Can ‘Ecospirituality’ Revive Appreciation of the ‘Sacred Cosmos’?
Rachel Wheeler Says Ancient People Knew How to Celebrate Life in Nature
How do spirituality and ecology combine to promote a closer relationship with nature? What lessons can be learned from the ancient desert Christians? How can Christians move beyond the biblical command to “subdue” and “have dominion over” the natural world and acquire a more positive and harmonious view of the world?
Dr. Rachel Wheeler, associate professor and chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of Portland (Oregon), grapples with these questions in her publications and work at the institution.
She is also cofounder and director of spirituality at the Heaven Human Earth Institute, a new center for adult education that unites classical Chinese medicine, depth psychology, ecospirituality, and mysticism. Its inaugural event will take place in Portland, Oregon, in July 2027.
Author of three books, Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition; Ecospirituality, An Introduction; and Radical Kinship: A Christian Ecospirituality, Wheeler focuses on the intersection between religious practice, spirituality, ecology, ethics, and psychology.
Ecospirituality
Ecospirituality is fundamental to her philosophy. She told The Earth and I that “ecospirituality is a way of describing our relationship of belonging within a sacred cosmos.”
Eco, from the Greek oikos, means home, while spirituality highlights the “sacred and life-giving in the context of earthly belonging,” she says. As such, ecospirituality celebrates humanity’s connection to the natural world.
While ecospirituality could appear contemplative, it can also empower individuals to influence institutions and systems. “We need to allow our own hearts to be changed,” Wheeler explains, “in order to foment the radical, persistent, system-wide changes we need and Earth needs.”
“We need to allow our own hearts to be changed in order to foment the radical, persistent, system-wide changes we need and Earth needs.”
Her outlook is influenced by Indigenous wisdom. “There is so much wisdom already evident,” she says, “in the land-based communities around the world that informs and inspires my own outlook and approach to ecospirituality. I gravitate toward being intentional in appreciating rather than appropriating Indigenous wisdom as a method in my own work and practice, and responding to the invitation of some Indigenous thinkers to explore my own lineages of land-based spiritual practices that go back not too far. Partnering with and giving over the power some of us hold to people who haven’t had it and learning to hold it together differently feels like an important challenge for this time.”
Radical Kinship
The idea of radical kinship sits in tandem with ecospirituality. “We’re kin with all by virtue of various levels of genetic sharing. New scientific understanding helps us trace kinship lineages pretty far back to the materiality that predates and includes the stars. Getting to the rootedness of that connection is what is evoked by the radicalness of this kinship,” says Wheeler.
The concept is open to all. She emphasizes: “Whether or not the sacred is how another person would refer to this new scientific understanding could involve faith commitments and language of religion but doesn’t have to. We can all hold sacred what gives and sustains life, what nourishes us to be nourishing for others,” she explains.
“We can all hold sacred what gives and sustains life, what nourishes us to be nourishing for others.”
Language has a part to play. Terms like “save,” “protect,” “manage,” “creation care,” and “stewardship” can imply standing apart from and taking charge of nature. Other words, like “kinship,” “interbeing,” and “love,” can help preserve “our sense of ourselves as human earthlings working with the rest of nature.”
It's instructive to listen to a podcast interview with Gary Alan, cofounder of The Sophia Society, where Wheeler explains ecospirituality and radical kinship.
Overcoming a Negative Legacy
As a Christian, Wheeler believes people of her faith must address the religion’s damaging legacy, which includes anthropocentrism (human-centeredness) and a belief that preparing for the “afterlife” is more important than caring for the health of this world.
Discussing the biblical idea of human dominion over creation, she comments: “People of faith have often misunderstood other ways to look at the Genesis creation stories that focus on the intrinsic goodness of creation. These other aspects of the creation stories in Genesis emphasize other elements that it’s been more convenient to forget than to hold on to.”
Lessons from the Christian Desert Tradition
Wheeler draws lessons from the desert Christians, who, in the third to the fifth centuries, lived in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. They led ascetic, contemplative lives, which influenced later spiritual traditions.
“Desert Christians were withdrawing from systems of oppression and injustice in a way that many of us long to do today. I love the stories of their voluntary simplicity and nonownership and noncoercion. I think we can learn from them still,” she states.
One of the stories that Wheeler points to can be found in John Wortley’s translation of The Book of the Elders. A teaching of Abba Pambo, one of the desert Christians, discusses the quality of a person’s clothing, outlining that a monk should wear the sort of clothing that, if they were to leave it outside their cell, nobody else would take it. This story, says Wheeler, “speaks to me of a radical detachment from things or the consumerism that’s running rampant in our world today.”
A similar lesson can be learned from the tale of two elders who wonder about the novelty of fighting over possession of a brick. They can’t maintain the fiction that either of them owns anything.
Wheeler explains: “The kind of desert spirituality expressed in the Christian desert tradition involves radical acceptance of limits and of cultivating a disposition of flourishing within, not despite, limits which our ecological homes ask and even require of us.”
Rewilding in Practice
Like the desert Christians, an individual’s own “rewilding” means “getting closer to our lives in relationship with the rest of nature,” says Wheeler. That could mean, for example, getting away from devices, growing something, limiting our diet to what’s available nearby, or getting outside and watching nature.
Through “terra-spiritual inquiry,” or listening to place, we can recognize wisdom where there is wildness. “I definitely think that love, affection, and care arise from specificity,” Wheeler says. “When we, too, feel loved by the place we live, we want to care for the place more.”
“I definitely think that love, affection, and care arise from specificity. When we, too, feel loved by the place we live, we want to care for the place more.”
Her own practices involve reading and study. She is a vegan and is car-free, helping her “regrow a sense of my intimate relationship of care and contact with the rest of nature.” She walks through a nearby public park “with a sense of companionship and belonging.”
These practices can help promote positive experiences “of ourselves as Earth beings in relationship with others to generate wonder, beauty, joy, curiosity, and gratitude,” she comments.
Prompting Change
If humans began thinking of other species as kin, everything would change. “We would not treat animals with such cruelty in our factory farming,” Wheeler says, “or despoil the ground with our agribusiness practices. We would no longer segregate ourselves in cities from the wildlife that persists with us but would rewild our cities more thoroughly to accommodate the wild kin living among us.”
“What gives me hope,” she concludes, “is that so much is already happening among humans and communities to recover a deeper sense of belonging amid so much creaturely otherness.”
*Yasmin Prabhudas is a freelance journalist working mainly for nonprofit organizations, labor unions, the education sector, and government agencies.
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