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Religion and Sustainability

James Parks Morton
Interfaith Center of New York, 38 East 30th Street, New York, NY 10016

Two of my environmental gurus, and also close friends, died this last year, just before Christmas. Carl Sagan and Laurens van der Post could not be more different, but they were equally passionate stargazers. Science and religion agree that we humans and the planet itself are made of stardust, so I offer these words on religion and sustainability in grateful memory of those remarkable latter-day astrologers.

Let me begin with a story about Sir Laurens that Larry Hughes told at van der Post's funeral in London on December 20, 1996. Larry was his American publisher of 37 years and 25 books, and the story took place on Laurens's second trip to New York, in 1961.

It was a summer evening and I was accompanying Laurens to a supper party. When we entered the large lobby of the building in which our host had an apartment, we saw three or four people excitedly running around trying to catch a pigeon which had flown in through the front door, but couldn't find its way out. Immediately, but in a very quiet way, Laurens took charge. He directed that someone open a back door which led out to a garden and that all of us stand absolutely still. Within minutes the pigeon flew down to the lobby floor and from about 10 feet away stood inspecting Colonel van der Post with that sideto-side movement that pigeons employ when sizing up a situation. Then the pigeon took one last look at this smartly dressed stranger, turned, and flew out the open back door into the garden. Am I imagining that Laurens spoke to this bird? I believe he did because I remember thinking ‘here we have Montgomery of Alamein and Francis of Assisi rolled into one’ (Hughes 1996).

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Later, as I came to read and learn more about Laurens van der Post, I realized that communication with animals was a very natural part of his life. Can we forget his persuasive chat with that stubborn camel or his meeting with that tiger on a jungle trail, or his marvelous portrayal of Blady the horse, or of Mantis or Hintze, the African ridge-back? As the hunter in The Hunter and the Whale explained: One of the reasons why nature, and animals in particular, were so important to us today was because they are a reminder that we could live life not according to our own will, but to God's' (van der Post 1987).

Such is our context this afternoon: pigeons, humans, aquifers, apartment buildings and rain forests, stubborn camels, and stars—in particular, the structural interdependence and interconnectedness of all creatures. “Inter” is today's buzzword for us because it is the necessary qualifier for everything that touches both sustainability and religion: interrelatedness, interdisciplinary, intercontinental, intergenerational, interracial, intercultural, interspecies, interfaith—all interdependent, all interconnected. No man—or woman—is an island, especially in the age of the Internet.

I want to give you my particular twist in defining religion and sustainability—that specific environmental subset of ecology. And then, like every preacher, I will briefly outline what I will say, then say it, and then tell you what I have said.

Defining Religion and Sustainability

The etymology of the word religion is so utterly fundamental and simple that it surprises many people. It comes from the Latin verb religare, which means to connect, to join together, to assemble, to create connectedness, to create community. By definition, then, being religious means being inclusive, perhaps even being compulsive about the idea that no one, indeed nothing in Heaven or on Earth, is left out. This primary “action” definition of religion as “connecting” is my particular slant in contrast with defining religion as believing such-and-such. “Believing” comes much further down the line. Mine is the more primordial meaning of religion as community-building and maintenance—getting all the people together, keeping them together, and celebrating cosmic togetherness. I will speak of several generic and universal rituals of connecting that people all over the world have practiced since time immemorial and also of their manifold variations and often striking differences. But my point is to celebrate diversity in religious practices in the same way we celebrate the unique gifts that different trees bring to the forest and thereby save us from missing the forest for the trees or vice versa. Religion and ecology both deal with individual persons and individual trees but always in the context of connecting the whole creation, the whole forest.

In fact, this fundamental etymological closeness of religion and ecology has led several of my environmental pals to claim with a grin that ecology is the flip side of religion, maybe even the religion of the new millennium. We could do worse.

But if so-called secular ecology defines itself as the study of connections—of how biological systems connect with each other and with their larger environment—when we come to the definition of sustainability, we plunge once again

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into the incense-laden atmosphere of religion. Sustainability is the whistle-blower of ecology, the hard-nosed safeguard and guarantor of harmony and balance within a given “connectedness,” lest it become overwhelmed by one or a combination of factors. The precise mission of environmental sustainability is to monitor and turn around threats to harmony and balance due to overconsumption, overproduction, and overreproduction and, equally important, due to disrespect for human rights and disregard for Earth's regenerative capacities. But whistleblowing is also a cry for justice and compassion that overlaps with another function of religion, stretching from the Hebrew prophets to the two Martin Luthers on to Sadat and Rabin and Mandela and Rachel Carson and Rosa Parks and Mother Teresa.

In short, with the ancient rituals and connecting rhythms of the world's religions basically in synch with the music of modern-day ecology and sustainability, have we not just about got it made? Are not religion and ecology almost two sides of the same coin?

What Went Wrong?

Often a situation comes into focus instantly if we reverse gear or look at a negative photo print. For a few minutes, let us define “bad” religion and “non”sustainability. Immediately we see the drive to all-inclusiveness and interconnectedness turn into its opposite—to exclusiveness, to one community splitting into factions, to communion turning into excommunication, to Us versus Them, to words and credos speaking louder than actions and behavior. And on the environmental side, is not nonsustainability inevitable if life is driven by economic determinism and its three bedfellows of maximal production with cheapest resources, psychological advertising, and unlimited consumption? The Me Generation becomes the me cosmos, and mono crop is king. Exit biodiversity.

Time out for the depressing light of reality: If we ask Mr. and Mrs. America and the families of Japan and Europe—we'll hold off asking Africa, the Far East, Latin America, and China for the moment—if we ask these “developed” folks where in their lives they honestly rate the importance of religion and the crisis of the environment, I think the answers to both will be lukewarm. Of course, positive polls can be cited about “belief in God,” increased church attendance here and there, and even the recent inclusion of the word environment in national surveys of important issues facing humanity. But what seems lacking is any widespread dimension of urgency or immediacy. Instead, what appear to be dominant characteristics of modern religions in developed countries are their privatized and sectarian nature and their being optional, as in sports or collecting. In no sense today is religion recognized as a generic and given part of basic human reality, like breathing, eating, sex, communication, tools, and art. To put it simply, religion in recent years has been severely trivialized.

Similarly, most people's concern about environmental sustainability is on the back burner, but for different historical reasons. Since the 18th century, what we in the West have thought of as the environment has been largely subsumed under the abstract category of Nature with a capital N and therefore eternal, invisible

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(apart from 18th-century landscape painting and new science), and just there as a stage and resource for the human project. Sustainability, let us remember, was virtually unheard of until 1992 and Rio de Janiero; and for most people it is still an unknown word.

The history of abstract Nature, structurally divorced as it was from concrete humanity, is similar to the history of light. That is why Marshall McLuhan put a photograph of a very concrete light bulb on the cover of his 1966 book The Medium Is the Message to awaken people to the all-pervasive, and therefore invisible, medium of light.

But it took an additional 22 years for the abstract environment to become visible and concrete for most people. Indeed, it took a series of four blockbuster events beginning in the sweltering hot summer of 1988 to accomplish this visibility. First, that lonely garbage barge as it wandered the oceans seeking a place to dump its cargo; second at the peak of the summer's heat wave, the closing of New York's public beaches because of the piles of smelly washed-up trash, hospital wastes, and orange peels; third, as shown in Newsweek's August 1988 cover drawing of the modern nuclear family (mom, pop, junior, and sis) sweating like pigs under a bell jar, “the greenhouse effect”; and fourth, as shown in Time's man-of-the-year December 31 issue with its lurid cover titled “Planet of the Year,” Christo's wrapped, deflated beach ball sporting the moonshot image of Earth, washed up and sagging on the shore.

Genesis of a New Global Environmental Forum

Oxford 1988

Now, back to a sense of urgency and immediacy. Even with the creation of Earth Day in 1970 and the valiant slugging efforts throughout the 1970s and 1980s of the environmental groups and of those relatively few scientists and activists and statesmen whom we all know, environmental concerns didn't begin to become priorities at the American breakfast table until 1988, for a variety of unplanned, serendipitous convergent reasons. In addition to the four media events of that hot 1988 summer just mentioned, one of the surprising alliances of 1988 was the remarriage of science and religion. Of course, as in most marriages today, there had already been a number of one-night stands and some closeted attempts at cohabitation. For example, Gregory Bateson, Rene Dubos, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, James Lovelock, and 2 dozen other environmental scientists and scholars had regularly preached at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine beginning in the 1970s. But I was considered an oddball in the tradition of my predecessor Dean James Pike and the famous Red Dean of Canterbury. According to hallowed English tradition, Anglican Cathedrals are often known as “Royal Peculiars.”

At any rate, because of this decade-long practice of using the pulpit of St. John the Divine as an open forum for environmental issues as religious issues, I had been approached in 1985 by a delegation of three wise men, headed by Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke, and including Claus Nobel and Akio Matsumura. All

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three had worked for several years with global population issues involving parliamentarians and UN agencies. Now they had a new agenda and wanted my help to expand their population concern to include the full spectrum of environmental issues and to bring religious leaders worldwide into association with their band of global parliamentarians—in short, to create a new global forum combining church and state, an obvious no-no both to the UN and to all so-called modern states.

I replied that I thought this was just what the world needed, especially if we invited major scientists to join the plot from the beginning. They agreed, and I immediately called my friend Carl Sagan for help.

We organized ourselves that year as a nonprofit called the Global Forum for Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders and set about planning our first meeting for spring 1988 in Christ Church College, Oxford. We all had agreed that it should take place in the most kosher setting possible. It was to be under the formal patronage of the archbishop of Canterbury on the religious side, joined by the Dalai Lama, Cardinal Koenig of Vienna, Mother Teresa, and the high priest of the African rain forest and on the political side by two senior senators, Sat Pal Mittal of India and Manuel Ulloa of Peru. Most astonishing was the arrival of a delegation from the Soviet Union that included archbishops, rabbis, imams, cosmonauts, the president of the Supreme Soviet, and Gorbachev's chief nuclear adviser, Evgeny Velikov, who headed up the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In all, 300 persons worked together under the huge banner of the planet seen from the moon: 100 sitting parliamentarians, 100 spiritual leaders, and 100 scientists, artists, and journalists. We were together for 4 full days; major addresses were by given by Sagan, Velikov, James Lovelock, Father Tom Berry, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama; and we closed with a banquet at Blenheim Palace, where Dr. King's right-hand organizer, the Rev. C. T. Vivian, offered the blessing, and Carl and I chatted over port about atheism—our unending conversation.

I have treated the 1988 Oxford meeting at some length for two reasons. First, it really was the first major public viewing of environmental science, religion, and politics as partners in the common enterprise of living sustainably on Earth—a solemn return to the way all the world had operated until the modern era. But second, and perhaps more important, the Oxford meeting had a substantial impact in the United States on the forthcoming remarriage of environment and religion. The two marriage brokers were Carl Sagan and his Russian colleague, Evgeny Velikov, who reported to Gorbachev that a meeting just like Oxford, only much bigger, should take place in Moscow as soon as possible. They told Gorbachev that it would re-educate Russian scientists, politicians, and religious leaders about how to work together to rehabilitate the dangerously degraded “Chernobylized” Russian environment. Gorbachev gave an immediate go-ahead (he was just approaching the zenith of his power in 1988) and scheduled a 5-day meeting for the second week in January 1990, when all his new election and restructuring procedures would be in place.

But while the Moscow preparations were zooming ahead, things were moving at a snail's pace in the American religious community with respect to any recognition of crisis, let alone action, on issues of sustainability, even after the hot

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summer of 1988 with its garbage-strewn beaches and Newsweek and Time covers. I thought that the obvious course to follow was to go to the very top religious leaders with a blue-ribbon delegation of respected environmental true believers. Several polite meetings with the highest muckety-mucks actually took place, but eyes glazed amid confusion about the meaning of environmental stewardship. Were we talking about fund-raising stewardship as in churches and synagogues?

I was exasperated, and so was Paul Gorman, my sidekick and environmental partner at the cathedral. What next? We called Sagan and out of our shared frustration, a brilliant, totally different strategy was forged: To convert religious leaders, we decided to “lead with the enemy” and have Sagan recruit a small army of the world's most distinguished scientists, who would implore the religious leaders to join them in their urgent appeal to save the world. A one-paragraph cover letter signed by four impeccably placed national religious leaders paved the way and was followed by an impassioned appeal signed by 34 impeccable scientists with Sagan's name at the top of the list (Sagan and others 1988). And the miracle happened. All the top American religious leaders, deeply flattered, immediately signed up, and we had an instant Joint Appeal of Science and Religion sent to every minister, rabbi, and priest in the country (Hurst and others 1988).

As it turned out, our Machiavellian plans were providentially timed—the appeal letter had been mailed in November 1989, and replies arrived like Christmas cards just in time for presenting to the January 1990 meeting in Moscow.

Moscow Global Forum.

Indeed, the Moscow Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders was the full flowering of the seed planted at Oxford in 1988. Some 1,200 people sat for 5 full working days under the banner of planet Earth seen from the moon; the meeting was opened by UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar, followed by keynotes from Elie Wiesel and Jim Grant of UNICEF; Senators Al Gore and Clayborne Pell and Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Tim Wirth all pushed the emergency button; 15 American 8th-graders attended with their 15 Moscow 8th-grader hosts; and a delegation of 55 indigenous religious leaders came from five continents. The expected tradeoff also occurred: nine Chinese delegates came on condition that the Dalai Lama not be invited. But on the last day, Carl Sagan and Evgeny Velikov asked all the assembled world religious leaders to join their American confreres and add their names to the “Joint Appeal of Religion and Science,” bringing the total to 300. And every session was opened by either a prayer or a chant or a moment of silent meditation from the religious traditions of the planet.

The meeting was extraordinary in its urgency and spirit. Artists made remarkable contributions, and vast amounts of vodka were joyously consumed in the midst of bureaucratic Moscow's predictable nonfunctionality: the telephone system, faxes, office supplies, and literally tons of fresh food all had to be imported from Finland and Frankfurt. But what a pivotal moment! Of the 1,200 attendees, 800 were from Russia; and for the first time since the revolution, religious leaders, elected public officials, scientists, news reporters, and artists mingled freely and in small buzz groups opened their hearts about a world after Chernobyl with

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its contaminated breast milk, poisoned rivers and aquifers, and deformed animals and insects.

The final session, on Friday afternoon, was held in the Kremlin in the ceremonial Hall of the Soviets, a climax past imagining. On the wall behind the podium stood a colossal 12-ft statue of Lenin, the only decoration in this exceedingly austere chamber, and on the rostrum were eight chairs: Gorbachev in the center flanked by Archbishop Pitorim, Angie Biddle Duke, Senator Manuel Ulloa, Akio Matsumura, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Carl Sagan, and me. To the astonishment of all 1,200, the session began when a skinny saffron-robed swami from India, who happened also to be a well-known microbiologist, mounted the podium, rapped the floor with his walking stick, and slowly began to chant “om.” The entire room joined in the om-ing, and I wondered what Lenin thought from his lofty perch above us.

Gorbachev's speech was like Martin Luther King's 1963 “I Have a Dream” call to arms. He acknowledged the environment as the major global crisis before us, now that nuclear arms were coming under control, and then apologized very candidly for Russia's major role in creating a polluted world and pledged his personal leadership to meet the challenge. His final words were a very practical proposal. The great humanitarian achievement of the 19th century, he reminded us, was the creation of the Red Cross to alleviate human suffering from natural and human-made disasters. What the world needs today, he concluded, is the creation of an international Green Cross to heal the wounds of the degraded and ravished natural environment and to restore harmony to the total created order.

A final comment about the extraordinary timing of the Moscow meeting in January 1990: In the very same week that Gorbachev made his speech on Friday afternoon, the citizens of the Baltic states threatened to leave the Soviet Union if they were not granted their political independence. I remember Gorbachev's impassioned face on Russian television on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, imploring the crowds in the streets of Vilna; and on Thursday, we were told that the president very much wanted to keep his appointment with us, but that we must recognize the unpredictability of his schedule. After Friday afternoon actually happened, with the Green Cross buzzing in our brains, along with the prospect of a vodka and caviar reception with Gorbachev, the two dozen or so Jewish members of our ranks, Sagan included, gathered in a basement room of the Kremlin Hall of the Soviets and said prayers for the beginning of the Sabbath—certainly the first time that ceremony had ever taken place in that building. More miracles of timing.

Perhaps no one will ever know how important the Moscow meeting was, but several specific results are important for our brief consideration of religion and sustainability. First, the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders barged ahead and asked Gorbachev whether he would agree to be president if we did all the leg work of organizing his International Green Cross. Those negotiations took the better part of the next 2 years but provided the impetus for our planning a third global forum, to occur in Rio de Janeiro as part of the Environmental Summit in June 1992. That meeting in 1992 took place in Rio de Janeiro's original city hall, and all our by now faithful regulars chimed in—Al Gore, Tim

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Wirth, Carl Sagan, Perez de Cuellar, Maurice Strong, the Grand Mufti of Damascus, and even the Dalai Lama, who just happened to be in Rio de Janeiro. The high point came when Senator Manuel Ulloa announced that Gorbachev had indeed agreed to be president of the newly forming International Green Cross, and we were to go ahead full speed in getting its organizational shape together in preparation for an inaugural meeting to take place a year hence, in 1993 in Japan. Keep in mind that at this point Gorbachev's domestic problems were coming to a boil, and his own political future was very unclear.

Moscow's second direct result for religion and sustainability was the tremendous affirmation it gave to the newly forming “American Joint Appeal of Religion and Science for the Environment.” Paul Gorman at the cathedral made his priority the organizational task of transforming enthusiastic responses to an impassioned letter into a functioning program. Once again, major input came from Carl Sagan, Al Gore, and Tim Wirth; and by April 1990, the joint appeal came into existence as an organization, with Paul Gorman as its director, I as chairman, and offices based at the cathedral—just 3 months after Moscow.

The American Religious Communities' Commitment to Global Concerns

In the following June (1991), the new joint appeal held its first conference, beginning at New York's Museum of Natural Science and continuing at the cathedral, where 24 top religious leaders met—Jewish, Roman Catholic, Evangelical, mainline Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox leaders, and executives of the historically black churches—to be briefed by no less than Peter Raven, E.O. Wilson, James Hansen, Sherwood Rowland, Henry Kendall, Anne Whyte, Beverly Davison, Steven Jay Gould, Ann Druyan, and, of course, Sagan, Gore, and Wirth. At the end of the second day, the 24 religious leaders issued a powerful public statement committing the American religious community to solid environmental concerns.

Urgency at last was truly the name of the game. In March 1992, the Joint Appeal held a consultation with top leaders of the Jewish community (with Sagan, Gore, and Wirth again as principal teachers); and in May 1992, the Joint Appeal made its maiden trip to Capitol Hill with its “Mission to Washington.” First, 50 heads of religious denominations were lectured by 50 scientists (the same faithful soldiers), and then in pairs they took on representatives, senators, and finally a joint congressional committee.

That night, after it was all over and the exhausted triumphant faithful sat down to strong drinks and dinner at a favorite Italian hideaway of Gore's, the second baby from the remarriage of religion and the environment was conceived. The question was, What next? And by the time the party had broken up, it had been decided to go for broke: seriously to take on the American religious establishment—obviously as partners, not adversaries—with a powerful up-front goal—guaranteeing that for local churches and synagogues the environmental crisis would have a clear priority for prayer and meditation, for study and proclamation and public action. In short, a central religious issue in the same sense that justice,

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peace, and poverty had become intrinsic religious concerns, not just “secular” issues. At long last, it looked as though the old sacred-secular standoff could be put to rest and that all of creation could be seen as holy and the very stuff of religion. Could it be that our starting point of religion and ecology as flip sides of each other, as the twin practitioners of connecting everything, just might be gaining ground?

National Religious Partnership for the Environment

That was all in May 1992; the next month, off we went to Rio de Janeiro and the environmental summit with its new word, sustainability. By fall of 1992, we were laying the groundwork for the new child of the Joint Appeal, a brand new baby to be called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment and to be composed of four religious partners: the Roman Catholic Church, the three denominations of Judaism, the National Council of Churches (including all the mainline Protestant, Orthodox and black churches), and the Evangelical Christians (including the Southern Baptists and all the Pentecostal churches). That is a huge mouthful, but the point is that its structure included virtually all the Christians and Jews who together make up the majority of Americans.

What made it politically important was its organizational structure with a small governing board composed of the top brass of the four religious partners—the folks who control the denominational budgets and make the policy decisions. Carl Sagan and Henry Kendall from MIT were also on the governing board maintaining the strong link with the scientific community, I continued to serve as chair, and Paul Gorman was president of the new organization, still with its offices at the cathedral. This trim structure proved excellent for fund-raising, the fact that Gore was in the White House did not hurt, and in 1 year we raised enough millions from major foundations to assure each of the four partners an annual grant of $250,000 for each of 3 years to be used by their own staff in their own style to make environmental sustainability come alive for their own religious tradition. The bottom line is that today we are involved directly with 50,000 local parish churches and synagogues. It is a major foot in the door. Again and again, we receive deeply moving testimonies of something cooking with kids in Sunday school, of how a certain team of interfaith activists turned around a certain city's incinerator policy, of extraordinary sermons and study groups and retreats and liturgies that have literally changed people's lives. It has just begun, and the consortium of foundations has already renewed grants for another 3 years.

But there is a negative side. Inertia remains all too real. The reality of unsustainable lifestyles is still our daily bread—James Lovelock's unholy trinity of cows, cheeseburgers, and chain saws. Sagan is dead, and the national environmental agenda has taken a tough political beating in spite of Gore and Wirth. Gorbachev's Green Cross has gone nowhere, although his very expensive State of the World Forum has kept the environmental flicker somewhat alive. In late June 1997, the UN convened its special summit session to review progress on the environmental commitment that the nations had made at Rio de Janeiro five years before in 1992. Rio plus 5 rather uneventfully came and went, although Steven Rockefeller's heroic work on creating a charter, with major input from the

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religious traditions of the world, is a hopeful sign that had its preliminary airing in draft form at the June UN meeting. We hope that it will be ready for adoption by the total General Assembly for the millennium. So fasten your seatbelts!

My only dour reminder is the final statement in Elizabeth Dowdeswell's preface to the excellent 1997 UN Environment Program paperback Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-1), prepared for Rio plus 5: “We know that the knowledge and technological base to solve the most pressing environmental issues are available. However, the sense of urgency of the early 1990s is lacking. Progress towards a sustainable future has simply been too slow.”

How troubling it is once again to return to a lack of urgency! We already know that both ecology and religion are about the connections that include every iota of creation. And we know that both sustainability and religion are whistle-blowers, prophets, and trouble-makers when situations become nonsustainable either for human justice or for Earth's capacity to regenerate itself and remain livable. But it is urgency that alone seems to be the lifeblood, the spiritual linchpin that can make ecology truly sustainable and make religion truly religious. Indeed, if history can be our teacher, it seems that only a giant environmental disaster equivalent to Hiroshima or a global stock-market crash could produce the urgency necessary to make it crystal clear that the present situation is genuinely life-threatening. There is historically only one alternative that is not catastrophic and that is capable of generating the urgency to turn people around. And that is a profound spiritual awakening.

I do not mean the urgency of shouting preachers or millennarian threats on television. A spiritual awakening can stem from any source or any combination of sources—political, scientific, artistic, religious, media, cyberspace. Because this awakening must be spiritual, I cannot exclude any possibility. But whatever the sources, it must produce a profound urgency that turns our whole lifestyle and life orientation upside down for the long haul—not for 2 years but for 2 millennia. It must be an urgency that converts us and makes us gladly adopt a positive asceticism that can literally preserve Earth and all life on it. We can all learn these ascetic disciplines from folks who have been practicing them for years, for centuries, and who are willing to teach us how—from Buddhists and Benedictines, from Quakers and Jains and Jews and Hindus and Sufis and medicine men and women. Spiritual poverty was not grim or sentimental for St. Francis, but vital and urgent, full of guts and joy. Urgency gives us an earthy sense of humor with human tears and with the sincere expectancy of surprises from many quarters. Spiritual urgency makes us capable of being at home in any situation.

The disciplines of positive asceticism that I am talking about can awaken us to the basic spiritual orientations of urgency and immediacy and vitality. They can open our eyes to the fact that most in life is not either-or, but a necessary combination of opposites like body and spirit, and that so-called spiritual disciplines in fact deal with physical breathing and diet and mantras and prostrating and sex. Positive asceticism can make us see that it is spiritually urgent for everyone—literally everyone—to experience both city living and real wilderness; that it is likewise urgent for everyone to understand intellectually the structures of stasis and kinesis, of crystals and gases, of classicism and romanticism; and that everyone's

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life is made up of the opposites of enthusiasm (literally en-theos or god inside us) and abstention, of Easter and Ramadan, of Yom Kippur and Divali.

Spiritual asceticism teaches us that nothing is more vital than the urgency of rhythm. Rhythm itself is the basis of all religious practice, coming from our private internal and inescapable rhythm of the heartbeat—hence, the primordial urgency of the shaman and his drum, of music as the necessary handmaid of religion with tambourines and thundering organs and deeply monotonous unvarying chants. These rhythms sustain us and get us through life. Weekly rhythms, feasts and fasts, the rhythm of the seasons with solstices and equinoxes, spring and fall, the summer powwow and the piercing sundance—they make our blood circulate.

As a New Yorker, I have come to be sustained by our cathedral's annual environmental extravaganza for the Feast of St. Francis. Every year on that first October Sunday, everyone brings an animal to church. Paul Winter performs his Missa Gaia with full band, with African dancers and drummers, with a choir of 600 and the recorded voices of timber wolf and whale, and with legendary sermons by Carl Sagan and Al Gore. The climax comes with a procession down the aisle led by an elephant, followed by llama, horse, cow, sheep, owls and macaws, hamsters and tortoises, New York rats and cockroaches, a tree, a treasured moon rock and meteorite, and finally a glass vial containing 500 trillion blue-green algae. Last year, 6,000 two-leggeds were inside, and 1,000 had to listen from loudspeakers in the garden. It is urgent and immediate, vitality itself, deeply sustaining, deeply environmental, deeply religious.

Religion in this most basic primordial form can raise us to ecstasy, where we can experience our connectedness to everything that is and where we can see the true meaning of urgency and the necessary cost of a universal spiritual asceticism for the long haul that will make catastrophe unnecessary and instead make a sustainable future for the planet possible.

My penultimate comment is personal. Since 1972, 1 have worked to reveal the primordial rhythms and vital connectedness of creation itself as the essence both of religion and of environmental sustainability. I have worked from a base that is necessarily limited—American, Christian, Anglican, Episcopalian. We have done some good things, and I think the cathedral is still a useful model 25 years later.

The Interfaith Center

But starting in January 1997, a small group of us have been approaching the same reality of sustainability and religion from the other end of the stick. We started a new project in New York called the Interfaith Center, where our base is not one religion but many of the world's major religions working together—Hindus and Moslems, Sikhs and Buddhists, Jews and Christians, Taoists and Shintos, Jains and indigenous traditions, and so on—in short, the de facto religious picture of New York City, which is only a mild exaggeration of the religious mix in Toledo or Miami or Los Angeles. Today, there are more Moslems than Presbyterians in Houston, Texas, and more mosques than Anglican churches in Birmingham, England. All life today is urbanized and every city worldwide is increasingly an implosion of the planet's religious, racial, and cultural diversity into new demographic containers of connectedness. To help make this given unavoidable

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physical connectedness also spiritual, sustainable, vital, and urgent is the task that our new Interfaith Center has set for itself. We all know that this kind of compression of different traditions is causing increasing conflict everywhere. But we believe that conscious cultivation of interfaith respect based on interfaith exposure and cooperation is the way to go.

So we are about developing curricula for 3rd- and 4th-grade public-school kids to learn the stories and songs of the world's religions just as they are learning about the different continents and their peoples. Just think of the pictures the kids can color! We will work heavily with the whole gamut of religious art and music and poetry and dance and drama. It will be deeply cultural. And we will train rabbis, imams, ministers, and priests to become skilled in conflict resolution. We will work closely with the UN and its agencies. We will have a Web site and also an interfaith gift shop and bookstore. We really want to do everything to make our given connectedness visible and understandable in all its beautiful diversity so that everyone can learn to appreciate both the forest and the trees, both the pigeons and the stars.

Now let me end where I began with our two stargazers, Laurens van der Post and Carl Sagan. On the fourth advent Sunday in December for the last 5 years, Laurens has preached at the cathedral and included in his sermon the story about the Kalahari bushman from his book A Mantis Carol.

Van der Post answers a woman's question about the reasons that a bushman dances. There are two different dances, he tells her: the Dance of the Little Hunger and the Dance of the Great Hunger.

The first one is of the physical hunger the child experiences the moment he is born and satisfies first at his mother's breast, and which from then on stays with him for the rest of his life on earth. But the second dance is the dance of a hunger that neither the food of the earth nor the way of life possible upon it can satisfy. It is the dance of the Bushman's instinctive intimation that man cannot live by bread alone, although without it he cannot live at all; hence the two.

Whenever I asked them about this great hunger, he writes, “they would only say not only we dancing, feeling ourselves to be raising the dust which will one day come blown by the wind to erase our last spoor from the sand when we die, lest others coming and seeing our footsteps there might still think us alive, not only we feel this hunger, but the stars too, sitting up there with their hearts of plenty, they too feel it and feeling it tremble as if afraid they would wane and their light die, on account of so great a hunger.

When we know that the stars too share our hunger, then life on Earth can really become sustainable. Because we will know its deep urgency in our bones and in our blood.

References

Hughes L. 1996. Funeral address for Laurens van der Post. London UK: 20 December 1996.

Van der Post L. 1987. The hunter and the whale: a story. London UK: Chatto and Windus.

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