Rejoice! The good green news is born

"Keep Christ in Christmas!" is the familiar refrain of Christians who fear the secularization of the holy day celebrating the birth of Jesus, their savior.

But in America, non-Christians often celebrate Christmas.

According to a recent poll by the Christian group LifeWay Research, "A majority of agnostics or those claiming no preference (89 percent), individuals claiming other religions (62 percent), and even atheists (55 percent) celebrate Christmas along with 97 percent of Christians."

Do you need to be Christian to celebrate Christmas? What is Christmas all about?

I have a different relationship to Christmas. At the same time, I also have the relationship to it that most Americans do--sentimental, commercial, social, with a bit of the spiritual added to the mix. I offer and receive presents. I carol with my friends and family. I even dress up as a giant reindeer to help in a hundred-year-old town tradition whereby Santa "arrives" (each year by a different method, including jet pack, camel, and VW microbus) to a standing-room-only crowd of kids and parents at the Woodstock Village Green. The difference is that I read the Christmas story from the standpoint of what I call the Deep Green Gospel. We almost never hear that gospel preached from church pulpits. But that doesn't mean it's not there in the details of the story, staring us right in the face.

The Deep Green Gospel (the ecological "Good News" of the Bible) is the same as the first principle of ecology: Everything that eats is also eaten. Consider the following, drafted by the Stockholm Conference in 1972 (predecessor to the 1997 Kyoto Accord):

Life holds to one central truth: that all matter and energy needed for life moves in great closed circles from which nothing escapes and to which only the driving fire of the sun is added. Life devours itself: everything that eats is itself eaten; every chemical that is made by life can be broken down by life; all the sunlight that can be used is used. Of all that there is on earth, nothing is taken away by life, and nothing is added by life--but nearly everything is used by life, used and reused in thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains of plants and animals and back again to the beginning.

This is why Jesus is born in a manger (which, lest we forget, is a feed trough for animals). It is the reason why all of his best teachings are couched in ecological terms, using the language of animals, seeds and flowers, and the reason why, at the very end of his life he insists that he is food. This is my body, eat. This is my blood, drink. That he offers himself as a willing sacrifice for the sins of the world is the most thinly theologized teaching in the whole Bible. We have only to look at nature to see what he is really saying, which is simply this: Return to nature, and follow nature. Give back that which you have received and take your place once more in those vast chains of plants and animals which give rise to all life, sustain all life, and to which all life exists in a state of perpetual return and resurrection. Take up your cross and follow me.

The truth couldn't be simpler--or more unpalatable to modern human beings. Like Job, we prefer to eat and not be eaten, taking a free pass on the biological realities that govern the planet and in so doing guarantying our eventual degredation and despair. The Deep Green Gospel is in every way the antidote to the "be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth and subdue it" model that has brought us now to the very brink of planetary ruin. It really is the Good Green News. If we are able to hear it and accept it, it will accomplish what no amount of eco-lobbying or enviro-proselytizing can do--it will create a generation of "Born Agains" who understand for the first time what that term really refers to--not "born from above," as the term sometimes appears in modern translations, but "born from the Earth"--in other words, "born from below."

Do you recognize this teaching as the teaching of the gospels? If so, then you have also recognized the teachings of the Earth and the point of global warming. The latter isn't some form of divine pushishment. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse aren't the four seasons driven mad, and therefore vengeful, by climate change. Global warming is the planet's way of reestablishing the necessary limits for human activity on our planet. It is, in fact, an event heralding the birth of a new kind of teacher. Only, this time, we're about to meet Him in His true form, rather than having to dress him up in the swaddling clothes of a metaphor. The Planet is born. The Planet is the teacher. The Planet is the Word.

Anyway, these are just thoughts shared freely on setting up our family creche. We'll spend some time this season singing carols that bring a sentimental tear to the eye, and even doing a bit of shopping (though less of the latter these days, and with a mind to sustainability, financial and otherwise). And, of course, we will read and listen to the teachings of Jesus. Only, in the latter case, being followers of the Deep Green Gospel, we will know what we are listening to and rest in the peace of that knowledge.

Here's wishing you all that Deep Green Peace and a very Merry Christmas. Use the season to pass the Deep Green Gospel along to someone else, if you have accepted its message. If not, go in peace of any color. The Planet embraces us all.

By Clark Strand  |  December 21, 2010; 6:32 AM ET  | Category:  animals Save & Share:                 
Previous: Christmas has always belonged to other traditions | Next: Christmas belongs to Christians

Posted by: clarkstrand | December 24, 2010 9:55 AM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: MrMeaner | December 23, 2010 11:15 PM
Report Offensive Comment