a light, how then can we simply use the natural world and not cherish it? How can we continue to rape it, depleting its diversity and life, rather than serving it by using all our intelligence and technologies to enable it to flourish? Whether we are Christian or not, Dame Julian can teach us how to love our world and delight in it, for in loving it consciously or unconsciously, we thank the One who made it.
Ignatius of Loyola is better known for the discernment of spirits than his insights into creation. Even so, like Julian, he has much to offer us if we wish to change. Unlike Julian, however, Ignatius does not offer us a text that we can read and reflect on so much as exercises that we can do. This is important for giving us insights grounded in our own experiential truth.
In this way, we not only grow in our desire to be transformed, but we also find ourselves in the process of being changed over the course of the [Spiritual] Exercises.
Although the form of the Exercises is different from Julian’s ‘shewings, ‘ they, too, have the power to draw us into a new understanding, which is also affective and intellectual. The whole dynamic of the Exercises is deeply ‘incarnational’. It is rooted in this world in all its reality mediated through our experience and imagination. It is a world in which we find God always creatively and graciously at work ‘for us’; a world in which and through which we must also face the reality of ourselves in the alienation of our own disordered relationships as well as the longing and the call to live beyond ourselves in service of God and neighbour. As will the mysterious and incomprehensible ‘logic’ of the Incarnation, we discover a greater freedom that does not remove us from humanity and creation but moves us to an ever-deeper commitment to them.
Creation is not absent from the Spiritual Exercises. One of the most characteristic ways of encountering God is as ‘our Creator and Lord.’ In the Principle and Foundation we are reminded that our true freedom lies in the ‘praise, reverence, and service’ of God, who is the ultimate goal and lasting happiness of our lives. ‘Praise, reverence and service’ are the three acts which come from a healed intelligence, ego, and will. They are the ways in which such a restored person lives in and expresses an overflowing gratitude to the Creator, others, and to the whole natural world for grace of his or her own healing. It is like the life that the prodigal son can now live after he has returned home and been embraced by his father. For the first time he appreciates that he has a home and what it means to live in it again.
Creation is present from the very beginning of the Exercises in the “Principle and Foundation.’ It presents us with a rather austere logic which will unfold in all its challenging and liberating richness over the course of the Exercises. It reminds us that all things ‘are created for man (sic) to help him in attaining the end for which he was created’ (23). At first glance this may seem a rather negative, almost utilitarian, approach to the natural world. In fact, it re-orders our relationships to it.
All created things have their own value and purpose, and they, too, are ordered within the great ‘communio‘ of all creation which is sustained and comes into being in transcendence to God – Creator and Redeemer.
The dispositions of ‘praise, reverence, and service’ belong not only to the human person but to all created things. Each life and form have their purpose within the whole community of creation. ‘Mission’ or purpose or telos is not just realised individually, each form fulfilling its particular end; each individual can only attain their end in and through their participation in and dependence upon the whole community of life. The mark of our own redemption is to recognise this and receive it not as a limitation but as an expansion of our horizon and the securing of our being. When we can do this, then we can take on our full responsibility to God and to our neighbour, especially to all things that share and contribute to our common home. Like Julian, Ignatius does not separate the work of creation from the work of salvation.
This understanding of the dynamic and unfolding life of creation runs through the whole process of the Exercises, but it surfaces explicitly in two well-known parts. The 1st week of the Exercises is dedicated to recognising the depth of our sinfulness – that incurvatus in se – whereby we make ourselves the centre of the world and place our own desires over it. In the turn to self, we not only alienate ourselves from God but from creation as well. Creation now suffers the consequences of our self-aggrandisement as we instrumentalise all our relationships to serve our own ends. The mark of our awakening to this and the beginning of our ‘homecoming’ begins when we place ourselves before the cross, which for Ignatius and Julian, is the unfailing guarantee of God’s mercy and salvific love (60). There we are liberated from our illusions and the distortions of our alienated and destructive will. We discover a new freedom and are restored to the community of life (angels, saints and creation) in the presence of Christ’s love sacrificed for us.
The effect is a surging gratitude in which we realise how much this community of life has continued to support us and desire our good despite how we have wounded it.
That experience continues to deepen until the ‘Contemplation to attain the love of God” at the very end of the Exercises (232). Here, gratitude knows itself as the love that wants to love in return – a love that knows no limits and which overflows to the whole of creation, which again mirrors and returns God’s love to me, “this is to reflect how God dwells in creatures: in the elements giving them existence, in the plants giving them life, in the animals giving them sensation, in man bestowing understanding. So He dwells in me… and makes a temple of me since I am created in the image of the Divine Majesty”. In recognising this, we also accept our responsibility to creation, to heal rather than wound and deplete, for insofar as I see this, every destructive action of mine wounds and dishonours God, ‘who works and labours for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth.’
Neither Ignatius nor Julian are pantheists or romantics; they are mystics who have been touched by the truth of God’s love ‘labouring’ for us and our lasting good in all created things. For both, the cross is inscribed in creation, as is the resurrection. They have seen that creation itself is part of our salvation and shares in God’s own salvific purpose. Loving God means loving God’s gifts — finding our vocation and our humanity in praising, reverencing, and serving the life that God has committed to our care.
V
These two mystics make change possible for us.
They open our eyes by opening our hearts to the world we live in. They invite us into our ‘common home’ to rediscover the life, the humanity, and the God we are always in danger of forgetting.
Once more, COP29 will alert us to the catastrophes we are facing.
They will tell us how we are running out of time, and will work hard to persuade us that we can—and must—change, not just for our own salvation but for the salvation of of all life on our planet. The real catastrophe lies not only in the destruction of the natural world and its cost to all life, but also in our failure to change.
It takes moral, political will and spiritual vision to do this. Julian and Ignatius can be good guides to rediscovering and living with joy and gratitude in our common home.
James Hanvey SJ
October 2024
[1] https://economicsofwater.watercommission.org/report/executive-summary-economics-of-water.pdf
