Cultivating the “unquiet heart”: Ecology,education,and Christian faith

Living against despair: Hope in our time

In September 2016, President Barack Obama told The New York Times that what he has learned about climate change since taking office is terrifying. ³ He is not alone. For many who read the science, the prospects are alarming. So alarming, in fact, that some climate scientists have said we have now passed the point of no return. Of course, this is not news for vulnerable human communities who have experienced ecological devastation or long been subjected to racist and colonialist practices of ecological pillaging and toxic dumping. For too many communities, the point of no return disappeared from our rear-view windows some time ago.

Despite this pessimistic, seemingly hopeless portrait of the earth’s future, practical theologians must ask, “How shall humans live?” How shall we understand this question in relationship to a planet that seemingly has passed the point of no return? How shall we live without succumbing to a deep and unremitting ecological despair, a paralyzing loss of confidence in a good future for the earth?

Resisting pervasive ecological malaise, an ecologically grounded Christian practical theology concerns itself with the cultivation and nurture of people of faith who inhabit God’s world well. It asks, “What is the vocation of the human being in God’s world, and what kinds of communities and practices are needed to ground this work?” As Hilda Koster argues in her essay, ⁴ these are rather anthropocentric questions and appropriate ones. To answer these questions, we must begin with a theological anthropology recast in an ecological and eschatological frame. This recast anthropology necessitates a new understanding of the work of the church, an understanding that can be enriched by resilience thinking. These ecologically reframed anthropological and ecclesial perspectives invite new proposals for how we understand Christian vocation and the kind of ecologically grounded religious education that will nurture people of faith in the meantime.

Ecological and eschatological anthropology

Theological anthropology has, historically, turned on such quandaries as determining what distinguishes the human being from other creatures. In his 1985 landmark text, God in Creation, however, Jürgen Moltmann asks a new question: What difference would it make to instead imagine the human according to what links us with other creatures? ⁵

Perhaps there are clues in the Yahwist account of creation in the second chapter of Genesis. The clue is in the language: the human, Adam, is fashioned from the fertile topsoil, adamah. Hebrew Bible scholar Ted Hiebert has argued that the human’s origins in the soil, and the accompanying charge to tend or even serve the earth, are the paradigmatic human vocation. ⁶ It is a call to live simply and in harmony with the planet: tending the earth with care and, even more, subjecting human will to the vast webs of biological interdependence.

Biblical accounts of creation, and the myths of human origins contained therein, tap into deep human memory. They are powerful metaphors that continue to speak to human life and vocation in all kinds of ecological contexts. Moltmann cautions us, however, that human beings are not meant to return to a “paradisal primordial condition.” ⁷ For one thing, the state of the planet precludes us from returning to a mythical perfection. That is, perhaps, obvious. Anthropologies that place disproportionate weight on these origin stories are prone—perhaps even guaranteed—to elicit despair, because what they demand is impossible.

Even if it were possible, however, a regressive anthropology presents a theological problem. It truncates the active and creative presence of God throughout history, and the active and creative presence of God luring us toward a future with hope. The God of creation is the God of origins, the God of continuous creativity, and the God of a future that is open. The underlying premise, Moltmann insists, is that “creation is not yet finished, and has not as yet reached its end.” ⁸ Creation is an unfinished world in which we, unfinished creatures, live and move and have our being. That means that humans live within an unfolding history of creation and live toward a “new creation.” Human identity must be located in memory, in history, and in an eschatological future. We live in the in-between.

To be sure, some formulations of eschatology have sometimes, even fairly, been castigated as impeding the work of ecological responsibility. One well-known megachurch pastor, a couple of years ago, boasted, “Save the environment? I know who made the environment. He’s coming back, and he’s going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV.” ⁹

This idea—that God’s alternative future involves an abandonment or even destruction of this world—means that Christian theologians must wrestle with the images of heaven and earth and their very real implications for Christian life. Instead of understanding heaven as the place to which humans will be whisked away upon our bodily death, or at some appointed time, Moltmann compellingly describes heaven as “always the space of the possible,” already open to the earth. ¹⁰ Intimately related, the spheres of heaven and earth together anticipate God’s renewing work of new creation, which will make a dwelling place for God, with unhindered and boundlessly fruitful communication between heaven and earth. ¹¹ As Richard Floyd has written, in this tension, “Moltmann walks the fault line between a hopeful orientation toward the future and a humble cherishing of the good green earth.” ¹² Humans dwell along this fault line between possibility and present actuality. This creates in us a tension, often described as the “already and not yet.” But as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, creative tension can be a force for good and for change in the world. ¹³

An eschatological and ecological anthropology is needed for our time. Such an anthropology necessitates a willingness to live in and for our unfinished world. This willingness, and all of the hoping, striving, and disappointment it implies, is perhaps best described by Moltmann as the “unquiet heart.” He writes,

In this hope the soul does not soar above our vale of tears to some imagined heavenly bliss, nor does it sever itself from the earth … It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in us. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. ¹⁴

A resilient church

I think a little part of me has always been looking for a Church of the Unquiet Heart. This church is the struggling church—the church living in the midst of creatio continua. ¹⁵ In ecological terms, this church is awaiting, discovering, and anticipating the new creation together with our whole ecosystem. As Paul wrote to the Romans, the whole creation—not just humans—is groaning in labor pains, awaiting liberation and redemption. ¹⁶

In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew assaulted the nation of Haiti. Already battered and only partially rebuilt after a severe earthquake in 2010, the effects were devastating. As one woman interviewed by The Washington Post put it, “This is killing us. There is nothing left to live on. Our trees and our crops are gone.” ¹⁷ Haiti’s history of colonization, enslavement, and ongoing paternalism and occupation has stripped the land, impoverished human communities, and overburdened urban centers. It is, perhaps, as clear an expression as I can imagine of what Paul described as creation in bondage and subjected to futility. Despair is a real threat in Haiti. In the countryside of Haiti, however, a different history of creation is unfolding. The Mouvman Peyizan Papaye has built six eco-villages, each of which is home to ten families who are learning to live in relationship to the earth after evacuating Port-au-Prince following the 2010 earthquake. Though the whole creation continues to groan, these tiny, simple, verdant eco-villages are a kind of testimony to heaven being thrown open, just a little. Haiti is a religiously diverse country. And yet, the struggling church lives in any place in which communities of faith and conscience struggle, with unquiet hearts, to respond to the space of possibility thrown open on earth: to live responsibly and with care in relationship to the earth; to identify signs and evidence of beauty, flourishing, and promise; to anticipate the renewing of the earth. Where these burdens and strains are carried and honored, there too should be the struggling church. It is a resilient church.

In recent years, scholars in the field of environmental studies have shifted to the language of resilience. As the improbability of regressively recovering and maintaining a sustainable equilibrium point became more apparent, scientists began to search for language to frame the work of environmental science in the face of an unknown, multivariable future. In a world now persistently “out of balance,” ecological resilience assumes uncertainty, unpredictability, and change in the ecosystem. ¹⁸ Andrew Zolli describes resilience thinking as “how to help vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world.” ¹⁹ Perhaps today, we might add, in an unfinished world. The fields of the human sciences are exploring social and psychological resilience, as well. In the midst of suffering, resilient persons, like resilient ecosystems (including the human communities therein), look for creative ways forward even when faced with unclear, unpredictable, even unfinished futures. ²⁰

Might we lean into the tensions of an unfinished world, an unfinished church, with resilience? Reimagining the life and work of the church in the world through the lens of resilience invites commitments and practices that cultivate the capacities to live with creativity and courage in the midst of struggle, and in anticipation of an unfinished future. There, at the very core of this resilient church, may we find beating, quietly and persistently, an unquiet heart.

Christian vocation and education for inhabitance

Cultivating the unquiet heart, and the resilient church enlivened by it, requires a clear sense of Christian vocation for these in-between times. In as much as Christian theology has sought to make sense of the human being as bearing the imago Dei, Moltmann writes, we also need to attend to the human being as bearer of the imago mundi, “a being that can only exist in community with all other created beings.” ²¹

As beings in community with other created beings, humans need a sense of “habitation,” a means of dwelling with ease and mutual care as members of an ecosystem. ²² This language of inhabitance is not coincidental: ecology is derived from the Greek term, oikeo, which means “to inhabit.” Literally, then, ecology is “the knowledge (logos) of inhabiting.” ²³ Thus, the root of my claim at the outset of this article: ecologically grounded faith turns on the capacities necessary to inhabit God’s world well.

Inhabitance requires a kind of intentionality and relationality not required of the casual resident. Environmental education theorist David Orr compares a resident to an inhabitant:

To reside is to live as a transient and as a stranger to one’s place … to become merely “consumers” supplied by invisible networks that damage their places and those of others … The life of the inhabitant is governed by the boundaries of sufficiency, by organic harmony, and by the discipline of paying attention to minute particulars. ²⁴

What kind of education, then, might nurture these capacities to inhabit God’s world well? David Orr argues that transformative environmental education cultivates “ecological literacy,” which turns not on the mastery of more data, but on “that quality of mind that seeks out connections … The ecologically literate person has the knowledge necessary to comprehend interrelatedness and an attitude of care or stewardship.” ²⁷ Remarkable to me, as a religious education scholar, is that Orr is not writing from an explicitly theological perspective. Yet, his proposals bear very strong theological implications, employing language like interrelatedness, care, and stewardship.

Orr’s category of ecological literacy, as an educational purpose, resonates with what Moltmann describes in more theological terms as ecological awareness, by which we “express the experience of creation in thanksgiving and praise … [being able] to discern the world in full awareness of God’s hidden presence, and to apprehend it as a communication of God’s fellowship.” ²⁸ So, in conclusion, let us consider three educational principles and practices that might be of service in a church committed to cultivating ecologically grounded faith, and thus persons with the capacities to inhabit God’s world well.

First, the cultivation of ecologically grounded faith takes time. Orr notes that instead of the rapid accumulation of technical know-how, “Slow knowledge is shaped and calibrated to fit a particular ecological and cultural context. It does not imply lethargy, but rather carefulness and patience. The aim of slow knowledge is resilience, harmony, and the preservation of … ‘the patterns that connect.’” ²⁹ Slow religious education eschews the rapid accumulation of data and the quick fix, preferring the long and winding road of nurturing wisdom.

Second, one of the reasons that the cultivation of ecologically grounded faith is a slow process is that it requires engagement of the body and emotions of the learner, as much as it does cognitive capacities. This is how the unquiet heart is honored and fortified. Ecological religious education requires placing our bodies in the world made by God, and opening our emotional selves to being confronted, inspired, and moved by that experience. It requires feeling the rumble of the passing subway and a lingering in silence next to a stream. The human body “understands” the world in its own way, and paying attention to this embodied understanding is an often dismissed path to perceiving God’s hidden presence in the everyday. Indeed, what if, after every embodied encounter with the earthly and sacred matter, we sat together and asked, “What has happened to us, here?” ³⁰

Third, the cultivation of ecologically grounded faith will be strengthened by attention to reimagining liturgical practice. As embodied and affective practices that connect us to memory and history (and that anticipate the future), liturgical practices are radical sites for nurturing ecological awareness. The waters of baptism, the bread and wine of Eucharist, the celebration of rogation and harvest days, planting in a memorial garden for All Saints Day: all of these practices close the space between God’s creating activity and the material elements of God’s good earth. All of these practices open God’s earth to the space of the possible.

All of these practices honor, expand, and cultivate the unquiet heart. May it be so.