Giving the talk “Gardening in the Ignatian Tradition” at the Food Summit organized by the Ateneo de Manila University, Xavier University and Ateneo de Davao on December 3, 2021, has accorded me an opportunity to reflect on my gardening experience in the light of Ignatian spirituality.

What emerged out of this reflection has been the apt metaphor of the “garden” and the theme, “Garden Not Desert.” I managed to establish the interrelations between my own affective responses and Ignatius of Loyola’s language of discernment that has to do with “sifting the interior movements of the heart” by noticing the interplay of thoughts, feelings, and desires. In fact, the 14 Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (nos. 313-327) seek to uncover which spirits are at work in the interior promptings of the heart toward a particular choice. Affectivity is therefore the “seat/site” of discernment from where we seek to uncover which spirits are at work in interior promptings toward making a particular choice before God.

On March 2, 2021, as I made my way to the Jesuit Residence on the Ateneo de Manila University Campus, I entertained the thought of joining Albert Alejo SJ and Tej Kayan Kujur SJ in gardening, as my heart was shrouded in feelings of “better for me to be in touch with the earth as to lend credence to what I am teaching on The Theology of Ecology at LST” and desires “to be truly in touch with the Earth.” So on March 3, 2021, I made a personal decision to join both Jesuits in tending the Coveg20 Garden.

On November 28 and December 2, 2021, I felt the affective experiences of interrelations with the plants, “rejoicing in their joy of being alive” and “missing being in their midst”, and when I was in the garden, I felt I was “in a state of osmosis of interbeing-communion, interconnectivity and relationality.”

In the last eight months, I have grown in the art of puso-logy (puso meansheart in Tagalog) with the felt-experience of the inflowing & outflowing of energies from my body, and all the surrounding lifeforms in the home garden. Of late, in the last two weeks (Dec 3-14, 2021) I have deepened the felt-osmosis-experience of the inflowing-outflowing of energies in and through me, the global earth-space and cosmic space of the energies.

This existential experience of the inflow-outflow of energies enables me to resonate with Teilhard de Chardin (1960, 34) who wrote: “Besides the phenomenon of heat, light and the rest studied by physics, there is, just as real and natural, the phenomenon of spirit … [that] has rightly attracted human attention more than any other. We are coincidental with it. We feel it within. It is the very thread of which the other phenomena are woven for us. It is the thing we know best in the world since we are itself, and it is for us everything (Chardin, 1969, p. 93). Chardin (1960, 34) further expressed in Le Divin Milieu:“In action I adhere to the creative power of God; I coincide with it; I become not only its instrument but its living extension. And as there is nothing more personal in a being than God’s will, I merge myself, in a sense, through my heart, with the very heart of God.”

At the thematic level, it is an existential experience (sentire) of the “spirits of delightful joyfulness of interbeing-communion, interconnectivity and relationality.” In fact, from the Trinitarian gaze (Exx §§190-199, 290-298), I have a better sentire of this cosmic-global-local inflow-outflow osmosis of energies/spirits of interconnectivity and relationality.

This Trinitarian gaze has increasingly convinced me that the Chardinian sense of the spirit is indeed God who is the all-pervasive Spirit (John 4:24). God’s Spirit or Rûah Elohim has been corporealized in creation, in all lifeforms, humankind and otherkinds on earth. For this reason, Mark I. Wallace posits, the entire creation, and everything around us, is “the Trinitarian enfleshment of God in nature”[1] and God has incarnated Godself “in all things that swim, creep, crawl, run, fly, and grow upon the earth.”[2]  Hence the energies flowing in the cosmos are indeed the indwelling presence of Rûah Elohim, God’s corporealized presence in creation.

Rûah Elohim is the spirit of love for God is love (1 John 4: 16). The inflow-outflow of energies/spirits is related to God’s omnipresent love in creation. Little wonder, Chardin remarks that “love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

So the cosmic flow of energies and spirits is the cosmic love in which all lives and all things created move and have their beings in God (Acts  17:28). Living in the heart of God calls for a change of era through leading dharmic/accentric lifestyles that foster an interfaith collaboration to nurture the co-arising of Buddhahood, Divinehood, Godhood, Muslim-hood in all things/lifeforms so that we become a New Creation, a New Earth and a New Heaven.

The mystique of everyday ecopractice has further deepened the sentire cum kosmos that “Everything in this world is connected” (LS 16, 70b, 91). It has motivated me to plant more fruit trees in our Coveg 20 Garden as part of the Great Green Wall in sub-sahara Africa and around the world, to decarbonize gas emissions, ensure climate stability and food sufficiency for vulnerable communities in our Earth-Home.

Through the Asian School of Wisdom, I feel the need to feature more indigenous spirit-led intellectuals to speak of how ancestral wisdom, not the knowledge of anthropocene, is the power of “sapientialocene,” an era of change that ushers in a civilizational future of wisdom-driven/inspired society that “ripples-up” from the local to the regional and finally to the global home.

Through the IMCS (International Movement of Catholic Students), ALL Forum, and the courses at the Loyola School of Theology, I need to engage in a synodal journey with the young, allow God to open the closed petals of their hearts to the inspiration of God’s omnipresent Rûah indwelling in all things and persons, created as imago Dei, imago mundo/cosmos because all are created to be “with God, with our neighbors and with the earth and cosmos” (LS 66).

There is a need to beef up the spirit of resilience in what Vandana Shiva (2016) called the “small-scale, counter-cultural communities,” which Michael Northcott (2018) believes are the source of “resistance to corporate power …in the recovery of place, and that religious tradition is a potentially powerful source of such resistance.” Resilience is proactive in the  face of the inertia generated by the hegemony of the “dole out” system.

In collaboration with the Jesuit Network on Peace and Reconciliation, and the global Laudato Si’ Platform, there is a need to mobilize a critical mass of 240 million – 3.5% of our world population to ensure that a tipping point is crossed – and then change will be within reach, according to Harvard University researchers.

This emerging ecopractice enables earth-sojourners to wakefully experience being existentially wired to this cosmic flow of energies and love of interbeing connectivity and relationality so that all experience God corporealized in all lives/things. This God is born in our midst as the God-born-at-the-margin (“manger”), in a small town, who ministers to the multitudes at the margin, in the countryside, excluded by the hierarchical structures of the Temple State, which would eventually be crushed by the imperial power, but would rise again with an “insurrectional power” in the spirited early Christian Movement.

The story of God-with-in-us, alive in our people, our common home, lives on! May this emerging ecopractice draw us closer to Emmanuel in the garden of our hearts, in our homes, in our earth-space and in our cosmos!

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[1] Mark I. Wallace, ‘The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide,’ Cross Currents 50 (Fall 2000), pp. 310-31, here cited 318.

[2] Ibid., 318.