Green sisters edition 2, chapter 1

Today I have for you the second installment in my Green Sisters series of essays for our book club. Please enjoy, and thank you always for every bit of support, I am so grateful!


In the first chapter of Green Sisters, Sarah McFarland Taylor outlays both the companionship between ideas and theories, (chief among them Tradition and innovation) growing together and supporting each other, but also the direct people who work together in almost a symbiosis. The same way ideas and people work together, Taylor also explains relationships that do not lead towards growth and goodness, and does not shy from saying it—male clergy opposed to the movement cling to the past and do not change or grow from the harms and ills of the catholic church’s history.
Taylor likens this simile green sisters and environmentalism as companion plants. “Drawing from a gardening approach known as “companion planting,” favored by organic gardeners in general and used by organic farming religious sisters, provides a fertile framework for looking at how sisters combine varieties of Catholicism, contemporary spirituality, environmental thought, and “green culture”” (28). Some plants grow best alongside other specifically corresponding plants—out of God’s miracle or the divine knowledge of Sophia.
I, personally believe this connection can even be drawn to symbiosis—the mutual benefits of one organism with another—which sometimes is understood as creating its own organism. Take the example of lichens. They are an algae and a fungus that work together, but a lichen is considered its own species. Ultimately, are we not all one organism, which cells die and are reabsorbed into other elements of the living being?


Something that renewed my own rational for choosing the path of farming was this quote: “If we were to accept the Earth on the terms and under the exquisite conditions in which it continues to evolve, the role of the farmer would be raised to a most honorable and sacred human profession”. I’ve heard this sentiment echoed through seemingly all of the figureheads of the small scale farming movement. Farming is a devotion. “Good work”, “work worth doing.” Laypeople to this world end up telling me something to the effect of “yeah, but it’s so hard!” Well, choose your hard! You can have a beautiful and rewarding “hard” or later on after taking the “easy” road have a rude awakening into an uncomfortable and grievous “hard”. Spirituality is the lens that turns this beautiful “hard” sparkling, meaningful, and all along the way rewarding.


Taylor writes about the potential women have to affect change for the ecojustice movement, however, she does issue a caveat, “Such arguments (which are usually labeled as examples of “cultural feminism” have come under fire by other branches of feminism for “essentializing” women (promoting the claim that there is some universal essence to being a woman that all women share)” (41). This thought is something I’ve been grappling with for a while, and I think there’s a difference between declaring this divine earthen-connection within women as a form of feminism, and personally feeling this divinity within yourself as your own expression of your own brand of feminism. You can feel this divinity, but no one speaks for everyone. We can’t speak for others and I think the Green Sisters would say so. Green Sisters seem not to be “loraxes” for our world, but instead, they seem to say “listen to the trees, hear their inherent divinity.”


Taylor continues to stress Thomas Berry’s idea that we need to create a new sense of what it means to be human. This connection to the world rather than a separation. The earth and non-human earthlings, then the humans, then the holy host, then the triune God. We are all one and god is within Us.


The Green Sisters as Taylor shows us, are, indeed, countercultural movers and shakers. “Sisters’ historical involvement in peace and justice concerns, civil rights, women’s rights, and antiwar efforts have given rise to an American Catholic sisterhood practiced at being what environmental author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams calls “edge walkers”” (49). Some Catholics view them as pagans and say these sisters are the ones that need reform. The sisters maintain a voice of growth, though. Grow past the ills and harms of those who were in power, return the power of divine voice to the people. Taylor ends this chapter with a sentiment so beautiful I have to share. She writes of a statue of the Virgin Mary becoming covered with moss and enshrouded by grasses, “Green sisters have become faithful tenders of that growth as new green shoots somehow manage to embed themselves in stone” (51). It is these plants which will help us grow towards the light.