An Encounter with God

"Earthkeeping," a relatively new word in common usage, signals a growing concern for the environment as a major social issue. We do well to linger a bit over the term, to reflect on it carefully.

To keep something is to take care, to be careful; often it means to hold something in trust, to preserve and conserve something precious. In medieval fortified castles, the innermost part -- the place of the final defense, of preservation of all that was most precious -- was called "the keep."

We are being forced to learn that the earth is not ours to exploit at will, that it is not a deposit of raw materials to be worked upon and used up without any consideration of the claims of the earth itself to respect and reverence. The truth that is coming home to us is that we hold the earth itself in trust. Non-human components of our biosphere do have claims on us as elements of a common fabric or system of life. A system is not something added on to the individual parts; rather, the components, including ourselves, exist only as parts of a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live," goes an old Irish saying. This attitude of mutual care must now become a deep value, an organizing principle, or the earth will not be home for many more generations.

Where did humankind go wrong? Certainly the root of the error is found not in political, economic, or social systems and policies but far deeper, in attitudes and beliefs and values that are the underpinnings of all systems and policies. These beliefs and values make up something much more elusive and immeasurable, but all the more powerful. We call it culture.

Searching for the cultural roots of our misuse of the earth, some point the finger at the biblical tradition, in its Western development at least. They blame the Genesis account of creation. That account, at least as it has been misunderstood and handed down from generation to generation, has supported the notion of humankind's mandate to exercise dominion over the rest of creation.

In our day we are living with the consequences of dominion understood as mastery and exploitation. The roots can be found in Greek culture as well as in the biblical story. What has exacerbated the problem is applied science. Yet technology has changed only the scale of exploitation, not the underlying worldview that values all else only as it serves the gratification of humankind.

Exploitation of other human beings has always evoked a prophetic criticism. The prophetic voice raised against the exploitation of what is not human has been a much weaker voice. Today that is changing. Today we are looking for a way to convert from our death-dealing dominion, from being earth degraders to earthkeepers.

How can we find help from the Bible? We will certainly need much more than a correct exegesis of the Genesis account of creation. To learn that we misinterpreted the notion of dominion is important but clearly not adequate to our need. Nor will we be helped by a string of proof texts for a new set of moral imperatives that spring from fear for our own and our children's future.

What the Bible can give us is much more powerful. Through the Word of God, if we act on it, we can be brought to a new vision of how we are to dwell in the world, and to a new and transforming experience of our vocation as earthkeepers.

We do not find in the Bible any treatment of the environment as an "issue," that is, as a set of problems to be solved. We find, rather, creation presented as a mystery of God. Are we to conclude that the Bible has nothing to contribute to our handling of very genuine ecological crises? Quite the contrary. We can conclude that the key to the problem will be found when we locate them within the deeper, mysterious dimension of our lives. A mystery is beyond comprehension, not because it is unreal, but because its reality exceeds our powers. We solve problems; we dwell in and celebrate mysteries -- God, love, life, to name the most central. One mystery of our biblical faith that can bring us to saving ways of earthkeeping is the Sabbath.

The Mystery of the Sabbath
Jesus penetrated the mystery of the Sabbath as God's own way of being most vividly present to the world. The healing miracles on the Sabbath -- the cure of the man crippled from birth and of the man born blind -- are figures of our redemption, a redemption accomplished by God saving us from our destructive ways.

A strong case can be made that Western civilization, which has dominated so much of modern history, is working itself to death. The Sabbath can bring us deeply into the mystery of our relationship to God, to the earth, to others, and to ourselves. The restoration of the Sabbath may be the saving grace that will keep the human race from self-destruction.

Doing things, making whatever can be thought of, making more and more, measuring human progress by the sheer quantity of goods in one's possession or in the possession of one's society -- these are seen by many as the very proof of rationality, of being human. In the Ten Commandments given to Moses, there is a corrective to the human propensity to measure meaning in terms of doing rather than or at the expense of being. That corrective is, "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy."

Because many of us learned only this abbreviated version of the divine command, and because we understood it as hardly more than an obligation to go to church on Sunday, we should begin our consideration of the Sabbath by pondering a few biblical texts.

God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on that day God had rested after all the work of creating. -- Genesis 2:3

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath for God. You shall do no work on that day, neither you nor your son nor your daughter nor your servants, men or women, nor your animals nor the stranger who lives with you. For in six days God made the heavens and the Earth and the sea and all that these hold, but on the seventh day God rested; that is why God has blessed the Sabbath day and made it sacred. -- Exodus 20:8-11

The accent in these passages and in others that could be cited is clearly on the place of rest in the scheme of things both human and divine. The seriousness of the command is clear from the sanctions attached to the Sabbath rest. Leaving aside the problems related to those sanctions, we ask the question why are we to keep the Sabbath as a day apart.

We are to keep the Sabbath holy because God has made it holy, and holy precisely as a day of rest. Elsewhere in the law, the Sabbath day is extended to the seventh or sabbatical year, and to the Jubilee year, occurring after seven sabbatical years.

We do not make the Sabbath holy by our worship; rather, we are to keep the day that the Lord God has made holy, and we are to do this primarily by resting. What does "holy" mean? The word comes from the same root that gives us the word "heal." A holy day is a healing day, something to be kept in mind when we ponder the gospel accounts of Jesus healing on the Sabbath -- an act that above all others infuriated those who saw in this a challenge to their own controlling position in society.

We know, of course, that in the Genesis account that portrays God the Creator in human terms, we are not to interpret God's rest in physical terms, any more than we are to imagine God fashioning the earth in the manner of a craftsperson fashioning an artifact. Both work and rest have much more profound meanings than those literal ones. We get some hint of the meaning of God's rest from the recurring refrain in the Genesis account, "And God saw that it was good."

God saw. God contemplated. The six days of creation, the working days, are for the sake of the seventh and not the other way around. The Sabbath, and nothing else, can restore to our culture the dimension of contemplation on which our very life depends.

Keeping the Sabbath does not mean an obligation to attend Sunday worship. Rather, it is an invitation, a call to contemplation, so that we too can recognize that the world is good, that we can come to experience it as a whole, as a living fabric that we hold in trust for each other. It is in the shelter of each other, in mutual care for each and all, that we live. There is no other way.

CONTEMPLATION REVEALS BEAUTY to us, beauty that is love made visible. Once we have a love relationship with the world, we can ask the right questions. We can enter into earthkeeping with some prospect for a way of living that will not turn out to be destructive despite our good intentions. Without contemplation our good intentions so often serve others and ourselves badly.

While it is true that we can trace much of the degradation of the environment to greed, there is also well-intentioned activity that is destructive. People cut desperately needed firewood in Nepal, and as a result, other poor people in Bangladesh are killed by floods brought on by soil erosion attributable to deforestation upstream in Nepal. Development experts introduce better breeds of cattle into the Sahelian nomadic economy, and the resulting overgrazing causes the desert to expand. These discouraging examples can be multiplied indefinitely. What this tells us is that we need some guidelines that will protect us from behaviors that are destructive even when we don't intend such results.

Nature itself is not wholly benign. Today there is much sentimental talk and writing about nature that fails to face up to some painful and difficult facts. What is good for the wolf is not good for the lamb. Some forms of life, those we conventionally call "higher" forms, live off other forms and destroy these forms in the process. Nevertheless, there is in all this some inscrutable plan within the mystery of creation, and we want to enter into the plan.

We do not enter the plan through analysis; we enter it through obedience. Sabbath rest, which is the context for contemplation, is a brake on our technologically contrived rhythms, rhythms that are not in harmony with the inner structure of the earth.

Contemplation has its own rhythm. Contemplation waits on God's revelation, waits patiently in God's silence, allows reality to present itself on its own terms.

Sabbath, when kept, reveals to us the interiority of creation. We may be more accustomed to calling it the transcendant dimension or the spiritual. It is thoughtful physicists who not infrequently come upon the reality of the non-material dimension of creation ahead of those whose religion is largely a matter of habit or unexamined tradition.

Jewish tradition saw the Sabbath not as a 24-hour period for special religious activities but as an encounter with God. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, in his book The Sabbath, reminds us that the notion of sacred space is subordinate to the sense of sacred time in the Jewish tradition, which develops around Sabbath time, Exodus, and the coming of the Messiah. It is only secondarily that the land becomes a symbol for the ways of God with humankind.

If we are to be earthkeepers according to God's way, we will first have to become earth lovers. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoeyevsky said that the world will be saved by beauty. He may have meant that we shall have to find the ways and take the time to see the world as it really is. We cannot do this if our response is controlled by the utilitarian drive to get all we can from the earth for our immediate satisfaction.

Lovers know what the beloved needs, and true lovers also learn very quickly the disciplines they must impose upon themselves to see that these needs are met, that they do not turn the beloved into an instrument for their own gratification. There is an order inherent in the universe, but only the contemplative heart can discern it. Analysis divorced from loving contemplation will continue to produce bigger and more costly mistakes.

When we find our delight in contemplative relationship to those things that God saw and pronounced very good, we will want to tread lightly on the land, to be people who give more than we take. This takes time, generous time, and in a regular rhythm.

At one period during the French Revolution, a group of social engineers managed to impose the 10-day week to provide more work days. They gave it up when the horses died. Our entire biosphere depends upon the Sabbath. We have the ability to disobey but with devastating results.

Sabbath gives us the time we need to experience with relish that God is Creator. This is not meant to be a theological abstraction. It is meant to be a mystical experience, the experience that God is making the world, and therefore me, now, and doing it for sheer love. The earth is not completed. God is making it day by day and pronouncing it good. We are here because and only because we are being made out of nothing and God's creative love.

We cannot rush into that truth. It takes time to let it come home to us. To know God as Creator, as distinct from having the notion of a creator God, needs a day each week, a day that sheds its radiance on all we do during the next six days. But we come to this knowledge only if we celebrate the Sabbath day well, if we keep holy this day that God has made holy.

Mary Evelyn Jegen, S.N.D., was vice president of Pax Christi International and taught, wrote, and conducted retreats and workshops on peace and justice when this article appeared.