The Rev. Woody Bartlett, founding director of Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, finds his motivation for green projects in his faith.

At Georgia Interfaith Power & Light we have developed a set of four values that describe the spiritual stance that we humans must adopt if the earth, including us, is to flourish. Let me share them.

"Into Earth" - © Jan Richardson

The first value is Community. We humans are members of an incredibly large and diverse community. And we don’t mean just the community of humans, although that is surely a large part of the community we speak of. But we humans are part of an even more important community—the community of all life, the community of the creation. This community is composed of mammals and bugs, fish and birds, things that crawl and things that hop. We are part of one huge, terribly complicated and intricate system of life. It is a sturdy system, having lasted in one form or another, in one degree of complexity or another for some three and a half billion years. It is our family.

In the end, we are absolutely dependent on this community. This larger community produces our food. It supplies our oxygen. It regulates our climate. It provides the materials for our clothing and shelter. We inextricably belong to this community of life. Our bond can be described as ‘love’—the kind of love a child has for its parent. And in some important ways, we can say that the community of life loves us back. It sure does supply what we need to stay alive.

Now, the second value—Stewardship. Because we are such a strong and able species, we humans bear a special responsibility towards the earth and its inhabitants. In the faith community, we call that Stewardship. We can create immense cities, beautiful buildings and vast civilizations. But we can also destroy immense cities, beautiful buildings and even vast civilizations. Right now, due to our carelessness and our ignorance—let’s be blunt here, often due to our obsessive need to control—we are causing the extinction of untold numbers of species that have lived for millennia. There is very plausible evidence that we are in a great crash of life that is much greater than the crash that took out the dinosaurs and more than 75% of the extant species some 65 million years ago. And it is not just the loss of those beautiful species that must be lamented; it is that they are interactive members of the community of all of life that is alarming.

So we have Community and Stewardship. The third value derives from those first two—Justice. In Christian ethics, we learn that the two great ethical imperatives are love and justice. We’ve just heard about love. Now we have Justice—the equitable distribution of love among all involved. Justice is love focused on the weakest, the most vulnerable. Justice provides protection not just for poor and vulnerable people, but also for poor and vulnerable species. Justice is the Endangered Species Act in action. Justice is God’s insistence to Noah that he get two of everything onto that ark.

Now let’s get to the fourth value—Awe. At the end of the day, after we have concerned ourselves about Community, Stewardship, Justice, we must assume a position of Awe—awe both before this remarkable creation and awe before its Creator. We are born to delight in the creation around us. Classical books on prayer suggest that there are five types of prayer. At the top of the list is always adoration. Again, we are made for worship, wonder, awe.

When my oldest son was about 18 months old, one of the first objects he learned to name was a bus. We would all be driving around town and he would yell at the top of his little voice, “Bus. Bus.” We would strain to see what he saw and there, several blocks away would be a bus. His childlike delight was captivating, irrepressible and the essence of what it is to be human.

The physicist, Brian Swimme, says it most playfully. “We are born to gawk.” We are born to be like country farmers who come into the big city for the first time, our heads thrown back as we stare up at the massive skyscrapers, our mouth hanging open in a giant gawk. Wow!

At its heart, the environmental issue is a spiritual issue. It is about how we relate to the Earth and the Earth’s Creator. It starts with community, continues with love and justice and ends on our knees with awe!

The Reverend Woody Bartlett is an Episcopal priest (retired) in the Diocese of Atlanta, and along with his wife, Carol, the co-founder of Georgia Interfaith Power & Light.