Sisters of Earth
Religious women and ecological spirituality
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Sisters
of Earth is a network of Roman Catholic religious women and affiliated laity,
mostly in the U.S., who are converting their land and institutions into centers
of ecological literacy and environmental sustainability. This work reflects
a new awareness among women religious of ecological crisis, and yet such ventures
have deep roots in older monastic tradition.Monastic communities historically were rural, land-based and supported themselves by agriculture. They cultivated a communal way of life committed to voluntary poverty and simplicity. They practiced withdrawal from the luxury and corruption of the "world," or what we today might call "consumer society." Monasticism spread in Western Christianity at a time of the collapse of Roman imperial civilization, a collapse that was political, economic and ecological. It was a time when the things of "this world" were seen to have failed. Monasticism was an effort to construct an alternative way of life suitable to salvation.
The monastic way of life was not simply "other-worldly," it also held forth a vision of the restoration of creation. It promised a restoration of the original harmony of all creatures with one another and with God. The natural world corrupted by human sin would be restored. One sign of this was a restored peace between humans and animals that was corrupted at the time of the flood (see Genesis 9:2). Stories of friendship between animals and monks, a return to simple subsistence agriculture, the holding of all things in common, were all marks of this intended return to an original state of creation as intended by God.
Many early Church Fathers believed that God created the riches of the earth to be held in common. The rise of private property in the hands of the rich, impoverishing the majority of humans, was an expression of fallenness. For example, in the fourth century Ambrose, bishop of Milan, wrote:
Why do the injuries of nature delight you? The world has been created for all, while you rich are trying to keep it for yourselves. Not merely the possession of the earth, but the very sky, air and the sea are claimed for the use of the rich few. ... Not from your own do you bestow on the poor man, but you make return from what is his. For what has been given as common for the use of all, you appropriate for yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich. (De Nabuthe Jezraelita 3, 11)
For Ambrose, simple living, land held in common with equal benefits for all, restored God's order and intention for creation.
Monastic tradition has also stressed service to society and help for the poor. Monastic communities in the West have been centers of literacy and education. Thus for women religious to reshape their land and buildings to make them centers for ecojustice and learning about an ecologically sustainable lifestyle is a modern renewal of some very traditional impulses of Christian monastic life.
The Sisters of Earth movement has a more recent history in the U.S. In the 1940s the Catholic Rural Life Conference (CRLC) promoted a back-to-the-land movement for U.S. Catholics. Part of this was a perception of city life as corrupt. Catholics, then largely urban immigrants, would recover a "purer" life by moving to the country and taking up family farming and traditional home production skills, such as bread-baking. But the CRLC was also concerned about justice for farmers being driven off their land by corporate enterprise. Catholic communitarian social justice movements, such as the Catholic Worker and the Grail, were influenced by the CRLC and created farming communities, even while retaining urban service work.
In the 1960s, the Grail and other groups of religious women reemphasized urban ministry, under the influence of organizers such as Saul Alinsky, and abandoned communal farming. But the 1970s saw a discovery of the issue of ecology as a crisis of industrial civilization. The Club of Rome report and the celebration of Earth Day in the late 1960s heralded a new awareness that consumer society was using the resources of the earth unsustainably.
The guru of the Catholic ecological movement, however, has been Passionist priest Thomas Berry. Berry was a professor of the history of religions at Fordham University who turned to a focus on ecology and cosmology in the late sixties. He founded the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in 1970, focusing on a sustainable relation of the human community to the earth and the universe. His collection of essays, Dream of the Earth (1988) has become a classic of the ecological spirituality movement. Together with physicist Brian Swimme, he authored The Universe Story (1991), which redefined modern scientific cosmology as a new creation story.
Berry's most recent book, The Great Work (1999), defines the creation of an ecologically sustainable culture as the primary historic challenge of the present human generation. Berry's seminars at the Riverdale Center and the distribution of his papers and tapes, became musts for the continuing education of Catholic women religious. Other Catholic centers of spirituality, such as the Sophia Center at Holy Names College in Oakland, Calif., have claimed Berry's work as the central pillar of their educational vision.
Berry is not the only influence on the Sisters of Earth Movement. Another important shaper of this movement on the practical level is Jesuit Al Fritsch, director of Appalachia -- Science in the Public Interest. Fritsch's Center does ecological sustainability inventories for institutions, including religious orders. Women's religious orders, particularly, have asked for his assessments of the sustainability of their properties. From the mid-1980s Fritsch's center carried out such inventories on over 60 motherhouses of women's religious orders.
Fritsch's resource audits are comprehensive and include the areas of energy use, food use, land use, the physical plant, transportation, waste management, water use and wildlife. In the area of energy, Fritsch's audit includes both avenues of conservation and partial self-sufficiency in energy needs. He recommends such possibilities as solar, wind, biomass and hydro energy; solar food drying and cooking, the use of greenhouses, passive space and water heating, and photo electric potential. The audit points out ways to increase self-reliance in food and to reduce costs of food from production to preparation. He examines land use to promote self-sufficiency, edible landscaping, aquaculture, multiple use of land, wildlife refuges and the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of land use.
In assessing the physical plant, Fritsch examines the physical condition of the building and its use patterns and suggests more efficient use of the present building. He examines the transportation uses of the community, both public and private, to recommend greater efficiency and environmental quality. Waste disposal is assessed to discern present practices and recommend recycling, composting and use of compost toilets. Water use is examined as well as management of wetlands, with recommendations for conservation and alternative sources.
Finally the relation to wildlife is examined, both flora and fauna, to suggest improved protection of habitat. (See Resource Auditing Service, PO Box 298, Livingston, KY 40445.)
Why have religious women been the primary agents of this kind of ecological conversion? Men's monastic orders have similar roots that would seem to dispose them equally to such concerns. The answer seems to lie in the greater prophetic consciousness of religious women as they have taken hold of the renewal of their communities in the last 35 years since the Second Vatican Council. An important factor in this greater prophetic consciousness has been the influence of feminism on American women religious. American nuns have become aware of the injustice of the clerical establishment to women in general and to themselves as religious women. This critical view of the church institution has fostered greater independence and initiative among religious women to undertake their own work for justice, rather than depending on the leadership of the male clergy.
An ecofeminist approach that blends feminism, ecology and justice seems to have a particular appeal to Catholic religious women. Ecofeminism brings together spirituality and scientific rationality, prayer and practical management, outreach to society and service to the poor with cultivation of the inner self; critical reason with the poetic, artistic and intuitive. Berry's vision and Fritsch's practicality make for a wholistic reshaping of religious community life. It allows religious women to reclaim the best of the past tradition of monastic life with the call to renewal. Ecofeminist leader Miriam MacGillis uses the metaphor of "reinhabiting" for this process of conversion which both reclaims and transforms the places that one already lives. Religious women are "reinhabiting" the land, the tradition, the calling for community life that they already have.
Women's religious orders and movements began to apply ecological sustainability to their lands and buildings in the early 1980s. The Grail, for example transformed their property in Loveland, Ohio to develop a permaculture garden and solar heated greenhouse. They added "how to" courses on permaculture and solar heating to their regular course offerings, with their own work as demonstration training sites. Other women's orders also underwent their own conversions of their properties and the founding of training centers for others to learn from their experience.
The Sisters of Earth built on this accumulation of centers over the past decade, bringing them together as an organized network in 1994. At the present time there are about 300 members of this network, mostly across the U.S. The network has a larger global reach than these numbers suggest, since many members represent centers that influence local regions, and their religious orders have ties to their sisters in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. The network allows for mutual support and a sharing of experiences through a newsletter, a national conference every two years and an Internet connection (contact through Mary Lou Dolan, <elm@woods.smwc.edu>).
Although the transformation of motherhouses as ecological sustainability and teaching centers suggests a rural focus, much of the work of members of Sisters of Earth ranges across urban institutions as well. Most notable is the application of energy, food and waste recycling to hospitals, a major ministry of religious women. Other ecologically-minded religious women have focused on their work in parishes and schools. A considerable number of the leaders in the Sisters of Earth movement have been teachers of science, and ecological sustainability has given them a new outlet for their training and teaching.
Among the projects undertaken by Sisters of Earth members have been solar heated houses and greenhouses, strawbale houses (to demonstrate the cheap and energy efficient nature of this kind of building material), wind energy systems, solar ovens, composting toilets and community gardens. Typically all these projects are undertaken not just for internal improvement, but are made into demonstration projects for teaching programs that combine a new vision and spirituality with practical skills. These skills have also been shared in the mission work of religious women. Learning how to build composting toilets and solar ovens has enhanced the work of religious women in the poorest communities, in areas such as Central America and Africa.
Sisters of Earth members have also been active with international agencies. One member, Jean Blewett, the founder of Earthcommunity Center in Laurel, Md., offers workshops and retreats on ecological spirituality and practice, and monitors the debate on sustainable development at the United Nations. Others are active with such organizations as Worldwatch, Environmental Defense Fund and Greenpeace. Another, Aurea Cormier, a university professor of domestic science, has developed a textbook entitled World Food Problems, and organizes an annual forum on food and nutrition issues.
While many of these women have created centers that do ecological literacy training, the most important such center, where many Sisters of Earth have gone for their own training, is Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey. Genesis Farm was founded by Miriam MacGillis. MacGillis has written extensively on the new universe story and ecological spirituality and is a frequent lecturer on these topics around the world. Genesis Farm offers major training courses in such areas as "The Universe Story and Bioregionalism" (a two-week program), a six-week and a twelve-week earth literacy program, and such focused seminars as "simplifying our life-styles" and "re-visioning the vowed life."
Ecological spirituality and practice is also reshaping prayer and literacy for these religious women. Several have developed ecologically-focused labyrinth walks. Genesis Farm has shaped a sacred space on their land as an earth meditation walk. The stations of this walk bring together the stages of the universe story with the stages of each person's life cycle story. An ecojustice center in the Philippines, organized by religious women there, has created a meditation walk on their land modeled on the stations of the cross. Each station focuses on an area of the sufferings of the earth and its creatures, inflicted by sinful humankind: pollution of water, fouling of the air, the poisoning of the soil, extinction of species, social violence and poverty.
The prayers of the church year also allow for a recovery of the relation of liturgy to the seasons, the winter and summer solstices, the fall and spring equinoxes. Prayer is also integrated into rhythms of daily life: rising and sleeping, food preparation, eating and cleaning up, fasting and feasting. Sisters of Earth is an inspiring example of how a traditional Christian form of community of life, the monastic order, is being redeveloped, or "reinhabited," to make them vehicles of ecological living and learning.