Composing a Further Life

was the environment as sort of the largest issue that we have. I didn’t even know the word
ecology
, and environmental concerns were nowhere in any of my education. It wasn’t mentioned even in the study of the Psalms.… The wonder and splendor and all of that business is what the Psalms talk about, but that reality of creation was not linked to the current situation.… The environment just grew and grew as I met more and more people within that mode of study and action.
    “I met René Dubos through a wonderful PR man we had at the cathedral who had read his new book called
Beast or Angel?
about what makes us human. 1 He thought it would be interesting to have Dubos have a dialogue with me as a priest.… At the end of it I said, ‘I would love to have you preach at the cathedral.’ I was organizing a series about poverty, and René Dubos gave this unbelievable sermon about lichens.” 2 What we call lichens are actually a symbiosis of two organisms, a fungus and an alga, each of which gives up its separate existence. “They become glorious by diminishing themselves. That blew everybody’s mind.”
    “But, Jim,” I said, “how did you recognize that poverty, which was so important for you coming up, was a topic on which Dubos would have something beautiful to say?”
    “He must have said something in our dialogue.… I knew that poverty was a central thing in my theology, in the church, in Christian life, and I think I asked him, … ‘Is there a way in which what we mean by poverty has meaning to a scientist?’ ”
    “In this context, holy poverty? Not poverty as a problem to be eliminated but poverty as spirituality?”
    “Right.”
    “What fascinates me,” I said, “is that the way people weave the parts of their lives together is also a kind of ecology: your interest in architecture, and the whole green cathedral project. It’s such a beautiful marrying of concerns.”
    “Other issues came up as I learned that there was more to life than what I had thought about, things changed. The whole patriarchy business, and this song and dance about how it would be wrong to have women priests because Jesus was a male and that was God’s plan. Well, that all went out the window.”
    “So where did getting out of patriarchy start for you? I remember there was a scandal about the
Christa.”
    “The
Christa
. That was a big scandal, but the women’s ordination thing was earlier.” The
Christa
was a bronze sculpture of a crucified woman that had been created by the British sculptor Edwina Sandys for the UN Year of the Woman in 1975. It was at the cathedral during part of Holy Week in 1984, causing outcries of blasphemy around the world. Yet even St. Paul, no particular friend of women, said in his Letter to the Galatians that in the church, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). This is what the
Christa
represented, at the same time that she served as a reminder of the ways in which women have suffered and sacrificed themselves through the centuries.
    One more key element for Jim was added by another scientist, Lewis Thomas, who also preached at the cathedral. “It was in that middle period that it suddenly became very clear to me, with
ecumenical
and
ecology
—I love the derivation of those words, and they’re very similar in that they’re talking about a totality, which is what creation is all about, and
vive la différence
—that diversity is the essence of creation. I heard Lewis Thomas give a lecture in which he said, ‘You know, there are no two cells alike. There are no cells alike any more than there are two snowflakes. There is nothing unique in being unique.’ That was the perfect phrase. And uniqueness is the essence of creation. It really came through the greenness, and the greenness came from looking back from the moon, and the beautiful blue-green creation, and seeing that everything is on that little ball that you can blot out with your thumb. Totality, inclusivity, greenness, uniqueness, all of that was just a huge turning point for me. And that meant again a kind of intellectual license for having diversity of speakers, of preachers, of traditions and so on, celebrated. This is a Christian place, this is an Episcopal place, but our Eucharist was open to everybody, and whenever I had preachers of different kinds, I had them join the clergy and gather around the altar, even