Not long ago, we discussed my passion for justice. Today I'd like to articulate another: my sense of the sacredness of the natural order of life on earth. Among the most illuminated moments of my life are times when I have been overwhelmed by the beauty of the living order --the sight of sunlight shimmering in the trees, the opening of a rose, the grace of a flock wheeling in flight. Sometimes I'll give my kids a leaf of our fresh basil to smell, or a sprig of peppermint growing wild on our slope. And I'll ask them, with at least some seriousness, "Is there any more powerful proof of the existence of God than the wonderful fragrance of this leaf?" Now, unlike some of our callers, I am not confident that I know for sure about what God is or what God wants of us. But in the light of my own profound experiences with the natural world, I do feel disturbed by the way our religious tradition seems to make a radical division between the Divine and the Creation. When I consider the miraculous beauty of the natural order we have inherited, and the way many people who regard themselves as godly seem so casual about trashing up this planet, I can't imagine that God is pleased. Can the Artist be pleased if we honor him but desecrate His work of art? It seems to me that the sacred has many dimensions. But most of us are sensitive only to some of them while being insensitive to others. For example, some are anguished by the destruction, through abortion, of living human fetuses. That's how I feel when I see our earth being despoiled. The whole network of life seems to me a miracle, and our wanton exploitation of it a sacrilege. Do we have the right to bend so much of the living earth to our will? Many people make a radical distinction between the value of human life compared with that of every other kind of creature. But shouldn't we be suspicious of our claims to special status? It seems that every group of people is all-too ready to declare itself superior and to think it right to treat other groups of people as lesser beings. "We're better than they are" has been used around the world to justify shabby treatment human beings of another race, nationality, or gender. If people are so eager to declare themselves better than other people, without particularly sound moral reasoning, should we not wonder how justified we are in thinking ourselves entitled to use every other living thing as mere resources for our purposes? We are smart, but are smarts the proper measure of worth? Do not many of our fellow creatures have as much capacity for joy and for suffering as we do? Certainly, through our intelligence we have gained dominion, becoming the mightiest creatures on the planet. But since when does might make right? We have scriptures that tell us how special we are. But those same scriptures have been used to justify slavery and other injustices. We read that we are made in God's image. But what makes us think that the elephant does not also represent an image of our Creator? After all, how much are we really prepared to claim that a human being is like God? And while words may be divinely inspired, they still must be filtered through the all-too polluted minds of men. Every breath we take, every meal we eat, depends on the integrity of the biosphere. Unless we rever and respect the order of life more fully than our civilization presently does, it is not just "the environment" we will destroy, but ourselves as well. This is the special challenge humankind must meet: we are the creatures who need --for our very survival-- to understand our true place in the great scheme of things.