We, the 7.7 billion big-brained biped mammals, Homo sapiens, may feel a bit less full of ourselves in light of the fact that our bodies are said to weigh in at just 0.1% of the mass of all life on Earth. The rest is dominated by plant life with 80%, bacteria with 13%, then fungi with 2%. Animal life (insects having the biggest share) make up a mere one-sixth of fungi’s modest portion.
That’s the science. What does faith say to me?
For every 100 humans stocking the planet when I was born there are now about 370. Yes, I’m old, but my 80+ years amount to less than a flicker in the timescale of life on Earth. Our impact on the whole web of life and its resource base has soared scarily faster. The rush gets more out of control despite voices of wisdom both ancient and modern.
It may help to note that while the Hebrew and Greek scriptures were being written, around 19 to 26 centuries ago, the human tally grew to less than 3% of what it is now.
The thing is, it’s not all about us and our time. Our species is a latecomer in the 4.3 billion years since the first primitive life cells emerged in water, beginning the saga of evolution.
Let’s first rubbish the old notions that Homo sapiens is somehow the only species immune from the ecological truth that species exceeding the limits of gross consumption in the wider context of life become extinct. We have no exclusive, supernatural, rights and expectations regardless of the rest of the biosphere.
Yes, there’s plenty fuel for claims of divinely ordained exclusiveness in selective readings of ancient traditions. But there are deeper grounds for a holistic, ecologically earthed faith.
Here’s a funny thing: around 1967 a series of articles I published in The Southland Times on sustainably productive husbandry of farmland were accorded New Zealand’s top award for economic journalism. The joke in retrospect? The values described and discussed didn’t include a single number preceded by a dollar sign.
For me, the key to hope is that elusive truth - glimpsed, sometimes felt, pointed to in nature, art, science, all healthy religion but never to be objectively defined – I know as The Incarnation. This truth, I believe, is from before the Big Bang, is eternal and embraces all people, indeed all creation. And, for me, the window upon the Incarnation is the thoroughly earthed, natural, human life of Jesus.
Whatever perceptions people begin their search from, the challenge, I say, is to together seek faith within this truth, agreeing that it’s bigger than we can possibly contain within any and all of our boxes of religiosity, spirituality, science, art, knowledge, cultures, traditions, whatever… ; indeed, bigger and more potentially life-giving than we can more than begin to imagine. Yet imagination is precisely the gift our species has to share in hope for all life on Earth.
Perhaps I’ve lost most who have read this far. That’s OK. I, too, am lost, but lost in challenging wonder.
Boyd Wilson, 2019
Boyd Wilson was a prominent agricultural journalist before becoming an Anglican parish priest specializing in rural context of land-inclusive community.