When mountains sung

The cause of war and ecological crisis is unlikely to provide its solution.

As I write, at the end of Autumn, wars continue in Ukraine and Congo, among other places, and COP is taking place in Egypt. Our minds are focussed on the death humans deal to the world and one another. And yet, as I look at the green lawn of St Paul’s Chapel at Niiza, surrounded by blue butterflies and birdsong, I am struck by just how alive the world still is.

The city can blind us to this. Urban life teaches us to see animals as either pets or food; trees as pulp for our printers or our posteriors; in short, to see the whole world, including humans, as resources. Our thought on the environment rarely gets beyond this perspective, focussing on what will be left of the world for future generations to use.

The ancients saw things quite differently. For the Buddhist, all things express Buddha-nature. In Shinto tradition, mountains and rivers are themselves deities. The world of the Bible is one in which trees clap their hands, mountains sing, and the skies proclaim the glory of the Lord. There is no such thing as dead matter, nature ungraced. All is ordered by God’s Word and animated by His Spirit.

With our materialistic and utilitarian mindset, it is tempting to think of these as metaphors. Yet when St Francis called the sun and moon his brother and sister, I think he meant it quite literally. The cosmos lives and communicates.

It is hard to see the technocratic, acquisitive mindset which has prevailed over the last couple of hundred years offering a solution to the wars and ecological devastation which it has caused. We need a return to older ways of seeing things, not as resources for our exploitation, but as part of one great, living family of which we are only a part, and which we are called to love.