Sikh Faith & The Environment
FAITH AND THE ENVIRONMENT - Reflections from Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ji
A person of faith cannot help but feel a deep sense of connection, love and awe-inspired respect for the environment. Our central belief is that the One Creator pervades all creation. ‘Nam’ or the Divine Name is the Creator’s presence, which sustains and is infused through all that exists. Scripture tells us that ‘Nam’ is the first expression of God’s existence, and that ‘kudrat’ or nature is the second. It calls us to have an unending sense of gratitude towards nature, which embodies the divine light of the eternal Lord ‘Balihari kudrat vasia, tera ant na jaey lakhia…’ One verse we recite daily is ‘Pavan Guru, pani pita, mata dharat mahat…’: Air is Guru, Water is Father, and Great Earth the Mother…’. This calls on us to love and respect the elements like the irreplaceable personalities in our life who nurture, guide, sustain and lovingly sacrifice themselves for us.
We must not forget that our environment includes not only the diversity of physical landscape, but also the people around us. We are to care for the environment, not just in a mechanical way, but through an attitude of love which seeks ‘sarbat da bhalla’ or the ‘well-being of all’. The spiritual path teaches one to be mindful of what one consumes, to waste little, avoid harm to others and to live in a spirit of gratitude, generating spiritual wealth in the form of divine attributes. This is a challenge for us living in society which glorifies the wasteful and thoughtless amassing of material wealth, where acts of modern warfare and nuclear testing have caused undisclosed damage to the planet’s ecology. Faith traditions teach us to harness our divine potential and serve the Creator and creation as sovereign and responsible beings. This is what the Turban and Kirpan remind us of as Sikhs that we have a duty of care to uphold. Our saint-solider tradition calls upon us to have the courage to cherish and defend goodness on earth. Perhaps this is a reminder to us as humans to be more than ‘eco-friendly’, since the time has come to actively defend and protect the environment when it is most at threat.
Submitted by S S Mandla
9th June 2008.