In preparing my reflection for your consideration this week, I wanted to evoke both the deep and healing wisdom of our spiritual tradition at its best alongside the sobering and sometimes soul-shattering realities we see all around us if we’re paying attention. Spirituality that is transformative is always paradoxical, both/and rather than either/or. And I give the wisdom tradition primacy now because in times like these too often our fears and emotions drown out the healing insights offered by incarnational spirituality. And to be clear, when I speak of the wisdom tradition, I’m celebrating the spirituality of Mary Magdalene as well as Mary the mother of Jesus.
+ I’m engaged in what Cynthia Bourgeault calls the perennial tradition that spans generations and faiths, what Matthew Fox calls deep ecumenism, what Richard Rohr calls an alternative orthodoxy, what Gandhi and King called soul force, and what the mystics of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and the Seik faith trust as a humble, grounded, embodied solidarity that connects heart with mind and soul and humanity with all of creation.
+ If you love poetry, you’re part of the wisdom tradition. If you honor nature, same again. If you resonate with Joan Chittister, Henri Nouwen, Howard Thurman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Helen Keller, Thomas Keating, Parker Palmer, Carrie Newcomer, Mary Oliver, Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, Wendell Berry, Rumi or the new/old advocates of Celtic spirituality in the 21st century: you are a part of this wisdom tradition whether you name it as such or not.
Eco-theologian and spiritual director, Steven Chase of Collegeville, MN, puts it like this. When we live in profound harmony with nature, not dominating or exploiting but taking time to listen and respond to the heart of creation as conscious co-creators with God, then we start to see the world as it truly is – born of original blessing, not original sin – a relationship where God creates, shares joys and sorrows with us all and calls it good: very, very good. St. Paul celebrated this truth in the opening verses of Romans 1:
Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power, divine nature and holy love, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made in nature. What can be known about the sacred has been revealed in creation. So, we are without excuse (if we’re paying attention.)
Chase goes on to quote Freeman House, a naturalist who has given his life to caring for the wild salmon of the Columbia River watershed. After years of being silent in the presence of creation, House has concluded that when nature and spirit embrace, it “affects how we see and hear and feel. (Indeed, this solidarity shapes) how we perceive reality. Together,” he writes, “this embrace forms empathy” which House defines as “the practice of cumulative attentiveness… and reciprocal perception.”
That is SO insightful: empathy is the spiritual practice of cumulative attentiveness and reciprocal perception. It is listening and silence, presence and patience, give and take beyond the bounds of traditional anthropocentrism – and trust, deep, soul-cleansing trust. I can’t help but recall how my mentors in spiritual direction put it: contemplation, they said, cultivates a non-anxious presence by taking a long, loving look at what is real. Wisdom ripens not through desire – and never only by just accumulating facts – but by learning to rest in reality without rushing to judgment or getting lost in our emotions. A contemplative being practices living and loving the movement of God’s life, death, and resurrection in real time, connecting heart and soul and mind with the ordinary in patient and tender ways. My friend in Brooklyn, Pam, recently sent me this quote from Michael Dowd in EarthSpirit: A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Christianity that teaches us that: “The human is that being in whom the universe… has reached such a degree of complexity that the universe is now able to consciously reflect on itself… The child entranced by the immensity of the ocean is Earth enraptured by itself… The worshiper singing praises to God is the universe celebrating the wonder of the divine Mystery whence it came and in which it exists.”
St. John the Evangelist tells us that al of this occurs because of love: we are able to love and listen and learn to respond tenderly in solidarity from the heart because since before the beginning of time we were loved. Indeed, all of creation was formed by love for love – and our contemplative practices help us tap into the source. This is the wisdom tradition I call to our attention: ordinary women, men, and children committed to taking a long, loving look at reality so that we might see creation as God sees it. Even in the pandemic we can look at life through the lens of love. Even in our racial reckoning and political dysfunction we can move patiently. Tenderly. With a cumulative attentiveness that nourishes a reciprocal perception and connection.
My heart tells me this is where we need to start whenever we consider reality. What we now see all around us is traumatizing and exhausting. Church historian, Diana Butler Bass, recently wrote that unless we have pushed out heads so deeply into a hole that our feelings and fears are denied completely, the wounds of this moment are telling us that “the wheels have already come off our bus! Have you noticed,” she asks people of faith, “That the earth is burning? That innocent people are being killed in the streets because of their skin color? That millions of men and women are out of work? That a pandemic is raging, and thousands and thousands are dead who would otherwise be alive? Have you noticed that black and brown people are telling white America that their lives are in jeopardy if the status quo continues?”
I would add: have you noticed how every day, just when we think we’ve seen it all and reality can’t get any worse, it does? Without exaggeration, these facts on the ground feel apocalyptic. Even the staid and linear journalists at the NY Times make passing references to the end times. So, I want you to consider five simple words that might help us stay grounded in the heart of wisdom even as we enter the fray of reality. Jesus taught them to his disciples in a prayer some know as either the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father and they are: “on earth as it is.” Often we add “in heaven,” but let’s stay right with on earth as it is for a bit. (This idea comes from Steven Chase in his reflections on Nature as Spiritual Practice.)
In the new liturgical Season of Creation today is Land Sunday. And if we take a long, loving look at our land on earth as it is, we see both the suffering as well as the “solace, healing, and guidance” that is taking place on the land. Fires have broken out all over the world: in California and Oregon, in Lebanon and Lesbos, in the Amazon, Australia, Arizona, and even Siberia. At the same time, pumpkins and apples are being harvested, sweet corn is still coming from our fields, and some of the best blueberries I’ve ever eaten are available at roadside stands all over my community. So, as I listen to both the suffering and the solace, I hear the land saying that our shared well-being is connected to the compassion we choose to bring to the earth as it is right now. The land is ask us to renew our reverence for the sacred trust God set in motion in the beginning. Without sentiment-ality or false optimism, I hear the land asking us to return to the time-tested insights described in Scripture so that we might reclaim a life-giving partnership between that can sustain us all.
Bible scholar, Ched Meyers, writes that when we revisit the Biblical stories of our origins they offer us vivid warnings about what life on earth looks like when we violate the sacred partnership God shared with humanity and the land in the beginning. The early pre-historical myths of ancient Israel in chapters 1-11 of Genesis describe “the change of consciousness that propelled the rise of civili- zation” from a tribe of wandering Arameans living in harmony with the land to a more complex culture filled with farming, exploitation, disequilibrium, and injustice. Meyers notes that:
The forbidden fruit (in the mythological Garden of Eden) symbolizes the primal human conceit that we, by employing our ingenuity, our technology, and our social organization, can improve on a creation that may be good, but is not good enough (for our insatiable desires.) From this view, the creation and fall story represents an ancient warning tale: it was produced by Israel’s sages, working with and editing older, ancient Near Eastern sources, probably gathered during the exilic period (when Israel was in bondage to Babylon.) In the aftermath of a failed Israelite monarchy these wise elders attempted to understand their historic experiences of royal exploitation, civil war, erosion of the wilderness traditions, and their eventual conquest and dispossession. (Ched Meyters, Seasons of Creation)
In other words, the wisdom tradition of post-exilic ancient Israel explored how they were brought to the brink of extinction anthropologically: they knew that “something had gone fundamentally wrong with the human journey… and their trauma… was a symptom.” Meyers believes that these stories are “a sort of searching, post September 11th type of reflection – except that the Hebrew sages of old had the courage to look at the contradictions of their own experience, rather than avoiding self-examination by scapegoating their enemies” like we did in the USA. – and all too often still do nearly 20 years later. In the beginning, the story tells us, humanity shared an intimacy with the land on earth as it is – not a romantic or idealized fantasy – but a gritty, working partnership that honored the land with four relational names: mother, sustainer, altar, and home.
When our stories of origins tell us that humans were formed from the topsoil of the land – the star dust I spoke of last week or adam ha adama (Hebrew for an earth person arising from the soil) – “the text is unembarrassed and straightforward as it confesses that we are birthed from the earth along with all flora and fauna.” In this, the land becomes our mother from which all new life begins. “Old indigenous cultures (and First Nations people) know this, as do the new biological sciences, but our Western Christian tradition has ignored this wisdom for far too long.” (Meyers, The Season of Creation: Land Sunday, p. 83) As a young man, I recall arguing with my father who worked for Exxon/Mobil in real estate. He was telling me that when the corporation purchased a plot of land, they owned not only the physical turf but also rights to the air and space above the ground, too. Oh what an argument between father and son erupted then about arrogance, greed, and living out of balance with God’s sacred trust. Our modern sensibilities have forgotten that the spirituality of our creation stories insist that the land is our Mother.
These same stories also suggest that when people live in partnership with the land, God calls it a garden. The land becomes our sustainer – saturated with all the bounty and delight the Lord seeks to share – so long as the sacred balance is maintained. The vocation that guarantees abundance is for human beings to live as caretakers treasuring the land as a gift on earth as it is. “Plenty is contingent upon human beings serving and preserving creation… to neglect our part in stewardship and take too much of the divine gift is to reckon with disaster.” (Meyers, p. 84) Tom Hayden wrote about the Vietnam War citing a quote from Sitting Bull in 1877 where our First Nations leader said of white America: “The love of possession is like a disease with them…” Our Enlightenment ignore-ance has trained us in “natural scarcity and the presumption that the Earth has no intrinsic value until we re-engineer it into a commodity.” We have forgotten that in the beginning our stories say that Mother Earth can be our sustainer IF we are willing to share.
Another name our early stories give us for the earth is altar: In the beginning, worship on earth as it is took place in nature. It still does. It is not an accident, you know, that “Torah’s first account of an encounter with God outside of Eden occurs when Abram defects from empire and enters the marginal desert of Canaan. He arrives at an oak tree – elon moreh in Hebrew meaning a teacher and oracle giver – where God first tells him that he will come into a new land flowing with milk and honey and become the father of a great nation.” In gratitude, Abram constructs the Bible’s first altar on the land. This is an archetypal recognition that organically we experience awe and holiness in nature. How many contemporary men choose the golf course over church on Sunday mornings: not only is it quiet, but it is outdoors and beautiful. “No work of human hands, much less technol-ogy,” writes the poet, “can improve on creation where nature is the MOST appropriate setting for true worship.” (Meyers, p. 84) I know I have felt increasingly grounded and alive learning to garden over the past few years – and we’ve started to build a small family altar outside under the arbor. The land in harmony with humanity is an altar for us all even if our era has forgotten this truth.
And the land is also known as “our home” in our creation stories. Much of the Hebrew Bible tells a story of what happens when God’s people choose empire over solidarity: there is exile, there is homelessness, there is confusion, alienation, and spiritual loss. The exodus tells us of a people dispossessed who are promised a home after generations of bondage. Same for the various other exiles where the hubris of humanity casts them out of their own homes for a season of suffering. Meyers writes: “The biblical narrative begins with a myth about a garden-home that is lost – it includes a myriad of tales about homelessness and restoration – and concludes with a myth that the garden-home can be restored.” Revelations 22 reads: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there anymore for we will see God face to face and living in harmony with God’s holiness.
Intimacy with the land, balance and partnership with nature, getting over ourselves long enough to reclaim the earth as it is as Mother, Sustainer, Altar, and Home has not become a matter of life and death on earth as it is. My soul trusts these old stories to offer time-tested correctives to our current reality. Ched Meyers concludes his study of our origin stories by reminding us that "our descent into vanity has been increasing exponentially by the century for ten millennia: First, the natural world has been increasingly demystified and subjected to ever more intense technological exploitation; second, hierarchical social formations, economic stratification, and war have pro-liferated; and third, human spiritual life and ecological competence have atrophied resulting in growing alienation from both nature and spirit." Remember how T.S. Eliot put it?
The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death but no nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
If we take a long, loving look at our reality we know that we’ve lost our capacity to move within creation as a partner sharing wonder. We’ve forgotten how to patiently practice an empathy of cumulative attentiveness and reciprocal perception. And we have discarded our child-like joy at finding the holy in flowers, trees, water, rivers, oceans, and mountains. St. Joni Mitchell wasn’t kidding when she implored that “… we’ve GOT to get back to the garden” in her song, “Wood-stock.” None of this, I understand, is going to quickly put out the fires currently spreading over Mother Earth. I suspect that things will get worse before they get better for that seems to be the arc of how sacred wisdom is reclaimed in human history.
And yet, while I grieve, I trust that reclaiming our partnership with God and the land is integral to renewing salvific empathy and compassion action on earth as it is. Like all spiritual truth, this starts small so that we might experience the reality of holiness. One of my seminary mentors, the late Dorothee Soelle, framed our challenge like this: Upon seeing the beauty of a flower, which of these five reactions speaks to your soul? Do you say: A) Ahhh? B) Oh, beautiful – I want it, but will let it be? C) Oh, beautiful – I want it and will take it? D) Oh, beautiful – I can sell it? Or E) So what? Be-coming the change we need begins by listening to what the land is already saying to our souls about the suffering as well as the solace. Naomi Shihab Nye subtly invites us to listen in her poem, “Shoulders.”
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo,
This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo,
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream deep inside him.
We're not going to be able to live in this world
We're not going to be able to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
The healing of the earth as it is starts when we pause. When literally and figuratively we get grounded. When we listen to the land, when we choose beyond the evidence, beyond our pain and training, beyond our culture to trust again that the way of God as revealed in Jesus is transformative. The wisdom traditions of all our spiritualities teach that trust and silence, patience and befriending the land in the presence of the Spirit, pausing to return to what is true is how we return to our home, to our gardens, to our Mother in the earth. I suspect this part of what today’s gospel would have us know, too.
Jesus is telling those who wrestle with fear and doubt that the only sign we’ll be given is that of Jonah. For there is no sign that captures the sacred paradox better than the sign of Jonah. Matthew 12 puts it like this where Jesus says: Just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” He is speaking to us of loss – and renewal. Darkness – and light. With an eye towards metaphor it helps me to know that the words of Scripture literally say that until Jesus endures his “three day journey into the heart of the Earth” – en te kardia tes ges in Biblical Greek – new life will not arrive for him or creation. (Meyers, p. 94) Jesus enters the land, the very heart of the earth as it is, insisting that “unless the seed disappears deep into the Earth, it will not rise again.” He says much the same thing in those seed parables, too.
Fr. Thomas Keating insists that those seed stories teach us that God’s presence is NEVER like the massive Cedars of Lebanon, and always more like those scrappy, sometimes unclean, and so very, very ordinary mustard seeds. In this we can see that our renewal will NOT be “other worldly” or grandiose, but small and grounded in the soil of the earth as it is. One wise old soul said: Jesus understood that only the old wisdom of the Earth can counter the pathologies of our new imperial civilizations – wherever and whenever they occur. (Meyer. P. 96)
When we remember how to love a particular place – a plot in our back yard, a discrete garden or a distinctive place in your city or community – when we choose to carry it in our soul like the man with his son upon his shoulder, then… then we are seeing and living with the eyes and heart of the Lord and renewing the ancient partnership of trust. One of the blessing the pandemic is giving to me – one that recognizes that I am a reluctant and obstreperous student – is learning how to love just where I am. Honoring and listening to my little slice of earth as it is encourages me to grow where I have been planted like Merton advised. And physically cultivating this wee small vegetable and flower garden, finding ways to effectively shoo away the voles and slugs and pay careful, helps me listen to the solace and the suffering all around me.
Sr. Joan Chittister says there are two realities that militate against consciously contributing to our healing the earth just as it is. The idea that we can do everything, and, the conclusion that we can do nothing. Both temptations are insidious: one leads to arrogance; the other to despair. Our little garden, our quiet walks listening to the wetlands and the trees, our tiny family and our precious friends push me beyond either temptation. Their living, loving, physical presence inspires me to renew my covenant with the earth as it is each day – not forever, just one day at a time – trusting that in concert with God’s goodness this will be enough – and here’s why. Time and again, my life has ripened and changed in ways I could never have imagined or predicted. I just read something similar from the singer Carrie Newcomer, who said about her life as an artist: What has happened has always been more interesting and creative than I could have hoped. This experience with uncertainty has affirmed again and again that I do not need to know exactly what awaits ahead, I only need to follow the thread, lay my ear to the ground and sense what is rumbling. I don't have to have a search light illuminating a mile down the road, I only need a small flashlight to light my next step. What I have learned is if I am true—the way is true. (FB posting)
To stay grounded, in what is true, I need a song – and as I was doing some cleaning this week that song came to me. It was a tune I used to sing with our daughters when they were small and life seemed much simpler. Once upon a time we sang it so often it had to be retired for a few decades, but now I can dust it off for it feels right. I first heard it at Carnegie Hall over Thanksgiving weekend back in 1980 when Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie played that hallowed hall. They helped me see that in many of the so-called children’s songs, there was a wise, old gentle wisdom that adults could stand to reclaim if we ever wanted to find our way back to the garden. So, while we can’t sing it in a group together yet like Pete and Arlo, I’d like to invite you to sing it with me now as preparation for sharing the bread of life and the cup of blessing born of the earth and human labor. It goes like this…
Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow
Gonna mulch it deep and low, gonna make it fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, please bless these seeds I sow
Please keep them safe below 'Til the rain comes tumbling down
Pullin' weeds, pickin' stones, we are made of dreams and bones
Need a place to call my own 'cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain find my way in nature's chain
Tune my body and my brain to the music of the land…
The healing of the earth as it is starts when we pause. When literally and figuratively we get grounded. When we listen to the land, when we choose beyond the evidence, beyond our pain and training, beyond our culture to trust again that the way of God as revealed in Jesus is transformative. The wisdom traditions of all our spiritualities teach that trust and silence, patience and befriending the land in the presence of the Spirit, pausing to return to what is true is how we return to our home, to our gardens, to our Mother in the earth. I suspect this part of what today’s gospel would have us know, too.
Jesus is telling those who wrestle with fear and doubt that the only sign we’ll be given is that of Jonah. For there is no sign that captures the sacred paradox better than the sign of Jonah. Matthew 12 puts it like this where Jesus says: Just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” He is speaking to us of loss – and renewal. Darkness – and light. With an eye towards metaphor it helps me to know that the words of Scripture literally say that until Jesus endures his “three day journey into the heart of the Earth” – en te kardia tes ges in Biblical Greek – new life will not arrive for him or creation. (Meyers, p. 94) Jesus enters the land, the very heart of the earth as it is, insisting that “unless the seed disappears deep into the Earth, it will not rise again.” He says much the same thing in those seed parables, too.
Fr. Thomas Keating insists that those seed stories teach us that God’s presence is NEVER like the massive Cedars of Lebanon, and always more like those scrappy, sometimes unclean, and so very, very ordinary mustard seeds. In this we can see that our renewal will NOT be “other worldly” or grandiose, but small and grounded in the soil of the earth as it is. One wise old soul said: Jesus understood that only the old wisdom of the Earth can counter the pathologies of our new imperial civilizations – wherever and whenever they occur. (Meyer. P. 96)
When we remember how to love a particular place – a plot in our back yard, a discrete garden or a distinctive place in your city or community – when we choose to carry it in our soul like the man with his son upon his shoulder, then… then we are seeing and living with the eyes and heart of the Lord and renewing the ancient partnership of trust. One of the blessing the pandemic is giving to me – one that recognizes that I am a reluctant and obstreperous student – is learning how to love just where I am. Honoring and listening to my little slice of earth as it is encourages me to grow where I have been planted like Merton advised. And physically cultivating this wee small vegetable and flower garden, finding ways to effectively shoo away the voles and slugs and pay careful, helps me listen to the solace and the suffering all around me.
Sr. Joan Chittister says there are two realities that militate against consciously contributing to our healing the earth just as it is. The idea that we can do everything, and, the conclusion that we can do nothing. Both temptations are insidious: one leads to arrogance; the other to despair. Our little garden, our quiet walks listening to the wetlands and the trees, our tiny family and our precious friends push me beyond either temptation. Their living, loving, physical presence inspires me to renew my covenant with the earth as it is each day – not forever, just one day at a time – trusting that in concert with God’s goodness this will be enough – and here’s why. Time and again, my life has ripened and changed in ways I could never have imagined or predicted. I just read something similar from the singer Carrie Newcomer, who said about her life as an artist: What has happened has always been more interesting and creative than I could have hoped. This experience with uncertainty has affirmed again and again that I do not need to know exactly what awaits ahead, I only need to follow the thread, lay my ear to the ground and sense what is rumbling. I don't have to have a search light illuminating a mile down the road, I only need a small flashlight to light my next step. What I have learned is if I am true—the way is true. (FB posting)
To stay grounded, in what is true, I need a song – and as I was doing some cleaning this week that song came to me. It was a tune I used to sing with our daughters when they were small and life seemed much simpler. Once upon a time we sang it so often it had to be retired for a few decades, but now I can dust it off for it feels right. I first heard it at Carnegie Hall over Thanksgiving weekend back in 1980 when Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie played that hallowed hall. They helped me see that in many of the so-called children’s songs, there was a wise, old gentle wisdom that adults could stand to reclaim if we ever wanted to find our way back to the garden. So, while we can’t sing it in a group together yet like Pete and Arlo, I’d like to invite you to sing it with me now as preparation for sharing the bread of life and the cup of blessing born of the earth and human labor. It goes like this…
Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow
Gonna mulch it deep and low, gonna make it fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, please bless these seeds I sow
Please keep them safe below 'Til the rain comes tumbling down
Pullin' weeds, pickin' stones, we are made of dreams and bones
Need a place to call my own 'cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain find my way in nature's chain
Tune my body and my brain to the music of the land…
