Mission Book Study—Earth Spirituality: In the Catholic and Dominican Traditions (10/4/06 )
by Sharon Zayac, OP, Director of Jubilee Farm

Using Sr. Sharon Zayac’s text Earth Spirituality as their starting point, participants in this book study at Barry University connected current thoughts on earth spirituality to the Church tradition. The study, facilitated by Fr. Dave Caron, director of the Center for Dominican Studies, helped participants recognize that reverencing Earth is not the same as worshipping nature; it is not pantheism. Instead, it is the recognition of Earth as an expression “of the God to whom we belong.”

Looking at the tradition, Zayac noted the eco-themes one can see in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Thomas, (1224 – 1274) a Dominican whose work still grounds much of Western civilization, eschewed dualistic thinking, including that which separated humans from nature or placed humans above nature. All of Creation for Thomas is One. Our fate is inextricably bound to the fate of Earth. 

Like Thomas, Meister Eckhart, (1260-1327/8) a Dominican recognized as one of the great Christian mystics, saw Creation as a revelation of God, feeling that Creation flows out of and back to God. As humans, we must understand our relationship to Creation, not set ourselves above it.

Zayac pointed to the Enlightenment as the period in which nature was demystified and the human became the only subject in a world of objects. As this world view developed, it was all too easy for humans to feel justified in subjugating the earth and its creatures, to the detriment of all. But dominion must give way to stewardship … Genesis does not give us a mandate to abuse and destroy, Zayac asserts. Instead, we are to act as God’s representatives, to recognize that there is no human and nature: we are all nature.

Zayac wrote of recent Church documents like Rerum Novarum, Pacem in Terris, and Onadium et Spec, that call us to respect and care for Earth. She also examined the U.S. bishops writings on the issue of global warming and other ecological concerns. Noting that Dominicans today are called, like all Christians, to respond to the “signs of the times,” Zayac encouraged a response following the Dominican Four Pillars: study, preaching, prayer, and community (life in right relationship).

At the conclusion of this book study, Fr. Dave conveyed Zayac’s image of God as “speaking through Earth, living persons, blades of grass, wetland and river, every pebble and oak.” All present felt inspired to act in the name of Earth community. One person even noted that she felt called to “disseminate the thoughts so nicely presented by the author.”