"A church - to be a church - should be enveloped by a forest"
On the lessons from church forests in Ethiopia and sacred groves in India
Over Christmas, I visited the Design Museum in Helsinki where the current exhibition (until 31 March 2024) is Garden Futures: Designing with Nature. While there are exhibits specifically to do with garden design, ranging from the evolution of garden tools to Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness, perhaps, not surprisingly, the ones which stood out to me were the tree-related ones.
One of these was a short film by Jeremey Seifert and photographs of the church forests in Ethiopia. These had previously been published on the Emergence magazine website and I had seen them then, but I was grateful to revisit them. “In Ethiopian Orthodox teaching, a church - to be a church - should be enveloped by a forest. It should resemble the Garden of Eden” are the opening linesof the film. The film and the photographs powerfully show how the garden around the church is a green oasis surrounded by bare, deforested land. “A hundred years ago, the highland was one big continuous forest.”
The speaker of these lines is Dr Alemayeh Wassie, a forest ecologist. He is working with the church to help protect what remains - and to grow them. He says, “We can bring back the landscape given that these church forests exists.”
I am reminded of the sacred groves that surround Hindu temples in India and the role they are playing in reforestation. On the Coromandel coast in southern India, the indigenous forest there is classified as Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest (TDEF). In 2002, it was estimated that only 4% of this forest remained, with a high proportion of this being in sacred groves. When the community at Auroville, near Puducherry, began reforestation efforts in the 1970s, they turned to the sacred groves to understand what the native trees and plants to the area were and began to cultivate them, and then to plant them. These efforts are still ongoing today, and have had a high degree of success. I volunteered at Sadhana Forest, which was established twenty years ago, and where barren land has become a thriving forest, with over eighty species of birds recorded. Another of the Auroville forests is Pitchandikulam, where there are now over 800 species of plants.
In the church forests film, Abu Gebre Mariam Alene, an Ethiopian Orthodox priest says, “Every plant contains the power of God, the treasure of God, the blessing of God. So when someone plants a tree every time it moves the tree prays for that person to live longer.”
Thinkers such as Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake have called for a ‘resacralization’ of the world. Ralph Abraham wrote, “I believe that the most important activity to save the world, or at least to move toward hope in that direction, is to recreate for some larger portion of humanity the lost thread of our connection to the sacred. This is the program that I call “the resacralization of the world.” (in Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness.)
It seems to me that the church forests of Ethiopia, the sacred groves of India and even the church gardens in England can be the starting points for both practical action in restoring biodiversity and also in this resacralization of the world, whatever your faith or beliefs. And how can we then take this out in the wider world, beyond these protected spaces?
Further reading:
Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong
Spiritual Ecology edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nat Hanh
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