A Study of Ecological Education on Meister Eckhart’s Ecological Thought

ABSTRACT

For many people around the world the ecological crisis is already a matter of survival. How could we cope with it sagaciously? As we know, an ecological crisis is not only the result of certain economic, political, and social factors but also a moral and spiritual factors which will require religious understandings of ourselves as creatures of nature, embedded in life cycles and dependent on ecosystems. Thus, I think that ecological education contact with religion is one of methods to solve ecological problems. This paper is to understand the thought of Meister Eckhart(1260-1329), spiritual and ecological theologian, and to apply in terms of the ecological education. Matthew Fox, studied his works, came up his ecological thought with the Four Paths of creation spirituality. The Four Paths tell us what matters. We are told in Path One that awe and delight matter, namely to experience God in the mystery of nature; in Path Two that darkness, suffering, and letting go matter, namely to know Him in the silence and emptying, in the pain and suffering; in Three Path that creativity and imagination matter, in other words, to co-create with God in our generativity; we trust our images enough to birth them and ride them into existence. And in Path Four that justice and celebration, which add up to compassion, matter. The principles of Meister Eckhart’s thoughts are useful for the ecological education. I suggest some opinions for ecological education that is possible in actual life; we have to teach people, treating hospitable for all natures, letting go our desires and experiencing pain of life, studying ecosystem through the contemplative method, and having a compassion for respect of life, justice and peace.