The Icon 'Round God's Neck
Toward sustainable community -- an interview with Larry Rasmussen

Larry Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. His recent books include Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Orbis, 1996) and Moral Fragments and Moral Community (Fortress, 1993). Last year he delivered a series of Kellog lectures on "Re-framing and Re-forming Community" at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. Rasmussen recently returned from a sabbatical year during which he visited earth-honoring Christian communities around the world.

Marianne Arbogast: You have said that any God-talk and any community-talk that focuses solely on human beings and excludes the rest of creation is obsolete.

Larry Rasmussen: It simply doesn't do justice to creation if we only talk about community and human beings. Scientists of all kinds these days are saying, in effect, that nature is a community. The genome, for example, underscores the fact that we share the basic code of life with the rest of the community of life. The same physical laws apply across the board in the material universe. There are many different ways in which one could say that the proper word for describing creation is as a community. And Christians have said that for a long time, but since the Industrial Revolution, especially, we've limited our community-talk to one species only, that came on the scene very, very late. We occupy, as human beings, the breadth of a hair at the end of a football field in the life of the universe. So when we talk as though we were the only members of the community of creation that count, that's simply quaint.

I do not think the question is, how do we wrap the global environment around the global economy? I think the proper question is, how do you wrap both economies and environment around healthy community?

I think it's actually worse than that. It really means that we're worshiping a species idol or a tribal god or even a race god -- as though the human race were all that mattered among how many million species. Or that one planet -- ours -- around a kind of middle-sized star in a universe of probably a hundred billion galaxies, is all that counts. So I think any kind of community-talk that doesn't include the whole creation doesn't do justice to creation and isn't worshiping the God of creation. I want to expand the very notion of community to include the whole cosmos.

M.A.: I'm interested that you say Christian tradition upholds that, and that you date the human tendency to think only in terms of ourselves as beginning with the Industrial Revolution.

L.R.: That's a major turn, because from the time of the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the West we came to view ourselves as a kind of ecologically segregated species. We set ourselves up as subject over against the rest of creation as object I call it apartheid thinking on the species level. And then we turned all of the talk of salvation, redemption -- all the great theological words -- to focus only on human beings. For the Hebrew prophets, for example, redemption is always the redemption of all creation, deliverance is always deliverance of people and the land, liberation is always the liberation of the whole community of life.

For the modern world, the Industrial Revolution is where the constriction really takes hold, but theologically it's prepared for by the Middle Ages. Medieval Catholicism took a wonderfully rich notion of the whole universe being alive and a sign of God -- but, in practice, medieval Catholicism focused salvation on the standing of human beings before the judging God. And with the Reformation, too, the focus became a focus on how human beings are faring in the presence of God, and salvation and redemption became reduced to the human community and human species only. And you can go back somewhat farther than that -- although it's surprising to see how in the patristic teachings and the Orthodox understanding of creation you don't have the separation of the human species from the rest in the way that it developed elsewhere.

M.A.: You have argued that we should think in terms of "sustainable community" rather than "sustainable development." What's the difference?

L.R.: First of all, we have to listen very carefully to how people use these words because there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. I've had people say, "What you mean by sustainable community is what I mean by sustainable development." But the distinction is a meaningful one because, in most cases, "sustainable development" assumes the fact and operation of the global economy and tries to sustain that ecologically. It tries to green the present efforts to integrate the economies of the world into a single global economy.

It assumes a long history that started 500 years ago with the first wave of globalization, when European tribes settled the rest of the planet in a series of neo-European civilizations here and there. Then, the language of "development" emerged after World War II, when all economies and societies were placed on the same spectrum, of whether they were "developing" (or "underdeveloped") or "developed," but you measured them all the same way -- their social well-being was measured by their levels of production and consumption of goods. You didn't ask about biological wealth or cultural wealth, you just asked about economic well-being, and you identified that with society's well-being.

And then the third wave of globalization is the post-1989 triumph of liberal capitalism, or the market itself, as the model for society, and its very economistic measure of well-being for the whole world. So when people talk now about sustainable development, they are assuming that history of those waves of globalization and asking, how do you make that environmentally or ecologically sustainable?

I do not think the question is, how do we wrap the global environment around the global economy? I think the proper question is, how do you wrap both economies and environment around healthy community? What is an economy for? What economy is supposed to be for is to help facilitate healthy communities. So start with local and regional community and ask, what are the proper economic arrangements, the proper political arrangements, the proper care of the earth for healthy community, and how do you sustain that?

I do not want to assume that the global economy -- and its tendencies toward monocultures and its tendencies toward disrupting local democracy, removing people's capacities for their own self-provisioning, self-organizing, self-directing activities -- is that which should necessarily be sustained. I want something where folks -- all the folks -- have a greater say in what their life together will be, and that requires a kind of decentralization that "community" indicates and "sustainable development" does not.

M.A.: In your lecture series last year at the Episcopal Divinity School, you said that an important task for the church today is to "rightly valorize Christian pluralism," and you contrast that to both orthodoxy and liberal tolerance. What's the difference between tolerance and valorizing pluralism?

L.R.: Tolerance was looked to, especially out of the Enlightenment, as a way of overcoming those terrible religious wars and the intolerance that has characterized so much of human history. So tolerance was a great gift of liberalism and the Enlightenment, and I don't want to sound like I don't favor tolerance and prefer the alternative! But tolerance of itself doesn't build community -- certainly not among enemies and not even among interdependent strangers. Tolerance issues the invitations, but it doesn't set the table or talk about the terms by which we live together, other than not bothering one another. Well, not bothering one another is necessary, but it's not sufficient.

I think it's necessary to value the pluralism itself. How do you create community out of muti-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-lingual reality? I live in New York. There are 144 languages spoken in the city and we've got all kinds of people who occupy the same island here, and they've got to find ways to get along. So it's a terribly important modern experiment and one that requires, for Christians, valuing Christian pluralism itself. And saying that it's because Christianity is expressed differently credally and culturally that it is a gift -- that it can speak to so many people's different ways of leaning into the world and still provide commonality. But we have to get over the notion that Christianity is a European religion, for example. It started on three continents simultaneously and was never homogenous. I think we need to use that very fact of Christian pluralism from around the world in learning how to create community out of plural reality.

M.A.: I was struck by the statement, in one of your lectures, that "Jesus got crucified because of the folks he ate with."

L.R.: The table and meals are always a microcosm of society, quite apart from Jesus. Society is what it eats. And how it eats, how the food is grown and gathered, who serves it, how it is produced, who's invited to the table, who's not invited to the table -- all these reflect the divisions and strata in the society. Jesus, by eating with tax collectors and sinners, is crossing the division of "we" and "they" that all societies have insisted are important and that are always reflected at the table. And he gets in trouble for building a movement that puts the marginal at table on equal terms with those at the center. You've got tax collectors, who are colluding with the Roman occupation, eating with others who are part of a movement to be rid of the colonizers. However, the terms are the terms of equality.

M.A.: You have suggested that when we talk about Eucharist we need to think in terms of real economics.

L.R.: Yes. What is the economy of the Eucharist? What do the practices of shared community at the table mean for all of the tables that are set by us humans and society? I think we have radical economics and radical politics embedded in the meaning of the sacraments themselves. They're not a kind of private space that pertains only to the gathered life of the church -- they're the public space as expressed by members of the church.

M.A.: Where do you see examples of the kind of community-building needed today?

L.R.: One example is Threshold Farms, which brings farm produce to the church where I and my family belong, Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, on 100th and Amsterdam. Threshhold Farms is a part of what's called CSA, community-supported agriculture, where small farmers growing produce offer subscriptions to city folks. We pay x number of dollars a share for the growing season, and then on a weekly basis we pick up the produce. The farmers use this urban-rural link for their livelihood and there's a real community dimension to it. Recipes are shared, subscribers are invited to participate in events at the farm, kids are especially welcome. Once in a while, in town, folks will stay on a Tuesday when we have pick-up of our produce and we'll all have a community potluck together. That's a very different experience from industrialized agriculture where the farmer is producing for a mass market and where the consumer doesn't know how or where the food was grown, and has no meaningful relationship to the producer of the food.

Another kind of example is faith-based community organizing, where the churches become anchor communities in the efforts of people to address the needs of their neighborhoods. The philosophy of some of the community organizing has changed. Instead of organizing around an issue -- say, more jobs, or getting rid of a toxic waste site -- and then dissolving until the next issue comes around, there is an effort to organize for the sake of creating community and supporting community gifts and assets, and then, from there, taking on the issues as they arise.

Another example is the Maryknoll Ecological Sanctuary in Baguio City in Luzon, the northern island of the Philippines, where I spent some time during my sabbatical year. In 1991, an earthquake destroyed much of Baguio, including the convent, and they decided to rebuild not a convent but a bio-shelter and to establish an ecological sanctuary. Baguio's a mountainous city and they're on top of one of the hills. They established the sanctuary there, in part, to preserve the 200-year-old pines that are being lost to deforestation as the city grows. But it wasn't just that kind of protectionist thing. There are 14 "stations of the cosmic journey" in the ecological sanctuary, that express the whole tale of evolution as a religious tale. It's all told Filipino-style. A Philippine artist and students from the university, together with the sisters, said, how do we tell the story of who we are as peoples of these islands as a part of the cosmic story?

The Maryknoll community has, for a long time, been working with the peoples of the mountains who have lost much of their land and some of their culture to the impact of international mining and logging interests. So this ecological sanctuary with its meeting-place, which is called Center for the Integrity of Creation, is a place where the urban poor and the rural poor come together and work on how to address the sustainability of their own local communities and the region. The ecological sanctuary is an effort to provide the context, host those meetings, but also give it ritual shape. Every major event there starts with earth prayers. They are danced in the environmental theater by people who are having the meeting and by students from the school for the deaf which is in the sanctuary itself. It's a beautiful example of community-building, of sustained efforts at sustainable community that addresses the issues of the human community together with the issues of environmental well-being. They would just say "the justice issues" and mean by that society and nature together.

M.A.: Could you say more about your recent sabbatical?

L.R.: It was a wonderful year. I have a research project -- and I'm trying to find people interested in joining me -- that I call "Song of Songs: Christianities as Earth Faiths." "Song of Songs," of course, refers to that earthy little book of the Hebrew Bible where you've got two love stories going on at the same time -- you've got this sensuous love between human beings, and then you've got the sensuous love of these passionate souls for the land and its life. But it's also a reference to a statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in an address on the foundations of Christian ethics in 1928. He says: "The earth remains our mother just as God remains our father, and our mother will only lay in the father's arms those who are true to her. Earth and its distress -- this is the Christian's song of songs." So Bonhoeffer is saying that fidelity to God is lived as fidelity to the earth.

I want to find the expressions of Christianity that contribute to earth-honoring ways of living. So I went looking for communities that were already living earth-oriented, earth-enhancing ways of life. I purposely picked a very wide spectrum of confessional, cultural, racial, ethnic, geographical expressions of Christianity. I think the wrong way to go is to try to develop an eco-theology and call people to an eco-church as some new and separate stream. Instead, we need to draw upon the deep traditions that have been around a couple of millennia, expressed in a variety of ways. So I asked the communities I visited, what deep traditions of Christianity are you drawing upon and what are you doing with them?

The Maryknoll Ecological Sanctuary was drawing on rich Catholic sacramentalism and Roman Catholic mysticism and traditions of the contemplative life, and their work was deeply informed by that.

The Coptic Church in the desert in Egypt was drawing upon the traditions of the desert fathers and the desert mothers as it greens the desert. In that tradition, the desert is the place of death and barrenness and the assaults of Satan and evil, and the way in which you show resurrection or new creation or new life is to green the desert. You create Eden on the home turf of death itself. So the greening of the desert is theological as well as a way of putting food on the table.

The African Association of Earthkeeping Churches in Zimbabwe was another. This is part of a group of African-initiated or African independent churches that are trying to, as they say, "regain the lost lands and reclothe the earth." When they celebrate Eucharist, they plant trees, they gather the harvest or they dedicate seed. They try to restore the land, but they're also working very hard for land reform, which is a big, volatile, contentious issue in Zimbabwe, because the land was taken by the colonizers and the best land is in the hands of white Zimbabweans who are a small minority.

Then I went to the Iona Community in the Inner Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. The Celtic tradition is a tradition of creation-filled asceticism. You say no to one way of life and yes to another way of life, and live it out with very disciplined spiritual practices. It's the tradition of the monks. This creation-filled asceticism intrigued me, because so much of asceticism has been earth-denying and body-denying.

One of the other communities I visited was Orthodox Alaska, because the Orthodox Church in Alaska, which was founded by the Russians, is overwhelmingly native American. I wanted to see what kind of synthesis there was of a native American cosmology of sea and land and sky, with Russian Orthodox earth-filled asceticism. One of the iconographers there who's a native person himself told me a Russian saying that he says is a favorite: "Earth is the icon that hangs 'round God's neck." In the iconic tradition you take the particulars of earth -- you know, there's a plant, there's a saint's face, there's a raven, there's a wolf. These are all ways of looking at the reality of earth in order to enter into the mystery of God and the cosmos.

M.A.: It must have been encouraging to experience that breadth of positive models.

L.R.: Yes, and it was great fun when I would tell people in one community about the ones I'd been to before. They found it so energizing to know that there were other folks concerned with the same things, because oftentimes they felt they were the only ones, and often they met a lot of opposition in their own churches. Many of them encountered the criticism that attention to the environment was detracting from attention to people's issues and problems. (The African Association of Earthkeeping Churches never met that because the problems were one and the same -- they had to survive on degraded land. I've never found a poor community that has said, it's either the environment or people, because they experience degradation to the environment as a part of the same dynamic by which they experience oppression.)

One of the reasons I emphasize valorizing Christian pluralism is because to be rooted and honor earth means doing so in a particular place. You can't do that generally. It's the flora and the fauna, it's the geology of a particular place. So you have to be able to have varieties of Christianity that can give expression in a variety of places. You have to think ecologically about ecumenism and ecumenically about place. It was fascinating to me to see how desert spirituality mirrored the desert, how mountain spirituality mirrored the mountain, how Celtic spirituality mirrored Ireland and the west coast of Scotland. All the images in their prayers are images of the world around them -- it's just good reporting! So the pluralism of Christianity needs to be one that lets that Christianity resonate with the people and the place together.

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness, <marianne@thewitness.org>.