Uselessness as Radical Disruption: Spiritual Resources for Eco-Crisis

The resilience of global economic arrangements despite their manifestly ecocidal outcomes is secured by our collective assent to their morality. In Resisting Structural Evil, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda explains that “United States society…generally promotes the excessive consumption and wealth accumulation enabled by prevailing economic arrangements as a good life.”[1] Few people would call ecological destruction good, but similarly few appear willing to oppose the reduction of success to quantitative measures of economic growth, which are at best indifferent to ecosystemic flourishing. As Norgaard et al. explain, “Incorporating values of care and stewardship in today’s public economics comes up against economism, which has powerfully inscribed mathematical formalism as a prerequisite to policy choices.”[2] By definition, religions appeal to sources of value that transcend contemporary economism, which should give faith traditions including Christianity a disruptive energy vis-à-vis the economic status quo. Yet this disruption has not materialized with sufficient force. In Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Wendell Berry laments that “The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.”[3]

For Berry, modern Christianity’s failure to equip its adherents to oppose ongoing environmental degradation is rooted in its hierarchical dualism of soul and body, which is tragically aligned with our economic system’s exploitation of the physical world for abstract goals. As such, fierce resistance to dualism is a hallmark of Berry’s critical relationship to Christianity in his essays, fiction, and poetry. A poignant example is found in poem VI from Leavings, in which the speaker first praises the saints: “I know how you longed, here where you lived / as exiles, for the presence of the essential / Being and Maker and Knower of all things.”[4] But the same speaker goes on to confess that he much prefers “the Heaven of creatures” to any “dismattered” paradise. There is a gentle ribbing here, as if the speaker is saying, “I know well enough what counts for holiness these days; all the same, heaven had better have dogs and horses.” This sentiment reflects Berry’s argument elsewhere about Genesis 2:7, of which he writes, “God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope…. ‘Soul’ here refers to the whole creature.”[5] In other words, the modern Christian imagination, so well suited to support rather than disrupt the murderous violence of contemporary economism, is by no means a necessary interpretation of the tradition’s own wisdom.

In contrast to typical pictures of holiness, historical and contemporary practices of Christian asceticism look a lot more like the dusty disciplines of the sabbath-poet-farmer than the stark rejection of physicality expressed in contemporary economic arrangements. Br. Paul Quenon, a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, captures this resonance in his 2018 memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life. Since entering the monastery in 1958, Br. Paul has spent much of his life outdoors, learning from animals and trees and all manner of living and dying creatures. He describes nature as his spiritual “guru,” implying that communing with creation is inseparable from seeking communion with God. Moreover, such communion is a precondition of basic happiness, as we ought to expect for spiritual dust creatures. When he is outside, Br. Paul writes, “I thrive a happy animal and blossom.”[6]

This essay proposes that a broadly accessible yet underappreciated aspect of the tradition of Christian spirituality is the wisdom of practices that promote our animal happiness, in defiance of economism’s preference for measurable utility. One example that I take up at length in the paper is the discipline of rest. Rest has emerged as a central subject of popular reflections on mental and physical health, and on effective practices of resistance to systemic oppression.[7] As Cole Arthur Riley explains in This Here Flesh, “Rest is an act of defiance, and it cannot be predicated on apology. It’s the audacity to face the demands of this world and proclaim, We will not be owned.”[8] Rest is a refusal of the terms of contemporary economic life, where humans and nature are reduced to their measurable usefulness to the abstractions of growth and productivity. This refusal is born of the joy of existing without accounting for oneself, the courage to be useless.

Ultimately, I argue that Christian spirituality makes a connection between uselessness and intrinsic value in a manner that is seldom appreciated in terms of its disruptive material consequences. To reject utility is to discover the harmony between our animal happiness and our participation in “the cosmic dance.” There is no cosmos but this one, and defending it effectively begins in practices of joyful liberation from utility—for oneself, for other human beings, and for creation as a whole. Given our familiar alienation, there is nothing so radically disruptive as the pursuit of animal happiness, nothing so heartening and healing as “pointless,” affectionate communion with creation. “To live in gratitude simply for being becomes the motif of life, liturgy, and mutual love,” Quenon writes. “It serves no apparent purpose, other than the hidden marvel of being in God.”[9] In serving no other purpose than this, useless lives expose and deactivate the murderous lie of “a good life” under contemporary economism.

[1] Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological and Economic Vocation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 4. Emphasis mine.

[2] Richard B. Norgaard, Jessica J. Goddard, and Jalel Sager, “Economism and Ecological Crisis,” in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2017), 409.

[3] Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays (New York San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1993), 94.

[4] Wendell Berry, Leavings: Poems (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011).

[5] Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 106.

[6] Paul Quenon, In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2018), 42.

[7] Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, First edition (New York Boston London: Little, Brown Spark, 2022).

[8] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh (New York: Convergent, 2022), 157.

[9] Quenon, In Praise of the Useless Life, 5.