Praying with Animals, Plants, Soil, Land, and Water: The Theology of Creation in Cláudio Carvalhaes’ Liturgical-Political Theology ^†

Abstract

This paper delineates the theology of creation in Brazilian theologian Cláudio Carvalhaes’ eco-liturgical theology of liberation. Reorienting lex orandi-lex credendi-lex vivendi by his liturgical methodological innovation lex naturae, he envisions every dimension of worship as deeply connected to a planet in crisis. Lex naturae transforms liturgical spaces into creational–political spaces which invoke and evoke people to deeply attend to, to cry with, to wonder with, and to pray and sing with the forests, animals, soil, water, and all earthly beings. Celebrating a creational solidarity and wisdom, lex naturae ritualizes that people are the earth, the earth is in people, and human and more-than-human beings belong to each other. Using the seven petitions of his “The Ecological Lord’s Prayer”, Carvalhaes’ theology of creation, which reimagines the Divine, the earth, and the human in a multispecies context via the (re)orienting ground of lex naturae, is “unearthed.” His theology of creation centers the creaturely commonality with more-than-human neighbors and challenges human beings to live, love, and flourish within all the entanglements of created life. Lex naturae is also a form of asceticism which aims to recalibrate the human focus towards environmental justice for the planet. It aims at changing human desire to turn away from the brutalism of colonialism’s ecocide and toward wholesome relations with animals, plants, soil, land, and water. In the end, this paper claims that Carvalhaes’ theology of creation affirms a “godly animism”.

1. Introduction

At the heart of Brazilian theologian Cláudio Carvalhaes’ Ritual at World’s End: Essays on Eco-Liturgical Liberation Theology is a liturgical methodological innovation. Carvalhaes argues quite forcefully and passionately that the three traditional liturgical leges (lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi) need to be reconfigured around a new, fourth law: lex naturae. If Christian communities are to honestly, responsibly, and prayerfully hear the cry of the earth, liturgy needs to be decolonized, renewed, and ecologically reimagined. In our present planetary crisis of ecological degradation that threatens the well-being and existence of the natural world and all of its denizens, lex naturae reorients our prayers, our theologies, and the daily actions of persons and communities so that we are fundamentally (re)connected to the earth.

A prime example of how lex naturae can orient Christians toward renewing the earth and transforming rituals is Carvalhaes’ “The Ecological Lord’s Prayer”.1 At the end of his introduction to Ritual at World’s End, Carvalhaes offers his eco-liturgical liberation revision of the prayer. It reads as follows:

Our God who art in pluriverses, the skies and the earth,

Blessed be your name: life. May your pulsing life come to be seen,

  heard, touched and felt through the oceans, the forests, in the rocks,

  in the life of plants and in the sounds of animals and singing birds.

May the atmosphere of the sky that carries our ability to breathe stay

  balanced as fossils are kept under the earth.

Give us this day our daily bread through a variety of seeds and grains and leaves

  without pesticides, without monocultures, from local farms and

  agro-biodiverse-cultures.

Forgive our plundering of the earth, our total lack of relation and reciprocity

  with the earth and more than human beings; as cells, mycelium, fungi and

  infinite processes of symbiosis forgive us daily by giving life back

  when we destroy it.

And lead us not into consumerism and devouring the earth but deliver us from

  the apathy that says nothing can be changed.

For life is kinship, relationally and reciprocity. Now and forever. Amen.

(Carvalhaes 2021, p. 22)

By engaging Ritual at World’s End, his book How Do We Become Green Communities? as well as several other essays and articles, the aim of this paper is to employ the prayer’s petitions as a means to sketch Carvalhaes’ theology of creation.2 Before attending to his theology of creation, I analyze Carvalhaes’ methodological innovation of lex naturae.

2. Lex Naturae: A New Way to an Eco-Liturgical Theology of Liberation

In some respects, Carvalhaes’ eco-liturgical liberation theology is his response to a question I have slightly modified from Gordon Lathrop’s Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology: What does liturgy have to do with the earth in this moment of ecological precarity and uncertainty?3

Improvising on James Cone’s emphasis that theology begins where it hurts, Carvalhaes asserts, “Liturgy starts where it hurts”.4 What hurts and groans is the “colonial earth” that has been and is being injured and devastated—the land, soil, plants, flora, trees, animals, rivers, mountains, oceans, clouds, atmosphere, and the poor—by settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.5 We are living amid a wrecked and ruined earth, “devoured by modernity, colonialism, and capitalism” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 111).

Following Leonardo Boff’s thesis that the cry of the earth is connected to the cry of the poor, Carvalhaes’ eco-liturgical theology of liberation begins with the land and with the people, especially the poor and subjugated, who live with the land.6 By linking ecology and injustice, he does not “proceed from a grounding theoretical adventure” but rather attends to the entanglements of the multiple living forms that constitute the biosphere, the current conditions and existential threats of ecological degradation, species extinction, and the “material effects and psychic affects of geotrauma”.7 In connecting the cry of the earth and the lamentation of the poor Carvalhaes reinserts what Bruno Latour calls a cosmological dimension into issues of injustice, oppression, and liberation that were typically treated as matters of ethics (Latour 2024, p. 3). At the same time, social questions about poverty, violence, unequal power dynamics, class struggles and disparities, colonial and racist logics, hierarchical division of people, and so on “are now being newly articulated … in connection with the reappropriation of cosmological questions.”8 This perichoretic reimagining of the cosmological and the social generates a new theological remaking of Christian liturgy and theology more intentionally attuned and open to the natural world. With the world in a frightening state of precarity, liberative eco-liturgical practices are thus needed to transform consciousness and action as well as to resist the “predatory gravitational forces of colonial earth” that brutalize the planets’ ecological pluriverses (Yusoff 2024, p. 6).

However, liturgy and theology are often placeless, ground-less. What stifles and chokes the generative possibilities of an earthy and earthly Christian faith, according to Carvalhaes, is that Christian rituals “tend to keep us detached from the earth” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 97). Absent in liturgy and theology are the rivers, mountains, flora and fauna, animals, and the land, as well as the economic, political, and social structures that form the very lives of persons and communities living in local and regional places (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 99). These absences create “an abyss between faith and matter” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 94). Like a modern-day Amos, Carvalhaes condemns rituals of the earth that gesture in hollow fashion to care for the earth while human praxis continues to perpetuate the destruction of the earth. Such rituals may make participants feel good about themselves but fail to create transforming change in consciousness, behavior, and action. Carvalhaes writes, “If our rituals of the earth are green-washing seals of hollow connections with the land while we continue to perpetuate all forms of inequality, consumerism, and the devouring of the earth, these rituals created by us have flunked us completely” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 20).

To rectify these profound problems, Carvalhaes argues that “the most important political gesture the field of liturgy can offer to a Christian praxis of praying-believing-acting” (lex orandi-lex credendi-lex vivendi) is to fundamentally reorient this praxis ecologically (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 81). He writes:

We have elevated and removed the altar from the earth: we have perverted sacraments into limited and exclusionary means of grace instead of the ends of grace; we have separated earthly sources of faith from spiritual practices; we have denied materiality for the spirit; we have turned our attention from place to time.

(Carvalhaes 2021, p. 81)

That the earth we inhabit is holy ground (Ex 3:5b), what is then needed is to reconfigure the three liturgical leges around a fourth law, lex naturae, or the law of nature. In other words, Carvalhaes suffuses liturgy with ecology. Lex naturae is a new liturgical axis mundi. Lex naturae must be “the orienting ground from which we can learn how to pray, to believe, and to act” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 81). Reorienting the three liturgical leges, lex orandi-lex credendi-lex vivendi, by lex naturae, Carvalhaes envisions every dimension of worship as deeply connected to a planet in crisis.

Placing the distressed earth and its wounds, as well as the wonder and awe of the earth, at “the center of our attention in very concrete ways”, lex naturae returns to the terrestrial as an integral factor in liturgy and theology.9 Deeply informed by Indigenous epistemologies, Carvalhaes declares, “we must create rituals that ‘trigger perception’ of a vaster, more complex and richer form of relationality with the earth, moving us from a humanistic exceptionality to a more bounded and deep belonging with the earth and space we inhabit” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 114).

Ecologizing our thinking and imagination can transform our ritual making. For Carvalhaes, “rituals are technologies of attention” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 124). Rituals are “gestures, performances, and movements” of relations in which we think, feel, imagine, and orient ourselves to the earth. They are powerful tools that work on the human consciousness; they intend to affect what is said and performed. As Carvalhaes claims, “Rituals are less about the reification of beliefs and more about discoveries, awareness, and mutuality” among human beings, plants, trees, birds, water, soil, land, air, rocks, bees, and the wretched of the earth (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 124; 2022, p. 10). In other words, rituals of attention “think the ecological thought”.10 Ritualizing the ecological thought “entails attentiveness to the interconnection and liveliness and agency of all beings” (Burrus 2019, p. 1). Rituals of attention thus evoke metanoia of thought and heart from the sins of indifference to, and separateness from, the more-than-human beings to seeing the face of Divinity in every more-than-human being. Rituals “produce the means to live” and “help us to land, to arrive on the ground” so that we learn how to live mutually, reciprocally, responsibly, and with care within our entanglements with the natural world (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 124). To learn how to be with the earth in a more conscious and compassionate way.11 To pray with the dogs, roses, oak trees, rivers, soil, land, and sky is to closely attend to God’s creation, to its liveliness and its suffering.

A brief example of the practice of praying with the earth (a ritual of attention) is a Lenten devotional Carvalhaes co-authored with Lutheran pastor Virginia Cover (Cover and Carvalhaes 2021, pp. 143–79). For personal or congregational use, the Lenten booklet engages appointed readings throughout the Lenten season. It is designed with the reader(s) and a living plant together. The devotional intends for the reader(s) “to talk with the plant, with soil and rock, and to listen to them” (Cover and Carvalhaes 2021, p. 146). Each day of the Lenten season includes a scripture reading, a brief reflection, and a short prayer. Celebrating a creational solidarity and wisdom, the devotional ritualizes lex naturae. It fosters and nurtures spiritual practice as placed and planetary. It ritualizes that people are the earth, the earth is in people, and human and more-than-human beings belong to each other as kin.

3. Praying with Creation

From his eco-liturgical liberation theological perspective and his methodological principle of lex naturae, Carvalhaes’ theology of creation flowers. As indicated earlier, I will use the petitions of Carvalhaes’ “The Ecological Lord’s Prayer” to delineate his theology of creation.

Petition #1. “Our God who art in pluriverses, the skies and the earth”

The prayer’s opening petition names God. When Carvalhaes speaks of God’s creation or “the house God has given to us”, Carvalhaes identifies God as Creator (Carvalhaes 2022, pp. 19, 23). How he understands God as Creator can be discerned from how he names God. Notice that he says, “Our God who art in pluriverses”. I perceive his emphasis is on the preposition “in”. What is the significance of naming God as “God who art in pluriverses?” To answer that question, let me turn to one name for God Carvalhaes uses.

Twice in How Do We Become Green Earth Communities? Carvalhaes names God as “God on earth” (Carvalhaes 2022, pp. 23, 122). The name expresses Divinity as alive and rooted in the created world. God’s natural home is the earth. “God on earth” is a name that does not pit immanence against transcendence. Rather, “God on earth” is transcendently immanent. “God on earth” names “the aporetic mystery” of liberating Love that pulses through the seemingly infinite entanglements of Becoming.12

Addressing God as “God on earth” does raise the specter of pantheism. However, in the wake of human indifference and violence against more-than-human beings and the ecosystems that sustain planetary life, Carvalhaes takes the risk of such a charge. He beckons us to love the earth as a manifestation of God. In our ecologically endangered world, addressing the Divine as “God on earth” intends “to open worshipers’ gaze to the face and presence of God in the life of the planet itself”.13 Against conceptions of a domineering God orchestrating cosmic and terrestrial events, Carvalhaes claims, “the agency of God is in the plurality of the agencies of the universe and each animal, each vegetable, each mineral, each cell, and each process of symbiosis. A God of endless relationalities. A God of reciprocity and mutuality. A God of a thousand forms of liberation” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 12). In other words, God’s own voice is birdsong, whale song, the roar of a waterfall, wave crash, thunderclap, wolf howl.

By addressing God as “God on earth”, Carvalhaes does not propose that the earth is God. He advocates novelty, innovation, risk-taking, and provocation—“we must lose our fear of not believing properly”—in order to mend the disconnection and detachment from the rest of the natural world (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 95). Following the insights of Lisa E. Dahill, to address God as “God on earth”, “allows worshipers to experience this divine name as a concrete form of address intimately connecting Christian faith in its fullest liturgical expression and our planet’s materiality and mystery”.14 The name “God on earth” evokes “a return to the capacity to experience” the natural world “as itself a primary locus of the divine” (Dahill 2016a, p. 30).

The divine name “God on earth” has sacramental overtones in that human beings, plants, soil, land, waterways, oceans, trees, mountains, air, insects, birds, and other animals are living, planetary manifestations of Divine grace and presence. Eucharistic overtones are also evident since the name gestures toward a presence of God within planetary flesh.

Carvalhaes does not fully attend to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Yet, the emphasis on relationality, mutuality, and communion in his vision of “God on earth” could work alongside the dynamic sense of the Trinity. I am especially thinking of Paul Fiddes’ trinitarian vision of God as currents of relational love.15 Or the way trinitarian theology has shaped Elizabeth A. Johnson’s eco-theological work16 and the trinitarian informed reflections of Sallie McFague in her final book, A New Climate for Christology.17

Petitions # 2 and 3. “Blessed be your name: life. May your pulsing life come to be seen, heard, touched and felt through the oceans, the forests, in the rocks, in the life of plants and in the sounds of animals and singing birds. / May the atmosphere of the sky that carries our ability to breathe stay balanced as fossils are kept under the earth.”

Petition #2 affirms the shared life of human beings, more-than-human beings, and nonanimal nature. Throughout Carvalhaes’ writings on liturgy, anthropogenic climate change, and liberation theology, he declares there is one life shared through all living things, through all vibrant matter, on the earth.18 All living things are expressions of this pulsing, shared life that animates all (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 50). Humans are belonging to all living things and all living things are belonging to us. Such belonging, with its patterns of life and death, creativity and destruction, is graced. It is a becoming, say Carvalhaes, “what we never stopped being: the earth” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 51). Or, in the sense of Sallie McFague, a becoming what we never stopped being: the Body of God.19

With an emphasis on Divinity and all living forms bounded up in webs of relations, its identification of the natural complexity of drawing breath, the geologic and geophysic intimacies expressed in the phrase “stay balanced”, and that Divinity may be seen within the natural world, Petitions #2 and #3, when read together, address several other aspects of Carvalhaes’ theology of creation.

First, creation is a complex relational becoming. As an ongoing process of evolution, creation is rhizomatic. It is a multiplicity of intersections. It is a meshwork of entangled relations. It is a transversal milieu. “It constitutes an immanental plane … in which countless subjects live and move and their … becoming” in interactions with others (Van Horn 2023, p. 34). Everything is connected to everything else. And everything exists in ecosystems and eco-relational webs.

Second, the earth is holy. It may be more appropriate to say that the earth is the holy of holies—and by “holies” I mean the pluriverses of plants, trees, soil, land, animals, insects, water, and air that compose the multiple ecosystems and bioregions of the earth. Because the Creator indwells in the earth, the earth is sacred. The wild Logos of God, through whom all things were made, inhabits all of creation. The natural world is alive, vibrating with the Holy.

Third, creation is theophanic. Protestant theology claims that human beings hear the living Word of God mainly, if not exclusively, in the Book of Scripture. A Reformed theologian, Carvalhaes’ theology of creation advocates that we can hear the living Word of God in the “Book of Nature”. Just as the liturgy hands the “Book of Scripture” to the ekklesia, lex naturae liturgically hands the “Book of Nature” to the gathered people. In fact, Carvalhaes suggests that the earth participates in divine revelation. And for that reason, attending to the whole earth, with its pluriverses and its meshwork of complex ecological interrelations, is necessary for knowing the Creator.20 Human beings and more-than-human beings embody “in a fundamentally trustworthy way a revelation” of the Divine Logos.21 Attending to the natural world is to encounter the Logos permeating every fabric and form of creation.

Petition #4. “Give us this day our daily bread through a variety of seeds and grains and leaves without pesticides, without monocultures, from local farms and agro-biodiverse-cultures.”

Our daily existence is vitally dependent on complex ecological, environmental, biological, and human patterns and structures within the bioregions we inhabit. Such dependency points to the reality that the human being is placed and grounded. In other words, the human being is a terrestrial being, an earthling.

As his theology of creation sprouts from the soil of lex nature, Carvalhaes is highly critical of the ways modern forms of Christianity, in reaction to the influence of Enlightenment philosophy and modern science and under the sway of capitalism, have played a role in creating and justifying exploitative and destructive attitudes toward creation through otherworldly qualities of theologies that divorce and disentangle human beings from the land, waterways, oceans, animals, and other more-than-human beings. Emphasizing transcendence in opposition to immanence, focusing on the salvation of human souls, and viewing the natural world as a fallen, evil, and dead place, and a proclivity to wage a culture war against bodies, these forms of Christianity have largely forgotten “the [important and fragile] role the verdant world of animals and plants, land and water, plays in human well-being” in the terrestrial story of the planet.22 As Cynthia Moe-Lobeda has written, the willful failure of memory that humans are terrestrial beings coupled with our ecological denial of the needs of the earth are pushing us into becoming “un-creators.”23

Rather than dominators of the wilds who have “organizes our common life [as] one of exploitation, carelessness, development, pillage, death, and destruction”, Carvalhaes urges human beings to remember that we are earthy human animals (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 24). Human beings are humus, organic matter from soil. As humus, human beings are symbiotic with the earth. We are one animal species among many others. We inhabit and are embedded in a multispecies context. We need to embrace our animality.24 Thus, a full acceptance of the limits of our existence as creatures embedded in a bio-community of living beings obligates human beings to live within the limits of their local ecosystems and to resist practices that poison, pillage, devour, and destroy local and global ecosystems (Latour 2024, p. x). Embracing our closeness, our deep interconnectedness, to the more-than-human world does not deny the particularity of human nature. The mysterious distinctiveness of human being is not a threat to an eco-liturgical liberation theology. Such uniqueness points to “the need for attention to both [human] distance from and closeness to” the more-than-human.25

Petition #5. “Forgive our plundering of the earth, our total lack of relation and reciprocity with the earth and more than human beings; as cells, mycelium, fungi and infinite processes of symbiosis forgive us daily by giving life back when we destroy it.”

This petition expresses a key feature of Carvalhaes’ theology of creation: the subjectivity or “personhood” of the more-than-human of the earth. Carvalhaes argues that animals, plants, trees, birds, oceans, seas, rivers, land, soil, mountains, and the atmosphere are active and alive as persons. In the modern West, while animals of all kinds would be considered alive and active, they are not considered “persons”. Nonanimal nature—plants, trees, mountains, oceans, seas, rivers, land, soil, atmosphere—is considered inanimate.26 However, lex naturae views animal and nonanimal nature—the more-than-human—in personalistic terms. To ascribe personhood to all things places “human beings in a wider fraternity of relationships” that includes “elephant person”, “cardinal person”, “pine tree person”, “river person”, and “rock person” along with “human persons” (Wallace 2019, p. 9). To think of animals, plants, human beings, bodies of water, earthen landscapes, and atmosphere as living “persons” “flattens commonplace ontological distinctions” between animate/inert or sentient/insentient (Wallace 2019, p. 9). As Mark Wallace writes, “Everything that is is alive with personhood and relationality … according to its own capacities for being in relationship with others.”27 The theological narrative of lex naturae pushes the transformation of human consciousness to know and understand that all things are created subjects, some of whom are human.28 It pushes human beings to learn to think and feel animals, plants, rivers, and mountains as “personalistic” (Carvalhaes 2021, pp. 49–58, 61–62, 87, 135–38; Cover and Carvalhaes 2021).

An excellent example of Carvalhaes’ argument for the personhood of the more-than-human is his recounting of what he describes as “Plantgate” (Carvalhaes 2021, pp. 135–38; 2022, pp. 78–79). “Plantgate” is a liturgical example of a ritual of attention where the more-than-human is not treated as an object but as a subject, a person. In a worship experience at Union Seminary in 2018, he led a liturgy called “Confessing to Plants”. Following the Indigenous thinker and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s admonition that we should talk to plants and address plants with pronouns, Carvalhaes invited people to talk to plants, to confess to plants the ways human beings have mistreated and maltreated plants. Plants were carried into James Chapel; soil was scattered on the floor. He writes, “By confessing, we realized we are all part of the same life. We realized we were each other’s metamorphoses. We realized that without the plants, we can’t breathe! We realized how immensely grateful we were to the plants and we now need to care deeply for them” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 79). He continues, “That worship service stretched me to consider plants as full living beings with their own ways of perceiving the world, having agency and offering us ways to live” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 79). Thus, rituals of attention have power to helps us think and feel plants, as well as animals, mountains, trees, rivers, and soil as “thou” not as “it”, to borrow from Martin Buber. This encourages us to befriend animals and nonanimal nature as “persons” not in a paternalistic sense but with equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. Befriending animals and nonanimal nature compels greater solidarity.

Occasionally, Carvalhaes will identity birds, trees, plants, rivers, bees, and mountains as “human”. This is problematic. When he makes this identification, he is affirming the “personhood” of animals and nonanimal nature. He desires that human beings see and value the more-than-human as ourselves—an ecological understanding of Jesus’ second commandment. Yet, his use of “human” manifests a problematic anthropomorphism as well as the residue of an anthropocentrism that he expressly denounces.

Petition #6. “And lead us not into consumerism and devouring the earth but deliver us from the apathy that says nothing can be changed.”

“Lead us not into” and “deliver us from” is language that gestures toward an eco-liturgical asceticism. This eco-liturgical asceticism is a creational praxis for human living and well-being amid anthropogenic climate change.

Carvalhaes’ theology of creation centers a “creaturely” commonality with our more-than-human neighbors and challenges human beings to live, love, and flourish within all the entanglements of created life. The askesis cultivated by lex naturae aims at changing human desire to turn away from the brutalism of colonialism’s ecocide and toward wholesome relations with animals, plants, soil, land, and water. Reordering and transforming priorities intends to change human consciousness to understand human well-being and flourishing as wedded to the well-being and flourishing of the more-than-human world; to envision salvation as not merely social but also placed, natural, ecological, and common. What are ascetical, ecological disciplines associated with lex naturae? Let me briefly suggest three disciplines.

First, attention. In our present ecological crisis what is at stake is the urgent and profound need to pay attention, especially as learned through ritual (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 9). “Paying attention is where everything begins”, says Carvalhaes.29 Attention is devotion. It is a way of seeing deeply into things. It is a form of prayer. It is a form of love.

Rituals of attention are practices that discipline us to attend to our desires and affections for the natural world as part of our spiritual longing.30 Such rituals, which intentionally include the more-than-human world, have the power to capacitate human hearts, minds, and imaginations to the interconnectedness of all creation, to understand the “personhood” of the more-than-human, and, with humility, lovingly know our dependency upon the land, soil, animals, plants, water, and atmosphere for life and well-being. To give “one’s conscious [loving] attention fully and deeply,” generously and inclusively, to the land, to a river, to a maple tree, to a yellow finch.31 Lex naturae teaches us to place the natural world at the center of our concern. Doing so is a way we love God and seek to become attuned to the pulse of the Divine within creation. Carvalhaes contends that “we need theologies where the earth is the locus, animals and humans are in relation, and plants, insects, rivers and birds are part of the same horizon of God’s love. We need new theologies, rituals, and worship services that attend to this much larger expanse of attention so that we can delve deep into these entanglements and relations” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 120). In other words, “paying attention is a way to belong to each other” and to God (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 105). To be immersed into the whole of the biosphere in order “to be brought into a sensus plenoir—a ‘fuller sense’—through the offering of simple attention” as well as to gain the wisdom that everything is part of the sacred whole (Christie 2013, p. 165).

Second is the discipline of crossing. In How Do We Become Green Earth Communities? Carvalhaes says, “we are always crossing and being crossed” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 83). Related to the practice of attention, crossing, as a practice, is a process of mutual belonging and attending to encounters. Ritual is a vital way through which “we cross and are being crossed” by people, place, animals, flora and fauna, water, air, cloud, and spirit (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 84).

Quoting Rafael Haddock-Lobo—“Crossing is the method of letting go to allow the encounter to happen”—Carvalhaes contends that by crossing, we unlearn ways we have harmed, degraded, devoured, and destroyed the more-than-human world.32 We learn to surrender the destructive hubris of human supremacy and exceptionalism. Crossing involves giving up the modern settler colonial project of mastery, domination, control, and possession; of seeing the more-than-human world as utility and material resource.

In terms of “allowing the encounter to happen”, crossing pushes us to learn how to act and care—how to love—the more-than-human world as our “kin”. A central commitment of Christian faith is to enter places of vulnerability and fragility, to dwell there, and to see those places, and all living beings that indwell those places, as having particular value (Christie 2013, p. 273). This commitment has its roots in the idea of kenosis, or self-emptying. In terms of Carvalhaes’ eco-liturgical liberation theology, the gesture of self-emptying means to go deeply into those places of precarious existence, which means to embrace the hurt of the natural world and the cries of multiple species, as well as mourn the extinction of so many animals, insects, and plants. Crossing is the ascetical discipline that calls us to confront and to learn to dwell within such ecological affliction and violence in order to heal ourselves and the planet since we know that the undoing of the planet is also our own undoing.

As a kenotic practice, crossing, to borrow the words of Sallie McFague, teaches “human beings to live ‘for others’ as the only possible response in a world that characterized by giving and receiving, symbiosis and sharing, reciprocal interdependence, life and death” (McFague 2021, p. x). The biosphere is composed of multiple biosystems of radical and total entanglement and interdependency. Relationality is basic and central to the natural world (and God). Vulnerability and fragility are also basic and central to the natural world. Self-sacrificial (kenotic) activity occurs up and down at all levels of planetary action. All reality is characterized by the pattern of self-donation. Hence, a fundamental posture of the human being is kenosis. And crossing is an ecological ascetical discipline, a cruciform discipline, in which human beings can learn to practice self-donation so that other life-forms may flourish.

Third is the practice of mourning and lamenting. Across Carvalhaes’ writing on lex naturae and how to live liturgy in the present moment of ecological crisis, there is a profound mourning for stolen lands, the capitalistic pillage of rainforests and other habitats, the pollution of rivers and oceans, and the premeditated death of multiple species. Carvalhaes laments the pandemic of ecological trauma. Globally and locally, ecosystems, bioregions, and habitats are experiencing the shock of devastation and destruction, and recovery is becoming more and more difficult, if not impossible.

The looming ecological catastrophe is upon us. We cannot run from it, nor should we hide from it. Douglas Christie reminds us how crucial the practice of mourning “for our kin in the web of life” is for ourselves and the future health of the planet.33 When we ignore or are indifferent to the suffering, destruction, and death of our more-than-human kin, we hide from our own vulnerability and precarity within the web of interconnectedness that constitutes who we are. As Christie says, “the diminishment or loss of the capacity to mourn reflects a loss of knowledge, an unraveling of the ties of kinship that bind us to the lives of other beings” (Christie 2013, p. 71).

The practices of attention and crossing discipline our mind, heart, and imagination to those very ties of kinship with other species and the natural world. Attachments and attunement to these deep entanglements capacitate us to grieve because, in the words of Aldo Leopold, “we only grieve for what we know.”34 Christie writes:

The ability to mourn for the loss of other species is, …, an expression of our sense of participation in and responsibility for the whole fabric of life of which we are a part. Understood in this way, grief and mourning can be seen not simply as an expression of private and personal loss, but as part of a restorative spiritual practice that can rekindle an awareness of the bonds that connect all life-forms to one another and to the larger ecological whole.

(Christie 2013, p. 71)

To help us relearn how to mourn, Christie invites us to practice the ancient monastic tradition of penthos, or the gift of tears. The desert monks understood the gift of tears as helping to awaken oneself to the possibility of greater intimacy with God and with others. They spoke of tears as “piercing of the heart”. When the flood of tears pierced one’s heart, it was believed that tears expressed and made possible an honest reckoning with one’s sin, brokenness, fragility, and alienation from God, others, and the world. Tears also affirmed that one was ready for life-changing transformation.

Today, tears may help us learn to see and respond to the earth and its wounds more deeply and honestly. Tears can help create a sense of being alive in the world. Awakened to its precarity, beauty, and wonder, we can contemplate through our tears lost places, the loss of other beings, the loss of possible worlds and places. Born of gratitude, tears can capacitate us to deeply appreciate what has been. As part of the work for sustained ecological renewal and hope, tears can also be a source for imagining new possible worlds with the birds, the forests, the mountains, and the rivers (Christie 2013, pp. 73–74).

Petition #7. “For life is kinship, relationally and reciprocity. Now and forever.”

The Ecological Lord’s Prayer’s final petition addresses several theological dimensions of Carvalhaes’ theology of creation.

First, the petition language “for life” is soteriological language. And for Carvalhaes, salvation is terrestrial. In an eco-liturgical liberation theology, salvation is not from this world. Salvation is within this world. Salvation centers the earth. Salvation is deeply communal and placed. It is material. Salvation includes human participation in movements of liberation that resist ecological degradation. Salvation is with other human beings and with the more-than-human world (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 65). God’s salvation is the flourishing, health, and well-being of the more-than-human world. God’s salvation is also humanity living in relations of solidarity, mutuality, reciprocity, care, and respect with whole ecosystems (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 24).

Second, the language of kinship gestures toward ecclesiology. Carvalhaes forcefully challenges the church to be a green community. As a liberative, political, and ecological community, the church is called to ecologize life, to cultivate a creational imaginary. To ecologize life is to resist the anthropocentric gaze that claims the superiority of the human species and violently devalues the more-than-human world, “thingifying” animals, plants, soil, land, microbial life, water, trees, mountains, and air. It is to see that the beauty and goodness of the earth, indeed the entire cosmos, lies “in its interconnected totality” (Burrus 2019, p. 73).

“The mission of the church is to become green!” exclaims Carvalhaes (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 19). As a human community within the wider biotic community, the mission of the church is to be caregivers to the earth, to be gardeners of God’s good and lush creation. To serve and preserve the earth. To learn to connect to the soil from which we come. To learn how to compost from the God of resurrection who brings life from death. To learn from the transversal links among the wisdom of Indigenous peoples, environmental studies, ecology, biology, geology, meteorology, agrarianism, the humanities, philosophy, theology, and social ethics.

Moreover, to become a green assembly is to become a multispecies community. Green assemblies must include all the denizens of a local patch of landscape into/as its space of worship if we are to understand the church, the sacraments, the world, and nature as holy (Carvalhaes 2023, p. 525). As a place of material and spiritual connections, the church works to form habits of solidarity, empathy, mutual care, belonging, and friendship between human beings and the more-than-human world. The great cloud of nature’s witnesses calls upon the human community to be a responsible member of the earth community, diligently and generously working for the preservation, protection, and care of the whole earth community.

Lex naturae transforms an understanding of ecclesial practices. We are to compose liturgies that include bringing into the worship space the holy “sounds, voices, and presences of the land around us” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 122). We are to take inventory of the ways we have “brutalized, pillaged, devoured, depleted, and destroyed” the land around us in order to confess and repent our ecological sin and be converted to the earth (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 34). “The sacraments present God’s love for the world.”35 Carvalhaes calls upon us to reimagine baptism outdoors in living water in its natural habitat. To be baptized is to be baptized into a watershed, an ecosystem. Celebrating baptism places a moral responsibility on us to become more responsible for the health and well-being of creeks, streams, rivers, seas, and oceans near us (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 132). Carvalhaes asks, “Can the new identity received by the baptized be the ‘citizenship’ of the earth, shaped and transformed by the identity of other humans and species?”36 The Eucharist remembers the very soil from which seeds of grain sprouted and grapevines flourished. Bread and wine point to our lives as intertwined with soil, plants, fruit, and the people who labor in the fields.

Lastly, in the petition, the phrase “now and forever” is eschatological language. For Carvalhaes, eschatology is both immanent and imminent. Modern Christian eschatologies are often characterized by a heaven– dualism, an earthly escapist discourse, and the supposed destruction of the earth. These eschatological elements give license to neglect this world and contribute to the “contemporary effacement of human awareness” of the ecological crisis (Dahill 2016a, p. 27). These eschatologies have also often been sequestered by time and history and ignored space, if not opposed time to space. Greatly influenced by theologian Vítor Westhelle, Carvalhaes argues that an eco-liturgical liberation theology’s eschatology must attend to space.37 It must consider the “somewhere else” and not only “somewhen else”.38 To attend to space is to attend to materiality, flesh, and bodies. It considers, as Westhelle says, the “experiences of spatial marginality, displacement, and liminality, … [and to] frame eschatological thinking in a way that addresses the experience of those who live in and through the eschata on a daily basis with regard to the places in which it happens.”39 And those who experience this daily eschata are not merely human beings but also land and soil, creeks and rivers, dogwoods and bluebonnet flowers, prairie grass and savannah grasses, hawks and bluebirds, wolves and tigers, artic ice and atmospheric rivers, and microorganisms. Eschatology cannot traffic in a deferred “elusive future” or a mystical “eternal now”.40 Why? Because an ongoing ecological, apocalyptic catastrophe is imminent, an already unfolding immanent reality, especially for the poorest of human communities and our more-than-human kin. This “eschatological reality is here, yet we feel the urge to evade it, and the lure to ignore it” (Westhelle 2012, p. 27). The hope of lex naturae is to attend honestly, seriously, and faithfully to the present eschatological reality of the planet.

Gathering Up the Petitions

By tilling the soil of Carvalhaes’ eco-liturgical liberation theology oriented around lex naturae, I assert that Carvalhaes’ theology of creation is animistic. His theology of creation expresses a “godly animism” (Carvalhaes 2021, p. 169). This “godly animism” is very similar to the “new animism”.41 The “godly animism” of lex naturae “construes all things … as living enfleshment of divinity in the world” (Wallace 2019, p. 3). Human beings and more-than-human beings, animate living forms and inanimate formations, “are all expression of the same life that animates [everything]” (Carvalhaes 2022, p. 50). The earth community is a vibrant, material, and spiritual community of created subjects, all of whom are endowed with diverse agential capacities in complex webs of entanglements—all of whom dwell within, and not apart, from all; all of whom all are kin, sacred and deserving of protection and care. As Carvalhaes affirms, “the breath of life is God” and “God becomes all the stuff that makes life possible” (Carvalhaes 2022, pp. 52, 77). All living, created beings, animate and inanimate, within the earth community are infused with Divinity. Divinity is interior to all living beings, not just humans. All human beings and more-than-human beings in the earth community are the face of the Divine within the plurality of God’s many material expressions within the creation. All that exists lives and all that exists is holy. As theologian Shawn Sanford Beck puts it, “Christian animism … is simply what happens when a committed Christian engages the world and each creature as alive, sentient, and related, rather than soul-less and ontologically inferior.”42 While all human and more-than-human beings have many different capacities and humans have no access to the feeling or cognizing of more-than-human beings, there is no hierarchy of being in which humans are superior. All beings are equal, interrelated, and interdependent.

Carvalhaes does not elide the difference between God and the earth. God and the earth are not merged or confused. Nor are God and earth “collapsed into the same community without remainder” (Wallace 2019, p. 15). Carvalhaes’ “godly animism”, as expressed in the words of Mark Wallace, “sets forth both the continuity and disparity between divine life and earthly existence” (Wallace 2019, p. 15). By creating all things, indwelling all things, and living among all things, God pours Godself into the earth. “God is wholly ‘the same’ with us.” (Wallace 2019, p. 15). Yet God in God’s incomprehensible mystery is also “Other” than the earth. Hence, a “godly animism” affirms God’s “otherness” and inseparability from creation. The theological narrative of lex naturae pushes claims that God and the Earth are entangled and interlaced “but without any confusion in the identifies of these two distinctive orders of being” (Wallace 2019, p. 16).

4. Conclusions

Carvalhaes’ urgent call that we need to pray with animals, land, soil, trees, birds, plants, rivers, oceans, mountains, and sky, in fact, improvises and rhapsodizes on ancient biblical and Christian cosmological visions. As Teresa Berger writes, “We catch a glimpse of worship as a … communion, if you will … with all that exists” in the ancient text of Psalm 148.43 The psalmist envisions a vast cosmic “antiphonal choir” composed of the chorus of the heaven on one side and on the other side an earthly chorus of humans and more-than-human (Berger 2021, p. 181). Revelation 5 also presents “a vision of worship that includes ‘every creature’ praising God” (Berger 2021, p. 181). Such a cosmic vision of worship is also prominent in the medieval religious Hildegard of Bingen and Francis of Assisi. Their visions reach back to the Bible as well as to “Tertullian and his claim that every creature prays: ‘Orat omnis creatura’.”44 Elaborating on this claim, Tertullian concludes his treatise on prayer, saying:

The whole creation prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray, and bend their knees, and in coming forth from their stalls and lairs look up to heaven, their mouth not idle, making the spirit move in their own fashion. Moreover the birds now arising are lifting themselves up to heaven and instead of hands are spreading out the cross of their wings, while saying something which may be supposed to be a prayer. What more then of the obligation of prayer?45

In light of Carvalhaes’ challenge to reimagine the Divine, ecology, and human existence in a multispecies context via the (re)orienting ground of lex naturae, the only proper response to Tertullian’s question is to live Carvalhaes’ Ecological Lord’s Prayer.