Deep in the woods on a Colorado mountainside, I came upon a message carved into the trunk of a tree [cf. my blog of 10/13/2024]. Reading the inscription, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. "JESUS 1972," it read, someone's "witness" at the height of the Jesus People movement. God told Adam in the Book of Genesis, "Have dominion over everything that has the breath of life." And here was Adam's faithful progeny, doing just that. What was even worse, given the year of that inscription and my faith at that time in my young life, it could well have been me wielding the knife.
We might think that adherents of religion, almost any religion, would be among the staunchest defenders of the natural world God made. "God sees the little sparrow fall,” we sang in Sunday School, “it meets his tender view ..." If God so loved the little things we knew God loved us too. The connection couldn't have been clearer. But that was a child's faith.
Adult faith, apparently, required something different of us, something more calculating, more strategic, more sinister. If the earth was our dominion, to do with it as we pleased, then it was not a question of whether we should cut down the forest or domesticate the breed or dig deep into the mountain; it was only a question of how. And the sparrows, or any other plant or animal that relied upon the natural environment we were claiming for ourselves? Collateral damage.
So, religion has not had a great record for defending, let alone loving, the world into which God set us. There's Saint Francis, of course. But he stands virtually alone as the exception, not the rule. The New World “discovered” by Christopher Columbus and settled by the Pilgrims was regarded as the New Jerusalem, the Promised Land, a world given them by God to be conquered, along with its people—not loved.
Walking the fine line between religious faith and environmental advocacy, Sarah Arthurs may be a hopeful sign of how loving God and loving the Earth need not be mutually exclusive. Sarah is the product of parents who did both. Her mother went to church and her father walked in the woods. Each found solace and inspiration and together they created a rich and soulful childhood environment for Sarah.
When Sarah thinks of religious faith she focusses on community, on that matrix of supportive relationships that allows people to grow into who they are and into how they're supposed to gift the world, not take from it. In other words, she sees belonging more than she sees believing, a perspective that helps her bridge the differences represented around the table of the Calgary Interfaith Council, where she serves as the Executive Director.
When Sarah thinks of the natural world, similarly, she sees its interconnectivity, with everything belonging, everything contributing, with the sacred not over against the natural, but the sacred resident within the natural. And that sacredness can be found wherever we encounter it, even in the midst of the city, where we are, she says, "Urban Earthlings."
Sarah may have found the crossroads that will help the religions of the world see past their tragic divisions to the role awaiting all creatures on the Earth, to invest in the evolution of the planet, not as conquerors and plunderers, but as faithful members and good stewards, as creatures among all the other creatures, who love the world that God made.
To listen to our conversation, just click on the Play button below. To find out more about Sarah and her work follow the More Info button to the show notes.