© Sean McGrath - 27 August 2024
From its earliest beginnings in The Future Nature Initiative, FANE recognized that environmentalism must address religion. Many people are drawn to protect nature out of what can be described as religious feelings of awe and reverence for the sacredness of the universe. FANEs mission, ecological conversion, a phrase which we take from Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, is not an individual affair: the world as a whole, the Pope writes, must change its way of living. FANE agrees with Francis that we must collectively turn away from consumer culture and embrace more fulfilling and spiritually nourishing, collective ways of life. We must return to our religious traditions and find in them new ways of revering, conserving, and stewarding the more-than-human world. Consumerism has seduced us to pursue false forms of transcendence. It ensnares us through our deepest desires, not only for gratification and pleasure, but also for meaning, self-fulfilment and happiness. It deceives us through advertisement into believing that these highest of all ends can be purchased. The result is a planet cluttered with a growing heap of disposable goods, mass-produced at great environmental cost, mounding up in landfills, polluting our rivers, and choking our oceans with microplastic.
We follow the medieval historian Lynne White Junior in seeing a religious cause to environmental ruin. Humans did not always see themselves as lords of nature. A changed religious attitude lies at the root of the sixth great extinction. Early modern Europeans, building on a mistaken reading of the Bible, de-sacralized nature. No longer the home and host of life, nature was reduced to a resource. It had no value in itself, and no reason for existing except as a means to the progress of humans, who were no longer regarded as part of nature. This confusion in our thinking must be redressed if our ecologically violent ways of living and producing are to be corrected.
The religious dimension of our mission touches on an important difference between FANE and other ENGOs. FANE places the human at the centre of ecology, not only because man is the problem but also because he is its solution. FANE is as committed to building ecologically converted, rural human communities as it is to conserving whatever wilderness remains on the planet. Without resilient, tightly-nit groups of humans, living close to nature and reverentially stewarding the lands and waters that they rely upon, there is no way forward, no way beyond cruel factory farmed meat production, environmentally devastating mono-cropping, genetically modified food, and the loss of connection to place which is now know as a form of mental illness (Nature Deficit Disorder or NDD). We believe that environmentalism that tries to solve our current ecological problems by excluding the human or advocating human extinction is misguided. Not only is it based on the same false dichotomy of man versus nature which causes environmental ruin, anti-human ecology is doomed to fail. An environmentalism that has nothing to offer human beings is never going to be popular. FANE seeks to promote a humanism that is not at the expense of nature and a naturalism that is not at the expense of the human.
The FANE Field School (FFS) not only teaches young people the vital practical skills needed to live a post-consumer lifestyle, it is also a social experiment. We are relearning with our students how to live in small, self-reliant, self-governing human communities. Western affluence, digital technology, and social media have made it possible for half of the developed world to live alone, at great expense to both the environment and human mental health. We are losing touch with what palaeontologists now regard as the greatest advantage of homo sapiens over other hominids: their capacity to cooperate.
FFS has many different historical precedents: the homesteading, back-to-the-land movements; the Catholic Worker movement; the Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold; 19th-century agrarianism, and especially the writings of Henry David Thoreau on simplicity, self-reliance, and the dignity of labor. In this short essay, I would like to speak of the influence of Benedictine monasticism on FFS, especially the Benedictine tradition of ora et labora (prayer and work).
It should be stated at the outset that FANE is secular and non-confessional. Many of our members have no religious affiliation. If they were asked about religion, they might say that nature is their church. We are interested in adopting only those aspects of monastic life which can be transposed into a secular key. We impose no religious views on those who participate in our programs. At the same time, we do not exclude the religious views of our members and encourage everyone to think deeply about the relation between their ultimate concern and their attitude to nature.
The Rule of Saint Benedict was written in the 6th century. It remains the foundation of many monastic orders still active today worldwide. The Benedictines lived communal lives dedicated to prayer, study, and manual work, especially food production for a self-reliant community. These micro-societies, often in wilderness areas, were productive, centres of craftsmanship and sustainable agriculture. In times decimated by war and plague, the monasteries became havens of civilization. The Benedictines were frequently victims of their own success, becoming so wealthy that reforms were required, such as the Cistercian Reform. The Cistercians returned to the original vision of Saint Benedict: monasteries as self-reliant agrarian communities of men and women living lives dedicated to poverty, study, manual work, and spiritual growth. The monastery ought to be a school of contemplation. The life of the monk is regulated, from the moment he awakens at 3 am for the first prayers of the day, to the moment he retires at 8 pm after the last. The activities that occupy the monk at every hour of the day are prescribed by the Rule so that, relieved of little decisions, he can give himself wholly over to contemplation.
The term, contemplation, is difficult to define, but the 20th century monk, Thomas Merton said it well when he wrote:
“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life… It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source.”
The Benedictine day is equally divided between communal prayer (ora, in the church) and communal work (labora, in the scriptorium, the field, or the factory). Neither activity has a pre eminence over the other. The secret to the vitality and productivity of Benedictinism lies in this refusal of Saint Benedict to separate prayer and work. Every monk is required to dedicate part of his day to meditation and manual labor. Meditation for Benedictines involves reading and reflection and naturally leads to prayer. But work too, in the field or in the factory, if it is done mindfully, is also a natural preparation for prayer. The point is that ora and labora do not exclude each other. They are not separable, but neither are they the same. A spirit of solitude prevails over prayer, whether the monk is alone or sitting beside others in a church. The monk carries that solitude and recollection into his physical labor. In the same way, he carries the singleness of purpose, which is characteristic of good manual work, into his prayer.
Most important, ora et labora is grounded in Benedictine community life, which supports it and protects it. The community prays, solitarily or together, just as the community works, solitarily or together. Rather than self-sufficiency, the Benedictines teach us community resilience, which FANE believes will be essential to the ecological civilization to come.
The ora et labora tradition is important to us because one of the main goals of FFS is to teach contemplative environmentalism to young people from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. Activism that is not rooted in reverence is as dangerous as any form of compulsive behaviour. We have had too much merely reactive environmentalism. The environmentalist should not only react to climate change, habitat loss, and pollution, he or she should also act out of a profound sense for the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of nature. This experiential knowledge is nurtured through prolonged exposure to landscapes, seascapes, and changing seasons, as well as through the study of eco-systems and their diverse ways of organizing themselves. FANE’s three principles—to experience interdependence, to understand our place, and to respond to the cry of the earth—all require contemplation.
The Benedictine combination of study with mindful manual labor (MML), and solitary meditation with communal discussion and recreation, are key components of the daily life of an FFS student. In the secular context of FFS, ora at labora translates into a balance of reflection, meditation, and reading with good, healthy, outdoor communal work, like building a barn or cutting a trail through the woods. We pay careful attention to the schedule of the day (our version of the Benedictine Rule), dedicating the first hours of the day to study and desk work (reading, journalling, research). We keep our manual labor strictly within the hours of 1:30 and 4:30 pm, and ensure that there is plenty of time for community recreation at other times of the day. Students discover their own rhythm in the schedule. Most come to value quiet, reflective hours alone as much as the community fun in MML and at mealtime. For an FFS student, study, MML, discussion and community recreation fill up his or her day. From 6 to 10 am, the student meditates, studies, or pursues other contemplative practices (personal or academic reading, yoga, hiking, cataloging wildflowers, inspecting tidal pools—whatever is needed). Students are encouraged to protect this time and to avoid noisy, chatty togetherness. From 10 am to noon, FFS is in seminar. Full-time faculty and guest lecturers lead a discussion about one of the classics of environmental ethics and ecology, which students will have read beforehand. Lunch is at noon. The midday meal is also time to relax together and enjoy each other’s company. Wifi is up and running for this period for anyone who needs to get online. From 1:30 to 4:30 pm, the whole community is involved in MML. We have lots to do at the Burn Head Retreat: we are still building; there are animals to care for, gardens to tend, fish to catch and fillet, berries and mushrooms to gather, and countless other tasks associated with living off-grid. 4:30 pm is the holy hour. Students are free for two hours for whatever they need: a swim, a chat with a friend, a game of cards. At 6:30 pm we meet for a pint of home brew and dinner preparation. After dinner there is time for community discussion (“feedback fires”) and unscheduled recreation. We finish our day by 8:30 pm.
These are rules and are to be broken when necessary. Just as in Benedictinism, ora et labora is meant to create freedom, not hamper it. All of our rules, schedules, and practices are the means, not the end. The end for FFS is to learn environmental virtue, especially the power of voluntary poverty, the goodness of participatory technology, and the personal fulfillment of belonging to an ecological community. FFS graduates (ambassadors) take these virtues back into whatever part of the world they come from and so become catalysts of global ecological conversion.