We need to remember what land is. Land is grace. It is something that comes in quiet moments and deep breaths. It is not something that was created to be sectioned off or partitioned. Land is experienced as that moment of ineffable beauty, vivid touch and life, something that can’t be owned, can’t be faked and never quantified. Land requires the right eyes to see it-eyes that have been cultivated to see the world as a beautiful whole, to take everything in. It requires lungs that know how to breathe in the sweet morning air, drinking it, tasting it. It requires a heart with the passion to know it deeper and deeper, more and more. It is the “transcendent but astonishing and holy power to be, an ever flowing river of grace, a jaw dropping gift of infinite giftedness.”1

To understand God is to know what it is to look in the distance and feel the horizon. It is that profound sense of infinity that washes over a person when he or she gazes into the beyond-does not ignore it, but is drawn into it, deeply. To know God is to see the world around you as grace, to see people as grace, to understand life as a gift.

The popular academic view today is that Christianity’s perspective on nature is, to a large degree, responsible for the degradation ofthe natural world. I will agree that the western world, that has been dominated by Christian culture, is greatly responsible for the disregard for the environment, but I have always found it difficult to understand why the tradition itself is responsible. The overly quoted passage from Genesis, “Let them have dominion over the fish ofthe sea and the birds ofthe air. .. ” seems as obscure a representation of what I’ve come to know as the Christian tradition as lines from the Psalms asking God to destroy my enemies. Both are products of certain cultural contexts that simply are not often viewed as relevant.

I think that what has come to be understood as a Christian worldview affecting environmental issues is really an economic worldview that has affected all of the western world. I can remember sitting in a high school introductory economics class struggling to grasp the way in which this system assesses the worth of a thing. I can vividly remember my teacher explaining that the value of a piece of land is solely determined by the market and by what that piece ofland can be used for. A piece ofland, in this view, is reduced to logs, or at best, to the recreational potential of the land. Worse still is that the value of the land is not static-it varies based on the demand for lumber at the time. Value is reduced entirely to utility. The economic worldview has no conception of a thing as valuable in itself, but only in the market.

Thomas Merton, a 20th Century catholic monk, writes about the way in which this economic idea of value even influences our very conception of the self. He says that love has become a package or a deal; because we have ceased to understand ourselves as inherently valuable, we treat ourselves as commodities. American consumer society regards the individual as a package; if the person is not good enough, we think that changing the exterior will make up for it. Love, Merton says, becomes a deal-an exchange on the market that is understood as mutually beneficial for both parties, at least temporarily. According to this ideology, I cannot determine my value alone, but must understand it on the market, through the process of buying and selling myself in these deals. And if I stay in one relationship too long, I no longer know my value and must return to the market to rediscover myself. The inevitable consequence is that I will never know who I am because my very identity is determined by the constantly changing market. I no longer know how to love, but only how to exploit, to buy, to sell, to package.

Economics is not a description of how humans interact in the real world, but, instead, is a creative dream based upon counter-intuitive and reductive values. To believe the assumptions of capitalism is to put life into a box-to see humans as labor and trees as lumber is to miss something about who we really are and what is really important to us.

In reality, we cannot detach our relationship to people from ourrelationship to the land and urrelationship to and concept of God; these interactions create an inseparable whole. The Christian value system cannot simply be an anthropocentric model that leaves out the natural world, because all of our ideas of value are related. The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible is the manifestation of this unity of the conception of value; it is literally about the marriage of Solomon, but uses the imagery of nature. According to this book, the grace of one person’s relationship to another is the grace of the land-commitment to a person is the same thing as having a commitment to the land. Moreover, this book is widely understood as a metaphor for a person’s relationship to God that is brought about through a relationship to the natural world.

It is interesting, then, that a culture that has come out of the Christian tradition has embraced an economic worldview that stands in contrast to its own value system. Christianity has no concept of market value, but instead, of its opposite: that value is an unchangeable, inherent quality. According to Christian doctrine, people are made in the image of God-this is their true nature. Paul writes in Romans that nothing a person does can ever make him or her better in the eyes of God. No amount of packaging or dealing can change my identity; what I do can never affect who I am. I am valuable without being valuable for something else.

Love and commitment are the things that Christianity has taught me about God, about people and about land. I have learned to see the world as beautiful and miraculous-deep and wide.

Endnotes
1 P. Brockelman. “With New Eyes” The Greening of Faith.

Mike Tanana ‘04 is a Religion major and the proud owner of an awesome dog.