Sacred Earth Presentation

The following is a presentation I gave on May 22, 2010 in St. Johnsbury, VT at the Conference on Social Justice and Liberal Faith.  It offers some history and makes connections between areas of faith and life which I have been thinking about for a long time.  It is substantially longer than a "normal" blog, but hopefully it is worth a good read.

    Whenever I contemplate speaking about issues of faith, I am aware of Meister Eckhardt bending over my shoulder, whispering in my ear. “Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.  Every creature is a word of God.  If I spent enough time with the tiniest of creatures, even a caterpillar, I would never have to prepare a sermon, so full of God is every creature...”  If we all were attentive enough to this incredible world we live in, preachers like me would be effectively out of business.  I never let myself forget this, and what it does is basically hold me to a high standard for communication.  The words that I prepare cannot be solely mine, they have to come from a deeper place and speak a broader truth than I am capable of all on my own.  Paying attention to and being present in the natural world is what keeps me sane and guides me in my personal spiritual life; but this also provides support for the work I do in translating what God might be trying to communicate to us humans.  Divine messages are all around us, but we are often too busy to slow down and read them.  We don’t often take the time to learn the language, insisting that God speak in our native tongue rather than learning (or is it re-learning?) the language of the divine.

    When I was in seminary, we were assigned to read Pelagius, one of the early Christian writers and thinkers.  As I read his words about the spark of the divine being within each and every living being, both human and creature, and that each of us can directly experience God in the natural world, I grew more and more thrilled.  Here, at last, was someone who understood things as I did, and who could guide me as I made my way deeper into Christian ministry.  But the next morning, my professor opened class with words that resonated in my mind with terrible power: “Pelagius was a heretic,” he said. “Wow,” I thought, “so much for finding a soul mate among these guys.”

    I put Pelagius back on the shelf, and tried to pay attention to the other, more acceptable church fathers, but there was definitely something missing in my unfolding theological education.  Through the years, other voices spoke to me, blowing on the embers of my heart, encouraging me to think in broader terms than those that were being offered to me.  Matthew Fox opened my eyes to the possibility that we didn’t have to accept Christianity as it was being portrayed in the mainstream.  His reworking of the story of creation was nothing short of revelatory to me, as he put the scriptural creation story into the context of scientific knowledge.  Fox incorporated evolutionary process right into the biblical creation story, showing, to my eyes at least, that one did not preclude the other.  He also spoke of living in such a way that gratitude shaped everything we did, including how we thought about our place in the world and our relationship with the rest of creation.  One notion that stays in my mind 25 years after hearing him in person, is that he mentioned that he ate an orange for breakfast, and in honor of that orange and its having given up its life for him to be nourished, he felt it was fitting that he “become juicy;” as an orange is juicy, so should anyone who eats one become juicy, thereby bringing its juiciness alive in the world.  Wow! That really made me think about everything I ate or drank forever afterward.  And it also makes me wonder what this concept means for a culture that lives on processed foods.  When we remove ourselves so far from the food chain, how do we know how to show our gratitude properly?  How can we live in a way that honors the sources of our nourishment, when they are hidden in packaged foods that bear no resemblance to their origins?  When we remove ourselves from the natural world, it is not just animals and plants who suffer.

    While Christian tradition has most commonly interpreted Genesis as giving humans charge over the rest of the earth and other living beings, there have all along been those who protested, claiming that we were meant to live in harmony with the earth. The book of Job also has some thoughts to share about the place of humankind relative to the rest of the earth.  When Job is struggling to understand why he is being put through such a painful time of testing, he shrugs off the advice of friends and tells them that they don’t really know what is going on, but there are those who do know. "But ask the animals, and they will teach you,” he says, “or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this?” It intrigues me that this man, this good man, who, according to the story is suffering because God made a deal with the devil that Job would remain faithful no matter how sorely he was tested, recognizes his relationship with the creatures and with the earth herself.  He knows enough to pay attention to them for answers to his own problems, but he also recognizes through them that sometimes there is suffering in the world that cannot be avoided no matter who you are or how you conduct your life.  Job is comfortable being a part of the whole, one among many.  He doesn’t count himself as a better man among persons because of his previous wealth, but he also doesn’t count himself as better than the rest of the natural world either.  And, I know that most scholars would say that Job is able to weather the awful things that happen to him because he is faithful to Yahweh to a fault, but I think it helps that he sees himself as a part of the larger whole of the created world.  He doesn’t expect himself to stand outside of the natural workings of things, nor to be protected in ways that others are not.  This is an understanding that permeates the Indigenous understanding of the relationship between the human and divine, a healthy respect for the way the natural world functions and the role that we play in the mix.  The difficulty is, that many folks have stayed stuck in the mentality that says humans are put here to subdue the earth rather than to work in harmony with her.  This attitude and its resulting approach to environmental protection the use of natural resources has created problems that took their time in coming, but are now surfacing in ways that we cannot afford to ignore.

    As a Christian minister, it is painful to know that my tradition has been a part of the problem much more than it has offered solutions.  But something has kept me in the church.  Something, or maybe Someone, has insisted that I stick with it, looking for ways to break into minds and hearts that are closed to hearing about the deep roots that connect us with other creatures and living beings.  Something has not let me rest as I sought my own nourishment in ways that felt like it was coming directly from God or Spirit out in the natural world, while still preaching in the carefully constructed tradition of the church on Sunday mornings.  I may have entertained thoughts of leaving the institutional church, but Christ would not let me go.  Fast forward to the present day, when I am studying Celtic Christianity in preparation for a trip to Ireland and Wales.  It turns out that people are re-thinking Pelagius these days, and it also turns out that he was actually a celtic monk who was and still is well-respected in Ireland.  It seems he just had the bad luck of being on the non-Roman side of the argument all those centuries ago, and was only heretical when it came to the institution, not when the emphasis was placed on the Christ who is at the heart of it all. 

    Augustine was more popular with Rome because his theology supported Roman values, giving priests ultimate authority over people’s lives and thoughts.  Pelagius and his encouragement to see God in oneself and in all things natural did not work for the system.  It gave people way too much personal responsibility, and the religious authorities were afraid of that.  They didn’t want the common folks to think that they didn’t need priests nor the church in order to experience God’s presence in their lives.  In those days, the church was an important factor in maintaining rule and order on a secular level as well as religious, and so it was important to the powers-that-were that authority be centrally based - in them!  Dangerous thinkers such as Pelagius were deemed to be heretics in order to dissuade regular folks from paying as much attention to them.  Turns out this didn’t have a strong an effect on Christians in the Celtic tradition because they were used to thinking for themselves, and they trusted the God in their hearts a wee bit more than they trusted the God Rome was trying to sell to them.  Pelagius’ writings had much in common with Celtic prayers and blessings with which they were familiar, and so he was accepted as a teacher who embraced both Celtic and Christian sensibilities, as they themselves did.  In his letters, Pelagius wrote: Look at the animals roaming the forest: God's spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God's spirit dwells within them. Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God's spirit dwells within them. Look at the fish in the river and sea: God's spirit dwells within them. There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent... Look too at the great trees of the forest; look at the wild flowers and the grass in the fields; look even at your crops. God's spirit is present within all plants as well. The presence of God's spirit in all living beings is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God's eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly... All love comes from God; so when our love is directed towards an animal or even a tree, we are participating in the fullness of God's love. ("The Letters of Pelagius: Celtic Soul Friend," edited by Robert Van de Weyer)

    For me, it has been helpful to rediscover Pelagius, and to put Augustine in his place, rather than granting him so much authority over Christian theology.  And, I think Pelagius’ message is one that we need to reclaim in the church in a more widespread way, if the Christian church hopes to have any role in the future of our society.  It just is not acceptable to divorce spirituality from the natural world.  We are, after all, creatures, aren’t we?  We are a part of the natural world, simply one strand in the web of life.  If we pretend that we are not, then all sorts of havoc is the result, as we are seeing played out in the world around us already.  What I love here is the amazing juxtaposition between the fact of our creatureliness and that of our spark of divinity.  The Celts are comfortable with this relationship, as in this blessing where the divine is seen in a variety of natural forms :

Deep peace of the running waves to you,

Deep peace of the flowing air to you,

Deep peace of the shining stars to you,

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,

Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

    The Christian church has had trouble with both our creatureliness as well as with our close relationship with God.  It has not wanted to associate too closely with the possibility that we are simply one small aspect of the evolutionary chain of life, while on the other hand, also not wanting to be arrogant enough to entertain the thought that there could be a spark of the divine in such lowly ones as ourselves.  This has kept humans in a dead space, a limbo between the natural world and the world inhabited by God.  We have not been willing to lay claim to citizenship in either place, and so we have been without nourishment of either kind.  We have been attempting to sustain life in a nondescript place where there is no means of spiritual support.  By cutting ties with both God and the natural world, we have isolated ourselves from those who would guide us and help us to see a larger picture than just the human one.  We can’t afford to live this way much longer.  Like a root-bound potted plant, life in this repressive mindset cannot be sustained.  In a generation or two there won’t be anything left to salvage of humanity in our extraordinary potential, of the natural world as a life-sustaining environment, of a relationship with God that has any potency. 

    Many Christians have been disillusioned with the church for some time now.  They have turned to other spiritual traditions for their God-food, because the church doesn’t offer what they need to sustain their lives.  To them, the church seems outdated and unwilling or unable to respond to real-world demands and needs.  At the college where I teach, students seek answers in Buddhist meditation, Hindu chanting and Native American sweat lodges.  Each of these places does offer something to them, something they are hungry for, and yet I find it sad that the Christian church has not risen to the occasion as well.  These young people often do not see the Christian tradition as having anything to offer to them, and many of them come from homes in which their parents left the church in their youth as well, so that they haven’t even seen the church “working” for their parents either. 

    This is a critical time in which the true worth of the Christian church is being weighed.  People are no longer so tied to tradition that they are afraid to ask the question of its efficacy for their lives.  What we, in the church need to do is articulate the faith in such a way that it has power for people living in today’s world.  Paraphrasing Meister Eckhardt, “unless the Christ is born in you, here and now, it doesn’t matter if the Christ was born in a stable in Bethlehem.” The only kind of faith that is legitimate, is a faith that has something meaningful to say to folks today from the inside out.  The Christian faith has to be articulated in such a way that people who are living with global warming and environmental degradation, with economic crises and personal worries, can hear it in terms that touch their own lives.  They need to see it fleshed out in ways that make sense to them in terms of the problems they, our society and the earth are facing.  We cannot afford the luxury of a faith that says everything will be alright if we read our Bibles, pray and go to church on Sunday.  These activities may have been enough at one time, although I would argue that as well, but they certainly are not enough today.  We need to figure out ways to engage our faith with the real world, and unless we are willing to open our minds to broader possibilities of how the Christian faith might be interpreted, then we probably will not be able to do this.  We need people like Pelagius, Fox and Eckhardt to help us recognize our intimate relationship with both the natural world and God so that we can offer a response to the great crises we are facing in terms of environment, that is inclusive of all and proactive rather than inward-looking and reclusive.  We also have to be willing to listen to people of other traditions, for truths that we share, for common ground on which we can walk as we move toward some healing of the earth and of our starving souls.  Personally, I am indebted to Native American teachings, as well as other Indigenous and Earth-Centered traditions which have encouraged me to stay close to the earth, to pay attention to the messages Spirit is offering to me in the smallest of flowers on a spring morning in the woods, or the crows who harass me as I make my way across the meadow, the stream that moves over rocks and the breeze that lifts my face to the sun.  These teachings have kept my soul alive and whole as I searched for ways to integrate the utter necessity for me of time spent in nature, with a religion that, despite its discomfort with it’s own earthy connections, still insisted on holding onto me.  These more indigenous traditions have given me rituals to observe when I needed to offer gratitude in a tangible way, to the One who guides me and is with me always, but whose name and expressions were too restrictive within my earlier understanding.  We all have much to offer to one another, if we can both listen and speak with a bit of humility, recognizing that none of us has all of the answers, and that together we might have some.

    If we pay attention, and if Spirit shines on us and on our efforts in the world, the best we can hope for is that we embody all of the wisdom that has come to us and been a part of making us who we are throughout our lives.  As we move further into life, I pray that each of us will continue to learn and grow deeper in relationship with all that is holy whether that holy spark is found in an ancient maple tree, the bright blue winter sky, a hawk circling overhead, a loved one sitting beside you, in the one Christians call God or even in yourself.  This Celtic blessing prayer that I would like to leave you with expresses this well: 

“May the blessing of light be on you, light without and light within.

May the blessed sunlight shine upon you and warm your heart till it glows, 


Like a great peat fire, so that the stranger may come 
and warm himself at it, as well as the friend.

And may the light shine out of the eyes of you, 


like a candle set in the windows of a house, 


Bidding the wanderer to come in out of the storm.

And may the blessing of the rain be on you - the soft sweet rain. 


May it fall upon your spirit so that all the little flowers may spring up, 


And shed their sweetness on the air.

And may the blessing of the great rains be on you, 


that they beat upon your spirit and wash it fair and clean, 


and leave there many a shining pool, and sometimes a star.

And may the blessing of the earth be on you - the great round earth; 


May you ever have a kindly greeting for people you pass as you are going along the roads.

And now may the Lord bless you, and bless you kindly.”