Sean McDonah is a missionary whose message to the West is that it needs to learn about the rellgious reality of tribal people. Accordlng to him, we need to develop the sense of reverence and wonder at the beauty of nature that they have. Robyn Weston adapted this interview for publication.

Somewhere at this very moment, a man is standing among the trees in a forest. He looks at the immensity of the green life stretching far above him into the sky. Perhaps the music of the forest reaches his ears, perhaps not. In any case, it cannot be allowed to affect his intentions. Neither can the hundreds of years which shaped this massive life be allowed to mean very much to him.

Who is he? At one time either he or his forebears lived closely with the land. These days, in a society eaten away by poverty, he is simply grateful for a job. He starts up his chainsaw ...

Not far away from the logger, a small group of people have arrived in a clearing. The men have slashed and burned and cleared what they can. The women have begun to plant vegetables: root crops and corn. Careful gardeners they must be. This small plot of land will give them all their food for the next couple of years&emdash;if they are lucky. They will not be in the clearing very long. For all its rhapsodic growth and profusion of life, rainforest soil is thin and once the canopy is broken, the earth does not remain fertile.

The governments of the countries which are rapidly losing their forests blame the slash and burn farmers, yet the farmers enter the forest by the loggers' roads, and knowing that they will move on soon, stay close to the roads. Inevitably, as soon as heavy rains fall, the bare earth from road and clearing is swept away and rivers fill up with mud. Game has no habitat and fish die in mud. Huge rivers of mud slide down the naked hills. More people are homeless and without food. Many of them will move into the forest and begin to slash and burn.

Some years ago, Father Sean McDonagh, an Irish Columbian missionary who works with the T'Boli rainforest dwellers of Mindanao in the Philippines, was caught in a downpour. He took shelter in the hut of Dodong, a slash and burn farmer, or Kainginero.

Their talk that afternoon enabled Sean to understand the plight of the Kainginero. Dodong's story was and is part of a cycle of events which has affected many people.

Dodong's father migrated to Mindanao from one of the central islands in the 1950s. A traditional farmer, he acquired a few hectares of rich lowland country. When Dodong married, his inheritance was about two hectares.

In 1969, a local Department of Agriculture technician convinced the younger farmers that they should try some new varieties of seed. Dodong was very keen. He had to borrow money for fertiliser and an irrigation system but the promise of doubling his harvest made the loan a reasonable proposition, and besides, credit was on easy terms.

For two years the harvest doubled, but this was not as exciting as it might have been because the price of rice went down. In 1973 the price of fertiliser increased two and a half times. In 1976 there was a drought. One crop was completely lost and the other was almost lost. Like many farmers around him, Dodong was seriously in debt and there seemed to be no way that he could regain lost ground. The price rise of 1979 finally beat him.

He sold out to a multinational concern: pineapple growers. They gave him a fair price for his land, but virtually all the money was spent paying off debt.

A great deal of the Third World borrowing in the seventies was for agricultural purposes. Much of the borrowing was done with good intentions, but instances were reported of bank officials at international conferences waylaying Third World finance ministers to offer them easy loans. No word was uttered then of possible currency fluctuations or interest hikes. It was also the time in which the spending sprees of the outrageously wealthy spiralled.

According to Sean, even Dodong had heard about Imelda Marcos' thousands of pairs of shoes, but he had not heard that the small debt begun by the country during the seventies was now draining the nation's budget.

When Sean suggested that in cutting down the forest perhaps Dodong's six children would find themselves eventual farmers of rocks and rodents, Dodong said maybe, but he couldn't think about that, he had to feed his family today.

As a missionary, Sean McDonagh has no illusions about bettering the lives of people who in a few brutal years have lost their environment, their food and water sources, and above all, their spiritual reality.

He also has serious qualms about any religious effort which does not address environmental issues. If we import good will, medicine and food for people today, what will we do in twenty years time when possibly there will be no land? To help in a real sense, we have to teach people to protect forest, to plant trees, to save seeds.

Twenty years ago, when Sean first went to Mindanao, he flew over country which was covered with rainforest: some twenty million hectares. Today there is less than a million hectares left. As Sean said recently:

"The banking businesses and manufacturing communities see themselves as the powerhouses of our industrial economy&emdash;they're not really aware that the world is a living reality. They think it is a mine to be mined until it goes broke, and they forget if it does go broke, then every other corporation in the world goes down with it".

Rainforest in countries like the Philippines presents us with one of the most bewildering profusions of life imaginable. Millions of years ago, during the Ice Ages, countries like this were temperate while the rest of the world froze. Much of what is now our staple food evolved from such forests, as did valuable medicines. Such is the variety of life that we hardly even investigate its potential before we turn to destruction.

This problem requires a careful look at the religious beliefs which have shaped people's attitudes through the centuries. It has been argued that through our religion we have been led to feel superior to Nature, to treat it with contempt. Through this arrogance, we become conquerors, and dominators.

Yet, says Sean, this perspective is a selective one. Many covenants and creeds within the Judeo-Christian tradition also stress the need to care for Creation.

Missionaries are not generally seen in a good light these days. They have in the past indicated that Redemption and truth were the exclusive property of the West needing to be carried to the ignorant pagan.

Today the so-called heathen might well ask what the Christian message has to do with Christ if it only serves to inspire European cargo cultures addicted to war, vanity and exploitation.

In reality undisturbed tribal cultures possess a religious awareness of creation which permeates every aspect of their lives.

It is a curious turnabout that Sean McDanagh has become a missionary who preaches that the West needs to learn about the religious reality of tribal people. According to him, we need to develop the sense of reverence and wonder at the beauty of nature that they have. We need to stop seeing the natural world as an 'it', as a resource for the exclusive benefit of humans.

"In the great vastness of time, the real age of human discovery emerged with tribal people.

It was during the tribal era that all the varieties of languages, and all the social moral and political systems developed. Tribal peoples also developed the world of myth. They identified and shaped many of the archetypal structures of awareness which still guide our religious awareness today. Among these are the myth of the great hero, the journey symbol, both within the human psyche and across the landscape of the Earth, and also the symbol of the sacred place. The contours of the world of the spirits was also laid down. These operated to guide the community in its relationship to the natural and supernatural worlds".

If we look at tribal culture and call it primitive, this only shows our ignorance. The foundations and boundaries of human existence were set down then and if we want to survive then we must consciously learn from these ancient cultures.

For Sean, an acknowledgment of the value of tribal culture does not mean an abandonment of the Christian message. The compassion and the hope which originally took him to the Philippines, has continued to support his work there and still inspires his writing and his speaking. It is based on his faith. Christian celebration is still the key to his religious message as well as being a tool of criticism against greed.

He refuses to work with what he calls 'maimed symbols', and in a country where rice is eaten rather than bread, it is logical that rice should become the Sacrament.

Sean's congregation has developed liturgies of the Earth. In one of these, the congregation each pour a small handful of earth from their gardens into a pot. The leader, pronouncing a blessing upon farms in the area, then sprinkles Holy Water upon the earth.

"Let us never lose our love for the land," they all pray.

A litany of the plants is then sung. When this liturgy was devised, many traditional plants were included, some of which have vanished from the area. In his services, many old people cry as extinct plants are recalled.

A clay figurine is modelled from the earth as the congregation is called upon to remember how God made humankind from the soil, how the animals, the birds and the fishes are made from God's fingers and live, pulsing with life from God's breath.

"O God, Creator of this beautiful Earth which you have filled with an abundancc of living creatures, help us never to forget that our life and the life of every-creature depends upon our soil. Help us always to be grateful for this most precious gift. Enrich our soil, make it black and fruitful and rich. Protect us from long periods of drought and floods. Bless our land, especially your People."

The traditional T'Boli fertility dance is especially appropriate here at the conclusion of the ceremony. Then following their service, the congregation can take home the blessed earth and scatter it on their lands. According to Sean:

"In good ritual there is a way of taking action against the terrible things which happen to the Earth. In good ritual, we approach the problem on the level of the imagination, we address the symbols which affect our lives, and we are enabled to become the vehicles of healing on this level."

In a traditional world, where symbols still connected the Philippino farmer with the land, traditional wisdom enabled people to eat the produce of the land, but to save the breeding stock even if this meant going hungry for a while.

The seed companies have not taken care to maintain variety in breeding stocks. They encourage farmers to abandon traditional varieties of seeds, and to allow them to become extinct so that the agricultural business can sell lucrative hybrids. A customer who has to go back year after year to buy seed is a better sales prospect, after all.

In the long run this hurts everyone because if hybrids are attacked by disease or pests, genetic material from traditional varieties is needed in the laboratories as a basis to develop new hybrid stock.

A major problem with modern hybrids is that they need a lot of chemicals in order to grow. This means that earth and water may be poisoned. Transnational companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and Ciba-Geigy who attempt to control seed production may bring about a situation where the only seeds available on the market are those reliant on a high chemical input.

In giving up the old seeds which reproduce by themselves and which even in small areas have an enormous genetic diversity a Third World farmer is quite simply inviting disaster.

Sean describes this process as ecological sin, saying that if today it is the poor in the Third World who are suffering, in the future it will be the whole world.

"If our evil tbreatens 20 billion years of creation, it is a serious business If we begin to consider redemption in this case it should not be a blind proocss to take us beyond the Earth. It should be a process capable of healing the Earth, of restoring primordial unity, of making it possible for future generations to live here. There is much we can learn in the Christian tradition from the way that Jesus himself approached the natural world; much of his language, his parables, came from the birds of the air, the sheep, the shepherd, the vine, the branches, and ... for a Christian there is the experience of Christ as the cosmic Christ in perspectives like Paul in Colossians or John."

In Tagaytay City in the Philippines, a meeting of Catholic bishops took place on the 26 January 1988. The main purpose of the meeting was the creation of a pastoral letter with the title, 'What is Happening to our Beautiful Land?' It was the first time anywhere in the world that bishops devoted a letter to the issue of ecology.

"We often use the word 'progress' to describe what has taken place ovet the last few decades. There is no denying that in some areas our roads have improved and that electricity is more readily available. But can we say that it is real progress? Who has benefited the most and who has borne the real costs? The poor are as disadvantaged as ever and the natural world has been grievously wounded. We have stripped it bare, silenced its sounds and banished other creatutes from the community of the living. Through our thoughtlessness we have sinned against God and His Creation."

But the bishops also stated that none of us are helpless when it comes to the environment. Major battles are being fought and often won simply because people do not remain silent when they see their environment being destroyed.

"Organise people around local ecological issues. Become involved in some concrete action. There is much that can be done by individuals to reforest bald hills and prevent soil erosion."

Speaking of these suggested actions in Sydney, Sean went further. We should all compost if we possibly can, he said. We should endeavour if there is the smallest piece of land available to us, to grow some food: trees, vines, vegetables. Above all if there is forest, trees or parkland in danger, then we should do what we can, and our understanding of the issues and their causes should remain flexible and ready to grow.

The most thorny problem of all is the question of International Debt. Banks and First World governments are wary of debt cancellations, saying that such a step would rock the financial systems to their foundations and bring everything down in an enormous crash. Yet in a single day in October 1987 more money was wiped off the price of shares than the whole combined debts of Third World countries. The world financial system survived.

Many religious leaders like Bishop De Jong of Zambia, call for the cancellation of their countries foreign debt. There is solid biblical basis for this approach, which is designed to alleviate intolerable poverty and growing despair in Third World countries. The Year of Jubilee was seen as an attempt to re-establish a just social order at regular moments in the history of Israel. The excess land which had been accumulated by the rich and powerful, often through questionable means, was restored to the original owners (Leviticus 25 23-31). One important aspect of this was the cancellation of all debts. This desire to transform society did not emerge from a vague sense of pity for the poor but was seen as a demand of God's justice. His covenant did not envisage a community where a few would live in abundance and the rest in misery. The Earth after all is the Lord's and He wishes all people to share the goods of the Earth to meet their basic needs.

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