A Call to wholistic Earth Stewardship

by Ralph Green

The QEW Earthcare for Friends study guide brings together the ideas and labors of many Friends who reflect a variety of interests and viewpoints within our religious society. This wholistic approach is taken because we need to relate to God's creation as a whole. In addition to detailed scientific information, we need a broad perspective to see more clearly what is important and what the consequences of our actions are likely to be.

Recently I picked up an old book written by G. Ernest Thomas entitled To Whom Much Is Given: The Stewardship Questions of Jesus. He wrote of stewardship in its fullest sense: the stewardship of opportunity… the stewardship of service… of small blessings… of time …of talents … of business… of possessions… of money …of truth …of prayer …of courage …of heritage, and the stewardship of the Gospel.

Too often stewardship is seen in a narrow way, that portion given in the collection plate or in charitable donations. If we are truly God's stewards we should understand stewardship in a wholistic sense. It recognizes, as the psalmist wrote:

The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world, and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart. (Psalm 24, 1-4)

The author also wrote of the 4-H clubs. This helped me recall one of the proudest moments I had during my junior high years, when the garden I nurtured into production won the first prize in the 4-H garden contest. In the rural community where I grew up, 4-H provided important lessons in socialization and stewardship. I remember that the 4-Hs referred to "Head, Hands, Heart, and Health."

I have wondered since whether these Hs were ordered more for a pleasing spoken rhythm than to suggest an order of importance. I had heard it said that within the historic peace churches, the Friends were "of the head," the Mennonites were "of the hands," and the Brethren were "of the heart." But in truth, each is called to be a 4-H-er in a wholistic and spiritual sense. The essential unity of the four Hs might be easier to grasp if we reordered them as 1) Heart, 2) Head, 3) Hands, and 4) Health.

Let me explain:

As a people of God concerned for ministries of stewardship and reconciliation, we are commissioned to an awesome task in a troubled world. Our witness is not for the faint-hearted. The first step in empowerment is to know that of God in our hearts. By this we gain the courage, the inner experience, the ability to listen within, and then to appreciate our role as caretakers of creation. It is, as Josh Billings expressed in His Sayings: "If the harte iz rite, the hed cant be very rong." The genesis of this ministry begins with a transformed heart on fire for God.

The head, intellect, and knowledge are partial without the heart. T.S. Eliot put it beautifully in his poem, "The Rock":

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Heart and head are powerful tools in the service of God's kingdom. To do the work of stewardship and reconciliation, both work in concert. When they do, the fruit is wisdom.

After heart and head I would put hands. An old Shaker motto was to "put your hands to work and your hearts to God." In this way they were able to make things beautiful for God. One of our great privileges in ministry is that we can become the hands of Christ in this world. After World War II, elders of a bombed-out church in Frankfurt, Germany were considering how to repair the sanctuary. Among the objects to be restored was a statue of Christ which had been badly broken. All parts of the statue except the hands were found. After debating whether or not they should engage a sculptor to carve new hands, the elders decided to leave the figure without hands. Under it they wrote, "Christ has no hands but our hands."

The fourth H, then, would be health. Although the word came into English from the same root that gave us "wealth," wholeness," and "holy," today it commonly refers to soundness of body. In the early Greek texts of the Bible, soteria also meant "good health" and "well-being." It also signified deliverance from physical peril and safety from impending death; therefore many English versions have translated it as "salvation." But salvation in its original, more wholistic, sense applies not just to individuals who care for creation, but to the whole of creation itself. Both spiritual health and bodily health are made possible through the activity of the heart, head, and hands in working under the redeeming power of the creator God.

So, Friends, as we take up the lessons about Earthcare in this study guide and seek to apply them in our lives, let us be mindful that in our call to wholistic Earth stewards we are all literally 4-H-ers, filled with a joy in the ministry to which we are called.

A native of the State of Maine, Ralph Greene has served as an educator and as pastor of several Quaker Meetings in Maine and Massachusetts. Having grown up on a family farm, he has had a lifelong interest in rural life, ecology, and sustainability. He has worked with the American Friends Service Committee in their concern for economic and environmental justice in Maine. He is presently sojourning with St. Stephen's University in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, to develop a program of stewardship and reconciliation which is international, intercultural, and interdenominational in scope.

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