Sunday, July 29, 2018

'Future Hope' Column: Tapping a Power Stronger Than the Fossil Fuel Industry


By Ted Glick 

For over 50 years I have been a progressive activist and organizer, and for the last 15, a climate activist. Over these years I’ve always known that my upbringing in a family that took seriously the teachings and life example of Jesus of Nazareth had a lot to do with why I chose this course. Over recent years the importance of that spiritual grounding resurfaced as I’ve interacted regularly with people of various faiths within the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate (IMAC), a group I helped found a number of years ago.

IMAC is the only social change group I’ve ever been in which begins and ends meetings and conference calls with a prayer, and I’m often moved by them. Without question, this practice helps to keep us all more humble, less ego driven, and more focused on figuring out how we can most effectively work together to preserve, in the words of an IMAC document, “what we variously call God's Creation, Mother Earth, or simply, Earth, our one and only home.”

My family religious roots are deep. My father and both of my grandfathers were ministers in the Church of the Brethren. Growing up, I went to church every Sunday. For close to 20 years of my life in the eighties and nineties, I was a regular attendee and church council member of the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Since then, up until a couple of years ago, I’ve not been a regular churchgoer, but I haven’t lost my belief in the importance of the teachings and example of Jesus. I sometimes carry and read a pocket Bible when traveling, and a favorite book is God Makes the Rivers to Flow: Selections from the Sacred Literature of the World by Eknath Easwaran. Many times in the years since I accidentally discovered it, its pages have helped when my spirit has been down and I’ve been in need of inspiration.

Even so, I’ve never been much of a praying person. The one big exception is the long fasts I have undertaken in past years, including three long fasts between 2007 and 2009 on the climate crisis. During those times without eating, I came to appreciate Gandhi’s words that “fasting is the sincerest form of prayer.”

Wonder, in the Face of Nature

For myself and many others, the natural world – in the woods, in the mountains, by the sea, in the desert, by rivers and lakes, in urban or suburban parks – is where we can feel connection to something much greater than ourselves and can gain perspective and strength for struggle. As John Burroughs wrote, “Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they are revealed in the physical universe certainly tends to keep a man sane and sober and safeguards him against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds and indoor artificial lives tend to breed.”

Albert Einstein wrote about a sense of awe and wonder about the natural world that he considered to be at the heart of what makes us who we are: “The most beautiful experience we can have is that of the ‘mysterious.’ It constitutes the fundamental emotion that lies at the origin of true art and science. Anyone who does not know this and is no longer capable of asking questions, anyone who is incapable of wonder, is as if dead, with eyes covered by a blindfold. An understanding of the existence of something that we cannot penetrate and our primitive perceptions of the most profound reason and the most radiant beauty – this understanding and this emotion are what constitute true religious sentiment.” [Einstein’s emphasis]

Many people who are religious would say that this sense of the unknown, the mysterious, is really a path to belief in God. That is certainly true for me, though I prefer to call “God” the Great Spirit.

I find it very difficult to see how people can find inner peace, the strength to struggle day to day and for years to come, if they do not take time to connect with the natural world wherever they are. It can be found in urban settings too, in parks, in open green spaces, along rivers. Indeed, one of our responsibilities as citizens of the world is to increase the amount of green space available to city-dwellers to help all of us make the connections to nature that are so essential to emotional and spiritual health.

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Source: tedglick.com

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