Eco Catholic is an exploration of the green Catholic imagination and ecological spirituality. Contributors include Sharon Abercrombie, a journalist who has covered the environment, spirituality, women’s issues, animal rights and social justice for many newspapers, and Fr. Charles Morris, a priest of the archdiocese of Detroit who teaches courses in sustainability at Madonna University in Livonia, Mich.
Recently, a friend said, “We need to have a mindset of abundance. God is infinite and there is no lack in God.” I’m decidedly uncomfortable with this sentiment and similar popular ideas, all about material wealth with a spiritual spin to it.
I am amazed at how clever we’ve been at using the Bible and theology to justify our positions. And we are still at it, justifying our extreme wealth in the face of global poverty with platitudes about abundance.
We have an unhealthy dependency on 19 million barrels per day of liquefied plant and animal matter from the Mesozoic era. That works out to almost three gallons every day for every man, woman, and child in the country. Remember the harrowing footage of oil spewing out of BP's Gulf well? The United States uses more than four times the amount of the spill in one day.
The easy portability of oil's explosive energy has made us the most mobile humans in history. Fears of peak oil notwithstanding, it is also still very cheap. The gallon of gas that was $2.30 in real dollars in 1960 cost only $2.73 in 2010. No surprise, then, that petroleum powers 95 percent of all transportation in the United States.
The Sierra Club's Beyond Oil campaign proposes to move the United States off oil in the next 20 years. An article on the Club's Web site sketches out how it can be done.
I like the Christmas season, with its unique high spirits, days of leisure, and surcease from normal workloads. But you can’t beat the feeling I get in early January when the decorations are put away and things return to normal. I’ve had my fun and relaxation, and now it’s time to get moving with renewed purpose. It’s almost like there is a palpable, collective energy in the air whispering, “Arise. It’s a new beginning.”
So hope emerges, oozing out of the fresh pages of a colorful new calendar. The past is gone, the future allures, silently beckoning with a finger to come try again. Whether written or not, most of us make some sort of new year’s resolutions, in spite of the fact that we usually don’t keep them for very long, if at all. Is there any way out of this pattern of zeal and determination morphing into laziness and the comfortable old status quo?
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I am here to support your desire for self-improvement. I am the Angel of Encouragement drowning out the voices that tell you not to bother trying. I am Lady Wisdom offering advice on how to make this year different.
Many people lament and resist the darkness of these winter days, refusing to find anything good about them. But since they are a reality, how much better to put aside our prejudices and find joy in them. Genesis 1 says, “God separated the light from the darkness,” and “God looked at everything God had made and found it very good.” If God finds the darkness very good, then surely we can too.
My kinship with the dark began in childhood when my brothers and I spent long hours outside at night playing hide-and-go-seek. I recall the thrill of lying in the bushes, one with the shadows, as silent as the night, heart pounding, evading my pursuers. I would run far into the pasture or hide in the grain bins with no thought of fear or danger. The things of earth were my friends, so what lay there beyond my sight caused no alarm. The dark was my ally, the less moon and stars the better.
The following little drama takes place often when we visit our nearest organic food emporium. My wife and I wait in the checkout line. We watch the persons in front of us pay for their free-range eggs, their pesticide-free spinach, their freshly-squeezed herbal tinctures and their organic vitamins. Then the checker asks them to choose between paper or plastic. Either option is a choice that harms the environment, either by destroying trees or clogging landfills.
Using energy efficiency alone, the United States can go a long way toward rolling its contribution to global climate change back to safe levels. The TopTen USA Web site lists the top ten most efficient products in a number of categories -- from televisions to cars to refrigerators to laptops to desktop monitors.
What is spirituality? It is a steepening, like soaking tea leaves. It is a steepening of the mind and heart, body and soul. We are the leaves, the bodies immersed in a broth of mystery, absorbing the way of nature and the way of transcendence.
Spirituality is a way of living. It is an attitude, a motivation, a feeling practiced and a practiced feeling. A feeling practiced becomes a habitual way of feeling. And a practiced feeling points to the recurrence as well as the deepening that comes with a process of valuation, recurrent integration, and sustained conviction. Spirituality is not the end or purpose of living, the goal for which one lives. It is a manner, a style, process or method by which one lives in light of the goal. It is the stuff of character by which one creates character. Spirituality shows itself in the seasoning, which accompanies one's way of being…. like tea, one can be steeped! It is the steepening which gives character to one's spirituality. How are you steeped?
Are you steeped into some tradition, a way of life and being which has informed your thoughts, your words, your choices and actions? How have you steeped yourself? Lightly or thoroughly?
Henry David Thoreau was America's foremost nature writer and philosopher. Below is the entry in his journal for Dec. 25, in 1857. He kept careful record of his forays and expeditions outdoors on the outskirts of Concord, Mass. He was a careful observer of the natural world. Here he writes of his discoveries on a Christmas Day walk and makes an observation that is also good advice for all of us.
"Dec. 25, 1857: A strong wind from the northwest is gathering the snow into picturesque drifts behind the walls. As usual they resemble shells more than anything, sometimes prows of vessels, also the folds of a white napkin or counterpane dropped over a bonneted head. There are no such picturesque snow drifts as are formed behind loose or open stone walls. Already yesterday it had drifted so much, i.e. so much ground was bare, that there were as may carts as sleights in the streets.
Just beyond Hubbard's Bridge, on Conant's Brook Meadow, I am surprised to find a tract of ice, some thirty by seven or eight rods, blown quite bare. It shows how unstable the snow is.
I’ve long been a fan of winter. I just like its paraphernalia, its garb, its customs, necessities, limitations and snowflakes. As a kid I suffered every summer from hay fever, welcoming the relief the frosts always brought. A spell of living in the country also helped me cultivate a taste for the cold times. Winter is different away from the cities and suburbs.
An acquired taste perhaps, I believe the season of winter deserves a prominent niche in the Academy of the Underrated.
Many of you are probably familiar with Kathy in the comics. The 
quintessential shopper, she’s gullible to every sales pitch, buys expensive things she doesn’t need, and is neurotic about buying the perfect gift. She wouldn’t be funny or popular if she didn’t reflect some truth about our obsessions.
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Jesus came to free us from our obsessions, so let’s give him a chance to help us do things differently. We don’t have to be mindless consumers, overburdening our lives with material possessions. I teach classes now and then on “Clearing Your Clutter,” and it’s amazing to see how people cling to possessions, even when they are burdensome and unfreeing.
Christmas will be here in a few days, but it’s not too late to take a few immediate actions to defy the consumption patterns that assail us like the flu bug.
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