Posts Tagged ‘creation’

#24: Bowing to the earth.

{ May 3, 2009 @ 3:05 pm } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the twenty-fourth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “The Zaytuna Ruku Tree,” by Zaid Shakir.

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9‘As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. Gen 9:8-10 (repeated 9:10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17)

ruku-tree

All Rolling Pine trees eventually tip over, their heavy tops pulling them down toward the earth until they uproot themselves and die.  They assume a posture of prayer, and bowing low to the ground, finally seek it so much that they disappear into it.  Genesis 9 repeats, over and over again, the promise that God made after the Great Deluge, the destruction of the world: “I am establishing my covenant with you…” But, we usually stop listening, if not reading, there.  If we continue to hear the passage, God’s covenant is with all living creatures.  Every one.  Each.  No matter how small, discovered or undiscovered by human beings, predatory or preyed-upon.  The Ruku tree, the tree that assumes the Muslim posture of prayer throughout its life cycle, reminds me that God’s own Creation sometimes honors God more fully than we humans ever manage to do.  My back is not bent by prayer.  I will, likely, never commit myself so fully to looking toward, to seeking God, that my devotion will cause not only my own suffering but my own death.  I will likely sit more comfortably, rest more easily, seek even less justice, forget to remember to be merciful.  We humans tend to have sharp bursts of energy with devotion but not stick it out for the long-term.  I remember that first jolt of spiritual energy I had when I first connected to God, first had a personal experience of the holy…  Did it fade, or have I been leaning toward it, inexorably and sometimes invisibly?  Am I willing to lean so heavily, bow so low toward the sacred I encounter I finally find myself prostrate on the ground?  Can I, too, be a living sign of the covenant God made with Creation, as the Ruku tree is?

#18: Outward manifestation of an inward pollution.

{ April 20, 2009 @ 10:49 am } · { ecology and religion, Eucharist }
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***This is the eighteenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Restoring the Inner Landscape,” by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sacraments lately, partly because I’m in the process of discerning my own call to ordained ministry and partly as a result of encountering a formula, over and over again, in which, like our definition of what a sacrament is in the life of the church, a symbol acts as the outward sign of an inward reality.  Seyyed Nasr states that the ecological “crisis must be seen as the external manifestation of a universal pollution that has turned the inner landscape of so many modern men and women from a luxuriant garden into an arid desert.”  A sacrament is the outward manifestation of an inward grace… the fact of our negligent and intentional destruction of the natural world is an outward sign of an inward lack-of-grace.  Sacrament… destruction.  Is it possible that our environmentally catastrophic behaviors are the diametric opposite of a sacrament, anti-sacramental?  I think so.  The broken world we’ve made is evidence of our spiritual brokenness, our inability to recognize God’s grace in Creation, in God’s making of us a part of this integrated and connected web of life.  We’ve exited ourselves from this web, and having done so, have made ourselves non-sacramental.  Holiness is at stake, it is in danger.  We are spiritually adrift, having cut the ties linking ourselves to the natural world of which we are a natural part.  Our “inner landscape” is arid, and so we have made our external landscapes arid.  Can we view the state of our world as a direct result of the state of our souls as a human family?  And, if we work on healing our souls, will we heal the world?  Or is it the opposite, that in healing the world, our souls will find wholeness and reconnection to one another and to God?  Perhaps it is a both/and.

#15: Being family.

{ April 9, 2009 @ 11:30 am } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the fifteenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Finding Communion with Creation,” by Anglican Bishop Mark McDonald, whose diocese is Navajoland.

I’m sitting at my desk right now overlooking the parking lot in the back of my apartment.  It’s pretty unattractive.  There’s the carport, piles of leaf bags, a pretty skeezy looking fir tree, the backs of people’s houses.  At first glance, it’s not a gorgeous place to work, to write, to reflect on Creation.  But then, when I still myself, I notice that there is a pine tree peeking around the corner of my window sill, with baby pine cones dripping from the tips of the branches, tiny brown baby pods waiting to be born, swaying in concert in the cold wind that started this morning.  There are the early royal purple pansies I potted Sunday in honor of my move to this new apartment, an offering of hope for an unknown future.  The petals are drooping a bit, rebelling against the necessary move to a new pot.  Alot like myself, actually.  But they’ll perk up, after they feel the opportunity to stretch.  Yes.  To stretch and to explore the new air around themselves.  Bishop McDonald talks about how we are humanized by this world, by living in it, by noticing and caring for it, by situating ourselves squarely within and upon it.   We can not be human outside of Creation.  It is our home, whether we are comfortable here or not, whether we recognize how we fit into it or choose to separate ourselves and categorize ourselves as outside it.  We are brothers to tiny pine cones, we are sisters to tired pansies… we know ourselves as we truly are only when we familiarize ourselves with them.  Familiarize… make-family-of.

Purple pansy

Purple pansy

#14: Breathing in, it’s Yah; breathing out, weh.

{ April 7, 2009 @ 11:45 am } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the fourteenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Splitting the Sea…So What!” by Rabbi Zoë Klein.

Kabbalists imagine that the forgotten pronunciation of the name of God is Yah on the whispered in-breath and weh on the whispered out-breath, the whole name of God formed by a single cycle of breath, the awesome mystery of God’s name not separate from the mystery of breathing.  I don’t know about you, but I forget most of the time that I breathe at all.  It’s a mystery of the human body that we don’t consciously supply ourselves with what we need to survive from moment to moment.  Dolphins have to remind themselves to breathe.  Perhaps if we did, as well, we would remember more often where that breath comes from, its communion with the air of our environment, with the ruach, the Spirit that moves eternally around us, through us, shared amongst us, cycling within our bodies and given between ourselves and all of the living things on earth.  The whole world breathes in Yah and exhales weh, and we are only a moment in that cycle.

#13: What in your life is not for sale?

{ April 1, 2009 @ 3:34 pm } · { ecology and religion, social justice }
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***This is the thirteenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “What In Your Life is Not for Sale?” by Allen Johnson, coordinator of Christians For the Mountains.

What in your life is not for sale? Perhaps for money, certainly… but perhaps you aren’t motivated by money.  What in your life is not for sale, what are you not able and or willing to sell for the sake of your pride?  Your convenience?  Your hope for the future of your children?  Maybe its a sense of need to believe in goodness that you’re willing to sacrifice anything to maintain.  I confess, when I’m deeply honest, I’m not sure what’s not for sale in my own life. At times, I’ve transacted deals against my own values, against my integrity, against my reputation, against my emotional, physical, or spiritual well-being.  Not to excuse, but that’s being human.  Unfortunately, it’s not the way Jesus asks me to live.  The problem is, and I know I’m not alone in this, I’m pretty good at justification… if it’s for a “greater good,” do the ends justify the means?  Jesus reminded his followers that their lives were of no value if their souls were lost in the saving.  This seems pretty straightforward, until we have to make decisions about how to live, what saving our own lives looks like in the real world where we have to live everyday.  What in our lives is not for sale, and why?

#12: Janus-faced pain.

{ March 24, 2009 @ 10:51 am } · { ecology and religion, social justice }
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***This is the twelfth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Reborn in the Flames,” by Nandini Iyer.

Nandini Iyer reflects on the two-faced blessing of fire: destruction and generation, crisis and opportunity, warmth and burning.  I’ve been thinking during the last month or so about blessings, and how often the directions and situations we find ourselves facing seem, like a devastating fire, to be at first glance simply unconquerable misfortunes.  Whether of our own doing or others, it’s so difficult to see what good could possibly come from pain.  One of the things I value so much in the Hebrew Bible is its theme of stories that tell us to remember how God has acted within and through apparently unredeemable moments in history.  There are so many platitudes about not knowing the will of God, things being in God’s plan, the mystery of God’s purpose… I’m not talking about empty comfort, band-aid responses to make ourselves feel momentarily better, as though there simply has to be meaning in this.  Honestly, sometimes there isn’t meaning in pain, despite our desire for it.  What I do believe, and what I appreciate Nandini exploring, is the idea that each destruction holds within it a small, sometimes invisible, but always present opportunity for God to act redemptively, using the very nature of that destruction for some kind of good, even if we can’t immediately see what that might be.  I don’t know that God always does this – and I don’t know why.  But it is good to live in the tension of possibility, and to hope.

fire

#10: Susto… soul loss.

{ March 17, 2009 @ 10:43 am } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the tenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “The Great Without,” by Linda Hogan. 

“Soul loss – called susto in contemporary North American Hispanic communities – is what happens when the world around us disappears.  It is a common condition in the modern world.  Susto probably began when the soul was banished from nature, when humanity withdrew from the world, when there was a division into two realms – human and nature, animate and inanimate, sentient and not. This was when the soul first began to slip away and crumble.”  

I read more about susto,  admittedly on Wikipedia yet still… and found that it’s a cultural illness experienced as a result of intense fear, sadness, or loss.  And this made me think about Hogan’s definition.  She’s right.  Most of us suffer some level of susto, having built walls around ourselves, safe little impermeable membranes preventing connection with other people, with soil, with conflicting information, with awe, with deep emotion, with beauty.  The world around us disappears, gets smaller and cleaner and easier to manage, and our souls, rather than growing and stretching into the wider reality we’re offered… simply wither.  And we know it.  We can feel it.  And so we fill it up with stuff, which only clutters our vision more, divides us further, makes the walls higher.

#8: In the morality business.

{ March 9, 2009 @ 11:50 am } · { ecology and religion }
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***This is the eighth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Consider This,” by T. L. Gray, a minister of the National Baptist Convention and a doctoral student at Vanderbilt.

The statement that the church is “in the morality business” is a troubling one for me.  I get it.  I know what I think Gray’s claiming – the church is supposed to be one (if not the) arbiter of ethical standards, the guide, the plumb line, if you will.  We’re to be the witness of what it means to do good, to do no harm, to be in love with the intended way of things.  We’re to be “in line.”  Except.  That word, “morality…”, especially in combination with the word “business.”  Are we, really, to be in the “morality business?”  Or, are we instead to be about the business of living rightly so that others can do so, also?  Gray, talking about Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth says, “The ‘truth’ presented in this film  was probably not what Jesus had in mind when he said, ” You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” The ecologically-focused truth we moral businessfolk have been peddling is not the Truth.  Not the Way. And certainly not the Life.  It hasn’t freed us, and it hasn’t freed anyone else.  Perhaps I’m feeling a bit harsh today, feeling a little as though the church has sold the world a bill of goods and is now calling in a debt no one feels obligated to pay.  Services have not been rendered, you might say.  We’ve claimed that the environment is a political issue, that the church doesn’t truck with politics.  And we’ve been naive and entirely incapable of self-reflection when we’ve made that claim.  Because the environment is a political issue, and we are political people… people of the polis, the city.  We’re a community, and to claim that we can’t be a part of the environmental crisis for reasons of “morality” is, well… dumb.  The environment, as Gray preaches, is a moral issue as well as a political one.  If we’re actually going to be in the morality business, we must attend to it.

#7: A most elegant book(s)

{ March 1, 2009 @ 9:00 pm } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the seventh of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The two chapters are “Science, Scripture, and Con-serving Creation,” by Calvin B. DeWitt and ”Song of Salmon,” by David James Duncan, a novelist and essayist.

Dewitt quotes his Psalter, reading the second article of the Confession of Faith: 

We know God by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and governance of the universe/ which is before our eyes as a most elegant book/ in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters/ leading us to see clearly the invisible things of God:/ his eternal power and divinity…/ Second, he makes himself known more clearly and fully by his holy and divine word, as far as is necessary for us to know/ in this life, to his glory and our salvation.

And I think to myself, what are the creatures, great and small, that have been letters leading me in my own life to read God in Creation?

Duncan “sings” his Song of Salmon, claiming that “wild salmon are holy,” that human beings are but renters on this earth, that the salmon in the rivers and streams he loves are the very image of self-sacrificing love, the picture of generosity in blessing.  

And I think to myself, were I to write a new Song, what would it be?

800px-unidentified_species_050a_aka2

Moss.  It would be moss.  Significant moments in my life, some small, some invisible, some even imagined, but all important have had as their foundation, their backdrop, their bed (if you will) the most incredible, resilient, impossible, luxurious and creepy Bryophyta.  When I was a little girl, I’d disappear into the woods around my grandparents’ house in Eastern Ohio for hours on end, usually to avoid family arguments or to simply spend time where the quiet wasn’t invaded by constant chatter, where I could hear my thoughts and the wind rolling through the trees.  There was a point, a precipice overlooking a creek-bed, where the foot of every tree was covered in moss.  My grandmother taught me that leprechauns lived in that forest, so I carefully and lovingly created little homes for them, moss couches in furry living rooms of various shades and species.  I hadn’t really sorted out God yet, but I knew there was magic somehow in the world and forests had to do with that mystery.  So I built.  And I wondered at the weirdness of moss, its smooshy crunchiness, the resistance it gave to being stepped on, but only so far before it allowed itself to be crushed, the sense I had that it was ancient beyond time.  It helped me to see better the invisible things of God, reading about the potential of invisibility and silence there, about the way of resistance and patience, of growth and uniqueness.  A most elegant book, and a song.

#6: Taking or taking care.

{ February 23, 2009 @ 11:56 am } · { ecology and religion }
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***This is the sixth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Two Towns, Two Crosses,” by Cassandra Carmichael, director of the eco-justice program at the National Council of Churches.

Alright, so honestly I was entirely uninterested in this chapter.  No need to explore why here, but there was one idea that caught my eye as I read… what does it mean to help people change from takers to caretakers?  How do we, people of faith or conscience with opinions and good information and a message that is, by all accounts, emergent – how do we help people move from being situated only in consumption and self-concern toward living out a sense of connection, interdependence, and necessity of immediate response?  I suppose this is “the” social justice advocacy question and not very original, but there it is.  Carmichael talks about how a community of watermen on the Chesapeake, people who’d been using those waters for their own survival suddenly experienced the literal washing up of their sins onshore when the garbage they’d been dumping rolled onto their beaches.  I suppose this is one way to bring people over from taking to care-taking, but it’s not controllable and not everyone moves easily based on shame and guilt.  I suppose my reflection and my wondering about this lead me to ask, what’s the most effective, most immediate, and most loving way to change behavior?  My instinct is that it’s not shame and it’s not just policy-creation.  What is really at the heart of sea change?  I find myself hoping that it isn’t fear.

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