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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