In my first post about Green Meditation, I suggested that all true theology is ecology. Where it isn't, it is because theology has gotten off track. Next, I promised to write something on how to learn Green Meditation. But really, that is just a matter of applying this same basic principle to every aspect of human activity until its meaning is inescapably clear.
The current imbalance between theology and ecology (which weights the value of human culture more heavily than the Earth) is at the root of our 21st century ecological crisis. That crisis was at least 10,000-12,000 years in the making, so it won't be righted in a day. The rebalancing of a species that has lost its niche in nature is necessarily a lengthy process, just as it took a very long time for us to lose that niche in the first place. A certain kind of thinking got us into this problem, and it will take a very different kind to get us out of it again. But it won't happen in a small way. And it won't happen fast. That is mostly what I mean when I speak of Green Meditation. "Green" doesn't refer to the emphasis of our thinking, its focus, or to its "color." It indicates an altogether different scale of mind.
In one of his essays from the early 1990s, the late geo-logian Thomas Berry wrote about the meadow he discovered as a 12-year-old child when his family moved from the center of town to the edge of town. The meadow lay just the other side of a creek that ran behind their newly-built house, and Berry's encounter with it seems to have set the course of his life:
This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever.
This is as good a description of Green Meditation as we're likely to find in the writings of those who wandered from theology to ecology and back again during the late 2oth century. Berry understood the oneness of theology and ecology, and he seems to have been willing to apply that principle across the full range of human activity--to economics, to politics, to education, to religion...to whatever. Nevertheless, the full scale of the problem was not yet visible to him (or to anyone else, for that matter) in 1993.
We had no idea then how big Green Meditation would need to be, or how far it would require us to go. The meadow Berry took his bearings from so early in life was, after all, essentially the edge of a suburb--a good place to start our lives as environmental activists since it was where most of us lived, but hardly the place to make a final stand. Whatever its value as nature metaphor, a suburban meadow is still a possession for the one who contemplates it (even one who contemplates it ecologically) and is therefore essentially a kind of park.
Berry's meadow is a good metaphor for 20th century environmental thinking: In principle it was right on target, but its scale was much too small. The problem was, it lay too close to where human beings lived and worked and was thus too fully defined by human values and human needs. But that problem wasn't limited only to our environmental thinking; our theological thinking likewise offered us only the most domesticated kind of God.
In fact, these two areas of understanding--theology and ecology--are directly proportionate. It's hard to have a deep understanding of one without having an equally deep understanding of the other. The Bible tells us that God created us in his image, but the truth seems to be that we created him in ours. And why not? Who wants a God who isn't created in our image? Who wants the God of Job?
Actually, if we read the book of Job from a Green Meditation point of view, it quickly becomes obvious that there is a profound gap between the theological and ecological understanding of God--that is, between the God of the meadow and the God of the wild. At bottom, that gap--and how to bridge it--is what the book is about. By the end of it, Job has "learned" Green Meditation, but not before he has had his anthropocentric view of the world around him thoroughly dismantled by God.
At the end of the book, Job is allowed to return to the "meadow," or habitable margin, of the life he lived before, but he no longer takes his moral bearings off of it. How could he? The mere thought would be impossible, if not horrifying, after all that he has been through.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to scare anyone away from Green Meditation by suggesting that in studying it we may be tempting Nature to offer us lessons we won't be able to survive (or won't want to). I only want to suggest that Job has lots of pressing questions about life and suffering, and why things are the way they are. Those questions eat away at him from within. The boils and sores he suffers externally are nothing compared to what is going on inside of him.
In this way Job is a kind of symbol for the unsustainability of modern life, because these same kinds of questions eat away at us as we live along the meadowlands on the very margins of nature. What Green Meditation teaches us is that it is because we live on the margins that we have such questions, and the fears and anxieties that inevitably accompany them. Green Meditation offers us the answers to those questions, just as God does to Job, but we don't get those answers by asking them in the meadow. Like Job, we find them in the wild.
