This book has twelve contributors, all women, who are scientists, religious sisters, and theologians. They offer exemplars from around the world and across the ages whose lives and teachings demonstrate a green spirituality to which people today might aspire and from whom they have much to learn. The dedication page says it best: “In gratitude for the green saints who came before us, and in hopeful anticipation of the ecological saints we are all called to be.” The book’s editor, Libby Osgood adds at the start of her introduction: “At the center of ourselves there is a spirit of courage and of hope.” She is looking for readers who still have hope to turn things around on Earth.
The intended audience is mostly Roman Catholics. Each contributor is Catholic, and together they feel there’s been too little attention given by their co-religionists to Pope Francis’ most important writing, the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, calling for a complete paradigm shift of human relationship with the environment, “changing societal structures and calling us to individual conversion,” as Osgood puts it.
Who are the exemplars in the chapters? I’m guessing there are very few readers who will already know all of them, even by name: the Desert Mothers of late antiquity, Clare of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Our Lady of Guadalupe, John of the Cross, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Toni Morrison, Thomas Merton, Sister Paula Gonzalez, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Sister Laura Vicuna Pereira Manso and the other martyrs of the Amazon.
Osgood will be known to many as one of two editors of Teilhard De Chardin: A Book of Hours, which won a “Best Book of the Year” award last year. Here you can see an interview we conducted with her and co-editor Kathleen Deignan.
Osgood is a scientist, religious sister, and theologian all in one. Her chapter is the one devoted to Bourgeoys, a seventeenth-century religious sister who became the first Canadian woman to be canonized a saint by the Catholic Church. Osgood alternates between placing her subject in a context as wide as the cosmos and describing how Bourgeoys was ahead of her time. For example, Osgood writes: “Adopting a spirituality that understands that the cries of the poor are the cries of Earth, an ecological spirituality acknowledges that we humans are creatures who are part of the whole, ongoing, and evolving cosmos.” And Osgood also tells us, “Beavers, cabbages, cattle, dogs, doves, eels, fish, flowers, fruit, plants, pumpkins, remora, seeds, snowflakes, stars, and living water are just some elements of creation that appear throughout [Bourgeoys’ writings].”
A final chapter by Ronnie Noonan-Birch summarizes things with an appeal to “Biodiversity as the call to become a green saint of today.” A marine socio-ecologist by trade, Noonan-Birch reflects on biodiversity as reflecting the mystical body of God, and with various “calls to action.”
Tags: Clare of Assisi, Green Saints for a Green Generation, Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, Laudato si', Libby Osgood CND, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Our Lady of Guadalupe, religious sisters, scientists, theologians
