Earth and Spirit

A conversation with Bruce Sanguin

by MAUREEN JACK-LACROIX

Bruce Sanguin is minister at the Canadian Memorial Church & Centre for Peace. We asked Maureen Jack-LaCroix from the Earth Revival Society (earthrevival.org) to catch up with him about his new book, Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos (CopperHouse).

Your book looks at the crisis we’re facing right now with our relationship with the earth, and our disconnection from creation. Why do you think our spiritual perspective is important to our ecological perspective?

We have to get our… belief systems sorted out because that will impact our ecological ethic. What I try to do in the book is provide the theological and spiritual underpinnings for ecological ethics. The basis is that what we’re doing to the Earth, we’re doing to the spirit. It’s a sacrilege to treat the Earth and all her creatures as commodities, as “its” and not as “thous,” not as centres of sacred presence. So, if we don’t have the belief system that recognizes the sacred in the earth and her creatures, then we’re going to feel more free to do whatever we want to do to meet our own end.

What is your spiritual relationship with Earth?

It’s changed over the last 15 years or so. I remember going on a spiritual retreat and meeting [mathematical physicist and cosmologist] Brian Swimme and being transformed… I became aware that I wasn’t a person walking on the Earth, that the Earth didn’t exist out there separate and apart from me, but rather I was the Earth, in a particular human form called Bruce Sanguin... [It] profoundly changed my understanding of my relationship with Earth. I’m not even comfortable so much talking about “the environment,” as if “the environment” is separate. There is no “outside” in this universe.

You ask us, in your book, to have a “compassionate response” to the plight of the Earth and the plight of ourselves with that. What would that look like, on a personal level?

I’m encouraged that we’ve reached a tipping point around global warming and climate change. We should call it the climate crisis, actually. All of a sudden, everyone seems to be getting it—that we have to make personal changes… People are telling our leaders they’ve got to catch up with this shift in consciousness. And I would like to extend that growing awareness. We have to have a lighter footprint on the Earth towards other species, for example—habitat loss is devastating. Entire species, we’re losing them at, some say, one a day—others say one species an hour—it’s a sacrilege… One-third of the world’s amphibians are now gone. Forever.

And they were the ones that first took us out of the water.

And so we have to understand that these are, literally, our ancestors… Jesus’ central metaphor is of the Kingdom of God—what the world would look like if God, and not Caesar, ruled... And I think if we take the “g” out of kingdom and talk about the “kin-dom” of God, we’re getting closer. We’re involved in a kin-dom here and we can take Jesus’ teachings and apply them to the rest of creation, the more-than-human parts of creation, and recognize our kinship.

Spirit’s kinship.

Exactly. There’s no one faith that contains any more truth than any other belief system. We all have different windows on ultimate reality. The Christian window is just one, and we need to work with all faith systems to evolve the kin-dom of God.

Bruce Sanguin will launch Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos on Sunday, April 22, 7:30 pm at the Canadian Memorial Centre for Peace. Info: canadianmemorial.org.