We thank Denis Healy of Carrigtwohill for the following Tribute to his late brother, Brother Dan Healy (Brother Bonaventure). The late Brother Dan Healy has a nephew and grandnephew living in Millstreet.
Remembering Brother Dan Healy 1945 – 2024
He embraced an Ecological Christianity
Brother Dan took the name Bonaventure for his final profession.
Chapter from Darwin Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos.
(With kind permission of the author Bruce Sanguin Minister of Canadian Memorial Church and Centre for Peace in Vancouver.)
Human Ones as Harvesters of Grace
Mark 4:26-28
Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like someone who scatters seed on the ground, goes to bed, and wakes up to discover that the seed has sprouted, but he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full head.
But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes out with the sickle, because the harvest is ripe”. Jesus would have received top marks in any biology class today. In this parable, he describes what scientists call self-organisation. We have finally confirmed what farmers have known for 10,000 years; the planet knows what she’s doing, and so does a seed. Throw them together, add time, and presto, you’ve got wheat. In an emergent universe, there are no external forces causing an Organism to do its thing; the latent tendency of the wheat plant exists within the seed. The farmer in the parable of the Kingdom ‘does not know’ how this happens, and neither to our scientists. All the fancy names might give us some sense of control, but they don’t lessen the mystery.
Earth’s capacity to “produce of itself” through a universal intelligence, requires us to acknowledge that we exist in a state of grace. It’s not our gig. As previously mentioned, there are a lot of brainless organisms on earth that exhibit astounding intelligence. Seeds are just one of those. Algae figured out how to eat carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Without this intelligent being acting on our behalf, the temperature of the earth would rise beyond what we could endure. In other words, slime-mould still puzzles our brainiest scientists.
But we refuse to take our place in grace. We help nature along by making petroleum-based chemical fertilisers and pesticides to increase crop yields. Wes Jackson, Director of the Land Institute, says that we grow our food in oil, not soil. Farmers have become dependent upon the “protection ring” of the petrochemical industry. Once farmers have entered the vicious cycle, there was no clear exit strategy. Yet there is no credible evidence that the use of these products increases harvest yields. Since 1945, pesticide use has risen 3300 percent, but overall crop loss to pests has not gone down. Insects, with their puny brains annually outsmart our brightest chemists. So despite pounding US crops with 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides annually, crop losses have increased 20 percent. The soil is less productive as a result. Farmers compensate by pouring 20 million tonnes of fertiliser on them annually, an average of 160 pounds for every person in the US. This further destroys the soil, in a vicious cycle of “crops and robbers”. The net result? Chemicals destroy the soil, leech out into the rivers, and end up – where else? – In our bodies.
We don’t need to improve upon nature. We are born into a planetary bio system that has already done the work on our behalf. And so, after 14 billion years of the universe working it out, we arrive on the scene, and like the farmer in Jesus’ parable take out our sickle. We reap a harvest of pure grace. Day in and day out, we are harvesters of grace. Flowers adorning the table; food on our plates; bodies to taste, digest, assimilate, make new proteins, and, on a good morning, eliminate. This is what the Kingdom of God is like, says Jesus-pure grace, handed to us on a silver platter. All that’s asked of us is a little appreciation, and a lot less attitude. We can’t begin to “get it” rationally any more than the farmer understood how the earth produced of itself, and the plant grew up. We weren’t meant to “get it” with our heads. We were meant to receive it in our hearts. God is gracious.
