Eco-Spirituality - What is it?

Eco-spirituality

Eco-Spirituality is an approach to faith that celebrates humanity’s connection to the natural world. We are of the earth, not separate from it.  Immersion in nature helps us to restore the deep connection between us and the natural world, the essential interdependence between us that we have lost in the modern world.

There is a growing consciousness of the importance of our relationship with the earth, a recognition that we each need to come to a point of reconciliation with creation and  be gradually transformed in an ecological conversion, whereby we become one with the earth.  

We are capable of being in relationship and communion with both the natural world and with its loving Creator. Pope Francis in his Encyclical ‘Laudato Si’, writes:

“Creation is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things.” (Laudato Si, 77)

Eco-spirituality is calling us to see and respond to the awareness that all creation - living and non-living - is infused with the divine presence as sustaining and transforming energies of love. The Jesuit mystic and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, provides us with a vision, a theology which underpins this spirituality.

By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who have eyes to see. On the contrary everything is sacred…
The world, this palpable world which we are wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place and we do not know it.

Eco-spirituality recognises that our choices have consequences; the choices we make each day in this relational world affect not only other humans but also the natural world on which we depend for our survival. It is an invitation to encounter the Presence that is God in Nature, leading to an ecological conversion and reconciliation with Creation.

Eco-spirituality encourages a prophetic and contemplative life-style free of the obsession with consumption. Less is more.

“The ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion… an interior impulse which encourages, motivates, nourishes and gives meaning to our individual and communal activity… where the life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature or from worldly activities, but lived in and with them, in communion with all that surrounds us.” (Laudato Si, 216, 217)