A white card from Renaud Meeus, teacher (1)
Faced with the climate challenge, we have seen that it is not a question of falling into blissful optimism in the power of technological innovations, nor into desperate and anxiety-inducing pessimism, but of walking on the path of lucidity, which does not accommodate any blindness. The future of the world as described in the latest Giec report requires us to stop believing that we can miss out on a profound questioning of ourselves and our model of consumerist society. The climate crisis is therefore coupled with an existential crisis, that is to say a matter of life and death. We cannot confront these questions linked to this double crisis only through the prism of technological reason, insofar as questions are linked to them concerning love, death, eternity, the sacred and suffering, which belong much more to the realm of spirituality.
Therefore, what place can the spiritual occupy in the different dimensions of our life, and what meaning can it give in the face of the trial that awaits us?
The Bible, from its first pages, informs us of an existential paradox that we all carry within ourselves and which can be a source of life or death. In the myth of Creation, a voice of love gives two orders: man is simultaneously called to “cultivate” his desire, to bring it to full bloom and, at the same time, to “guard” the garden; in other words, to be the guardian of his desiring soul so that it does not destroy the gift entrusted to him. Man will therefore have to learn to transcend this paradox by discovering the wisdom to reach adulthood of mastery and balance of these two polarities of his to be in the world. The Bible teaches us how elusive this wisdom will be, and that something in humans refuses this limitation. Besides, isn’t this legitimate knowing that to exist means to come out of oneself by the movement of a desire which constantly seeks the object and the loved one? This impetus is that of life which makes us taste a “je ne sais quoi” of the profusion of Being. We must neither deny this life force inherent in our human condition, nor repress it, but simply educate it, that is to say lead it out of the traps of greed and appropriation which would be contrary to the spirit of gratitude and wonder. From this datum of existence that is our famous paradox, two paths seem possible to us.
Consent in the name of compassion and responsibility
It can first be a question of getting out of the vision of a limitation felt as imposed from the outside by the world around us to move towards a progressive and agreed integration of these limits in the name of compassion and responsibility. . As Levinas teaches us, this world that we take and want to possess by reducing it to the measure of our insatiable needs, in the name of a freedom that turns on itself, we must rather learn to welcome it and to receive it as it is and with respect. The ethics of responsibility vis-à-vis the Other and our Earth must precede the ethics of our freedom to dispose of everything as we wish. Contemplating with compassion the face of fragile and vulnerable man or that of our bruised earth, should disarm us, strip us of our lust so that all creation can live before us without shame and without fear of being humiliated, but free and respected.
Consent to renunciation through joy
Our difficulty in limiting this life force that is the desire in us comes largely from the CPC system (Croissancist, Productivist, Consumerist) in which we live (2) and who seized his power to lead him astray from his legitimate end. Too often have we anchored our desiring force in the search for small daily satisfactions, while our desire is made for infinity. How many of us have really realized that we carry within us a thirst for something more than small material pleasures?
Getting out of the illusions of our materialistic world is therefore an emergency to heal our wounded planet, but also to heal ourselves and our desire which has degraded into lust; not only by resignation to losing what secures us, but by a joy that surpasses the small pleasures of our consumerist society, a joy alone capable of tearing man from his slavery. There is an urgent need to derive our joy not only from the limited natural resources that we find in the earth’s subsoil, but from developing our infinite spiritual resources. Urgency that we each realize our metanoia, our Easter: a part of us must die in order to be reborn to ourselves. Because we have to pass from a pleasure essentially taken in an overflowing and anarchic exteriority to a joy reconnected to our interiority.
It is about consenting, thanks to the joy stronger than the bitterness of renunciation, joy of voluntary sobriety, living more simply so that others can simply live (Gandhi), joy of discovering the treasure buried in oneself which is Wisdom radiant with goodness, which transfigures all realities, joy of reconnection to the mystery of life. Only an experience of profound joy will therefore make possible the renunciations necessary for the safeguard of our planet. The experience of mystics, such as that described by Saint Teresa of Avila in her book The inner castle of the soul, is it not enlightening for our subject? God, lived in faith as a real and objective presence at the center of the soul, she confides to us, can help us overcome all our fears by already giving us a taste of joyful eternity within us. Yes, building a new world – and it will have to – will not be done without first returning to the sources of Being which is love and joy, an essential condition for redeploying ourselves through our creative power which, then, will have become respectful of the whole of life.
Wasn’t Malraux right when he confided to André Frossard in an interview: “The 21st century will be mystical or it won’t be”?
>>> (1) This text is the second in a series of three texts dedicated to the transition. The first text was entitled “To face climate challenges, technology will not be enough”.
>>> (2) See MM Egger, Freedom from consumerism, Éditions Jouvence, 2020.
Will the climate crisis be the occasion for a spiritual rebirth?