 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
I was born in New York City in 1963 and in the midst of childhood was grateful to believe in God and to know the spiritual power of nature from an early age. Aware of my conscious religious belief since the age of five, I experienced religion and the natural world as dual gifts pointing in the same direction, portals through which God could flow into human life with transformative power. Two places anchored these experiences - the austere, rock walls of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church where my family worshipped and the forests and fields around my grandmother’s home an hour north of Manhattan. At St. Mark’s on Sunday mornings, I remember my knees and elbows joined to the dark wood of pews worn smooth from decades of prayer. In the fields and forests I built forts, climbed trees, crawled on boulders and knew the feeling of cool grass and stalky field-hay from running barefoot. These places taught me to be joyful, to adore, to wonder, to be in awe. It was a vitalizing, wild gift to know life’s depth in these ways as a child. In my teenage years I discovered academics, athletics, my social conscience, points of reconnection with the energy I’d known in those childhood experiences. Following college I had planned to join the Peace Corps. My father’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack kept me closer to home; I went to work discerning my calling over a period of several years. I developed a journalism project to interview centenarians, taught in a Harlem public school and worked at a Harlem drug rehab center. My heroes were religious leaders who wielded cultural and political power - Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X. Each combined an intelligent, aggressive faith with a commitment to reduce suffering and create change. Each expanded society’s compact around human rights, the decisive moral issue of the past millennium. But while I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, there was an incompleteness to my admiration of these men. Surprisingly, and revealingly in regards to religion, it took me fifteen years of adult life to see that the earth was the missing piece. I entered Union Theological Seminary, was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1992, and served as an oncology chaplain on a cancer ward at a Chicago hospital. I then served for ten years as a rector of two parishes in northern New Jersey and was active in denominational leadership. In my diocese I helped lead the ordination process and chaired the newspaper’s editorial board, and was involved in the affairs of the Episcopal Church regionally and nationally. I preached, led worship, taught, baptized, married and buried members of my congregations. I found my ordained life fulfilling, to a degree. I believed then, as I do now, that religious institutions play an important role in shaping the moral, spiritual character of individuals and society. Yet something substantial was missing. Pastoring a church requires a primary focus on one community; I wanted my ordained work to engage a major social issue and was discouraged by the shift of much public religious expression towards an immature, extreme conservatism. I was also concerned about a shortage of progressive spiritual leadership, a shortage I felt pointed towards a future where religion’s gifts to the world could be lost between the poles of fundamentalism and religion-suspicious secularism. Then I discovered GreenFaith. I volunteered as a speaker on the organization’s behalf. I got my congregation and my diocese involved. Unbeknownst to me, the organization was in transition. To my surprise I was approached about becoming Executive Director in 2002 and invited to write my own job description as a basis for negotiations. I had not previously thought of combining my commitment to religious leadership with my love of the earth. When I sat down to write, a new world emerged with sudden clarity. In fifteen minutes, I wrote a page-long description of my intended work, a description which with minor variations serves very well today. My life’s experiences had come to a point of profound integration, a point I am privileged to have known. I have now served with GreenFaith for four years, my four best professionally. I am an animated religious-environmental leader. I educate clergy and lay leaders about the connection between sacred texts, theological traditions and an ethic of care for the earth. I help religious institutions green the way they operate. I teach clergy and people of faith about environmental degradation and injustice and motivate them to advocate for a clean, healthy environment for all people, especially society’s most vulnerable communities. I’ve found hosts of ways that houses of worship and individuals can unite a love of God with a love of the environment. I find that most religious people have never seen a connection drawn between religion and the earth. Yet once those lines are drawn and the relationships revealed, people make connections quickly and are aware of the importance of the work facing us. I believe that caring for the earth and revitalizing progressive religion are two of the greatest challenges facing the human family. I feel privileged to have the chance to play a leadership role that unites these two critical fields in a way that offers new life to both.
|
|
The Rev. Fletcher Harper