May all I think and all I say be in harmony with thee
God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees.
Chinook Psalter

I'm supposed to talk to you today about "feminist and aboriginal perspectives on the environment." I've decided I can't do that. I must tell you for starters that the very prospect of trying to condense ecofeminist scholarship alone into ten or fifteen minutes of sermon time filled me with a sense of doom, and the notion that I could speak to or about 'aboriginal perspectives' on the environment felt equally impossible. So I have decided, instead, to tell you a story, and it happens to be my own story, which I feel I can relate to you with some authenticity, and incidentally I think it will tell you something about feminist and aboriginal perspectives on the environment. And if it seems a bit obtuse, just think of it as a parable.

But before I do that I would like to speak to today's gospel (which, serendipitously, just happened to be the proper for today). Diarmud O'Murchu, in Catching Up with Jesus (2005), his sequel to Quantum Theology, writes:

"In the complex world of our time, engaging with the right questions tends to be the secret to unlocking possibilities. Predictable answers carry diminished significance for our time. In the Jesus story, the question I like to return to again and again is: "Who do you say that I am?" From the Christian point of view I suggest that this is the most important question that has ever been asked, and Christianity is likely to remain well on course while we keep asking it."

OK - that's my theological framework, now here's my theoretical framework about the question of human identity. Most of us know how important it is for a child to receive 'recognition' from caregivers. We often talk about that as 'mirroring'. Feminist philosopher Diana Myers (1994) says that this is a key element in the creation of human subjectivity and moral identity. She explains that in order for a child to become a separate being, a subject, she must experience her primary caregiver recognizing her as a separate and unique person. In order for that to happen, the caregiver must be able to be empathic, to enter imaginatively into the child's emotional world and communicate it back to the child. This recognition likewise allows the child to recognize the caregiver as a separate and unique person. We can only know ourselves in relationship and when there is mutual recognition. Only when is it possible for a child to recognize herself as a distinct subject, is she able to create (and this is important) a moral identity based on empathy. It is, if you will, a holy trinity of you, I and us in relationship. With me so far?

So I grew up in a painfully dysfunctional family, and for those of you familiar with family systems theory, I was "the invisible child." I still experience this phenomenon sometimes in restaurants - no kidding - I've had at least three occasions when I've been out with friends for dinner, and have had my order forgotten. Everyone else gets served except me. And since I don't go out for dinner with groups that often, I think statistically the likelihood of that repeating should be quite low, so I don't think it's chance. I think I still carry the psychic wound of invisibility from childhood. But anyways... if you think about Myer's theory, that means that my primary caregiver, my mother, was probably also not able to recognize herself as a person, because if she had, she would have been more able to help me form my own subjectivity as a child. But don't get me wrong, I'm far from blaming my mother - she was my primary caregiver by default in the patriarchal family model that was the norm, and in reality, oppression of any kind can do great harm to one's subjectivity or sense of identity. Oppression, whether it's sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, violence, bullying can have devastating effects on our sense of who we are. In my case, girls and women (the females in my family), in a patriarchal culture of male dominance, were expected not be developed subjects, but to be objects of nurturance and service. Women were expected to be there, as they always had been, as mother, wife, housekeeper, baby producer, helpmeet etc etc to fulfill specific gender roles. There was also violence is our house.

My invisibility was actually a coping strategy for survival. I would make myself as scarce as possible to avoid being a target for abuse. My favourite hiding place was a ravine at the end of my street. It was only blocks away, but in suburban Toronto, at that time and for a child, it was wilderness, a piece of nature where I could escape into a world where I felt safe and accepted. In retrospect, it was a place where I think I was able to develop a small piece of identity, so my own sense of subjectivity is inextricably bound to nature. But I think that many of us - those who love the outdoors - have a sense of being at our very best when we are in the embrace of the wilderness. If you haven't already done it - can you imaginatively place yourself in nature now? Nature is such a powerfully spiritual place, no wonder many of the great mystics like Tesera of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen use garden and nature metaphors for the experience of God bountifully in their writings. Nature has profoundly healing effects. We gladly absorb the healing nature offers us.

Fast forward to my own mothering years of being overwhelmed with birthing three children within four and half years. Feeling depressed partially with what Betty Friedan (1963) called "the problem with no name," (it was the time of the early second wave feminist movement). I also felt my problem was profoundly spiritual. I plowed straight into this challenge. For psychological help I engaged various therapists and in looking for spiritual answers to my dilemma I decided to return to church and challenge myself intellectually as well by taking theology.

Signed up to Saint Paul University; required course: Moral existence. My first class in philosophy, taught by a Jesuit whom I will call 'Tom.' It was an all-male class with an all-male teacher (if you catch my drift). It was the most incredible experience - a group of men all speaking words that separately I could identify as English, but strung together made absolutely no sense to me. I felt like I was on another planet. I remember one class in particular. I was able to glean some threads of the philosophical ideas that Tom was speaking, and he was talking about a transcendent God whom I did not recognize. When he finished, maybe more out of exasperation than ignorance, I told Tom how I did not recognize this other, judging, detached, omniscient being as God, and related my version of a Creator who was imminent, and very (I learned the word later) panentheistic. God was in and of everything, not unlike the Creator that Matthew Fox and Diarmud O'Murchu later described in their theologies. Tom, in front of the entire class looked at me and said, basically "We have a word for that kind of thing - it's called heresy." I was stunned. This was the very thing I had feared, being found out to be a non-believer. However, I found it strangely liberating, and celebrated being outted with my classmates.

Later in my life however, being outed as a "non-believer" was not as pleasant an experience. In a former parish I supported my rector in his bid to make the language of liturgy more inclusive. It culminated in a special parish council meeting during which such nonsense was said like "the supremacy of God as male is supported because Jesus was male," but all kinds of homophobic and misogynist speech was unleashed as the pot began to boil. I felt that had this been a few generations ago, I (and maybe the rector too) would have been burned at the stake. I left, and happily, found a new home at St. John's.

What else was happening at this time was my first exposure to feminist theories and theologies of the environment. At a local gathering in the late eighties called 'Alive in the Nineties' I was exposed to Elizabeth Dodson Gray (1982) and her ideas about the connections between misogyny - the violence and degradation experienced by women and the degradation and violence towards earth, because of the centuries old binary, western philosophical tradition that equated women with nature.

Also happening around this time was a trip to Brazil for an international meeting of Episcopal women where we celebrated the Eucharist using female images, not only of God but of Christ as well. When the celebrant spoke of the body of Christa (la cuerpa de Crista) words cannot describe the impact that imagery had on me. This is the kind of affirmation of gendered identity, of RECOGNITION, that men experience - and take for granted - all the time. And remember how important recognition is to the formation of subjectivity. I was also able to meet with a vibrant community activist named Francis O'Gorman who took me to visit a slum community of women in Rio de Janiero who were transforming their lives by building a cooperative childcare centre.

I came home thirsting for this kind of community of women, for transformative living through working for social justice, and to continue to experience an imminent God that I recognized and whom also I felt recognized me. I came home, changed jobs - I got my job at the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre, changed the focus of my studies to social work and joined a women's circle. This women's circle, my work at the rape crisis centre and my social work would provide connections to aboriginal teachers and teachings, which have become foundational to my work as a healer, a teacher and in my spiritual journey.

My aboriginal teachers have taught me the importance of using the medicine wheel as a guide in healing work - so that all parts of the self, the community and the earth are held in balance. We remember to include the spirit, the emotions, the body and the intellect in a balanced way in the healing project. My women's circle gathers according to the cycles of nature as it is governed by the cycles of the moon. We speak in our intercessions to our "grandmother". We start our gathering with a call to the spirits of all the directions of the medicine wheel to enter and witness our prayer work. Each of the directions represents an element in nature, as all things in nature work in balance. We borrow also from the Wiccan tradition that acknowledges the centre of the wheel, the void, the axis or still point upon which the great wheel spins, and acknowledge that 'as above, so below, as within so without, change one you change the other.' In this quiet place of deep prayer immersed in language where we are recognized and are absorbed by female metaphors of a cosmos that nurtures and restores us, we in turn, in our own small way are healing the earth. Change one you change the other.

Rosemary Reuther (1992) writes: "A healed relation to each other and to the earth then calls for a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality. We need to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize the interrelations of men and women, humans and the earth, humans and the divine, the divine and the earth. Ecological healing is a theological and psychic-spiritual process. Needless to say, spirituality or new consciousness will not transform deeply materialized relations of domination by themselves...we must see the work of eco-justice and work of spirituality, the inner and outer aspects of one process of conversion and transformation." Change one you change the other.

Sally McFague echoes this argument that spirituality and justice are all of a piece: "... in order for the elites of the world to have the abundant life...which depends on burning vast amounts of fossil fuels, nature must pay, and it pays dearly...Nature is not the only one that pays: the poor also do. Since energy sources on the planet are limited, those with power will be able to steer a disproportionate percentage of the resources their own way. Thus nature and the poor tend to suffer at similar rates. If we want a barometer of how nature and the poor are faring on our planet, we should look at the representative human being of the twenty-first century: a poor, third world woman of colour who lives at the juncture of human poverty and nature's poverty, often reduced to gathering the few remaining sticks of wood to cook her family's meal....(This) ...then, is an illustration of one necessary bit of knowledge Christians need in order to put an ecological Christology into practice...we live on a planet with finite resources; if we use these finite resources in non-sustainable ways, we will destroy nature as well as deal unjustly with other human beings. (It) raises ecological, economic and justice issues: Who benefits? Who pays?" (2000, p40).

I would add that a feminist ecological Christology also asks the question, Who do you say that I am? We may answer, you are the Christ: the abused and neglected child (maybe aboriginal), the third world woman of colour, the crucified earth, or as O'Murchu says, the relational matrix. He says that it's time to honour the relational matrix: sounds a lot like HONOUR YOUR MOTHER!

We can't go on treating her like the mother we think we deserve, or the one we idealized or fantasized we had. As a matter of fact, we can't go on treating our real mothers and the other women in our lives like that either. Time to grow up, heal binary thinking and embrace the paradox (and responsibility) of interdependence: we are inextricably linked in mutual relationship and evolving subjectivity. To quote Paul, "...so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another" (Romans 12:5). Her fate is our fate, and our fate (women's fate specifically) is Her fate. The relational matrix, women, mothers, Mother God, Mother Earth, and, dare I say, Mother Jesus are asking, who do you say that I am?

References:

Friedan, Betty. 1963. The feminine mystique. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Gray, Elizabeth Dodson. 1982. Patriarchy as a conceptual trap. Wellesley, Mass.: Roundtable Press.

McFague, Sally. 2000. An ecological Christology: Does Christianity have it? In Chrsitanity and Ecology: Seeking the well-being of earth and humans., edited by D. T. Hessel and R. R. Ruether. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Meyers, Diana T. 1994. Subjection & subjectivity: psychoanalytic feminism & moral philosophy, Thinking gender. New York: Routledge.

O'Murchu, Diarmuid. 2005. Catching up with Jesus: A gospel story for our time. New York NY: Crossroad Publishing.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1992. Gaia & God: an ecofeminist theology of earth healing. 1st ed. [San Francisco]: HarperSanFrancisco.