Thomas Berry, who passed away recently at the age of 94, considered himself a “geologian,” a term he used to define a scholar of the earth and its evolutionary processes. His faith and teachings combined spirituality and ecology. Thomas Berry was, according to the film’s director, “a monk, a cultural historian, an author, a teacher and a mystic.”
Berry’s elegant description of “the sacred story, the story of creation” is intercut throughout the film with stunning footage of mountains, rivers, birds and fish. “I am not myself without everything else,” he says, as he radically, and quietly, describes the earth as “the center of everything – of our consciousness, our physical being, our world.” James Parks Morton comments in the film: “As a theological person, that really turned my whole thinking upside down.”
Father Berry worships the universe as “a cosmic liturgy” and calls humanity “mad” for defiling and despoiling the planet and its living systems. He gently reminds viewers that “we are not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects … A viable future for the human community rests largely upon a new relationship between human communities and the planet we dwell on."
If you would like to explore films with similar themes, please click on Christentum or Multi Glaube.