In the Q&A below, Berger discusses the genesis of her book, its main themes, and its importance in a world beset by ecological disasters.
Timothy Cahill: I want to turn finally to your current project, your book Benedicite: All Creation Worships. You describe it as “A Theology of Liturgy for a Planet in Peril.” As I understand it, you began formulating your conception that “all creation worships” at a 2018 ISM conference you organized, called “Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation,” with Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, giving the keynote. Was the idea already nascent in your mind when you organized that conference?
Teresa Berger: Yes, I’d been thinking about the topic for some years and thought we needed to put it on the map for liturgical studies. That was the idea. I wrote a fairly sustained introduction to the conference papers when they were later published, and afterward kept saying to myself, this needs more, this needs more. It took me a long time to find the particular focus that I was passionate enough about to make it the subject for a scholarly monograph. And then of course, COVID intervened and the rest is history. But I’m back with it now.
You’ve also said that part of the impetus for the 2018 conference and for your book came from studying contemporary liturgical attempts at greening worship. What did you find?
Much of that work, as well intentioned as it is, lacks any deep knowledge or engagement with the tradition that is there. So often you get these glib claims—”the church or the liturgy until now has been creation-oblivious, and now we need to do something about it.” The examples are ample and somewhat embarrassing. “Let’s have native wildflowers in the sanctuary!” I mean, that’s nice. It certainly beats having plastic flowers in the sanctuary. But if that’s the level at which you attend to this planetary problem, that won’t do it.
Yes. As you’ve observed, a sufficient awareness of creation does not begin and end with Saint Francis of Assisi. Simply evoking Francis once a year becomes a glib way of writing the subject off, of dealing with it superficially and ticking the box.
Yes. Francis becomes a sort of poetic fool for God who is so singularly creation-attuned he stands outside of tradition. I could quote you 10 examples off the top of my head of similar intentionalities in the Catholic tradition. But they are less known, less studied. The map hasn’t been created to show that there is a whole strand in our tradition like Francis. It’s important to unearth it and for us, as Christians, to situate ourselves within that larger existing tradition, rather than to think, “Oh, we need to invent, for the first time ever, how to be in conversation with all created reality.”
You’ve said something similar about the land acknowledgements that are now done at Yale and other institutions. How would you approach that practice?
I find acknowledging Indigenous peoples with land acknowledgements very moving, very appropriate, and very important. Not all of them are phrased well, but the point is important. Similarly, what if we acknowledged the created world, the bioregion in which we live and within which we worship? What if a “creation acknowledgement” were prayed before every liturgy that names the created realities in which that community finds itself? For me, in New Haven, that would be the Quinnipiac watershed and horseshoe crabs and what have you. What would that be like?
That not only recognizes the native tribes that once occupied the land that we’re on now, but it also honors what we know to be the Native American attitude toward the land, the same gratitude toward the Creator that you advocate in your book.
Yeah, sure, but what I want to say with my book—look, for a long time we’ve been lusting after Indigenous attunement to creation, and shaming the Christian tradition for not having it. I’m saying, but it does have it. We just have to unearth it. We need to learn our own tradition differently. I love to learn with Indigenous communities and from them, but it’s not the point of my work. I want to speak to our ignorance of the Christian tradition and the creation attunement contained there.
The easy criticism of that tradition is that, in Genesis, God okays our “dominion” over the earth, and with the exception of Saint Francis, Christianity allows us to madly and righteously exploit resources and pillage the planet. That’s the narrative you’re working against.
Yes, exactly.
You’re putting a historiographical foundation underneath what already exists, whether it’s Daniel or Psalms or an obscure early Christian text like The Testament of Adam, which inventories which hour of each day the different creatures shall praise God. All these sources have been easily shrugged off as rote or anodyne, but you’re saying, “No. All creation praising the Creator is central to our tradition.”
Yes. The overarching vision of the historiographic labor is one of worship not as a human posture towards the Holy One, but as the posture of everything created. I re-situate human beings not at the center of the encounter with God, but as latecomers to this worship. I’m making a theological claim that everything created worships. How that happens and how I can discern it as a human being, I don’t know exactly, but I also don’t need to know in order to sustain the theological claim.
Does this require that the term “worship” be redefined?
It depends on how you define worship to begin with. If you define it purely as what human beings do in relationship to God, it might need a redefinition. Our tradition from the Psalms onward, however, thinks of worship as something much larger than what human beings offer to God.
I’m trying to put the idea into words in a more positive sense, something like “worship is the acknowledgement of creation and the Creator’s role in our existence.”
That’s too weak for me. You can get away with too much with that. I mean, it’s there in Augustine and Aquinas—human beings worship intentionally and the rest of creation just worships by being the best form of, let’s say, a butterfly that it can possibly be. I think that’s hubris. We are thinking of ourselves on too-inflated a level when it comes to worship. The most important thing is not to figure out how all the other created elements worship, but to ground human worship in this broader worship by all creation. Then we can worry about how exactly we think a mountain worships. And we may come to a point where we say we don’t need to know that, as long as we can understand ourselves as fellow worshipers.
Your project does two things at once, I think. It both insists on humility on our part, but it also dispels a kind of estrangement or isolation we can feel from the rest of nature.
Yes, absolutely. Look at what science tells us. If we go back far enough, it’s the same DNA. I always find it funny that human beings do analysis of their own DNA, and yes, you find out that you might have a bit of Neanderthal in you, but it stops with human beings. And I think, wait a minute. Ninety-something percent of our DNA is shared with apes and chimpanzees. And if you go back, every life form begins with the same ancestral DNA. Pope Francis would say everything is interconnected.
You just anticipated my next question, which is to ask how instructive, inspirational, useful was Pope Francis’s 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si’?
Oh, to have a pope in an encyclical attend to the natural environment! There are some gorgeous, poetic passages in it that say exactly what I want to say. And, of course, Pope Francis also acted on these convictions, with solarizing the Vatican and a host of things like that. So yes, I loved having him as Pope. And I’m still waiting for Pope Leo to step up to that particular challenge.
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis explicitly challenged unchecked growth and unsustainable consumption, especially in developed countries, as devastating to the planet. Though it’s not at all the thrust of your work, your project does intrinsically contain the same critique.
Absolutely. Because you cannot murder fellow worshipers. I mean, we do it all the time—look at Ukraine and Russia. So, let’s say you shouldn’t. Francis says somewhere in Laudato Si’ that by decimating species we are silencing the voices of praise. We are destroying a choir of diverse voices.
And not just praise. You also will have a chapter on lament. How does that relate?
Some years ago, I noticed that earlier liturgical practices of the “We need to give thanks for the sun and the moon and the butterflies and the beauty of the earth” kind have transitioned to postures of lament, certainly in many environmental activist groups. It sent me back to the Scriptures and our liturgical tradition to trace voices of lament. And what I found is that, as with praise, it’s not only human beings who lament. In the tradition there are voices of other creatures lamenting. Reading some of these ancient sources, I found that as often as not other creatures don’t just lament, but they lament human evil-doing before God. That was startling to me.
Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. is a writer specializing in religion and the arts.
