A Franciscan environmental activist recycles some ancient traditions for modern use. 

Hundreds of years before the environmental movement, St. Francis of Assisi recognized God in creation and changed his life. Today one of his spiritual sons, Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M., is encouraging Catholics to do the same.

But while Warner holds up St. Francis, patron of ecology, as a prime example, he doesn’t expect 21st-century Catholics to live in a cave for half the year, survive on nuts and berries, or preach to birds. We need to regain the “sense of enchantment” that St. Francis had, Warner says, and we can do so by gardening, taking a walk in the park, changing our diet, and praying. 

How exactly can prayer solve complex issues like climate change? The problem, Warner says, “is more fundamental. The most important problem is that we go to church and hear all of these teachings, but it doesn’t affect us because we’ve so fractured our identity.”

So yes, experiencing God in nature is not only the Catholic thing to do, but it is also the first step to caring for creation. “I have the privilege of living at a rural retreat house, so I get to see beauty and a whole host of God’s creatures every day that I’m at home,” he says. “That prompts me ever more fully to love and express gratitude to God for the gift of creation.”

What's the single most important thing that Catholics can do to protect the environment?

Practice contemplative prayer. The fundamental problem is that we are alienated from God, ourselves, and the earth, and it's through prayer that we can come to understand where we belong.

It's our apathy, our consumerism, and our materialism that distract us from what's most important, and it's in that context of prayerful reflection upon our relationship to God that we can grow and accept our responsibility.

Is Catholicism really a nature-friendly religion?

Creation has been very important throughout the history of Catholic thought and teaching, but the current emphasis of both Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, on creation comes as a surprise to many Catholics. Somehow we've allowed our thinking about creation to be more influenced by our culture than by our Catholic tradition.

To love the earth is a sacred responsibility, but this idea has been lost. It's not just Catholicism that has lost its awareness of the importance of creation. This has been part of a broad erosion across religions, at least in the West.

Are we just throwing holy water on a secular environmental movement?

I don't think so. What people have talked about in the U.S. Catholic Church, especially the bishops in their 1991 letter Renewing the Earth, has been the notion of a distinctly Catholic environmental approach.

What makes it distinctly Catholic?

It has a much stronger emphasis on ethics rather than on individual issues. You are more likely to have tactical influence on the political process if you are issues driven, but I think most Catholics prefer to have a broader moral vision and are trying to understand what it means to live a more holistic life.

Catholic environmentalism also focuses on its integral connection to our vision of humanity in society. We've added environmental justice, the idea that the poor shouldn't bear an unfair burden of environmental degradation, as a theme within Catholic social teaching.

While this is important, I would say that it needs to be complemented by a spirituality of care for the earth, of love, gratitude, and prayerful relationship with the earth. That is what I think is most needed and most missing.

I think that so many people are repelled by the secular movement because they see it as driven by anger, not love. It makes people feel guilty rather than grateful and energized. That's a real challenge because if you just look at the data, it's really grim, verging on apocalyptic.

How do you find that spirituality of love and gratitude?

People have to open their eyes, and they have to go out and have a sensory experience of nature. I can point to the example of my father, St. Francis, here.
I don't think there are too many climate change deniers who have a direct sensory relationship with the earth. Many people have undergone very important transformations as a result of sustained contact with nature, whether it's rafting in Colorado, camping out in their local state park, or gardening.

I don't mean to sound trivial or cutesy here, but gardening can be a spiritual practice if you think of the cultivation of our own spirit and not just vegetables. Humility is instilled by the failures in gardening, and there's the potential for really luxurious sensory experiences, such as eating a fresh vine-ripened tomato from your own garden.

It has the potential to transform so much of the modern or post-modern malaise of the human spirit.

But isn't there a danger of people leaving the church to go find God in nature?

I never really understood why people seem to think this is an either/or issue, and I would point to myself as a contrary example. I find God in nature and I find God in the church community.

I don't understand how those who hear Genesis or the Gospel of John proclaimed in church can fail to see the connection to what happens outside the walls of the church. St. Francis is the example that says you can love creation and be a Catholic saint.

How did this connection develop?

Early Christian writers thought that we had to understand humanity's relationship to creation in order to understand our relationship to God. These were systems-human, creation, God-and we need to understand how they fit together.

The doctrine of the "primacy of Christ" emphasizes that before the beginning of creation, the cosmic Christ was intended to come in human form. "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation," St. Paul writes in Colossians 1:15. "In the beginning was the Word," begins the prologue of John's gospel (1:1).

Incarnation is not just a remedy for a problem, a response to sin, some said, but the highest, best form of conveying God's love. Humanity is a part of creation, and all creation, not just humanity, is able to bear Christ. Therefore, creation is born in a special dignity.

This understanding of Christ was conceived long before there was an environmental movement. But it's a resource that is fully a part of our Catholic history, and it reflects in a more formal way what St. Francis knew intuitively. These kinds of insights are in desperate need of retrieval and renewal to re-imagine our relationship with the earth today.