It sounds like a University Challenge question: ‘Name four words ending in centric.’ Well, these are the four which preoccupy me: theocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric and kincentric (I only learnt the last one recently). This begs explanation. The terms may sound abstract and airy-fairy. But what they mean to me isn’t just close to the heart and soul; it is the heart and soul.

‘Theocentric’ is the appreciation that the flow of sacred energy, the gift of divine life, is the core of everything, forming and reforming all that is, bestowing consciousness on all life, each being according to its particular nature, role and capacity. It is what Judaism’s most basic statement truly means: ‘Our God is one.’ That oneness inhabits everything, and the appeal ‘Shema, Hear,’ calls on us to heed it in all that is.

By anthropocentric I don’t mean that ‘man is master of all things’. I want to free the word, if that’s possible, from its well-worn associations with power and gender, and understand it instead as indicating our connection with and responsibility for our fellow human beings. Years ago I was invited to the Kirchentag of the Protestant Church in Germany. The strapline of the conference was ‘Ich sehe dich; I see you.’ It left me with the question: who don’t I see? Whom do I fail to notice? In tomorrow’s Torah portion Moses, raised in the Egyptian palace, ‘turns aside to see’ the sufferings of slaves. It changes his life. That’s what I mean by ‘anthropocentric’: widening and deepening our circle of compassion.

I’d come across the word ‘biocentric’ before, but I’ve thought about it more deeply since I encountered it in a critical sentence in Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet’s inspiring book: A Spark of Total Darkness:

We have a responsibility to transform our thinking about religion from an anthropocentric obsession to a biocentric reality. (p. 59)

He echoes the wonderful lines by the scientist and poet Rebecca Elson

We astronomers…. Honour our responsibility to awe.

Rabbi Adam deliberately uses ‘anthropocentric’ in the limiting way I critiqued above in order to challenge us to stop caring only, and thinking God cares solely, about humans. All life is sacred. Neither Judaism nor any true spirituality can condone our destruction of other species. All life co-exists together on earth, and no life can exist without this coexistence. We must re-learn our place in the sacred ecology of existence. As the daily prayers say: ‘How great are your works, God; you created everything with wisdom.’

I hadn’t heard of ‘kincentric’ until my friend Dr Justine Huxley gave me her book: Kincentric Leadership: Cocreating with a living intelligent Earth. ‘Kin’ is related etymologically to ‘kind’ not just in its connotation of fellow species but also of ‘kindness’. To live kincentrically means more than acknowledging theoretically our interdependence with all life. It means expanding our consciousness and changing our conduct so that we co-exist in respectful awareness, humble partnership and compassionate connection with all life.

If we thought and lived in accord with these four ‘centrics’ how different everything would be! Justine Huxley quotes a sentence attributed to Sarah Durham Wilson:

The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers.

I’m trying to start with myself.