A Nun's Tale

A NUN'S TALE

The story of Sister Paula Gonzalez

"What matters: making a living or making a life ?" ~ Sr Paula

Sister Paula Gonzalez, PhD is a hands-on builder of human habitation and industry. In Cincinatti she built an energy efficient home with material taken out of dumpsters (saved from the landfill). She built a poultry plant in South America--in a village without electricity. Their new sense of "community" led them to build houses for one another to replace the corrugated lean-tos they had lived in for generations. She is founding director of Earth Connection, a Sisters of Charity center for learning and reflection about living lightly on the Earth. A noted lecturer, futurist, and environmentalist, she sponsored a "Greening the Christian Community" series with the College of Mt. St. Joseph and the North American Coalition on Religion and Ecology.

The following is composed from talks given by Sr Gonzalez at the 1996 Earth Stewardship Conference in Jacksonville Florida.

Three Classes of Humanity

Humanity is not divided into First World and Third World. There are three human classes:

  1. Consumers (20% of population) such as the US
  2. Middle class (60% of the population) who live modestly
  3. Poor (20%) who die every day of starvation and lackof sanitation.

While 60 % of the world use 5% of the world resources, the other 40 % use 95% of the world's resources. Every day we throw away enough materials to build hundreds of houses.

Every 2.3 seconds a human dies of hunger (38,000 per day). If Americans would reduce meat 10%, the food savings would nourish 100 million of the 500 million humans near starvation. Our own health would improve not be diminished ! Food that we throw away would feed the starving millions.

An exercise bike in the spa is the symbol of our sick culture. It goes nowhere and it is a poor substitute for nature-based exercise.

Aluminum cans require 7050 BTU to produce; glass only 610 btu per fill. Recycling is not the answer to our overconsumption. We must learn to live lightly. As energy use goes down, jobs increase, according to the American Coalition for Energy and Economy.

World-Wide Transformation

There is a Three-Fold Transformation Underway in the World.
  1. The global transformation is ongoing like a jet. We can participate or we can get left out.
  2. Organizational transformation must empower people to be more self-reliant.
  3. Personal lives have to be increasingly transformed to influence values.

We must redesign the plug-in world. We must make adaptors. If you get a project started, community will happen because the creator is at work.

New Definition of Success

We must redefine success (quality of life) in terms other than consumption:

  1. Time for self, family, friends; fully satisfying relationships; reinvented leisure; close-knit community.
  2. Meaningful work; healthy environment; personal safety and security; access to health care.
  3. Good food; comfortable housing; ability to reach full potential; optimism for the future.

Kiros Time

The affairs of the day are now soul-sized. Life must be brought down to human scale innteractions, ie to the neighborhoo where we can act as individuals to improve our lives..

We cannot actualize alone, but only through interaction withother human beings. Modern cities are built around the automobile. Suburbia must be replaced by shared spaces, shared resources and interactions (pot luck dinners).

New Social Model

The desired social model is a round table. Support groups have already adopted this model. AA lead the way with its 12-point plan. It depends on a belief in a higher being and absolute dependence on his help. MADD is another example--every member is an expert , ie all have the experience of loss of a child to drinking drivers.

The eucharist provides a symbol of the new model--round shape and the sharing of the meal( fellowship in joy or suffering; working together).

New Definition of Progress

We need new definitions for the science of "economics" and the practice of development:

  1. Economices must recognize unpaid labor output (in the Home) and natural world output. A forest may be worth more than a pasture.
  2. Development does not mean destruction. Improvement of peoples lives is possible without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same.

Deus ex Machina

God will not save us because he will not take away the free will he gave us; he is faithful. Our understanding of God is human and therefore too small.

The following text is taken from the Heidelberg College Bulletin website @http://www.heidelberg.edu/HNIS/Publications/Bulletins/Bulletin28-1/Bull.news.html

Spiritualist stresses need for unity

First, the bad news ... -Despite recent economic growth, Americans have reported feeling significantly less well off in 1990 than in 1958. -The percentage of Americans who feel the "American dream" is very much alive was 32 percent in 1986; In 1990, it was 23 percent. -Ninety-three percent of teenage American girls report "store hopping" as their favorite activity. -The average amount of pocket money for American children, $230 annually, is more than the total annual income of the world's half billion poorest people. -The percentage of all humans who own a car is 8; the percentage of American households with one or more cars is 89. "Those kinds of statistics lead me to believe that we may have some trouble in this world," said Sister Paula Gonzalez, Ph.D., who spoke during a Heidelberg College colloquium in February. A pioneer in the field of environmental spirituality, Gonzalez prefers, however, to focus on the good news: That if we pay serious attention to our health and our planet's health, we may ultimately recapture a sense of reverence crucial to the survival of both. "What we need to do is to come face to face in our time with the global reality in which we find ourselves," Gonzalez said. "It's just beginning to permeate and really beginning to color our thinking. It's got to color our thinking a lot faster, because the state of our planet is not in such very fine condition." Because Americans live in a consumer-oriented society, the American dream has, in a sense, become a nightmare for others. Among the "interesting problems" are the idea that "the finite planet on which we live cannot afford even the 5 percent of the earth's people in this country," she said. Americans' affinity toward materialism, Gonzalez speculated, has an even greater consequence -- one of a spiritual nature -- that is ruining any concept we have of anything that is precious. "We have lost something more than the environmental debt. We have lost a whole way of symbolizing continuity, of symbolizing preciousness, and because we have lost this concept, we have also lost any concept that anything is sacred." The notion of reverence has been replaced by the "absolute arrogance of the industrial posture, which says we are dominant and we will do to you, river, mountain, ocean, whatever we damn please." Despite all the doom and gloom, Gonzalez retains an air of optimism that the current direction can be reversed. While humanity's and Earth's problems are interconnected, she believes through a mutual understanding, a change in thinking and unlearning the 20th century, we have the capability to redevelop the sense of "awe and reverence we need to live." "We have to develop policies and social systems that would make it possible to live as if we were truly united, as if we were one, and unless we learn to do that, it is highly probable that homosapiens will become extinct, perhaps by the end of the 21st century," she said. "Humankind's most urgent task is to cherish earth. ... We either sink or swim together." Gonzalez challenged those in her Heidelberg audience to get involved "in the most exciting activity there could be ...to change our heads, change our hearts and change our ways of living to ways that would be in harmony with the earth." --A.S.

WolfDen

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