A Green Gaze for a Broken Body: Contemplating the Incarnation with Ignatius Loyola And Warsan Shire

In Laudato Si’: On Care of Our Common Home, Pope Francis briefly proposes that the reader learn from “the gaze of Jesus,” for Jesus “was able to invite others to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world because he himself was in constant touch with nature, lending it an attention full of fondness and wonder” (Laudato Si’ 97).  It is clear that Francis wishes for the Christian community to acquire a “green gaze,” and while Francis does soberly acknowledge the groaning of creation across much of Laudato Si’, he curiously treats the gaze of Jesus solely in a positive light. In invoking the concept of the gaze, it is likely that Francis is hearkening back to his own spiritual tradition as a Jesuit, especially the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. If this is true, then there are other possibilities to explore in terms of acquiring Christ’s gaze. Specifically, it is very much possible, indeed inherent to a contemporary experience of the Exercises, to emerge out of it with a green gaze for a broken body because of the framework Ignatius establishes in one of the pivotal contemplations: the Contemplation on the Incarnation. In this regard, the Contemplation on the Incarnation during the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises stands as a promising resource for ecological reflection provided that it is modified to attenuate the original anthropocentrism of this Contemplation. This can be accomplished by interpreting and practicing this Contemplation in tandem with contemporary poet Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon," and by linking Shire's poem with an enduring insight from theologies of liberation regarding pain and suffering.

In and of itself, the Contemplation on the Incarnation does not explicitly call for a green gaze. However, this Contemplation does attend to a broken body. To pray this Contemplation, Ignatius designates three preludes and three steps (“points”) which methodically facilitate a layered repetition of the contemplation on the Incarnation that amplifies at least three realities: 1) the explicit will of the Divine Persons to save the human race, 2) the explicit reality of global suffering and evil due to human sin, 3) the implicit setting of earth as the space that is hurting. In all three cases, Ignatius is deliberate in having the retreatant deeply sense and feel the pain through imagination, hearing, and seeing actions unfold—both in terms of human brokenness and divine goodness resolving to redeem. Given these three realities, one can view the Contemplation on the Incarnation as also implicitly linked with the theology of Deep Incarnation, especially as it speaks to suffering. As such, it can foster a green gaze. According to Niels Gregersen, the third dimension of deep incarnation is suffering, and Christ’s cross is a suffering with, for, and among creatures. Since the Contemplation has the retreatant imagine the whole world as if tracing an atlas with the explicit aim of becoming aware of human sin, one can arrive at the sense conveyed by Francis (and indeed many before him who have advanced ecotheology) that, “The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’” [Rom 8:22] (Laudato Si’ 2). And so, the Incarnation enables one to see that the suffering of the world is linked with the suffering of Christ crucified. Yet here, a major limitation of Deep Incarnation becomes evident. As expressed in a recent essay by Michael Lee in Theological Studies, “Pushing Christian theology beyond anthropocentric limits, [deep incarnation] perceives the presence of God in the material reality of all creation… the problem is that death, not the cross, is the fate of biological existence. The cross is a particular kind of death caused by particular, historical circumstances, and when deep incarnation posits Jesus’ cross as the culmination of the incarnation it ignores those circumstances.” 

In like manner, acquiring the gaze of Jesus would need to be inflected by the particular historical circumstances that mobilized the Incarnation. Ignatius's Contemplation implies that the reality of human sin within history is what mobilizes the Three Divine Persons to redeem humanity. Understood from this framework, the gaze of Jesus is not merely that of praise of creation, but also that of sober awareness of historically inflected pain. To develop a stronger sense of the historical pain of the world as God’s broken body, this paper attends to a striking parallel contemplation in poet Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon.” In language that resembles the steps of the Contemplation on the Incarnation, Shire writes, “Later that night / i held an atlas in my lap / ran my fingers across the whole world / and whispered / where does it hurt? / it answered / everywhere / everywhere / everywhere.” Yet Shire’s poem is not merely concerned with pain everywhere, but with the historical inflections of this pain. Stanza two of the poem reads, “I’ve been praying / and these are what my prayers look like; / dear god / i come from two countries / one is thirsty / the other is on fire / both need water.” This line reflects in particular the experience of the 2011 London Riots in response to anti-black police brutality as well as the ecological reality of Shire’s home country. Put another way, the pain of the world is intersectional, touching on race, class, and ecology. In this regard, Shire’s poem fills in what the Contemplation on the Incarnation and Laudato Si’s section on the gaze of Jesus lack: the Incarnation is a response to historical human sin and how it harms the world as God's body. Such an awareness is best captured by theologies of liberation such as that of Ignacio Ellacuría in his framework of the crucified peoples—except here, Shire's poem also reminds liberation theologies to name the planet, and not merely peoples, as crucified.