In "Religion of Trees" yesterday we learned about Ethiopian church forests - the "forest islands" anchored by churches in a land that has over the last century lost 90% of its forest. Here was a religion that takes trees seriously, revering and protecting trees around its sanctuaries. Many now have walls to stop the encroachments of agriculture and herding, we learned, an idea which, forest ecologist Alemayehu Wassie Eshete, explained, "came from the church itself." If you see the rural church, they have the walls to protect the inner circle, which people think is the most sacred place. So let's move that wall to the outside and include the forest as part of the church itself.
Students were enchanted at these "church forests" of the oldest form of Christianity but missed the real story. The walls encircling the diminished forest, making it a "part of the church itself," are not part of an ancient Ethiopian Orthodox tradition - though they might be an extension of it. A century ago, the only church walls kept the forest out. But my point wasn't that these residual "church forests" were historically inauthentic, but rather that they are soulful responses to the present. Is it completely wrong or just incomplete to say
Preserved as an act of faith for centuries, these forests are proof of the power of spiritual ideas to create sustainable landscapes. Seen from above, the forests are demarcated by the stark boundary between sacred and secular, church and field, work and rest. They are places detached from everyday life yet central to it, informing human work and relationships within society. Like other objects within Orthodox traditions, the forests direct the worshipper to look beyond what is visible.
Much to ponder - and topics for further research! Students are working on littler research projects and I wanted to prod them beyond the often facile and always ahistorical narratives of news pieces in religion and ecology. But I wanted them also to consider whether we, also inhabiting a land that's been deforested, aren't in the same situation as these Ethiopian church innovators, discovering something precious and perhaps even otherworldly in the remnants of what to our ancestors would just have been the world.
