Meister Eckhart (1260-1329)
APPREHEND GOD in all things,
for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God
and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature–
even a caterpillar–
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.
WE OUGHT TO understand God equally in all things, for God is equally in all things.
All beings love one another.
All creatures are interdependent.
ALL CREATURES speak of God the way I have.
EARTH CANNOT escape heaven,
Flee it by going up,
or flee it by going down,
heaven still invades the earth,
energizes it,
makes it sacred.
All hiding places reveal God.
If you want to escape God
He runs into your lap.
For,
God is at home.
It is we who have gone out for a walk.
IF I WERE ALONE in the desert and feeling afraid,
I would want a child to be with me.
For then my fear would disappear and I would be made strong.
This is what life in itself can do because it is so noble, so full of pleasure and so powerful.
But if I could not have a child with me,
I would like to have at least a living animal at my side to comfort me.
Therefore,
let those who bring about wonderful things in their big, dark books take an animal – perhaps a dog – to help them.
The life within the animal will give strength in turn.
For equality gives strength in all things and at all times.
WHEN WE SAY “God is eternal,” we mean: God is eternally young, God is ever green, ever verdant, ever flowering.
Every action of God is new, for he makes all things new.
God is the newest thing there is; the youngest thing there is.
God is the beginning and if we are united to him we become new again.
THIS IS SALVATION: When we marvel at the beauty of created things and praise the beautiful providence of their Creator or when we purchase heavenly goods by our compassion for the works of creation.
IF THE ONLY PRAYER you say in your entire life is “Thank You,” that would suffice.
FROM ALL ETERNITY
God lies on a maternity bed
giving birth
The essence of God is birthing.
SPIRITUALITY
is not to be learned
by flight from the world,
by running away from things,
or by turning solitary and going apart
from the world.
Rather,
we must learn an inner solitude
wherever or with whomever we may be.
We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.
ALL GIFTS of nature and grace
have been given us on loan.
Their ownership is not ours, but God’s.
AT EVERY DEED, however puny,
that results in justice,
God is made glad,
glad through and through.
At such a time
there is nothing in the core of the Godhead
that is not tickled through and through
and that does not dance for joy.
-Meister Eckhart was a mystic who lived in the 14th century. (Mysticism in the Catholic tradition is the knowledge of God through experience.)
John Scotus Eriugena (810-877)
CHRIST WEARS “two shoes” in the world: scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.
Christopher Derrick
From his book, The Delicate Creation; Towards a Theology of the Environment (1972)
WE DO HAVE an urgent practical need to rediscover, reassert, and enact more fully our old lost awareness that God’s delicate creation is a good and holy thing, a work and presence of divinity, not dead and empty of all objective values, not by any means evil, not an enemy. Fully recovered and deeply felt, this awareness would lead almost automatically to a radically different handling of Nature, on lines more symbiotic and less exploitive, less appropriate to an enemy and more appropriate to a mother [or sister]: to adapt a phrase from Bertrand Russell, it would bring us back to a needed sense and practice of “cosmic piety.”
WE SHOULD SEE the environmental crisis as a warning, alerting us to a basic religious fact that we had forgotten, a basic religious duty in which we had been remiss. We need to accept the warning given, but then to forget all about the crisis and the danger, attending chiefly or only to the duty of giving to our environment the much more respectful handling that it actually deserves, and for no reason beyond its actual deserving.
[OUR] PRIME CONCERN will therefore be to reconnect the idea of God with the ideas of creation and immanence. While having no pantheistic tendency, without compromising God’s transcendence and the immense ontological gulf between the Creator and every creature, it will also – and more urgently – stress the other side of that ultimate dialectic, the creative and loving presence of God in all his works, all his possessions, and the consequent holiness of the phenomenal universe… This world belongs to God, not to us: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” In one sense, the whole environmental crisis arises from our habitual but extraordinary assumption that it belongs to us, to the human race, and to this generation in particular. We treat it in a fashion which is not only contemptuous but proprietorial, which is a great folly. By no conceivable title does this world belong to us. We did not make it: we cannot understand or control it except in the most marginal way: individually and collectively, we are catapulted into it by no choice of our own, allowed to occupy it for a short time, and then ejected: the environmental crisis shows up the unreality of any claim that we own it by right of conquest… There should be preached to us a more realistic idea of our own standing, a habitual awareness that we live here not as freeholders but as tenants and stewards, responsible always to somebody else, somebody who … loves this world and cares furiously about what happens to it.
DOCTRINALLY SPEAKING, an environmental theology will therefore put first things first. In a fashion highly “traditional” and somewhat alien to the present-day thinking of many Christians, it will concentrate initially upon the paradoxical things said and implied at the very beginning of the Bible and in the opening words of either Creed – God’s creative presence in his dearly-loved work; the consequent holiness of matter, our own persons included, and the given circumstances of our ordinary life; the Fall, our collective and culpable spoiling of an otherwise happy scene. Only upon that foundation, firmly established and deeply entrenched, will it erect the lofty structure of redemption and sacrament and of the additional and extraordinary goodness thus made available…
In the field of applied religion, of morals as against doctrine, this will involve the supplementary preaching of two rather unpopular virtues. In the first place, it will urge upon mankind a certain collective humility. This does not mean that it will take a low total-depravity view of human nature, or deny the old doctrine of man’s special dignity and vocation, his qualified lordship over this world. Humility does not work like that. The humble man is not the man who has a poor opinion of himself: he is, rather, the man whose merit and standing, whatever it may be, is not the object of his own habitual and anxious attention – the man, therefore, who feels no particular need to assert himself or dominate. At present, in its fretful desire to conquer this planet and outer space as well, our race displays collectively the vulgar assertiveness that we can sometimes observe (but never with much admiration) in the insecure, under-confident, alienated individual. Such collective behavior is not called for: it is a loutishness. Perhaps, like much individual loutishness, it calls for sympathy and reassurance rather than for rebuke. At the merely natural level, “cosmic piety” suggests that man is a very exceptional and splendid and sacred thing indeed, a lord of creation certainly and already, while Christianity develops this idea to almost extravagant heights. A sound environmental theology will offer us both reassurance and a degree of pained rebuke, a hint that we might do well to forget the boring obsession with conquest and think of happier things. It will suggest for man, in this life, a more gentle and indeed a more aristocratic role than that of the chip-on-shoulder lout, the swaggering bully, the exploiter, the tyrant: it will beseech him to enact, towards the rest of creation, the high relaxed courtesy that comes naturally to the humble.
In the second place, it will suggest for us a degree of practical asceticism [self-denial]: applied in daily life, it will certainly involve us all in a definitely simplified mode of existence, such as might seem alarmingly austere by the fat standards of today. It will probably be a much happier mode of existence, once we have got used to it; but in the early stages, it will dictate a rather painful mortification of the desire to control and the desire to dominate, and of general self-indulgence too. It will encourage us to be less greedy, less demanding, to have a more positive attitude towards existence as such, towards experience as given: if we still use the expression “standard of living,” this kind of theology will help us to give it a meaning less ridiculous than it has now. Thus sobered, we would shed many of the fretful complexities of present-day life – with reluctance at first, but soon with relief.
This would not be the kind of asceticism that despises and rejects the world: it would have exactly the opposite character, being rooted in an awareness of the enormous good that resides in even a very little – in commonplace things and small quantities and familiar routines… You criticize the given universe if you make impatient demands upon it, if you call for modification and particular arrangements: cars and champagne are excellent things, but if you call for them too insistently, you will be denying the more radical goodness of feet and water.
IT WILL BE our most practical course of action to put … religious motivation first, worrying much less about a survival that is temporary at the best, and worrying hardly at all about progress and development and conquest and our precious “standard of living.” The important thing will be the cultivation of an objectively worthy and well-mannered handling of the environment, considered as God’s work and property. If we thus seek first the Kingdom, those other things will, up to a point, be added unto us: otherwise, they are likely to prove very elusive indeed. The great lesson taught by the environmental crisis is that they cannot be captured forcibly in the course of a violent war against Nature. Our temporal well-being will be achieved lovingly or not at all.
WE NEED TO ASSERT and enact not only the goodness of this world but also the ontological goodness of its chief inhabitant, flawed and damaged though he plainly is, tiresome though he can often be to ourselves. Too easily, we forget his continuing splendor, detecting it perhaps in small children or at the time of first love, but forgetting it otherwise. Towards a recovered sense of reverence before humanity, no program of charity and courtesy and ceremonial would be too much.
THE STRONGEST OF ALL remedies is the daily habit of appreciative gratitude. We may not feel this naturally; but intellectually at least, we can recognize it as an appropriate response to the wholly surprising and undeserved gift of existence, and to this rather amazing world, and to all the apples, frogs, bears, cathedrals, fountains, worms, fireworks, icebergs, skyscrapers, flamingoes, snowflakes, bridges, alligators, honeycombs, girls, books, diamonds, ships, flames, hedgehogs, deserts, butterflies, and wine that we find within it. And for the Christian, a list of this kind will only be a preliminary, of relatively small account. Where this appreciative gratitude is not felt naturally, it should be cultivated… Even in lesser matters, we know that we owe thanks to our benefactors. Where the sentiment is not felt, there is a loutishness of the soul that may not be culpable; but if we refuse even the words and the outward forms of gratitude, we are guilty of bad manners in the highest degree. The necessity of prayer – and even the rule of its first formulation – might be considered to begin at this point: gratias agamus… It would be good manners, on our part, to make this a daily habit – to make it the whole of our prayers, if it comes to that, but at least their starting-point. And then, on some windy morning, we might open our eyes and for the first time catch sight of this world, our rare and fragile home.
– The Delicate Creation: Towards a Theology of the Environment, by Christopher Derrick. 1972. Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
WHAT WE CALL man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument… At the moment, then, of man’s victory over nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely “natural” – to their irrational impulses… Man’s conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be nature’s conquest of man.
The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis, pp. 40, 47. London, Geofrey Bless, 1962.
Honorius of Autun
THE TREE SENDS ITS ROOTS downward and its trunk upward, from which branches proceed, out of which leaves go forth: under these fruits hang down, in which seeds lie hidden. To this tree love is compared, through which the multitude of the faithful try to climb to the heights. The root which is fixed in the earth is the love with which one’s neighbor is loved on earth. The trunk rising to the heights is love loving God. The branches of the tree are the various virtues of charity, the leaves are good words; the flowers good will, the fruits good works, the seeds right doctrine.
– Expositio, PL 172, col. 278C–278D:
Kathleen (“Kat”) Hoenke
AS A PROFESSIONAL ECOLOGIST, I never thought I was a person who would need to experience an “ecological conversion,” but that is precisely what happened to me…
As an ecologist completely engrossed in the science of conservation, I was unaware that I was separating myself from nature and was blind to the seamless connection of conservation and our faith. Building a Saint Kateri Habitat became a spiritual experience for myself and for my family that I couldn’t have predicted. It was truly the ecological conversion Saint John Paul II promoted, and I’m incredibly grateful to have experienced it.
From the Catholic Rural Life Blog, 2019
Kathleen is the volunteer Program Director and Spatial Ecologist for the Saint Kateri Conservation Center.
Stratford Caldecott (1953-2014)
CHRISTIAN NON-DUALISM is trinitarian. The world is dying and passing away, which proves its “insubstantiality.” But in Christ the world is rising from death and ascending to the Father, since God loves it. What looks like “insubstantiality” is really the fact that God’s act of creation is only half completed (from our point of view, in time). In faith we see that it has an eternal destiny in God: that is, not in relation to God, but in God, whose otherwise unknowable interior has been revealed to us in the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
–Communio 34.4, Winter 2007
Marybeth Lorbiecki
NOW MORE THAN EVER, this Catholic imagination is needed, not only to renew the world through activism, but for its own survival—for the inspiration to renew the Church itself. It needs a groundswell of new directions, new energies, and new ways to show meaningful, inspiring servant leadership in the world. Catholics are an untapped alternative energy source, and they need to be invited to the conservation table to participate not just as humans and fellow planetary citizens—as many are already involved for these reasons—but also specifically as Catholics. Presently, ecological teachings have been perceived as sideline issues rather than as core to whom Catholics are and dream themselves to be.
-Conservation and the Catholic Imagination, Minding Nature: Summer 2010, Volume 3, Number 2
Cristina Gaztelu Vargas (1994-2018)
Henry David Thoureau una vez escribió: “Antes que el amor, el dinero, la fe, la fama y la justicia, dadme la verdad.”
Esto es así porque la verdad es algo que trasciende y que muchos no llegan a comprender. Basan los cimientos de su vida en aspectos mundanos, en lo superficial que la sociedad les pone en bandeja. Ser admirado, popular, atrayente. Tener poder, fama, dinero. Ser querido, mimado, protegido. La fama, el poder, el dinero y hasta el amor, se esfuman en cuando menos lo esperas. Sí, incluso el amor. Porque hay muchas formas de amor, pero el amor que nace de la verdad es el único que es verdadero y perdura más allá de nuestro concepto mundano del tiempo. Es decir que sin la verdad el amor no existiría. Porque sólo el amor que es cierto es el que mueve el mundo, el amor fingido, cualquier energía fingida y que, por tanto no es real, no mueve nada que luego no se desvanezca.
Estos hechos no son conocidos ni interiorizados por tantísimas personas porque no han llegado al punto al que tú ya has llegado. Y si han llegado, entonces no han sabido percibir ni sentir en profundidad la verdad, que les llamaba a gritos desde dentro y trataba de conectar contigo desde el exterior, a través de continuos signos que sólo tu ser verdadero puede ver. Por eso cuando estamos inmersos en el vacío cuando vienen los malos tiempos, es cuando podemos conectar con nuestro ser interior. Porque no está cegado con las distracciones del mundo. Nuestro ser, que es puro, salvaje y humano, está incorrupto por el mundo ficticio, pero también oculto y reprimido por culpa de esas presiones, miedos y prejuicios que la sociedad ha ido imprimiendo en nosotros.
Si logras escuchar esa llama cuando te escuezan los ojos de llorar y la garganta de gritar, entonces por fin habrás renacido. Habrás emprendido, sin darte cuenta y creyendo que ya no te quedan fuerzas ni motivos, tu verdadero camino hacia la plenitud; a través de la verdad.
Diarios 14/09/2016 
“Una vez que algo muestra sus verdaderos colores, no puedo intentar pintar encima. No. No puedo tratar de disfrazar la verdad para no hundirme ante el desengaño. Aceptar la verdad me ha hecho LIBRE. No me libera del dolor, pero le da sentido y lo llega a disminuir. No comprender el por qué de las cosas es de lo que más me martillea la cabeza. Una vez que conozco por qué debo pasar página…las cosas empiezan a cobrar sentido. Las aguas vuelven a su cauce. Es un proceso doloroso, pero todo se mueve, todo cambia. EL AMOR Y LA VERDAD NOS SALVAN.
Diarios – 22 de Febrero de 2016 
Patricia Gualinga
WE CAN’T feed our children oil.
WE WANT THE AMAZON to be valued for what it is, not just an economic resource. We are standing up for our lives, yours, the entire world and for the lives of our future generations.
-Amazon Watch
WE NEED A DIFFERENT KIND of democracy, where nature is not simply an external object, but a subject. It must be an actor. This compels us to rethink how we are inventing democracy.
– International Symposium on the Rights of Nature, 2018
DESTROYING THE AMAZON is the destruction of the world. If they don’t realize that, we are lost.
-Amnesty.org
Patricia Gualinga is an Indigenous rights leader and the former International Relations Director for the globally celebrated indigenous community of Sarayaku in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon.