Alexandra Keery meets a nun dedicated to sustainability
While walking through the beautiful gardens at An Tairseach, the Dominican centre for ecology and spirituality in Wicklow, it is easy to see why anyone could have a passion for nature.
Last week Sr Gail Worcelo, from Green Mountain Monastery in Vermont, USA came to An Tairseach to lead a retreat. Filled with a calm and powerful magnitude this Passionist nun has been profoundly influenced by the teachings of her monastery’s co-founder, Fr Thomas Berry, a priest in the same congregation who became her mentor and guide until his death in 2009.
She describes her meeting with him as ‘an awakening of connectivity’, and this awakening is something she aims to inspire in all people, and it is a central element of her beliefs and teachings.
Sr Gail lives her faith in a way that might seem unique to the average layperson. Dedicated to creating awareness of the environment, the Green Mountain Monastery provides programmes that encourage people to connect with the natural world and learn how to live a more ecologically sustainable life.
The monastery strives to be “an integral expression of the kind of awareness” they hold of “the oneness, or the interconnectivity”. Sr Gail explains: “We need to respectfully model that in our architecture, food, etc, so that when someone steps in they’re not experiencing dissonance.”
They are proud to be a self-sustaining and chemical free monastery, and through their experiences they are “engaged in knowing what it takes to live on the planet”.
At the monastery volunteers can get involved in a number of areas including: gardening, farming, greenhouse care, general maintenance and many other activities. The monastery also offers classes on sustainability, including a class that teaches students the properties of the dandelion and how to use it, as well as retreats. All of these activities are meant to connect people with the natural world.
Morning glory
Connecting to the natural world is essential to Sr Gail. Having grown up in Brooklyn, New York Sr Gail was surrounded by concrete. Her first experience with nature came through her grandmother’s flowers.
“My grandmother lived with us and she had a room at the back of our apartment, and she had always placed plants on the fire escape, and I remember my first experience of actually connecting with the natural world was through a morning glory that was on the fire escape. It was really my first connection with a life form – it inspired in me a deep beauty for creation,” she says.
Deep connections are precisely what Sr Gail wants to inspire in others. “People need to have direct experience, because when someone has a direct connection with the natural world in some way they tend to open up a portal of care inside of them.”
In order to inspire individuals to open up this ‘portal of care’ Sr Gail asks others to look inside themselves. “I like to get people to think about what’s the one aspect of the natural world or being that you want to work with, or speak for, or do something about; because sometimes it’s so overwhelming, there’s so many things, but each of us are differentiated in our loves,” she says.
“It’s important to pose the question because sometimes nobody poses it, nobody asks the question or invites someone to get in touch with their love. I just love to offer an invitation to consider your own one thing that you’d love to go for.”
Sr Gail offers several exercises that can be utilised to experience this sense of connection.
“Go out and focus on a square, one foot by one foot, and just stay there for about 15 minutes and see what arises there, see what comes up.
“Another experience is to use your imagination to try and speak for the grass or the wolf, whatever it is that is your one thing. These exercises get people to jog themselves out of their solely human perspective,” she says.
Sr Gail and her monastery, as well as An Tairseach, are passionate advocates for environmental awareness and sustainability.
They believe the environment is an extremely important issue and everyone should be engaged in ‘”the healing and protection of the Earth”.
When asked about how the average individual can get involved, Sr Gail said it’s important to not limit people in their capacities. “It could go from the small to the great, I wouldn’t limit people in their capacities. Oftentimes all of us, we don’t think we can do great things.”
Organic garden
“There are small things we can all do such as change our light bulbs and start a small organic garden, and these are all good things, but we can also get bigger. It’s important not to limit our capacities, and we also don’t need to stay singular – in our time of coming together in this new humanity we are linking more and more, and all in different ways. We need to start eradicating the isolated effect,” she says.
Sr Gail particularly encourages community engagement, especially parishes, and she offered some action steps they can take: “Parishes need to look around and see what’s happening and ask what’s needed.”
Once they assess their community’s needs they can better determine how to act, be it through forming a food co-operative or starting an organic garden.
Whatever the actions taken, the main focus of Sr Gail’s message is collectivism. Everyone from all backgrounds need to become involved if the Earth is to be properly cared for; “the crisis is so big, we’ve got to come together and make big changes”.
One does not have to travel all the way to Vermont to become involved with this movement.
An Tairseach has many programmes and tools for getting engaged and learning about the environment and sustainability, including a 10-week sabbatical programme. They also have a large organic farm, an organic farm shop and a 10-acre conservation area.
But whether the action is big or small, Sr Gail’s message is the same: “The environment is a world thing, beyond traditions… it is so much more than just one denomination’s problem, all faiths need to come together to tackle it,” she says.