Some nights here in Spartanburg, when the humidity settles like a gentle hand on the earth and the sky finally exhales after a hot Carolina day, I go outside to stand beneath the walnut tree. There’s a particular quiet that isn’t silence at all. It hums. It holds. It feels charged, like something is speaking in a language older than breath.
That stillness always reminds me: we don’t live in a dead universe.
Most of the visible universe, ninety-nine percent, isn’t solid matter at all. It is plasma. A luminous, relational sea of charged particles. Currents and fields. Filaments stretching between galaxies. A cosmos not built from bricks, but from glowing threads of electricity and flow.
In school, we learn, and I taught the states of matter like a checklist—solid, liquid, gas, and plasma as a throwaway footnote. But plasma is not a footnote. It is the rule, and our familiar solids are the exception. The universe is radiant, alive with movement, constantly exchanging information and energy.
Physics tells us that plasma behaves in collective ways, self-organizing, dynamic, responsive to disturbances, and creative in its patterns. Process thinkers like Whitehead remind us that reality itself is relational becoming. Thomas Berry whispers, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” And my own practice of watching the seasons through a single tree, learning to listen instead of command, keeps confirming it in the soil of experience.
If consciousness is not a switch flipped by neurons but a field that emerges from relationship, then plasma invites us into a bigger imagination of mind. Not disembodied mysticism. Not new-age glitter. But a grounded recognition that life and awareness might be woven into the fabric of becoming itself.
A tree’s communication with fungi under soil. A river responding to drought. Human emotion is entangled with weather and place. Stars singing in plasma arcs across galactic filaments.
This doesn’t diminish our humanity. It situates it.
We are not the lonely minds in a mute universe. We are participants in a luminous commons.
Maybe the first step toward ecological repair is remembering we never lived in a mechanical world to begin with. We live in a vibrant, shimmering, relational cosmos. A universe charged with possibility, longing, and attention.
And maybe consciousness is less a private possession and more a shared pulse in the field — like wind through pine needles, like sap rising, like starlight in summer air.
I stand beneath this walnut tree and remember: I am not separate. I am charge. I am relation. I am part of a glowing, praying universe that has been speaking long before humans arrived to give it names.
Here’s my audio reflection on Marder’s thought technology of “The Ecology of Thought”… it’s a really powerful notion. This is from my regular tracking and tree-sit journal with a black walnut that I’ve grown to love and learn from daily.
This paper develops the concept of Integral Plasma Ecology as a framework that bridges physics, cosmology, and ecological theology through a process-relational lens. Drawing from Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism, and Thomas Berry’s integral ecology, I propose that plasma, the most abundant and least understood state of matter in the cosmos, can serve as a metaphysical and theological metaphor for participatory consciousness and relational ecology. My background in physics education informs this exploration, as I integrate scientific understandings of plasma’s dynamics with phenomenological and theological insights from Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, and Leonardo Boff. The result is a vision of reality as a living field of plasma-like relationality, charged with energy, consciousness, and divine creativity.
Introduction: From Physics to Ecology
Teaching AP Physics for more than a decade invited me to teach the universe’s foundational structures of motion, fields, and forces. I taught students how energy moves through systems, how charge generates fields, and how the visible world depends on invisible relations. Yet it was through my doctoral work in ecology and religion that these physical insights deepened into theological questions. What if these energetic relationships are not merely physical but also metaphysical? What if the cosmos itself is an ecological process of becoming, an ever-living plasma of divine relation?
As Whitehead writes, “the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life” (Whitehead 1978, 113). This simple but profound statement reframes matter not as inert but as alive with feeling. Physics thus becomes a spiritual ecology and a study of how creativity courses through the veins of the universe.
In this paper, I build on that insight, proposing that plasma, the ionized, dynamic, relational state of matter, embodies the ontological structure of reality described by process philosophy and integral ecology. Plasma is the medium of creation: relational, dynamic, self-organizing, and luminous. It is the cosmos’ own ecology.
Plasma: The Fourth State of Matter as First Principle
Plasma constitutes over 99% of the visible universe (Peratt 1992, 4). From stars to nebulae, from lightning to auroras, plasma bridges energy and matter, revealing that the cosmos is not built of solid bodies but of dynamic, interpenetrating fields. In a plasma, electrons and ions exist in constant tension as an interplay of attraction and repulsion, order and chaos.
As a physics teacher, I explained plasma to students as “a soup of charged particles,” but even that language undersells its mystery. Plasma self-organizes into filaments and double layers, forming intricate networks that resemble neural or ecological systems. This self-organization without central control challenges the Newtonian image of matter as passive substance. It invites metaphysical reflection: perhaps plasma is a cosmological icon of relational being and a physical analogue for what theologians call the divine pleroma, or fullness of life.
Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man anticipated this perspective when he described matter as “spirit-in-evolution,” energized from within by a divine impetus (Teilhard 1959, 56). Plasma, as the living medium of the universe, may represent that very process as matter suffused by its own luminous consciousness.
Process and Participation: Whitehead, Cobb, and Berry
In Whitehead’s process cosmology, the universe is composed not of things but of events or occasions of experience that prehend one another in an ongoing flow of creativity (Whitehead 1978). Energy is not something added to matter but the form of its feeling. Plasma, then, is not simply physical energy but a processual manifestation of relational creativity with the universe becoming itself through fields of feeling or being or perception.
John Cobb, a key interpreter of Whitehead, extends this insight into ecological theology, arguing that “God and the world are relationally co-creative; the world participates in God’s creative advance” (Cobb 1985, 87). This participation, like plasma dynamics, is nonlinear, chaotic, and interdependent. There is no static center; instead, reality unfolds through relational patterns of mutual influence.
Thomas Berry’s call for an “integral ecology” resonates deeply here. In The Great Work, Berry envisions the universe as a single, living communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects (Berry 1999, 16). The plasma universe offers a tangible vision of that communion: everything is charged, in motion, and co-creating. Energy and consciousness are not separate categories but expressions of the same cosmic pulse.
Phenomenology and the Plasma of Perception
Turning from cosmology to phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Edith Stein offer complementary perspectives on relational being. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is “an intertwining, a flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 147). This “flesh” is not simply physical matter but a relational medium, much like plasma, that binds perceiver and perceived in a dynamic exchange.
Stein, in On the Problem of Empathy, describes consciousness as fundamentally participatory: to know another is to “live into” them, to resonate with their inner life (Stein 1989, 11). In plasma terms, empathy is the transfer of charge across a relational field. Consciousness is an electro-phenomenological event, where selves co-arise through interaction.
This phenomenological perspective reframes plasma as existential metaphor. The cosmos itself perceives, or feels, through its fields. Every charged particle participates in the world’s ongoing self-awareness. Thus, Integral Plasma Ecology posits that ecological consciousness is not uniquely human but cosmic, woven into the plasma fabric of being.
Integral Theory and the Ecology of Energy
The term “integral” situates this framework within the lineage of integral thinkers such as Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo, and Jean Gebser, who each envisioned reality as a multidimensional, evolving whole. In Wilber’s AQAL model (all quadrants, all levels), energy and consciousness co-evolve across developmental lines (Wilber 2000, 44). Plasma, as both physical and metaphysical energy, bridges those quadrants—interior and exterior, individual and collective.
In Integral Plasma Ecology, plasma functions as an integrative metaphor and ontological medium. It unites:
Physical energy (electromagnetic fields, thermodynamics)
Biological life (ecological flows and feedbacks)
Spiritual consciousness (divine creativity and relational presence)
This integration reflects Teilhard’s noosphere where the emergence of collective consciousness through the energetic evolution of matter. Humanity’s ecological crises, then, are not merely environmental but energetic dissonances within the plasma field of creation. Our technologies, economies, and even theologies have disrupted the cosmic charge balance.
Toward an Integral Plasma Ecology
Building on these traditions, I define Integral Plasma Ecology as:
“A participatory framework for understanding energy, consciousness, and ecology as manifestations of a single, relational plasma of creativity.”
Its key premises are:
Ontological Continuity: Matter, life, and mind are phases of the same energetic continuum.
Relational Primacy: Reality is constituted by relations, not substances.
Participatory Consciousness: Perception and energy exchange are coextensive phenomena.
Integral Practice: Healing the ecological crisis requires rebalancing our energetic and spiritual relations with the cosmos.
From the ionosphere to the biosphere, plasma organizes itself through feedback loops that mirror ecological networks. Lightning, solar flares, and auroras become more than meteorological curiosities, and they are expressions of what could be considered planetary consciousness.
In this sense, the Earth’s magnetosphere is a form of cosmic empathy, or a membrane that translates solar energy into life-giving patterns. The planet participates in the cosmic plasma dance, filtering chaos into order, radiation into rhythm.
Theological Implications: The Cross and the Charge
For me, the cross serves as a central symbol for this plasma cosmology. In my ongoing work on The Ecology of the Cross, I have proposed that the cross represents not only human suffering but the interpenetration of divine and cosmic energies. In a plasma field, positive and negative charges continually intersect, annihilate, and generate light. Likewise, the cross signifies the intersection of divine transcendence and immanent materiality and creation’s own plasma arc.
As Whitehead puts it, “God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (Whitehead 1978, 346). The divine presence, like an electromagnetic field, permeates creation, luring it toward harmony. Yet, as plasma reminds us, equilibrium arises not from stasis but from dynamic tension. The divine is not separate from chaos but works through it.
In this view, Christ’s crucifixion becomes a cosmic event: the discharge of divine energy into the plasma of existence, reconciling opposites and igniting the potential for renewal. Integral Plasma Ecology thus extends Christology into a cosmotheandric ecology when and where God, cosmos, and humanity participate in one charged field of becoming (Panikkar 1993, 58).
Ecological Ethics in a Plasma Universe
If the cosmos is a plasma ecology, then ethics must shift from dominion to participation. Every act, every thought, emission, or prayer, sends ripples through the field. Leonardo Boff’s Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor emphasizes that ecological healing depends on recovering our “mystical sense of communion with the universe” (Boff 1997, 67). Plasma theology radicalizes that claim: communion is not symbolic but ontological.
To pollute a river is to alter the energetic balance of the planet; to pray beside it is to restore resonance. Our responsibility is not to manage nature as resource but to resonate with it as fellow participant. This echoes Berry’s notion of the “Great Work” and the transformation of human presence from disruption to participation (Berry 1999, 105).
In educational terms, teaching physics or ecology becomes a spiritual practice. Students learn not only equations but energetic empathy with an awareness that to study energy is to encounter the divine flow itself.
Integrating Pedagogy: Teaching the Plasma Universe
In the classroom, I once drew magnetic field lines on the board, showing how charges move in loops rather than straight lines. Now I see that lesson differently. Those loops are metaphors for relational return to the continual circulation of divine energy through matter and consciousness.
An integral pedagogy of plasma would invite students to see science and spirituality not as opposites but as complementary ways of tracing those loops. Using laboratory experiments, like plasma globes or Van de Graaff generators, can become invitations to wonder at the living electricity of creation.
As David Bohm argued, the universe is a “holomovement,” a continuous enfolding and unfolding of energy and meaning (Bohm 1980, 48). Teaching within that paradigm transforms education into ecological initiation: a way of learning to dwell consciously in the plasma field of being.
Conclusion: The Luminous Communion
Integral Plasma Ecology reimagines reality as a luminous communion of charged relations. It bridges physics and theology, matter and mind, offering a cosmological language for our age of ecological crisis. It invites us to live as participants in the plasma field and to sense the divine energy pulsing through trees, storms, and starlight.
As Berry wrote, “The universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects” (Berry 1999, 16). In plasma, that communion shines visibly as the very light of the world is the glow of relation.
To dwell in that light is our calling, our work, and our joy.
References
Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.
Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge, 1980.
Cobb, John B. Process Theology as Political Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Panikkar, Raimon. The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.
Peratt, Anthony L. Physics of the Plasma Universe. New York: Springer, 1992.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Wilber, Ken. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 2000.
I had the chance to read Vernon’s work here over the summer and found myself relating a good deal to some of his insights and arguments, particularly as they relate to my studies of Religion and Ecology (but also evaluating the frameworks of philosophers such as Owen Barfield, who plays a pivotal role in the development of what Vernon is putting forth here).
If you’re interested in wider reads that offer historical, theological, and philosophical insights wrapped in consciousness studies and metaphysics, I highly recommend…
This book is a response to the crisis, though it differs from others. It focuses on the inward aspect of Christianity’s troubles. It approaches the problem at a felt or mystical level.
The root issue, I believe, lies with how Christianity has come to be presented or, to be more precise, how religious Christians have come to misunderstand the message. What was once experienced as a pathway to more life has, today, morphed into a way of life that to outsiders seems self-evidently deluded, defensive or distorted.
From my tracking page… Emmylou has picked up on my habit (a consecrated habit, to use the Merleau-Ponty phrasing), and I walked out into the backyard on Sunday to find her reading aloud with the Black Walnut, as I often do during the week.
The tree has begun dropping its heavy fruit, and the air smells faintly sharp as the husks split open on the ground. I noticed how she read with complete absorption, as if she and the tree were both listening together as two kinds of stillness sharing the same breath. It felt like a reminder that reading and resting under a tree are both forms of attention, both ways of being in relationship with a world that holds and teaches us quietly.
We were fortunate enough to be able to travel up to New Haven to see the construction of the Living Village this summer at my alma mater, Yale Div this past June… so excited to see this become a reality and hope it’s a sign of more things to come for institutions living intentionally on our amazing planet!
For the school’s dean, Gregory Sterling, the development was more than a decade in the making, but was important to his idea of ecotheology; a form of theology which focuses on the interrelationships of religion and the environment.
“We have to be stewards, and to realize that in the same way that I’m accountable morally for the way that I treat other human beings, I’m also accountable morally for the way that I treat animals or the world in which I live,” Sterling said.
We need to hear this in our Protestant churches in the United States every Sunday (and Wednesday and Sunday night and Tuesday during gatherings, etc.). Glad to see Leo taking on the ecological mantle from Francis.
Citing Francis’s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to “deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.”
He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.
“We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.
Prof. Sam Mickey discusses the volume he edited titled The New Ecozoic Reader this week. If you’re anywhere interested or adjacent to the study of Religion and Ecology, I highly suggest listening to the podcast episode here as well as reading at least the Introduction here to The New Ecozoic Reader (available for free download or you can order a print copy as well)!
In this episode of Spotlights, our host discusses a very special issue of The New Ecozoic Reader that has just been released. This special issue, edited by the Forum’s own Sam Mickey and Sam C. King offers retrospective and prospective views on the field of religion and ecology: looking at where we’ve been, where things stand now, and how the field, and our work together, could evolve going forward. The issue is very intergenerational and includes essays by both esteemed and established figures in the field, and younger scholars, just emerging on the scene. The issue includes a foreword by Iyad Abumoghli of UNEP Faith for Earth Coalition, a preface by Sam King and Sam Mickey, an Introduction by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, and contributions from: Heather Eaton, David Haberman, Elizabeth Allison, Whitney A. Bauman, Ibrahim Ozdemir, Jason Brown, Kim Carfore, Sarah Pike, Lisa E. Dahill, Nancy Wright, Jim Robinson, Melanie L. Harris, Christopher Key Chapple, Dan Smyer Yu, Charisma K. Lepcha, Philip P. Arnold, Sandra L. Bigtree, Graham Harvey, Russell C. Powell, Rachael Petersen, Terra Schwerin Rowe, and Larry Rasmussen.
On many mornings, I find myself sitting beneath the black walnut tree in my backyard, contemplating how an ancient abbess’s wisdom speaks to our ecological crisis. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century mystic, healer, and visionary, loved to talk about viriditas, the “greening” life-force of God in creation. She lived in a world where forests were alive with divine Light, and every medicinal herb carried a spark of God’s vitality. As a PhD student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, I’m continually amazed by how Hildegard’s medieval insights resonate with what I call the Ecology of the Cross, ora theological framework that challenges our modern extractive paradigms with a vision of kenosis, interdependence, and sacred entanglement. In this post, I want to weave together Hildegard’s greening spirituality with the Ecology of the Cross, exploring how her ancient ontology can inform a Christian ecological lens today.
Hildegard’s Viriditas: Greening Power and Divine Immanence
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess who saw the natural world lit up from within by God’s presence. Surrounded by the lush Rhineland forests, she perceived God’s “living power of light” energizing all creation, a verdant force she famously named viriditas, or greenness or greening power. In Hildegard’s theology, viriditas is the Holy Spirit’s life flowing through plants, animals, and elements, infusing them with vitality and growth.
“The greening power of the earth is the viriditas, which is the living light of the Holy Spirit… It is the love of God that flows through all creation, bringing forth new life and growth,” Hildegard wrote.
This was no poetic flourish for her; it was a literal cosmological principle. In her mystical visions, the entire universe even appeared as a tree, “verdant with God’s wisdom” and pulsing with divine life. For Hildegard, God was not a distant clockmaker but immanent in nature – present in the sap of trees, the humors of the human body, the cycles of the cosmos. All creation, she believed, is “alive with God’s presence” and thus sings a song of praise back to its Creator.
Crucially, Hildegard’s spirituality was deeply non-dualistic. She did not split spirit from matter. One commentator notes that she held a “theandrocosmic” ecology of life – a holistic view of reality as a dialogue between God (theos), humanity (anthropos), and the cosmos. This means Hildegard saw everything as interconnected as the health of the soul, the health of the body, and the health of the Earth were all of a piece. Indeed, Hildegard was a renowned healer in her time as a botanist and physician who composed texts on herbal medicine and the human body. She left behind volumes of wisdom on topics ranging from healthcare and natural remedies to music, ethics, and theology.
Her medical work (such as Physica and Causae et Curae) catalogued plants, stones, and animals, not just for their physical properties but for their spiritual virtues. In Hildegard’s eyes, studying nature was a way to understand God’s ongoing creative work. Healing a body with herbs and prayer was part of healing the ruptured relationship between humanity and creation. Divine immanence for Hildegard meant that the Creator’s power “flows through all creation,” so caring for creation was nothing less than an act of love for God. She warned that when we harm the earth, we harm ourselves, because we are inextricably part of this sacred web: “When we destroy the earth, we destroy ourselves,” she wrote bluntly. It’s hard to imagine a more ontologically rich affirmation of interdependence from the Middle Ages.
The Cross as Tree of Life: A Paradigm of Kenosis
Centuries before terms like “ecotheology” existed, Hildegard and her fellow medieval mystics were already linking the Cross with creation. In Christian symbolism, the cross of Christ has long been understood as a kind of Tree of Life. The New Testament itself refers to the cross as a “tree” (xylon in Greek which also refers to “clubs” throughout the Gospels interestingly enough) on which Christ was crucified (Acts 5:30; 1 Pet. 2:24). Early Christians couldn’t miss the irony of a wooden instrument of execution becoming the cosmic tree of redemption. Hildegard expands this imagery with her vision of the verdant universe. We might say her viriditas concept lets us imagine the cross not as dead wood, but as a tree greening with new life by God’s power. In one of my favorite poetic images, “even the cross, that ruined tree, bears sap enough to green the nations”… in other words, through the cross’s wood flows the viriditas of God, bringing renewal out of death.
This brings us to what I call the Ecology of the Cross. At its heart, this framework re-imagines the cross as more than a ticket to individual salvation; it is a paradigm of kenosis, interconnection, and humble participation in the wider community of creation. The Greek word kenosis refers to Christ’s “self-emptying” love (Phil. 2:5–8). On the cross, according to Christian faith, God-in-Christ empties Himself by pouring out divine love in utter vulnerability, even to the point of death. Traditionally, Christians see this as the path to resurrection and new life. But what if we also view it through an ecological lens? Ecology of the Cross suggests that the cross is “an ecological gesture of descent: a humble participation in the mutual vulnerability of the world”. In Jesus’ self-emptying sacrifice we see a model for how we humans should relate to the more-than-human world with radical humility instead of domination, willing to relinquish our privilege and power for the sake of healing relationships.
Such a kenotic ecology directly critiques modern extractive paradigms. Our industrial-technocratic society has often approached nature with an attitude of grasping and exploitation, the very opposite of self-emptying. Forests are logged and burned for profit, rivers are dammed and polluted for convenience, animals are driven to extinction for consumption or farmed for extracting nutrients in non-sustainable and ethically horrible ways. Creation bears the wounds of these extractive systems. In fact, we can literally see it in the trees: “forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet”. The cross, in an ecological sense, is present wherever life is suffering under unjust exploitation and wherever sacrificial love is bringing forth healing. The Ecology of the Cross invites us to recognize that the pattern of Christ’s cross, death and resurrection, is woven into Earth’s own rhythms. As I’ve written elsewhere, “the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift”. Every fallen forest that sprouts green shoots from its stump, every species brought back from the brink by compassionate conservation, every community that sacrifices for environmental justice… these are cruciform moments, little enactments of resurrection life.
Sacred Entanglement: Communion Beyond the Human
One of Hildegard’s gifts to us is a vision of sacred entanglement in a cosmos where everything is enfolded in everything else through God’s love. She spoke of the elemental interconnectedness of the four elements, the celestial bodies, and the human being (microcosm mirroring macrocosm). Modern science, with its talk of ecosystems and quantum entanglement, is catching up to this ancient intuition that “all beings are entangled in webs of relation”. Hildegard would agree wholeheartedly. And Christian theology adds: all those relations are grounded in God. Nothing exists outside the divine dance of communion. Significantly, Hildegard’s cosmology didn’t isolate humanity from nature; instead, she saw humans as integrated participants in the community of creation, “a world – everything is hidden in you,” she imagines God saying to each person, for the whole cosmos lives inside of us as we live inside it. This has profound ethical implications… if we and the earth are truly part of one living network sustained by God’s viriditas, then our calling is to nurture that network, to tend and befriend it, not to dominate or ignore it.
The Ecology of the Cross builds on this kind of sacred interconnectedness. It emphasizes that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it – through roots and branches, through crucifixion and renewal. In Jesus’ crucifixion, God doesn’t pluck souls out of creation; God enters into creation’s deepest pains to transform them from within. The Cross is God with us, with all of us, including the sparrows, the soil, and the stars. This is a profoundly metaphysical statement as it suggests that at the heart of reality (the metaphysical core of existence) there is a cruciform love that ties all things together in a bond of shared being. As theologian Catherine Keller might put it, there is an apophatic entanglement at work – a holy interweaving we only dimly perceive but are nevertheless a part of. Or as philosopher William Desmond would say, standing before a living tree draws us into “the between,” that threshold where mystery breathes through being. Such moments can feel sacramental. Indeed, in a sacramental worldview the material world mediates God’s presence. A forest can be a temple, a river can whisper divine truth. Hildegard, composing her ethereal chants to the viriditas of the Spirit, understood this well. The whole world was her monastery’s cloister garden, alive with God.
For those of us drawn to Christian ecotheology, to speak of sacred entanglement is to affirm what the Gospel has hinted all along: that Christ’s reconciliation “extends to all things” (Col. 1:20) and that creation itself eagerly awaits liberation (Rom. 8:19-21). We find ourselves, then, in a spiritual lineage that runs from saints like Hildegard straight to the present. “From the prophets to Jesus’ parables to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas… our tradition is rich with ecological wisdom,” as I’ve noted before on Thinking Religion. The task now is to live into that wisdom.
Kenosis, Viriditas, and Living in Communion
Bringing Hildegard’s mysticism into conversation with the Ecology of the Cross enriches both. Hildegard gives us the vibrant language of greening and the assurance that caring for the earth is an act of love for God. The Ecology of the Cross, for its part, gives us the challenging ethic of kenosis and the call to empty ourselves of pride, greed, and the will-to-dominate so that we can truly serve and commune with our neighbors, human and non-human. Together, these threads form a kind of cruciform ecology of grace as an approach to the environmental crisis that is both deeply spiritual and vigorously practical. It asks us to reimagine what sacrifice means. Instead of the destructive sacrifices demanded by extractive capitalism (where we sacrifice forests and futures on the altar of consumerism or chauvanism), we are invited into the life-giving sacrifice modeled by Christ and celebrated by Hildegard and a sacrifice that gives up self for the sake of renewed life for others. This could look like deliberate simplicity and restraint (a kenotic lifestyle that “lets go” of excess consumption), or like actively bearing the cross of ecological work in its many forms, whether that is replanting a clear-cut area, advocating for environmental justice in our communities, or tending a backyard garden as if it were an altar.
My own theological perspective is rooted in this integration of ancient wisdom and new vision. I’m convinced, as are many others, that our spiritual narratives and our ecological actions are inseparable. When Hildegard urges us to “participate in the love of God” by caring for creation, she is echoing the kenotic love poured out on the cross – a love that holds nothing back, not even life itself, for the sake of beloved creation. This perspective reframes Christian mission: it’s no longer only about saving souls, but about healing relationships across the web of life. It also reframes metaphysical and ontological questions. We begin to ask: What is the nature of being, if not being-with? What kind of world is this, if the Creator chose to wear its flesh and suffer its pains? Such questions lead us into what theologian Thomas Berry called The Great Work of our times and to rediscover ourselves as part of a sacred Earth community and to act accordingly.
In the end, Hildegard’s viriditas and the Ecology of the Cross converge on a message of hopeful, humble participation. Even in a time of climate upheaval, mass extinction, and social fragmentation, we’re invited to see the world with new eyes “to help people see differently and to recover the rooted wisdom of scripture and tradition,”as I often remind churches. We are invited to step into what the Benedictine tradition would call ora et labora, or prayer and work, on behalf of creation, joining our hands and hearts to the greening, healing work God is doing. The Tree of Life stands not as a mere symbol, but as an ongoing reality with the cross planted in the earth, drawing all things into divine communion. Hildegard’s lush visions and the Cross’s stark call both beckon us toward a future where humans live with reverence among our fellow creatures, where we embrace our creaturely limits and gift, and where, by God’s grace, the desert places of our world can bloom again.
As the farmer-poet Wendell Berry has said (in a line that often echoes in my mind when I gaze at a thriving green tree stump): “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how. By the greening power of God and the self-emptying love of Christ, may we learn how as well.
Process philosophy offers an alternative proposal that avoids the extremes of both reductive materialism and transcendent idealism. Rather than treating forms as autonomous agents, it understands them as potentiae—non-historical possibilities with patterned relations among themselves and to actuality generally. These possibilities do not act. They ingress. Agency belongs to actual occasions of experience, the events of concrescence in which the physical inheritance of the past meets the lure of unrealized potential. Forms become effective only as they are selected and transformed within the creative advance of living occasions.
I made some changes in my life back in May as my semester ended in my PhD studies and my dissertation began to take shape ahead of my 47th birthday.
We did lots of traveling as a family in June and July, I signed some new consulting clients, built a few websites, and had a wonderful summer of adventure. Those changes I made stuck and became routines and rituals. I slept well even in crowded hotel rooms and AirBNB’s in new cities with our children. I noticed my resting heart rate had dropped pretty dramatically.
Then August arrived and brought with it the annual torrent of new teachers and routines and meetings and after school activities and pick ups and drop offs and all things associated with having three young children. I noticed my heart rate had increased again. Things done and things left undone as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us to consider.
Talking with the Black Walnut this week, I’ve been pondering our own human conceptions of time and rhythm as I watch its leaves begin to silently fall here in late September.
I like to tell people that my dissertation (Ecology of the Cross) is my life’s work and that’s what I’m working on… contributing to Thomas Berry’s incantation of The Great Work of our time. Phenomenology has provided the structure for most of my research and thoughts as a part of all that work. Deep down, I realize (thanks to the Black Walnut and resting heart rates) that my life’s work is… my five children.
Maybe that dissertation will play some part in that in the future as they continue to explore, learn, and perceive the phenomena of consciousness and being in new ways. Planting sequoias for them and others who might be interested in what I have to say based on my aging heart and aging skin’s experience.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
I think of my aging heart and skin and my aging children and my aging theologies and philosophies. I turn back to Aristotle and Augustine and Hildegard and Edith Stein for answers while trying to look forward in a world of unease brought on by a spiritual crisis of being. And the Black Walnut reminds me in all of that consternation about time and aging that the cosmic dance goes on, ever turning and circling… not linear.
Not about monthly or quarterly trends or resting heart rates… but part of a much larger dance that we are somehow privileged to enjoy for a brief “time” as Humans. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. This insubstantial pageant of modernity goes on, and we’ll return to the dust from which we were lovingly made. But heart rates and life (as we consider we know it) itself is a part of the cycle that spins forever and concrescing in little moments of magic that become us.
I danced on a Friday When the sky turned black It’s hard to dance With the devil on your back. They buried my body And they thought I’d gone, But I am the Dance, And I still go on.
Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he
Back in January, I started tracking a black walnut (juglans nigra) in our backyard as part of coursework in my PhD studies. It seems like an innocuous thing to “track” a “tree,” doesn’t it? Those are in the form of regular audio reflections and pictures I’ve collected here.
The above video is from a snippet of reflections that I put together using Google’s fascinating and important NotebookLM. If there ever was something beneficial that has come from our early explorations with AI, this is definitely one.
Turns out, the practice (ritual?) has been quite transformative for me as a human. Moving from the winter months of little growth and “change” perceptible to us to an onlsaught of green sprouts and leaves emerging day-by-day over the spring and summer to the development of seed pods to now observing the falling leaves (and seed pods) has been an experience outside of our own conceptions of time. From phenomenology to existentialism to Christian ecology, it’s been quite the journey so far.
I hope some of that transformation has in some way contributed to the story of the black walnut that I’ve shared so many insights, tears, prayers, and reflections with over the course of the year.
Incredible statistic here… we are certainly harming our amphibian friends, as evidenced by countless statistics and news stories (salamanders, especially, in the Carolinas), but this reminder of the devastation humans have created and caused in terms of wetland biomes is especially shocking.
We’re still recovering from Hurricane Helene here in the Upstate of South Carolina a year later (the two homes across our street still sit vacant as a daily reminder), but I can’t imagine the human-scale destruction that another Superstorm Sandy-type event would cause the NYC / NJ region, given the lack of wetlands now…
Less than 1 percent of the quarter-million acres of freshwater wetlands that once blanketed New York City still exist. City officials have conserved some marshes, but others are on private property, including the 675-acre site where Atlantic Coast leopard frogs often breed. That land had a vast network of creeks before 1929, when the Gulf Oil Corporation started building aboveground petroleum storage tanks to receive oil from ships in the Arthur Kill strait between Staten Island and New Jersey.
As part of my studies, I focus on how we as humans internalize and externalize ideas such as ecology or being or intention in general (go read some Owen Barfield if you need a primer on why words matter… start with Unancestral Voice) by looking at the past (medieval but especially ancient). I’m convinced that we’ll eventually look back on this era of classifying natural avenues of therapeautic treatments such as psilocybin as dangerous schedule-1 “drugs” and shake our heads at our naive foolishness in the same way that we wonder how ancient people could have been so “primitive” about ideas (they weren’t!) before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment movement where so much of our current psychological crises and negative manifestations originate…
Link here is to the archived version (non-paywall):
The work suggests it might one day be possible to choose which brain connections to remodel, depending on the mental health condition that is being treated. “Our study hints at an exciting avenue for future research to combine neuromodulation with psychedelics to precisely target specific circuits for neural plasticity,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
I have very similar thoughts about our growing energy needs and utilizing the very free and abundant (and powerful) resource that is energy being produced by our own star that floods our Earth with more than enough energy potential to get us out of the capitalistic and colonialist matrix that is the fossil fuel industry… a mesh of Whitehead Schedulers powered by solar energy would do wonders to transform the daily lives of humans and more-than-humans here on Earth…
Good read and idea (and stats, espeically out of Pakistan):
So let’s start at $2.5 trillion, the number for the panels alone, because, hey, Tik Tok videos. Is that an absurd number to imagine helping to pay? The International Monetary Fund reported recently that the world spends $7 trillion a year subsidizing fossil fuel. And all it gets us is the chance to buy more fossil fuel—the last line of Jacobson’s email makes it clear that even at the full price this would be a huge bargain. You save huge amounts of money because you don’t have to pay for fuel any more. Once the panels are up, sunshine is free. It changes everything.
Great episode from Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology Spotlights podcast… enjoyed the discussion of Plotinus (always!), spirituality vs religious as well as some of the background on why we do what we do in this fascinating sphere of Religion and Ecology (plus, the host Dr. Sam Mickey is also a graduate of my program at CIIS):
This episode features Rachael Petersen, a writer, thinker, and convener. We discuss her life and work at the confluence of philosophy, ecology, and transcendence. As Program Lead of Harvard’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative, Rachael guides interdisciplinary explorations into how cutting-edge plant science challenges our ideas of mind, matter, and meaning. She holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where her research centered on panpsychism, pantheism, and the more-than-human world, with a special focus on German philosophy.
Interesting article… I’d add that religious orgs and churches have a meaningful role to play in helping people address climate anxieties and just being aware of ecological choices (corporate and individual)…
Other collective actions like community gardening, protesting, starting your own climate-aware group or spending more time in nature can help, according to Belanger, who’s seen patients have success with joining and leading climate cafes – online or in-person spaces where people gather to share their feelings on climate change.
“You don’t have to be a therapist to do that. It’s about holding space and that has been very helpful to them,” Belanger said.
For nearly two decades, my work has lived at the intersection of ministry, teaching, and consulting. From the pulpit to the classroom to boardrooms and coffee shops, I’ve found myself in spaces where the central question is always the same: how do we tell our story in a way that is authentic, transformative, and faithful?
Now, as I continue my doctoral work in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, that question has taken on new urgency. The story we tell as people of faith is not only about our relationship to God and neighbor—it is also about our relationship to the more-than-human world that sustains us.
MinistriesLab was born out of the recognition that many churches and religious organizations feel the tension of our ecological moment but aren’t sure how to respond. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and the unraveling of ecosystems aren’t abstract scientific headlines, but rather they are spiritual questions, theological challenges, and pastoral realities.
Too often, churches either avoid ecological conversations because they feel “too political,” or they silo them into one-off “green team” projects. But the truth is this: our spirituality is already ecological. Every sermon, every communion table, every baptism, every hymn, every prayer is situated within a world alive with God’s presence.
My research in integral ecology and what I call the Ecology of the Cross has convinced me that the church’s voice matters profoundly here. Congregations have the capacity to help people see differently and to recover the rooted wisdom of scripture and tradition, and to step into hopeful, place-based practices of care and connection.
What I’m Offering
Through MinistriesLab, I’m bringing together my background in marketing and digital consulting, my years of ministry and teaching, and my ongoing academic work in ecological theology.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Consulting: Helping churches and ministries tell their stories more clearly online and in person, with strategies that are both practical and faithful.
Speaking: Preaching, teaching, and leading workshops on the intersections of faith, ecology, and communication.
Place-Based Practices: Offering insights and guidance for congregations to engage their specific local ecosystems, whether through worship, education, or community practices that deepen spiritual awareness of place.
A Theological and Practical Invitation
The church has always been at its best when it helps people see the world with new eyes. From the prophets to Jesus’ parables to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas (the greening power of God), our tradition is rich with ecological wisdom. What we need now is the courage to embody it in this time and place.
That’s the heart of MinistriesLab: to equip and encourage faith communities to embrace an ecological spirituality that is both approachable and transformative.
If your congregation or organization is ready to step more fully into that work, whether through a consultation, a speaking engagement, or exploring new practices together, I’d love to start a conversation.
Trees are older than us (though not as old as you might think), longer-lived than empires, and deeply woven into the stories we tell about wisdom and spirit. They are teachers of patience and endurance, bearing witness to countless centuries of human seeking. Our ancient and modern columns of brick, stone, marble, or concrete still pale in comparison to our ancient tree kin.
Across traditions, trees have anchored human imagination. They serve as symbols of wisdom, life, and connection. However, more than symbols, they are living presences, mediators of the sacred. From Genesis to the Bodhi Tree, from Yggdrasil to the cottonwood of the Lakota Sun Dance, trees appear where human beings grapple with the mysteries of being alive.
The philosopher Owen Barfield once suggested that human consciousness itself has a history, that the way we experience the world evolves over time. He pointed to the so-called Axial Age, when religious and philosophical traditions in Israel, Greece, India, and China reimagined humanity’s relationship to the cosmos. Trees appear in those traditions as if marking the shift: not just as backdrops, but as active participants in our emerging sense of meaning. They carry forward the memory of the older ways of knowing, when spirit and matter were inseparable, and they gesture toward futures in which we might relearn that intimacy.
To pay attention to the trees is to pay attention to our own evolving consciousness. It is also to listen to what Donna Haraway calls “tentacular thinking,” the recognition that all beings are entangled in webs of relation, that meaning itself stretches across roots and fungi and soil and sky. Trees remind us that life is not linear but branching, not heroic but networked. They embody what Ursula Le Guin called the “carrier bag” story of humanity: not a single plot driven by conquest, but a gathering of seeds, fruits, and stories carried in community.
Tradition
Wisdom
Life
Spiritual Connection
Hebrew Bible / Judaism
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis); Etz Chaim (“Tree of Life”) as Torah/Wisdom (Proverbs 3:18)
Tree of Life in Eden and eschatology (Revived in apocalyptic visions)
Olive tree as Israel’s covenantal identity; sacred groves as contested spaces
Christianity
Cross as Tree of Life (Acts 5:30; 1 Peter 2:24); Hildegard’s viriditas (greening wisdom)
Tree of Life in Revelation (22:2) offers healing to nations
The Cross links heaven and earth; saints/monks often dwell in tree imagery of rootedness
Islam
Sidrat al-Muntaha (Lote Tree) marks the limit of knowledge (Qur’an 53)
Tree of Immortality in Eden (Q 2:35); olive tree as “blessed tree” (Q 24:35)
Trees as signs of God’s creation; paradise described as filled with shade-giving trees
Hinduism
Ashvattha (cosmic fig tree) in Bhagavad Gita represents eternal samsara
Banyan, neem, tulsi as living presences of the divine
Sacred groves; Bodhi tree as meditation site; cosmic tree with roots in heaven, branches on earth
Buddhism
Bodhi Tree: site of enlightenment, source of awakened wisdom
Trees as natural meditation sites; Bodhi tree as axis between ignorance and awakening
Indigenous Traditions (Americas, Africa, Celtic)
Oaks and yews in Celtic Druidic tradition as sources of sacred knowledge
Trees like baobab as “roots of life”; cottonwood in Lakota Sun Dance
World Tree as axis mundi (linking underworld, earth, heavens); trees as homes of ancestors/spirits
Norse Mythology
Yggdrasil’s roots drink from the Well of Mimir (wisdom)
Yggdrasil sustains nine realms of existence
Yggdrasil as cosmic axis, linking worlds; ravens, serpents, and gods interact with it
Chinese Traditions
Fusang tree marks sun’s rising, cosmic order
Peach tree of immortality (fruit of eternal life)
Sacred peach tree of Queen Mother of the West links heaven’s gifts with human fate
The Tree of Life in the Ancient Near East
The Hebrew Bible begins with a garden, and at its heart, two trees: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9). To eat of the first was to awaken to wisdom — to the awareness of moral boundaries and human limitation. The story is often told as a fall, but it can also be read as the story of consciousness coming into its own, with trees as the threshold between innocence and maturity.
Proverbs later describes wisdom herself as “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her” (Prov. 3:18). Here the metaphor is clear: to live wisely is to be rooted, nourished, fruitful. In Jewish tradition, the Torah itself becomes the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life, literally embodied in the wooden rollers of the scrolls used in worship.
But trees could also lead astray. The prophets railed against “sacred groves” where Canaanite deities were honored (Deut. 16:21). Yet, even this reveals the deep human instinct to find the divine among trees. And the symbol endures: the Book of Revelation imagines the Tree of Life restored in the New Jerusalem, its leaves “for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).
Christianity: The Cross as Tree
Christianity radicalizes the symbol by naming the cross itself a tree. The Apostle Peter writes that Christ “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). A Roman instrument of execution becomes the world tree of redemption. The symmetry was irresistible to early theologians: where Adam and Eve grasped at fruit, Christ is lifted up on the wood, reversing the fall.
Medieval mystics expanded this imagery. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) described divine life as viriditas, “the greening power,” pulsing through creation. In her visions, the universe itself was a tree, verdant with God’s wisdom. Monks, too, saw trees as ascetic companions: silent, patient, enduring through storms.
For Christians, then, the tree is paradox. It bears death and life, judgment and mercy, sorrow and redemption. Like Yggdrasil, gnawed by serpents but still sustaining the worlds, the cross stands at the center of human story… fragile yet cosmic.
Islam: The Blessed Tree
In the Qur’an, trees shape both warning and blessing. Adam and Eve are commanded not to eat from the Tree of Immortality (Q 2:35). Yet another tree, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary (Sidrat al-Muntaha), appears in the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey. It marks the furthest boundary of created knowledge: beyond it lies only God (Q 53:14–16).
The olive tree carries special significance. The famous Light Verse declares: “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth… lit from a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west” (Q 24:35). Here, tree and light merge: the olive, ancient source of fuel, becomes metaphor for divine illumination.
Paradise itself is pictured as a garden of abundant, shade-giving trees — a vision profoundly embodied for people whose daily lives knew desert heat. The tree is not abstract; it is rest, sustenance, and divine nearness.
Hinduism: The Cosmic Ashvattha
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes the universe as a cosmic fig tree, the Ashvattha: “With roots above and branches below, whose leaves are the Vedas; he who knows this tree is the knower of the Veda” (Gita 15:1). Unlike earthly trees, this one grows downward, its nourishment flowing from the eternal into the temporal. To attain liberation, one must cut it down with the “axe of detachment” and seek the source beyond appearances.
But trees are not only metaphors. Living trees are venerated: the banyan, with its aerial roots; the neem, with healing powers; the tulsi plant, tended in courtyards as a goddess in her own right. Sacred groves still shelter temples, holding ecological as well as spiritual memory.
The cosmic tree gathers together time, scripture, and existence. Like Barfield’s insight into symbolic consciousness, it points to a way of seeing in which reality itself is read as text, and trees as living letters of the divine alphabet.
Buddhism: Under the Bodhi Tree
Perhaps no tree is more famous than the Bodhi Tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. Sitting through the night, he confronted desire, fear, and illusion until he awoke into Buddhahood. Ever since, the Bodhi tree has stood as the site of awakening: wisdom that arises not from conquest but from stillness, from simply being present beneath a tree.
Buddhism also speaks of the Kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree, symbolizing abundance. Yet the Bodhi dominates the tradition’s imagination, embodying the dharma itself: impermanence in its falling leaves, interdependence in its roots, patient endurance in its trunk.
Like Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative, the Bodhi tree is not a hero’s monument but a gathering site. Pilgrims circle it, meditate beneath it, collect its fallen leaves. It is not conquered; it shelters. It contains, carries, holds the story of awakening.
Indigenous Traditions: The World Tree
In Native American cosmologies, the World Tree or Sacred Tree connects earth, underworld, and sky. For the Lakota, the cottonwood chosen for the Sun Dance becomes the axis around which the world is renewed. Dancers tether themselves to it in prayer, embodying the life-giving bond between human and cosmos.
In Africa, great trees such as the baobab and iroko are revered as ancestors themselves, places of gathering, storytelling, and ritual. The tree is not a metaphor for community; it is the community’s center.
Celtic Druids likewise revered oaks and yews, holding ceremonies in groves. Mistletoe growing on oaks was especially sacred, believed to embody divine vitality. These groves were what Haraway might call “tentacular nodes,” entangled sites of relation where human, animal, plant, and divine life braided together.
Norse Mythology: Yggdrasil
Norse mythology centers its cosmos upon Yggdrasil, the great ash tree. Its branches span the heavens; its roots drink from wells of wisdom and fate. Odin, in search of knowledge, sacrifices his eye at the Well of Mimir. Later, he hangs himself upon Yggdrasil for nine nights to gain the runes. Wisdom here is costly, rooted in suffering and sacrifice.
But Yggdrasil is under threat. Serpents gnaw at its roots, Ragnarok looms, yet the tree sustains all realms. It is fragile and resilient at once, much like our own ecological situation.
Chinese Traditions: Trees of Immortality
In Chinese myth, the fusang tree in the east holds the rising sun, anchoring cosmic order. The peach tree of immortality, tended by the Queen Mother of the West, bears fruit every 3,000 years, granting eternal life. Pines, peaches, and cypresses all became emblems of endurance, long life, and the Dao’s flowing balance.
Here again, trees bridge the human and cosmic, marking time’s rhythm and pointing to the way of harmony.
Wisdom, Life, Connection
Stepping back across cultures, we see three recurring themes:
Wisdom: Trees stand at thresholds of knowledge — Eden’s fruit, Yggdrasil’s well, the Bodhi’s silence, the Sidrat al-Muntaha’s boundary.
Life: Trees embody vitality — food, healing, shade, immortality. Their seasonal cycles mirror death and rebirth.
Connection: Trees serve as axis mundi, mediators of heaven and earth, ancestors and descendants, divine and human.
But with Haraway and Le Guin in mind, we can say more. Trees are not just vertical axes; they are networks. They are “carrier bags” of biodiversity, gathering species in their canopies and roots. They are “tentacular,” stretching mycorrhizal threads through soil, binding together whole communities.
If earlier ages saw the tree primarily as a ladder to the divine, perhaps our age can see tree as a web, and recognize in that web our own entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Religious traditions often use trees to point beyond themselves, such as metaphors for wisdom, life, and connection. But metaphysics reminds us that this pointing is not merely symbolic; it reveals something of reality’s very structure.
For Alfred North Whitehead, reality is not made of inert stuff but of events, relationships, and becoming. A tree is not simply a “thing” but a nexus of processes: roots drawing up water, leaves breathing light, fungi threading connections underground. The tree discloses the metaphysical truth that being is relational, that life is constituted by giving and receiving.
Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy makes a similar point from a phenomenological angle: to encounter a tree is to recognize it as more than an object, but as a living subject with its own interiority, its own trajectory of growth and flourishing. The “tree of life” is not a metaphor we impose; it is a reality we meet.
This is where Owen Barfield’s insight comes in: the symbolic power of trees is not arbitrary but reflects the way human consciousness evolves in dialogue with the living world. We do not invent the tree-as-symbol; rather, the tree discloses meanings that consciousness gradually awakens to.
Conclusion: Listening Again
Religions around the world remind us that trees are more than scenery. They are wisdom keepers, givers of life, and cosmic connectors. They hold our evolving consciousness: from mythic imagination to axial philosophy, from medieval mysticism to today’s ecological science.
In a time of deforestation and climate upheaval, the old teachers still stand. They whisper lessons of rootedness, interconnection, and renewal. Perhaps the most spiritual act we can take is also the most practical: to plant, to tend, to listen.
The Ecology of the Cross: Cruciform Trees
If trees are life-givers, they are also sites of suffering. The cross itself was once a tree that was chosen, chopped down, shaped into an instrument of execution that was reused countless times in the Judean countryside of what we modern people of the inherited West would call the first century anno domini or Common Era. And yet in Christian imagination, it became the cosmic Tree of Life. This paradox lies at the heart of what I have been calling the Ecology of the Cross.
In ecological terms, forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet. The crucified tree is not only Christ’s cross but also the Amazon rainforest under chainsaw, the black walnut in my backyard enduring storms, the pines of South Carolina clear-cut for development, or the oak trees that are carefully manicured for aesthetic purposes in countless pieces of “property” surrounding churches here in what we now call the Southeast of the United States.
The Ecology of the Cross invites us to see cruciformity not only in human suffering but in the more-than-human world. Trees bear the wounds of our extractive systems, yet they also continue to gift us life: oxygen, shelter, shade, renewal. In this sense, the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift.
Here the metaphysical vision and the theological converge. To stand before a tree is to be confronted with both beauty and fragility, both gift and wound. It is to be drawn into what William Desmond might call the metaxological, the between, where mystery breathes through being.
So when religions speak of trees, whether as wisdom, life, or cosmic connectors, they are not only projecting human stories onto nature. They are intuiting something real about the metaphysical and theological shape of existence.
And in an age of ecological crisis, these intuitions call us back. To see a tree as a teacher is to see the world as sacramental, alive with wisdom and suffering, calling for care. To embrace the Ecology of the Cross is to recognize that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it… through roots and branches, crucifixion and renewal, leaves for the healing of the nations.
As Wendell Berry once urged, “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how.
Notes
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: National Council of Churches, 1989), Gen. 2:9.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Prov. 3:18.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Rev. 22:2.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, 1 Pet. 2:24.
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990).
The Qur’an, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:35; 53:14–16.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Books, 2019).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989).
William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008).
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. chs. on sacred trees and the axis mundi.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), selections on tree cults and sacred groves.
Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).
John B. Cobb Jr. and Herman E. Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
Here’s a paper on integral plasma thoughts that I posted over on Carolina Ecology… I’m deeply fascinated by this topic that weaves together my background as a physics teacher and my PhD work in Religion and Ecology…
Plasma is not just a category of physics; it is a discipline for attention. It forces our concepts to move with fields and thresholds rather than with isolated things. Thomas Berry’s old sentence comes back to me as a methodological demand rather than a slogan… the universe is “a communion of subjects,” so our ontology must learn how currents braid subjects, how membranes transact rather than wall off, how patterns persist as filaments rather than as points.[1] Plasma is one way the communion shows its hand.
Here’s a paper I’ve been working on the last few weeks combining some of my interests and passions… ecological theology and hard physics. I’ve been fascinated by plasma for years and had a difficult time figuring out how to weave that into my Physics and AP Physics curriculums over the years. I’m grateful to be working on this PhD in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion and have felt a gnawing to write this idea down for a while now…
Abstract:
This paper proposes an integrative framework, Kenotic Integral Plasma Dynamics, that connects plasma physics, advanced cosmology, consciousness studies, and ecological theory through the lens of the Ecology of the Cross. Drawing on my background as an AP Physics educator and doctoral studies in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, I explore how plasma, the dominant state of matter in the universe, may serve as a medium for emergent intelligence and information processing, with implications for AI, ecological stewardship, and cosmic consciousness. Synthesizing insights from classical metaphysics, process philosophy, and modern physics, the work reframes cosmology as a participatory, kenotic process linking matter, mind, and meaning. It critiques the narrow focus on chemical-fueled space exploration, advocating instead for deepening terrestrial engagement with plasma, electromagnetic, and quantum phenomena as pathways to planetary and cosmic intelligence. The study highlights relevance for those interested in the physics of consciousness, information transfer, and plasma-based phenomena. It concludes with practical suggestions for interdisciplinary research, education, and technology aimed at harmonizing scientific inquiry, intelligence development, and integral ecological awareness to address critical planetary challenges through expanded cosmic participation.
In this paper for the ISSRNC, I explore how boundaries—ecological, theological, and social—are being redrawn in our time of climate disruption and mass displacement. Drawing from Christian theology, phenomenology, and lived experience in the Carolinas, I argue that the sharp lines we’ve inherited between human and non-human, land and sea, self and other, are not only breaking down, but inviting reimagination. From Aquinas’ vision of a diverse creation reflecting divine goodness, to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, to Edith Stein’s account of empathy beyond the human, I trace a theological-phenomenological approach to seeing the more-than-human world as sacred.
Through stories of storms like Hurricane Helene and the increasing migration of people, plants, and animals, I reflect on how we might live more ethically in a world of porous boundaries. What does it mean to see a floodplain or barrier island as holy ground rather than real estate? How can faith communities respond not only to human migrants but also to the migrations of forests and species? Ultimately, I propose an “Ecology of the Cross”—a theology rooted in kenosis, interdependence, and sacramental welcome—as a way to meet this moment with humility, compassion, and reverence.
Today, I presented this paper at the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture’s 2025 conference titled “Crossing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries: Religion, Migration, and Climate Change.”
Here is the abstract of my paper, followed by the full paper below, as well as the slides to help those who enjoy such…
“This paper proposes a fresh theological framework for addressing climate-driven human and non-human migration by re-envisioning ‘boundaries’ as sacred membranes rather than fixed walls. Starting with biblical exile narratives and covenantal land ethics, the study traces a scriptural arc from Edenic displacement to the open-gated New Jerusalem. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian metaphysics of diverse participation in divine goodness, it affirms the intrinsic value of every creature and landscape. A phenomenological lens, as seen in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of “flesh” and Edith Stein’s embodied empathy, reveals the porous intersubjectivity of humans, animals, and ecosystems, thereby challenging the modern Human/Nature divide.
The kind of future we want is one where the Carolinas are thriving, ecologically flourishing, socially just, economically inclusive, and spiritually fulfilling. No one will hand us this future ready-made. It will be crafted, decision by decision, action by action, by us, the people of this beautiful corner of Earth.
I’m always surprised by how poorly we “preach” ecology in church settings. I don’t mean that in terms of just formal sermons from a Minister during Sunday Service (although I’ve heard some rough ones over the years, particularly dealing with ecology), but instead the type of preaching that we do in Sunday School discussions or Children’s Sermons.
So, I offer these ten minutes with thoughts on a few influential thinkers and how they have helped shape my own conceptions of God, Communion, Ecology, and even “Events,” and how that might impact other ministries.
