cairns

Friday morning I drove East through fog into the rising sun.  The air was a golden mist more real than the phantom possibility of trees and hillsides beyond.  Then, gradually, the light grew.  The mist became water for very real green hillsides and woodlands under blue sky and bright sun.  It is a divine gift to watch the world come to be.  peace

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Frank Schaeffer writes about our deep longing for something we have not found.  And with vicious humor of our waiting on “spaceship Jesus!”   Sojo’s quote of the day is about how we all can experience the feeling of exile.  I have written that the moment of alone-ness gets my vote as Jesus’ most human moment.  Dorothy went looking for her heart’s desire….

It all takes me back to thoughts on our unity with the soil from which we are made.  T has led me here with many insights on eco-theology, S has led me here with his respect for native traditions and beliefs, D and L lead me here with their love of just being there in the outdoors.  (By the way DB, you should really write your description of being in the woods during a cold mist — a description of paradise in the very time and place many would picture torment — it deserves to be published and wants to be read!)  It takes me back to how much of the Bible is actually written in celebration of the earthly context in spite of all our other worldly projections.  So I am wading farther into old territory.

What if our unexplained longings, our common feelings of alienation, and our common desire to go home again are all pointing to the very dirt beneath our artificial surfaces?  I have been thinking a lot about my departed atheist friend John Elliot — a sharp witted but gentle man.  I remember his calm assurance that he was part of the farm he grew up, enjoyed life on, and would rightfully return to when he died.  He was one of the most convincing people I ever met not because of acidic arguments, but because of his assurance of his own place in the universe.  He was still connected to his soil and comfortable with the idea of returning to it.

Science tells us we are made of the common elements.  We teach young children to eat healthy foods to build their physical bodies well with the substances of earth their body needs.  I have often pondered how many generations it takes for a people to honestly say like the Native Americans, “We came out of this Earth.”  Arlo has joked about cells having memory.  I have written before, only partly with tongue in cheek, about the possibility of carbon memory.  (metal workers and sales people speak of materials having memory as if its fact.)  I am now pondering how very true it may be that we are longing for reunion with the dirt we are made from.

A side note on psychology: the most alienated I ever was from my father was any time I offended my mother.  If I was alienated from her, I was automatically alienated from him.  I know this flavors my thinking here.  Thoughts on alienation from Father God, take me immediately to our separation from Mother Earth.

I think it is interesting to look back at the Genesis account in this light.  Our ancestors are said to be in constant communion with God while they are in full communion with life in the garden.  The “fall” removes both.  What if we consider a non-traditional read.  The “sin” committed in the story occurs when they eat a fruit of the garden, but not for its own sake.  Instead of experiencing the joy of the natural nourishment of plant body to animal body, they seek to use the fruit as a means to knowledge — something other than its own identity.  What if the “fall” can be understood as our primeval moment of separation from our mother?

Looking through the lenses of Michener’s beautiful book The Source, perhaps it was the advent of intentional farming.  He does an excellent job of describing how man begins to feel separated from and threatened by nature when his family begins to depend on cultivated crops.  Michener took this further into the need for god’s to control nature.  I would take it backward to God using Genesis.  I can now read the story as the Creator placing humankind in the natural world as benevolent kings and queens of holy subjects, (mental image here of Lewis’ founding scene in Narnia), not dominators and abusers.  When they start to place their subjects (yes including plants) into slavery by seeking the knowledge which will bend life to their plans and desires it reminds me of wizards in Middle Earth producing orcs as “improvements” on the original creatures.  What if this is one read of the fall — the moment when humanity stepped out of the natural order to seek a world under human control?

Then our longing for return and unity with Creator could rightly be the desire for reunion with Creation — the love of the natural world which comes from every molecule of our being.  Perhaps our collective salvation depends upon our return to unity to with the creation.  I believe science fully supports this position.  And it doesn’t mean I deny the existence of the spiritual.  I am exploring the conclusions of rejecting the duality of the material and spiritual worlds.

I think this is fodder for the book I am longing to finally write.  I hope it isn’t just fever induced rambling! Let me know.

peace

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I just finished Tomlinson’s Re-enchanting Christianity.  He makes the strongest case I have ever read that the Gospel represents the news of redemption of everyone and everything.

On the face of it, it immediately leads to more “Christian” responses to the rest of the world, including the people of other beliefs and no beliefs, the animal and plant kingdoms, and the planet itself.  If God originally declared them all “good,” and has now declared them all “redeemed,” “ransomed,” “rescued,” or “saved,” how dare we treat them as anything less than God does?  Tomlinson lays out scriptural evidence for it while refusing to descend into anything goes, all beliefs are right, pantheistic nonsense.  He is not easy to dismiss.  His references and arguments make sense.

And they match what I continue to encounter in the world.  The Native American way was more respectful toward the Creator and the Creation than any church I have yet to attend.  The ancient Chinese, and many of their descendants right up to and through the age of Mao, worship the same God of creation while admitting with humility that to claim full knowledge of this God is hubris at a level the Judeo-Christian world would label blasphemy.  The African “animists” I was told about growing up as worshipers of evil spirits headed surely to hell unless missionaries arrived to teach them the “way of salvation,” turn out also to have  been people (with flaws like all other people) but also deeply connected to all levels of creation.  Exposure to the “christian” west turned them not to life but to generations of war and death.  The Ethiopians turn out to have a connection to the Jewish God far back into antiquity and a “Christian” church older than any other continuous group on the planet.

I meant it when I said I feel closer to God working or socializing with the staff of Christa than in the organization I have mistakenly agreed to call the church.  There is too little God, too much use of people as objects, too much exclusivity in the place I am leaving.  There just may be a wide open Kingdom of widely diverse individual souls moving into wholeness (holiness) and community out in the spaces I am now exploring.

I still see Jesus as central to all of it.  He is the ultimate expression of the Creator as the loving pursuer of relationship with all of creation.  As the book quotes Don Cupitt,

What Jesus preached was ‘the kingdom’ ; what he got was the church!

John 3:35

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.

It gives a whole new level of hope and faith to First Corinthians 13, so often used for a very different message.  Knowing that Love is the ultimate definition of God revealed in Jesus, Paul writes,

⁴ Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; ⁵ does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; ⁶ does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; ⁷ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸ Love never fails. [Really read that! Never fails!  If man can choose wrongly and go to Hell, then love has failed.  That simply is NOT what it says!] But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part. ¹⁰ But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

¹³ And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

[And that is how we will be known -- with, by, in, and through -- the perfect eyes of love!]

I think I am opening to a whole new level of understanding.  SM, I think it is saying that you can’t choose hell even if you want to.  Love wins in the end no matter what kind of nonsense we preach in our churches.  Now that is a Gospel that is Good News.  That matches the Prodigal’s Father running down the road to meet his lost son, and defying custom to reach out to his stubborn self-righteous religious son as well.  That matches a God who would stretch out His arms and die!  Not to save the few with the magic right teachings, but to wrap them back around everything.

I have a lot of happy thinking and praying to do.

peace

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It was a good, but very emptying, day with the Masters class today working on the course nobody wants to teach.  Students routinely give faculty lower evaluations after this course.  My last group did.  But, I think it is one of our most fundamental offerings and gladly accepted this request to teach it again two hours from home.  Helping teachers develop eyes and hearts for the unity in uniqueness among children is more important to me than how to do a little more math or English.

But, it is getting harder and harder for me to do, and I didn’t see it coming.  I celebrate diversity.  I see the glory of God in it.  I love to discuss it and explore ways that we all can grow past where each of us now is in worshiping God more by better loving the wild variety in creation.  But, today it was almost too emotional to handle.

It is no longer an academic subject to me.  Any pretense I ever had of objectivity or old school detached professionalism has been stripped away.  Every single topic brings floods of memories of specific children, the people who hurt them, and the ones who loved them.  Every attempt by a teacher in the class to become more open, see more fully, and love kids more deeply brings a wave of awareness of God’s love for the one allowing themselves to grow.

Some of it is just too deep and powerful to share in any normal academic way.  Now, I just have to decide whether its time to stop teaching it, or whether I am finally becoming qualified to start.

peace

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I’ve been noticing trees a lot lately. Its been happening for a few years now and was increased by the damage of last winter’s ice storm, the labor of cleaning up the mess, and the wonder of watching the local trees recover.

Even in the midst of all the sites of China there were several times when trees got my attention.  One was somehow special to local people who were choosing to have their pictures made by it in a whole park that looked the same to me.  Others just appeared along the way, through windows, over rooftops, or beside the wall.  I have written before about how they compare with volcanoes in my mind — a cool calm version of the volcano’s hot rapid leaping of the stuff of earth back toward the universe.  Lately it is something else.

(With full credit and thanks to Macrina W.), it is partially that virtually every tree has become to me like a temple.  And, it has gotten wrapped up with my musings on the Genesis account.  Every tree seems to contain an echo of the garden.  I see each tree as the tree of life.  For one simplistic thing, they usually outlive us.  The seasonal ones remind us that what appears to die lives on, and the evergreens remind us of hope in winter.  Even when they finally fall, they sprout fungus and support a wide variety of insect, reptile, and mammal forms on the road to becoming the root food of seedlings of their own and other kinds.

I see in each tree something of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  They are shelter, shade, food source, and providers of man’s favorite fuel to keep the cold away.  And they can fall and kill, burn out of control, or be made into spears and arrows.  There is so much there that can be sustaining or destructive, beautiful and dangerous, life bearing or coffin material.

I guess I see us in the tree as well.  There they stand day after day reenacting the story of creation.  Pulling dirt from the earth below and combining it with the elements of the sky and energy from the universe beyond to produce life and growth.  Without even turning to the “Tree” of torture worn and worshiped by most of Christendom, they are holy participants in the continuing act of creation.

They pull my mind upward to heaven, out of myself and into the grace and grandeur of their varied forms, and downward to fertile earth resting between their roots.  Somehow they have become far more than wood and fuel to me.  How often I am startled by the appearance of a single tree which stands out unique in a forest or landscape.

It happened sitting in a restaurant in Beijing and suddenly noticing a stately sweeping trunk through the window.  And it happened standing alone on the wall at night, feeling man’s great achievement of antiquity beneath my feet, but seeing around me bathed in moonlight mountain forests in every direction proclaiming truth and life in abundance far beyond anything man has yet to do.  And a night time adventure with friends became a moment of deep worship.  I was drawn to contemplate the wonder of a God who so freely supplies us with the very garden we claim to have lost.  I am surrounded by the original acts of creation still occurring, by the same choices still presented, and by the presence of life that is holy beyond my imagination.  I am awed.

peace

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Just found this in Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God,

Grounding this praxis is a stunning principle first articulated by Pope John Paul II in 1990: ‘respect for life and the dignity of the human person extends also to the rest of creation.’  Pragmatically, humans shall survive together with the other creatures on this planet or not at all.  The issue is more than practical, however, for respect for life cannot be divided.  Not only human life but the whole living Earth is God’s beloved creation, deserving of care…

‘Who is my neighbor?’ asks Brian Patrick, ‘the Samaritan?  The outcast? The enemy?  Yes, yes of course.  But it is also the whale, the dolphin, and the rain forest.  Our neighbor is the entire community of life, the entire universe.  We must love it all as our very self.’

S, if you still read here, doesn’t that sound like what our native cousins tried to teach us when we got off the boats?

peace

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“Preach the Gospel to all creation,” Christ said. Are we only now beginning to understand what he meant? I believe the unwritten melody that haunts this book ever so faintly, the new song waiting to be sung in place of the hymn of salvation, is simply the song of creation. To move away from the theology of salvation to the theology of creation may be the task of our time.

Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered, quoted in Brian McClaren, A Generous Orthodoxy.

I wonder how our world will change if we ever here 3:16 as truly meaning “the world,” not just men, humans, some life, but “the world.”  Waiting to see what you are writing T.  This theme just keeps rising up in different places.

My God watches specific sparrows play in my yard while I brood inside about theology.

peace

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How great a wrong is it for man to silence anything created to praise Creator God?

Psalm 148:1 Praise the LORD.

Praise the LORD from the heavens, praise him in the heights above.

2 Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his heavenly hosts.

3 Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars.

4 Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies.

5 Let them praise the name of the LORD, for he commanded and they were created.

6 He set them in place for ever and ever; he gave a decree that will never pass away.

7 Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,

8 lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding,

9 you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars,

10 wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds,

11 kings of the earth and all nations, you princes and all rulers on earth,

12 young men and maidens, old men and children.

13 Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his splendor is above the earth and the heavens.

14 He has raised up for his people a horn,  the praise of all his saints, of Israel, the people close to his heart.
Praise the LORD.

Isn’t it time to expand our narrow vies of God’s family, including our obligation to love them as created brothers and sisters?

peace

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This quote popped out of my reading last week partially because it reminded me of T’s work.

The basis for a theology of the cross’s view of the Spirit is found at the very beginning of the Bible, where the Spirit is described as God’s agent in creation (Gen. 1:2; 2:7). Far from being set over against the material world, the Holy Spirit was active in the creation of it. But the Old Testament never thought of creation as something that was past and finished. All existence depends upon God’s continuing creation. Psalm 104 expresses this faith very well. God’s creation is seen as active in the present, making the grass to grow for cattle to eat and plants to grow for humans to cultivate. Through God’s activity people have food to eat and wine to gladden their hearts. Just as in the original creation, the Spirit is seen at work also in this creative activity as we read, “When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created…” (Ps. 104:30). The Spirit may be in the extraordinary and unusual events, but this does not make the time of such events a unique “outpouring” of the Spirit, for it is God’s Spirit is not being outpoured at all times, there would be no existence at all.

Pp 89-90. “4 The Holy Spirit and the Theology of the Cross” by William Hordern in The Holy Spirit Shy Member of the Trinity, Bruner, Frederick Dale and William Hordern, 1984, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon. ISBN 1-57910-822-9

It makes me wonder –

Is the way forward from our constant stalemate of political hate statements, blame, and denials over the environment somehow found in this ancient interpretation of God’s work in creation?

Would we stop arguing blame and move forward if we saw with new eyes the miracle of continuous creation?

Would our near despair over current conditions and trends become more hopeful with this view of God’s continued work? Would we find hope in His power vs our stupidity? Or would we fear we have finally pushed Him to withdraw his Spirit and leave us to die?

While I still believe that the human story is Christo-centric, what if our greatest hope is that creation’s story is not human-centric anyway?  What if God’s plans for his continuing creation are about all of creation, including as opposed to only about us?

I wonder. They are questions worth living in for a while.

peace

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