Greening rites and festivals

In 1976 Arnold Toynbee published his last book, entitled Mankind and Mother Earth. ‘We now stand at a turning-point in the history of the biosphere’, he wrote, ‘It looks as if man will not be able to save himself from the nemesis of his demonic material power and greed unless he allows himself to undergo a change of heart’.

But such a revolutionary change of heart, Toynbee warned, would require the kind of motivation usually generated only by religion. Of course he was not looking for a religious revival of the traditional, supernaturalist variety. He regarded religion as the ‘human being’s necessary response to the mysteriousness of the phenomena that he encounters’. Indeed, that is how all religion began.

Returning to origins

But how will such a spirituality arise in this global, secular age and whence will it come? No religion has ever been invented from scratch; all have evolved out of whatever preceded them. Thus any future religion will arise out of the faiths of the past – and not only from Christianity, Islam and the like, but also from the pre-Axial nature religions that preceded them. Just as the Protestant Reformers, on setting out to reform the church, went back to what they took to be primitive Christianity, so we now need to go back even further -- to the pre-Axial religions.

When we do this we find, perhaps to our surprise, that they have never been wholly eliminated. Underneath the surface of the various layers of Christianity lurk the remnants of religion that focused on nature. For example, tucked away in an obscure corner of many a European cathedral is the sculptured representation of the little green man who symbolised the spirit of nature. And more obviously, we still name the days of the week after the ancient Germanic gods - Sunday for the sun-god, Monday for the moon-god, Wednesday for Woden, and Saturday for Saturn.

These relics remain in spite of the efforts of priests to eliminate everything that smacked of superstitious paganism. The devotees of monotheism were so anxious to reject the gods of nature that they disconnected the human species from the world of nature and focused attention on the human species itself. ‘Much of our trouble’, said the Catholic priest Thomas Berry, ‘has been caused by our limited modes of thought. We centred ourselves on the individual, on personal aggrandizement, ...A sense of the planet Earth never entered into our minds’.

Christianity taught us to fix our attention on heaven above, and to regard this as a fallen world, doomed for ultimate destruction. That is why in mediaeval times so many withdrew from the world into monasteries and nunneries to prepare themselves spiritually for their ultimate salvation. Even when Protestantism closed the monasteries and took a giant step towards the secularising of Christianity, they still saw the world as the place where the Devil beguiled and entrapped the careless and the unsuspecting. This conviction, still clearly manifested today, explains why fundamentalism regards those who call for the greening of Christianity as doing the work of the Devil.

To dominate nature or love it?

Even theologians of the calibre of Emil Brunner warned against giving too much attention to the world of nature. ‘Because man has been created in the image of God’, he wrote, ‘therefore he may and should make the earth subject to himself, and should have dominion over all other creatures . . . Man is only capable of realizing his divine destiny when he rises above Nature.’

It is not surprising, therefore, that it has been left chiefly to secular prophets and voices outside of the church to take the lead in re-valuing the earth and teaching us how to care for it. Just as two thousand years ago Paul claimed that ‘God has chosen the foolish in the world to shame the wise’, so today one can reasonably assert that Mother Earth now relies on the lefties, Greenies and despised heretics to shame the leaders of political and religious officialdom.

The very first greenie, as we have already noted, was the man now honoured as St Francis, who pioneered the greening of Christianity back in the thirteenth century. Of course his references to nature were still enfolded within the context of giving honour to the Heavenly Father. We are now free, as he was not, to give our full attention to the immense universe itself, to the mystery of life, and to our dependence on the forces of nature. This is just what theologians such as Gordon Kaufman and Sallie McFague are setting out to do. In 1997 McFague wrote Super,Natural Christians, How we should love nature, in which she effectively reconnects the Christian tradition with the natural world. And it is noteworthy that female scholars like Rosemary Radford Ruether, Karen Armstrong, and Anne Primavesi have been in the forefront of attempts to expound and popularise a green theology.

Step back to leap ahead

Perhaps there is no better way to reconnect Christianity with the natural world than to examine the major Christian festivals and trace them back to their origins in nature. All festivals were originally related to the movements of the heavenly bodies, for these were once worshipped as deities. Notice how the monotheists who composed the opening chapter of the Bible deliberately downgraded the sun and the moon – first by declaring them to be created, and second, by stating that their creation did not occur until the fourth day! That three days should pass before it appeared was a real put-down for the sun!

The waxing and waning of the moon and the changing path of the sun divide the passing of time into days, months and years, and thereby determined the time frame for all religious celebrations. But the sun and moon remain just as much time-markers for us as they were for primitive humankind. Indeed, our very bodies have biological clocks built into them and these we have tended to ignore for too long. The daily, monthly and annual festivals keep us in tune with the rhythms of the earth and may well play an important role in promoting our physical and mental health. The attempt to focus on these rhythms by some health programmes and New Age cults is not so outlandish as it may at first appear.

The oldest festivals we know of are those that celebrated the New Year and the appearance of the New Moon. In the biblical tradition the festival the New Moon was particularly important and we hear much of it in the Old Testament. The prophets saw it as a relic of the nature worship and tried to stamp it out. Isaiah vigorously declared that God hated Israel’s new moon festivals and found them a wearisome burden.

It is interesting to find that these celebrations had lasted until Isaiah’s time, for their origin goes back to the Hebrew patriarchs, who lived a semi-nomadic life. The moon not only provided the light for night travel through the desert but it always seemed more kindly than the sun, whose burning heat could be oppressive. It was much the same for the later people of Arabia and this explains why the month has remained the dominant segment of time in Islam. The Islamic world has never adopted the solar year, and to this day lives by a twelve-month lunar year that is eleven days shorter than the solar year.

The fact that the lunar and solar cycles do not neatly fit each another has long been a problem for cultures that follow a lunar calendar. We have solved the problem simply by dividing the solar year into twelve months of unequal numbers of days, thus disengaging our months from the actual lunar cycles. The people of ancient Israel solved the problem differently, in a way that has remained Jewish practice to this day. They observed a year of twelve lunar months as does Islam, but unlike Islam they adopted the Babylonian system of introducing a thirteenth month nearly every third year in order to re-align their lunar system with the true solar year.

The Canaanite calendar

The ancient Hebrews first had to come to terms with the solar year when they entered Canaan, for in becoming one people with the Canaanites they had to accommodate themselves to a predominantly agricultural culture that was closely tied to the solar year. While adopting the seasonal pattern based on the sun, the Israelites continued, as the many biblical references to new moon festivals show, to observe the lunar cycles.

The Canaanites appear to have developed a very complex calendar that divided the year into seven periods of fifty days, a scheme now known as the pentecontad calendar. Each pentecontad consisted of seven times seven days plus one. The number seven was treated as sacred, partly because of the four (approximately) seven-day phases of the Moon and partly because there were seven moving heavenly bodies—the five planets, the sun, and the moon. The seven pentecontads followed New Year’s Day, with seven-day interludes after the fourth and the seventh to permit celebration of the Feast of Booths and the Feast of Unleavened bread, respectively. I mention the Pentecontad calendar only because remnants of it have survived to this day in the seven-day week, in the fifty-day period between Easter and Pentecost and in the Year of Jubilee, or Fiftieth year.

Also surviving from ancient Canaanite practice, but in later forms, were the agricultural festivals: the festival of unleavened bread at the spring equinox, the first fruits (fifty days later) and the Ingathering of harvest in the autumn. The Israelites gradually disengaged these festivals from their original connection with nature and turned them into commemorations of basic events in their cultural history. Unleavened bread became the Passover, celebrating the deliverance from Egypt. First fruits became Pentecost, celebrating the giving of the Mosaic Law at Sinai. The ingathering retained the name Booths (or tents), but came to celebrate the long trek through the wilderness.

As Christianity emerged out of Judaism, it transformed the first two of these into Christian festivals. Because Jesus had been crucified during the Passover season, this erstwhile spring festival became the commemoration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Jewish Pentecost (originally the festival of first fruits) was similarly taken to signal the coming of the Holy Spirit. In the course of time the Easter celebrations became the most important of all Christian festivals, with Good Friday the holiest day of the year and Easter Sunday the most joyous.

The more it changes …

We too often forget that the Easter festival never entirely shed the practices that betray its connection with the spring festival, whether in Canaan or Europe. In Western Christianity, for example, we still call it Easter, preserving the name of the pagan goddess of spring, Eostre. What is more, and often to the chagrin of Christian clergy, its most popular symbols in this secular age are Easter eggs and Easter bunnies—echoes from time immemorial of spring festivals that long preceded the Jewish Passover and the Christian celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

If we wish to reconnect Christianity with nature and foster the kind of religion Toynbee called for, there is perhaps no better way than to return to the origins of our major festivals, all rooted as they were in the celebration of nature. The ecological spirituality of the future will celebrate the wonder of the universe and the mystery of life. It will focus on the natural processes that produced and continue to sustain life. It will encourage people to be grateful for the richness and the beauty of the natural world and to respond positively to the ecological imperative laid upon us all.

Let us look at what this might mean for Easter. Easter has commonly been regarded by Christians as the miraculous return of a dead man to life—a notion that Bishop David Jenkins called a travesty that turns Easter into a piece of cheap science fiction. Easter is very much greater than that.

Thirty-five years ago I wrote a book, Resurrection- A Symbol of Hope, that traces the long development of the Easter message. The theme is not uniquely Christian, but permeated the religion of the ancient Middle East long before the rise of Christianity. Christians did not create the Easter message, but used it to interpret the tragic death of Jesus in positive terms of hope.

Out of death comes life

The essential message of Easter can be put in the form of a paradox: All life ends in death but out of death there also comes new life. The theme of death followed by resurrection had long found expression in the stories of the gods --- stories we today call myths --- and chief among them was the story of the dying-and-rising god.

The ancients told these stories because that is how they experienced life. They saw the sun die every day in the West and rise again with new life the next morning. They saw the moon wax and wane every month. Then for a short time it could not be seen at all. But on the third day the new moon appeared. That, by the way, is the origin of the well-known biblical phrase – ‘on the third day’.

Then they noted the seasons of the year. The summer fruiting was followed by the autumn harvesting and then by the dying of vegetation in the winter. But in spring, what seemed to be dead came to life again. That is why the Easter festival was celebrated in spring. In spring, more strikingly than at any other time, death was being followed by resurrection to new life.

And not only in vegetation! Human life also ends in death. We too flourish like the grass, then wither and die, as the Psalmist observed. But as each generation passes away, it is succeeded by a new generation. Death and resurrection are built into the very fabric of all life on earth, including human life. This is the way Easter was celebrated for many centuries by the peoples of the ancient Middle East. The ancient Israelites reflected it in their own writings.

In Hosea, for example, we read:
Come let us return to the Lord
for he has torn us but he will heal us,
he has struck us but he will bind up our wounds
after two days he will revive us,
on the third day he will restore us to life,
that we may come alive in his presence.

The resurrection of Israel

But the Israelites seized upon the theme to interpret their own history. When they faced near extinction as a people by being overrun by powerful empires, they drew on the ancient hope of resurrection. That is why we find the prophet Ezekiel expressing hope for Israel's resurrection in the well-known vision of the valley of dry bones. ‘These bones are the whole house of Israel! Behold, says the Lord God, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves. I will put my spirit within you and you shall live and I will place you in your own land’.

The prophet applied the renewal observable in the natural world to the ongoing destiny of his people. That application of the ‘Easter’ experience, once started, came to the fore every time the people of Israel faced new threats. In the middle of the second century BCE, Greek rulers tried to destroy the Jewish people and stamp out their traditions. That's when the Book of Daniel was written, a text in which we read this obviously inspiring promise: ‘There shall be a time of great trouble, but your people shall be delivered and those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake and the wise among them shall shine like the stars for ever.’

Thus Easter faith --- resurrection from the dead --- was much talked about in Jewish circles at the beginning of the Christian era. It was an inherent part of the context of Jesus’ ministry, and he debated it with his fellow-Jews. Therefore, when he himself died on the cross as a martyr, his followers already had to hand the appropriate language with which to express their conviction that what Jesus represented to them could never be vanquished. Jesus was not dead, he was alive! But he was alive in a new way. He was alive in them. It was Paul our earliest written witness to the resurrection of Jesus who put it so eloquently saying, ‘It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’. And that explains why he came to speak of the community of Christians who shared this experience as the very ‘body of Christ’. The historical Jesus had died but all that he stood for was very much alive. The Church itself was the embodied risen Christ.

Nothing new under the sun

You may think that the Easter experiences of the first Christians was of an order quite different from the nature festivals of the past. The first Christians did not think so. Indeed, the Fourth Gospel places these words in the mouth of Jesus: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’. In other words, the death of Jesus had been understood as analogous to the death of a seed that springs into new life.

Listen to how Clement, one of the very early Popes of Rome, put it: ‘Let us observe how the Creator is continually displaying the resurrection, of which we find an example in his raising of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Let us look at the resurrection that happens regularly all the time. Day and night shows a resurrection; the night goes to sleep, the day rises: the day departs, night comes on. Let us take the crops. How does the sowing happen and in what way? The seed falls on the ground and dies. Then from the death of the one grain, by the mightiness of divine providence, there grows much more fruit’.

If even the early Christians could see that the rising of Jesus from the dead was all of a piece with the death and resurrection to be observed within nature, how much more are we free to do so today. Now we can not only observe that life on this planet has an awe-inspiring capacity to keep renewing itself, but that the evolution of life in all of its innumerable and diverse forms out of this once lifeless planet is itself the greatest resurrection miracle of all.

Even that is not the end of it. As astronomers now begin to unfold to us the marvels and mystery of our ever-evolving cosmos, they tell us that the earliest galaxies and stars did not yet have within them the chemical elements of carbon and the like that are essential to life. Before these more complex elements could even be created, stars of the type known as a supernovas had to explode and die, for only out of their fragments could the planets and the higher chemical elements be born. That is death and resurrection on the grand scale.

One grand motif

Thus the universe itself is deeply permeated by this basic phenomenon of death and resurrection. The Easter theme of life out of non-life --- of life, death and resurrection --- has been operative from the beginning of time. It is inherent in the nature of the universe itself and a fundamental principle of all life on this planet. This wellspring of existence as we know it surely calls for continual celebration.

What an opportunity there is in this ecological age for green Christianity to restore to Easter celebrations the eternal message of Easter. That is something to give us hope as we face an imminent ecological crisis. Just as our own bodies show a remarkable capacity to recover after illness and disease, so the earth has a remarkable capacity to recover, to regain its stability, to renew itself. We can take heart from the fact that the creative forces within us, within nature, and within the universe itself, are of such a kind that a new earth can yet be resurrected out of the death with which we humans currently threaten it. Easter, thus celebrated, can revive in us the hope for a worthwhile future on this planet.

Now let us turn to Christmas. For some 1500 years the 25th of December has been celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, but that was not the case early on. It is now widely accepted that we know neither the day nor the year in which Jesus was born. What Christians did, in about the fifth century, was to take over and Christianize an already existing nature festival --- the one that marked the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. It celebrated the day when the sun began to rise higher in the sky, bringing greater heat and longer days. This festival began as another version of the Easter theme, and its slogan was Sol Invictus --- The Unconquerable Sun. Christians thought the words particularly apt for the celebration of the new hope they associated with the coming of Jesus Christ.

The Christmas festival remains much more popular today than Easter because, without any guidance from anyone, society has long been unconsciously engaged in changing its character. Those who wish to celebrate it as the birthday of the supposed Saviour of the world are still free to do so. But for the majority it no longer means that. Even though the outward trappings remain—angelic choirs, the shepherds, the Bethlehem manger, the Three Wise Men --- Christmas has become a time of giving and receiving gifts along with outpourings of peace and goodwill. Above all, it is the one season of the year when families try to get together. This fostering of family life is to be encouraged and extended. It is a celebration of something very important in nature. Our very humanity, including the evolution of human culture, has been made possible by generation after generation of people being nurtured in families.

We in the southern hemisphere have special problems with both of these annual festivals. We celebrate Easter in the autumn, although it is in essence a spring festival. And Christmas is more appropriate in the winter, when the cold and darkness of the season encourage the family to move closer together around a burning fire in the hearth. Thus some pioneering souls in our hemisphere are already making attempts to mark the 21st of June with a winter solstice celebration. Such a move is to be encouraged in this ecological age. Should New Zealand become a republic, we could well replace Queen’s Birthday weekend with the celebration of the winter solstice on the third Monday of June. This could be joined with the Maori New Year, Matariki. This was celebrated on the first new moon after the appearance on the north-eastern horizon of the cluster of stars, called the Pleiades by the Greeks and Matariki by the Maori.

The day of re-creation

Until modern times the Christian church has been the official promoter and guardian of our festivals. Unfortunately, however, because it became increasingly divorced from the natural world and interpreted human life in other-worldly terms, it now has a great deal of unlearning to do before it can give to our ecological age the spiritual guidance that is so badly needed. Paradoxically, the church must learn to discover and experience within itself its own most basic message. Like the Lord it proclaims, the church must be prepared to die to its former life in order that it may be resurrected to the new vitality demanded by the ecological age.

Before it is too late, the church must take the opportunity to re-orient its own most frequent festival – the Sunday service. We have already noted that the seven-day week goes back to the ancient Canaanites, representing the basic unit of the Canaanite agricultural calendar. The chief reason why it survived through later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition was the observation of one day in seven as a day of rest. It has been celebrated in a wide variety of ways through history --- the Jewish Sabbath, the Christian Lord’s Day, Muslim holy day, and now a secular holiday --- but it has never lost its original beneficial purpose of providing a day of rest from normal work. That is why it was called the Sabbath, which means ‘cessation’. Originally it entailed rest from labour not only for humans but for animals, and not only for creatures but for the land. The processes of nature also had to have their rest, if they were to continue produce their fruits for humankind. The existence of the sabbatical year shows that ancient Canaanite agriculturists had learned the value of letting land lie fallow.

In many respects the seven-day week, with the institution of one of them as a day of rest, is the most enduring cultural gift we have inherited from ancient Canaan. In spite of the overwhelming secularisation of the Sabbath, this day of rest from work remains firmly embedded in our culture and, through Christian and Muslim influence, is now becoming a worldwide observance. What we are in danger of losing, however, is the positive spiritual direction it has in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Perhaps today we value rest from labour, whether mental or manual, more than ever; it provides for the re-creation of energy in mind and body. What Jew, Christian and Muslim added to this, by their various forms of worship, was re-creation of spirit.

In order to get the most out of life, we need regular occasions for taking stock of ourselves, clarifying our aims, admitting our mistakes, and resolving to make a new beginning. This is what their various spiritual practices did for Jew, Christian and Muslim in the past.

A new order of worship

If we are to respond constructively to the coming ecological crisis, re-orienting the Sunday service to the cause of green consciousness can play an important role. Less change would be needed than at first appears necessary. The service will still be a form of worship—that is, acknowledging what is of supreme worth to us. As Thomas Berry points out, ‘There is an awe and reverence due to the stars in the heavens, the sun and the heavenly bodies; to the seas and the continents; to all living forms of trees and flowers; to the myriad expressions of life in the sea; to the animals of the forest and the birds of the air. To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice’.

Reflecting on our cultural origins will still have its place; that is what Bible readings provided. Time will still be set aside for meditation; that is what the prayers provided. Mental stimulation, which is what the sermon provided, will remain an essential ingredient. It is the content rather than the form that needs to change. Ecological spirituality will focus on the nature of our relatedness, not only to one another as humans in human society, but also to all living forms of life in the ecosphere and to the forces of nature.

The singing of songs will still have an important place. You may think that what we sing is of no real significance. Not so! This may be illustrated by observing the rapid spread of the Protestant Reformation through northern Europe, for a great upsurge in congregational singing communicated the new spirit far more powerfully than could pulpit oratory or doctrinal tracts. Pope Urban III complained that Martin Luther had sung the church into heresy. In a similar way the evangelical revival under the Wesley brothers was spread by hymn lyrics. To this day the religious beliefs of churchgoers are shaped more by the hymns they sing than by the sermons they hear. It has been well said that religion is not so much taught as caught. And already appropriate hymns are being composed – particularly by New Zealand’s best-known hymn writer, Shirley Murray.

The reformed Sunday worship will also celebrate everything we have come to value in human existence, such as the importance of healthy human relationships, and the rich inheritance of human culture. In these days of declining church attendance, the reason why some still go to church despite the obsolete nature of the words often used, is the fellowship and mutual support they find there.

Change in the practices

We should note in this respect the great change that has already taken place in the way Christians celebrate their central ritual, known variously as Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass or the Eucharist. Over the last four centuries it has been interpreted less and less as the commemoration of a sacrifice offered on an altar to God (as it was in the Middle Ages) and more and more as the sharing of a common meal. Even the Catholic Church has made significant moves in this direction since the Vatican II Council. This ritual originated among the ancient Semitic nomads, who placed great emphasis on hospitality. It has gone through many forms, for better or for worse, but it can still celebrate and nurture the rich and sacred character of human fellowship.

The ritual that has changed most during the twentieth century has been the funeral service. It is fast ceasing to be the official ‘send-off’ to the next world and is becoming the celebration of a life lived in this world. Similarly, though the alteration has barely begun, the ritual of infant baptism can be profitably changed: once the business of cleansing from original sin, it can easily become the welcome of new life into the family. And confirmation will be replaced by a ritual in which growing adolescents acknowledge their adult responsibilities both to their fellow-humans and to the ecosphere.

As the religious activities of the past are reformed to meet the needs of the ecological age, more and more forms equivalent to those of the past but relevant to life in the present will be created and widely adopted. One of the great creations of the past is what we know as the Ten Commandments. It has lasted so long largely because it was once such an inspired creation, and indeed there are frequent calls to return to it. But good as it was in the past, its relevance in the ecological age is much diminished, not least because even the word ‘Commandment’ is no longer suitable. Today we are free people who choose our behaviour out of inner conviction. Nevertheless, as Green Christianity responds to the ecological imperative, it may well compose statements of intent to replace the creeds of the past.

Now, therefore, be it resolved …

Let me conclude by offering Ten Resolutions which could help us build a healthy world to hand on to those who follow us.

1. Let us take time to stand in awe of this self-evolving universe.

2. Let us marvel at the living eco-sphere of this planet.

3. Let us set a supreme value on all forms of life.

4. Let us develop a lifestyle that preserves the balance of the planetary eco-system.

5. Let us refrain from all activities that endanger the future of any species.

6. Let us devote ourselves to maximising the future for all living creatures.

7. Let us set the needs of the coming global society before those of ourselves, our tribe, society or nation.

8. Let us learn to value the human relationships that bind us together into social groups.

9. Let us learn to appreciate the total cultural legacy we have received from the past.

10. Let us accept in a self-sacrificing fashion the responsibility now laid upon us all for the future of our species and of all planetary life.

 

So ends this sketch of the greening of Christianity.