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HEAVEN & EARTH

A growing number of religious women feel they have been called on to help protect the environment

9/4/00

By RHONDA PARKS MANVILLE

NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER

rparks@newspress.com

Working in the organic garden at La Casa de Maria in Montecito -- with ripe tomatoes at her feet and the hot sun overhead -- Sister Marilyn Rudy, a Catholic nun, is trying to save the Earth.

For decades she served God and the church by caring for the homeless and people with AIDS in Los Angeles. And now she is one of a growing number of religious women, many of them nuns, who believe they are called to protect the environment, thereby saving creation from destruction.

"More and more, I saw that the way we treat the Earth is the way we treat the poor -- as an object not a subject, something to be moved out of our way," said Rudy, who grows organic food with another ecologically minded nun, Maureen Murray, on the La Casa de Maria property. "Saving cans is not really where it is at. It is in joining the spirit of the Creator, and being part of the Earth, so that you start to see people differently, and to see God there."

A religiously based concern for the Earth also is growing among members of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches and Jewish synagogues. While science and religion have not always been compatible, scientists and environmentalists are applauding these efforts. During a major environmental conference at Yale University in the spring, for example, scientists from around the world agreed that religion has a critical role to play in the care of the Earth.

"Science can come up with the knowledge of how ecological systems work, but it can't come up with the values of stewardship that are necessary to carry this work out," Westmont College biology professor Jeff Schloss said. "That is the job of ethics and religion."

At the heart of the so-called "eco-spirituality" movement is the belief that nature is the primary and unfolding revelation of God. At the forefront of this new frontier are some Catholic nuns in the United States, who are forging new alliances with one another to carry out the work. Rudy, for example, belongs to the order of St. Joseph of Carondelet, and Murray is a sister of the Religious of Sacred Heart. And their work is being done on the La Casa de Maria property, which is owned by the religious women in the Immaculate Heart Community.

"The Earth is such a profound teacher," Rudy said. "The universe is ever calling us to return to our beginnings, to touch our core, to hear the Earth and all creation and to bring the knowledge learned into our present life."

At La Casa de Maria, Murray and Rudy three years ago created a project called "Eartheart," in which they share the principles of eco-spirituality with others by growing food from seed and leading retreats on contemplative gardening. They till the soil by hand, grow worms and make compost. They pray and meditate, focusing on nature as divine revelation. They recoil at the mere thought of commercial fertilizers and pesticides, which they view as toxic poisons. The sisters advise people to live lightly on the Earth, to respect it and honor it and heal it.

Several weeks ago, nearly 100 environmentalist nuns came to La Casa de Maria for a meeting of Sisters of Earth, an informal network of religious women dedicated to environmental spiritual practice in its many forms. Most were from the United States but several came from as far away as Africa, Europe and South America. The group, which includes lay women in the sciences and education, meets every two years. Its primary purpose is to support those who are trying to save the environment, a movement still making inroads into the wider Catholic community.

While the movement appears to embrace some so-called "New Age" elements and rituals, such as chanting, singing and dancing to honor the Earth, the sisters dismiss the label as meaningless and dismissive. What they are doing could more accurately be considered a recognition of ancient wisdoms and rituals that respect the rhythms of nature, they say. And their work marks a return to traditions of a simpler time: Many American religious orders in the 19th and early 20th centuries grew their own food, as Rudy and Murray are doing now. Elsewhere in the United States, religious women are using solar energy and building straw bale structures on their property.

"Some may see this work as vanguard, but many people will tell you that all of this will be mainstream in 10 years," said Sarah Taylor, an assistant professor of religion at Northwestern University, who studied the movement while earning her doctorate at UCSB.

Catholic nuns have worked in uncharted territory before, leading the way in caring for the sick and poor, serving abandoned children in orphanages, and fighting the death penalty. These days, instead of starting hospitals as they did earlier in the century, some nuns have started eco-spirituality communities, such as Genesis Farm in Blairstown, N.

J., an organic farm and spirituality center.

Now, they are turning their attention to the needs of the Earth.

"Now that they see what is happening to the environment, they are responding to that, too," Taylor said.

In Santa Maria, St. Francis Sister Janet Corcoran carries out her passion for the green way of life by helping make Marian Medical Center an environmentally conscious member of the community. The hospital has won several environmental awards for reducing the amount of waste it sends to landfills.

The hospital has a diligent recycling program and operates a free "store" in which community members can help themselves to clean supplies and equipment that sometimes were used only once, such as surgical scissors and scrubs, sterile water bottles and big soap containers that can be used to store golf clubs.

These efforts are in keeping with the somewhat radical vision of St. Francis of Assisi, who had a great respect for all creation, said Corcoran, a Sisters of Earth member.

"St. Francis really is the patron saint of ecology," she said. "He called everything brother and sister -- a piece of wood, the sun and the moon -- and he saw nature as his family. There is this sense that people are in control of the world, but what we need is to respect and foster our relationship with Mother Earth. We are all interconnected. We are pilgrims here for just a little while, and we need to respect what God has given us."

The sisters have come into the environmental movement from two points of entry -- the peace and social-justice movements and through their interest in feminism and women's issues.

"They quickly discovered that the people hardest hit by pesticides, drought, bad water and polluted air are the poorest of the poor," Taylor said. "And they also came to see that link between the violence and oppression of women, and the abuse of the land. For a lot of them, this was the next step, from feminism to ecological consciousness."

It was work with the poor that inspired Rudy and Murray to carry out a new vocation of helping people by assisting the Earth.

"Since we are all of the Earth, we are all connected," Murray said. "I see this as the primary revelation of God. If we are violent with the Earth, we see violent relationships. The point is to be in harmony with all living things. Since this is God's creation, it is imminently important that I do everything I can to foster harmony with the Earth."

Global warming, ozone depletion, rain-forest destruction and toxic-waste disposal are just some of the symptoms that indicate all is not well on the planet, the nuns say.

"We're on a perilous path," Murray said. "It think it's very urgent. Look at the incidence of cancer, of asthma. There are more and more health problems with young children. We are ruining it for them."

Much of the growing interest in the Catholic eco-spirituality movement has come from religious women's communities, rather than from the men's, Taylor noted. One of the key reasons may be that women in the Catholic religious tradition are technically considered lay people, not clergy, and that gives them more room for experimentation.

"Since men are part of the church hierarchy, they are less willing to challenge the power and the hierarchy, because they are part of it. The women have less to lose," Taylor said.

Ironically, it was the writings of a man -- the Passionist Catholic priest and so called "geologian of the cosmos" Thomas Berry -- who inspired many of the women in Sisters of Earth. He is the author of "The Whole Earth Papers" and "The Dream of the Earth," in which he outlines what some Christians call the "new cosmology" -- a new and Earth-focused way of looking at the Judeo-Christian story of creation and the origin of human kind.

"The future of the Catholic Church in America, in my view, will depend above all on its capacity to assume a religious responsibility for the fate of the Earth," Berry wrote in a 1982 essay. "My question is this: After we burn our lifeboat, how will we stay afloat? What will then be the need of religion, Christianity or the church? Only by assuming its religious responsibilities for the fate of the Earth can the church regain any effective status either in the human community or in the Earth process."

Berry's teachings resonated with another local nun who devoted herself to the cause. St. Joseph's Sister Toni Nash, La Casa de Maria's program coordinator, helps spread the word about the environmental crisis by teaching others about the new cosmology.

She explains: "Cosmology is a group's creation story, and it lays the foundation for how people view themselves on Earth, where they came from, and what their purpose is.

"Our cosmology has been that God came, created us and the world, and then left," she said. "It's that view that allows us to treat the Earth as a thing to be explored and exploited. We do not see it as a sacred entity."

Under the new cosmology, the creation and the Earth and all its creatures are considered part of an unfolding, sacred process in which human beings have only recently begun to play a part, considering that the Earth is approximately 4 billion years old.

"We are reclaiming evolution and understanding its sacred dimensions -- it is a world still in evolution, being created as we speak. God's active creation is ongoing," Nash said. "We need to understand that when we interfere with this process, when we damage our Earth and pollute our water, we are doing something significant."

Human beings must change their behavior if the Earth is to be saved, she said.

"We are destroying the Earth at a rapid pace, and we don't have a lot of time," she said, noting that water pollution in some streams has caused new generations of fish to be born without reproductive organs.

"The water that we drink is the water that surrounds our babies in the womb," she said. "We need to stop the destruction, and put alternatives into place to repair what's been broken."