We need to learn from the experience of indigenous peoples. One of the themes which has been emerging here at the Eco-Bishops Conference has been the need to recover and learn from the wisdom and experience of indigenous peoples.
The picture is of our Eucharist yesterday morning led by Bishop Mark, Canadian National Bishop for Indigenous Peoples. We sat in the ground conscious that we are hosted by creation rather than users of it. Our worship ‘under the trees’ with Bishop Api of Fiji carried similar messages. His people are aware of rising sea levels as a daily reality – the need to move whole populations is is becoming a possibility which they will need to contemplate.
These ages-old ways of thinking are integrated and subtle – which makes them hard to grasp for those of us who are used to the very binary ways of thinking in the developed world.
But I found myself being drawn towards the affinities between these ways of thinking which are embedded in the lives and traditions of indigenous people and the insights and understandings of Celtic Spirituality. The connections are in ways of integrating understandings of earth and heaven, the mundane and the spiritual.
So we are moving here from addressing climate change issues – and what others here prefer to call ‘climate justice’ – as a matter of a few tweaks in lifestyle, important as that may be. This is about challenging ways of thinking and theologies which have brought us to the crisis which now faces the world