Thursday 30 April 2009

Transformational truth

The Rev. Canon Sally Bingham certainly knows about the environment and how that connects with spirituality. In her new book "Love God, Heal Earth : 21 Leading Religious Voices Speak Out on Our Sacred Duty to Protect the Environment" she has collected a great series of inspirational essays from Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist leaders that address the the moral responsibility we all have to protect the Earth, prevent climate change, and ultimately create a new humanity which acknowledges the interconnectedness of all life:

Climate Change is Not Just Inconvenient Truth, It's Transformational Truth

The Rev. Jim Deming, United Church of Christ, Nashville, Tenn. writes in his essay "From Southern Fried Guilt to Spiritual Responsibility".

...Many of us in the South grew up with the tradition of altar calls, where confessions were public and emotional. But it seemed the "back-sliders" were just as numerous, trundling down the aisle once again as they confessed that they had, as the Apostle Paul says, done that which they ought not to have done and not done that which they should have.

What then, are we asking folks to do when we ask them to change more than their light bulbs? Is there something I can learn from my "born again" tradition, born in the piney woods of East Texas and the rolling hills of middle Tennessee? What keeps us on the path of environmental righteousness and off the backslider's bench?

I believe that we much understand that we are asking people to change their basic values, not just their lightbulbs, and we go about asking will have a profound effect on the success and longevity of this change. I believe that values are changed when our experiences and observations don't meet our presuppositions, and someone we trust invites us to a new vision of what could be. In this important moment of history, what we are asking of people is deep, for the climate crisis is not just an inconvenient truth; it is a transformational truth based on a new set of values, a new way of looking at the world.
Bringing the moral aspect into environmentalism is "going to have a bigger effect on the change that has to happen; more than politicians, scientists"
Link
Read more!