I have been attending EcoFaith Recovery’s metro Portland cohort meetings and donating money monthly to EcoFaith for many years. Why and how I give are an important and intentional spiritual practice. I hope my story will encourage you to deepen your relationship to EcoFaith, too.
“How” I give isn’t about the mechanics of monthly donations moving electronically from my bank account into EcoFaith’s, it’s about Developing Relationships, the Second of EcoFaith’s Seven Practices for Awakening Leadership. https://www.ecofaithrecovery.org/practices-for-awakening-leadership/
The community dimension of Developing Relationships reads as follows: We disrupt the culture of isolation by developing relational cultures within and among diverse human communities, and between those communities and the natural world.
For better and for worse, earning and spending money is central to all cultures. Save for a few, isolated indigenous communities, all people are enmeshed in a complex global web of economic relationships that tend to center domination and competition. One way for me to intentionally develop and nurture a relational counterculture and, perhaps to disrupt America’s obsession with accumulating and hoarding wealth just a little, is to invest my money and my time in EcoFaith Recovery as a spiritual practice.
Earlier this year, I read two books together, All About Love by bell hooks and 12 Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong. Armstrong and hooks are two very brilliant and insightful women with incredible wisdom to share about building relational cultures.
For hooks, it begins by understanding what love is and isn’t. She defines love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Love is a verb, an active and continuing body of choices and decisions to nurture healthy spiritual growth in yourself and others. Love is a discipline. It requires learning and unlearning, practice, and intention.
Similarly, in 12 Steps to a Compassionate Life, Armstrong uses the recovery model to build a twelve-step program for increasing one’s capacity for compassion. Again, compassion for oneself and others doesn’t just happen. Although we may have different innate capacities for compassion, we can increase our awareness of and capacity for compassion through discipline, intention, and practice. In short, the 12 steps work when you work the 12 steps.
EcoFaith’s practices and my intentional, daily, spiritual engagement with them builds on this wisdom. Human relationships will always be messy. We will always have conflicts. We will sometimes fail in our efforts to understand and to be understood. Nonetheless, whoever we are and wherever we’re starting from right now, we can learn, practice, and increase our capacity for compassion and love. EcoFaith gives me the resources and a community to do my work, to practice and, hopefully, to grow. EcoFaith is always there for me, and it is always there for everyone with a heart for connection and relationship, to support you in this essential spiritual work, whether or not you follow a particular religious tradition.
Why I give is simple. EcoFaith is working to amplify and direct our love and compassion into the political economies and policies that shape our current culture.
EcoFaith envisions a collaborative, equitable, and regenerative world — beyond fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, deforestation, and systemic injustice — in which our interconnectedness with the whole community of creation is fully embraced, and all peoples are seen, named, loved, and flourishing together. This vision invites us into a deeper and life-affirming relationship with the Earth and all life that calls Earth home. As we develop our leadership skills and organize our communities to act together towards this vision, we have, can, and will influence personal and community practices and public policies. We have, can and will begin to move the culture away from today’s broken systems of extraction and domination of nature. Instead of passively or helplessly participating in the delusion that limitless growth can continue indefinitely, we can organize and act together to begin to heal what is broken.
I hope you’ll join me in supporting EcoFaith financially, and I hope that you’ll join us in the work of EcoFaith’s Metro Portland cohort in whatever ways are right for you.
In peace and with gratitude,
Peter Sergienko