Abstract
One morning, during a sabbatical in Costa Rica, my children and I sought a viewing of a quetzal in its natural habitat in the Monteverde Cloudforest Preserve. The quetzal is arguably the most beautiful bird in Central America. It is covered with shiny, metallic green feathers with a bright red breast and long streamers for its tail. Its train is so long that when the male quetzal leaves its perch it often flies backward for a moment to avoid damaging its sweeping tail feathers. With the help of a guide, we found a female quetzal in the forest understory preparing a nest in the decaying trunk of an old tree. Glittering in the light, we watched her bounce from the tree trunk to a limb overhead while making a whining, plaintive song. Her call sounded like the yelp of a newborn puppy, yearning and soulful. We listened to the quetzal for a while until she sallied forth through the damp forest. I resonated deeply to the longing in the quetzal’s call, and felt myself summoned into a sort of relationship with her through this song. The beauty of creation—the wonder of existence in the great gift that is life itself— echoed inside me in the cathedral quiet of this montane forest. In the refrain of a Native American prayer,
Beauty is before me/In my youth I am aware of it
And in old age I shall walk quietly/The beautiful trail.1
For me, the beautiful trail—the natural world—serves as the primary site for the sort of spiritual encounters observing the quetzal provided.
But ask the animals and they will teach you; the birds of the air and they will tell you; speak to the Earth and it will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you
(Job 12:7–8)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Native American Prayer, “Now Talking God,” in Earth Prayers: From Around the World, 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations for Honoring the Earth, ed. Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 32.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Norton Book of American Nature Writing, ed. John Elder and Robert Finch (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 183.
The sensibility here is borrowed from Friedrich Hölderlin by way of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur. Hölderlin writes that “Full of merit, and yet poetically, dwells man on this Earth” (quoted in Paul Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretations [Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1974], 466–67). Poetry is a meaning-making activity that invests life with a measure of coherence and purpose. Language is a world-creating exercise that converts existence in empty space into habitation or “dwelling,” in Hölderlins parlance, in a world charged with rich possibilities.
Graham Harvey, “Animism—A Contemporary Perspective,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron R. Taylor, et al., 2 vols. (New York: Continuum, 2005), 1:81.
“Pseudo-Titus,” in Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 239.
David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 2010), 47.
Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 149–50.
For wider discussion, see Mark I. Wallace, “Crum Creek Spirituality: Earth as a Living Sacrament,” in Theology That Matters: Ecology, Economy, and God, ed. Darby Kathleen Ray (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 121–37, and http://www.jesusradicals.com/on-christian-animism/.
For this perspective see Norman C. Habel, “Introducing the Earth Bible,” in Readings from the Perspective of Earth, ed. Habel, vol. 1 of The Earth Bible (Sheffield, England: Sheffield, 2000), 25–37.
The five volumes of The Earth Bible, edited variously by Norman C. Habel, Shirley Wurst, and Vicky Balabanski from 2000 to 20002 set the standard for systematic ecoexegesis of the Bible. Similarly, see Norman C. Habel and Peter Trudinger, eds. Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008),
and Richard Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010).
Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 21.
The emerging field of ecopneumatology—nature-based reconstructions of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit—is represented by the work of Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007);
Chung Hyun-Kyung, “Welcome the Spirit; Hear Her Cries: The Holy Spirit, Creation, and the Culture of Life,” Christianity and Crisis 51 (July 15, 1991): 220–23;
Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003);
Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); idem, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997);
Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, God’s Spirit: Transforming a World in Crisis, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1995);
Nancy Victorin Vangerud, The Raging Hearth: Spirit in the Household of God (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000);
Mark I. Wallace, Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); idem, Green Christianity: Five Ways to a Sustainable Future (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), note: much of the material in this chapter is drawn from these two volumes;
and Michael Welker, God the Spirit, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994).
On the biblical and theological history of feminine language and imagery for the Spirit, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Feminine Imagery for the Divine: The Holy Spirit, the Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition,” Saint Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37 (1993): 111–40;
Gary Steven Kinkel, Our Dear Mother the Spirit: An Investigation of Count Zinzendorf’s Theology and Praxis (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990);
and Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), especially 128–31.
Ellen Armour, “Toward an Elemental Theology,” in Theology That Matters, ed. Darby Kathleen Ray (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 54.
“The Creed of Chalcedon,” in Philip Schaff, ed. The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1983), 2:62.
These phrases that speak to the reconciliation of apparently opposing positions to form a burst of new insight into reality are used, respectively, by Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins from the 6th German ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933);
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977);
and Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993).
See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 172–277.
See Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Humanity Books, 1988).
Denis Edwards, “For Your Immortal Spirit Is in All Things,” in Denis Edwards, ed. Faith Revealing—Earth Healing: Ecology and Christian Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 2001), 56.
See also Amos Yong’s Pentecostal theology of Spirit-filled creation in The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 173–228,
and Sharon Betcher’s ecofeminist pneumatology in “Grounding the Spirit: An Ecofeminist Pneumatology,” in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 315–66.
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 7.
The seventh-generation ideal is also identified today as the triple bottom line business model (people, planet, profit). In this model, financial profits depend upon carefully managed environmental and social performance. Here corporate, societal, and ecological interests dynamically interact and mutually support one another. This model is analyzed as the “new bottom line” in Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 227–40;
as “oikonomia economics” in Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 138–75;
and “ecologically reformed capitalism” in Roger S. Gottlieb, A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 81–110.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Kirsteen Kim, and Amos Yong
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wallace, M.I. (2013). Christian Animism, Green Spirit Theology, and the Global Crisis today. In: Kärkkäinen, VM., Kim, K., Yong, A. (eds) Interdisciplinary and Religio-Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268990_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268990_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44371-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26899-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
