Inhabiting Eden

By Patricia K. Tull (MDiv’85)

Our instinctive habits showcase our deepest attitudes, sometimes to our peril.

I became aware of this anew one January, traveling in India with my daughter, who was living in Nepal. When our host in Coimbatore took us to the train station, he boarded with us, settling us across the aisle from a nun, explaining to her in Tamil who we were and where we were going. She nodded in our direction. She was wearing the white and blue habit of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, and I was entranced.

We set out northward among the mountains. Everywhere we had traveled in South India’s flatlands, we had passed masses of people working, walking, driving, biking, sitting, eating, sweeping bathing, cooking, laughing—as if all humanity had congregated on the tip of South Asia to sink it. But now we saw open countryside, mountains almost close enough to touch. I smiled at my daughter and then at the sister, who was eating her lunch, a box of chicken.

We ate a couple of bananas and looked in vain for a waste bin. The sister finished her chicken, stood up, leaned over two people sitting between her and the open window, and tossed box, drinking cup, napkins, fork, bones, the whole litter of a fast food meal, into the mountain, and then sat down, opening a prayer book.

Back home on the Ohio River, hundreds of thousands congregate for the annual fireworks display that wakes up all creation, Thunder over Louisville. The trash that strews roads and sidewalks afterward shows an ethic similar to the sister’s, an implicit belief that the earth is our waste bin.

I’ve watched friends, left-leaning scholars, commending environmental activism while simultaneously pitching recyclable bottles into the trash.

If being religious, or being in public, or even being verbally committed to ecology cannot help us reexamine small actions, what will change us in the large ones?

I am at least as culpable. If the nun trashed the mountainside, I had flown to India, trashing the stratosphere to see my daughter. We are social beings, limited both by personal habits and by what society makes possible.

Biologist E. O. Wilson—though himself an athiest—calls religion and science “the two most powerful forces in the world today.” He argues that science can provide information about the biosphere, but it is religious leaders who help shape awareness of and gratitude for this glorious, life-sustaining, but fragile sphere.

I wrote Inhabiting Eden: Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis to offer congregations and individuals a tool for exploring the intersection between Scripture and the multiple environmental issues we face. The book discusses the pain of change, the human role on earth—both our connections and our disconnections with nature—consumerism, food systems, toxic waste, and climate change. I hope that, informed by Scripture’s portrayals of our place on earth, Christians can deepen our roots while contributing in multiple ways to the healthier future the living community so desperately needs.

Patricia K. Tull is a 1985 graduate of Austin Seminary and A. B. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Old Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, which first published this article in the December 2013 issue of Mosaic Magazine. She is the author of Inhabiting Eden: Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis (Westminster John Knox, 2013), from which this essay is adapted.

Trisha will be teaching a class at Montreat next April on the book's themes: http://www.montreat.org/current/inhabiting-eden

She blogs at http://inhabitingeden.org.