Earth’s Crammed With Heaven
Proverbs 8:12, 22-31 October 14, 2007
John 1:1-5, Acts 17:24-28 Denise Cumbee Long
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes of his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
These words by Elizabeth Barrett Browning speak to me in a new way as I think about religious faith in the context of today’s ecological crisis. I will confess to having a divided heart. On the one hand, I sometimes feel that we have come through a spiritual awakening of sorts where creation spirituality, an ecological view of Christianity, is no longer seen as a fringe position, one having no place in mainstream congregations.
I am glad that it is no longer unusual on the Sunday nearest Earth Day for many local congregations to celebrate the beauty of the natural world, and I am grateful that one can hear a host of ecumenical voices speaking from the pulpit about the care of creation. Today’s churchgoers, at least in moderately progressive circles, aren’t afraid to be viewed as environmentalists; most are happy to recycle, buy low-emission vehicles and fluorescent light bulbs.
But, my divided heart also speaks to me from a darker place, and I find that I most often have a much more pessimistic view of how Christians are living out their vocation as stewards of the earth. In the larger scheme of things, our contemporary ecological consciousness has produced only mild responses to the problems at hand. If I look closely at the everyday practices and attitudes of most American churchgoers, I see ingrained ways of believing and being that for centuries have kept Christianity at peace with longstanding economic practices in a culture where individualism and greed are the presumed starting points for the good life.
What seemed at first to be a spiritual awakening now often feels more like a false start, or at best, a very small beginning… too little, too late. We speak of an earth of intrinsic holiness, but our actions belie our words. While we give lip service to an “earth crammed with heaven” in which every rock, tree, and creature reflect the glory of God, we most often act as if we were simply plucking blackberries from a drooping earth devoid of transcendence.
Why is this? The Bible clearly affirms a world that is holy, not just its human inhabitants. The world was created inherently good, and God’s creation is ongoing, a continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God. As Wendell Berry says, “We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time. But what keeps it from being far better known that it is? …How can modern Christianity have so solemnly folded its hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed?” (Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Earth and Word, ed. David Rhoads, Continuum, 2007, p. 52.)
I believe that one reason many modern churchgoers are content to pick blackberries instead of throwing off their shoes in awe of the burning bush is because most of modern Christianity still holds tightly to the “Fall and Redemption” model, what Thomas Berry calls a “redemption mystique”. For the last several hundred years, the church has regarded the earth only as a background stage upon which the drama of private salvation has been played out. In this model, we are obsessed with our sinfulness. The doctrine of Original Sin is accepted and understood as the predominant paradigm. Jesus’ death had the purpose of redeeming us from our innate depravity and saving our souls for eternal life in a heavenly realm somewhere far away.
Many of the hymns that you and I sang as children, the ones I call “the blood hymns”, reflect this theological view. Little or no reference is made to the world in these songs except as a negative influence which causes one to sin. And wow, is there a lot of sin! One must be "washed in the blood to be made clean"…..only amazing grace could "save a wretch like me"…"Once I was lost upon the plains of sin, Once was a slave to doubts and fears within…."Alas and did my Savior bleed, and did my Savior die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?"
But some of us have stepped away from the “Fall and Redemption” paradigm and toward a more creation-centered spirituality, what Matthew Fox calls a theology of “Original Blessing”. And since theology is meaningless unless it becomes personal, I want to share with you just a little of my own faith journey.
When I was a child of 4 or 5, my father was the pastor of a church in rural Virginia outside of Richmond. I have memories, although fuzzy ones, of that little church. I remember especially the Vacation Bible School on hot summer mornings. Of course there was the Kool-Aid in the little paper cups, the Bible stories, and the songs. There was "Climb, climb up sunshine mountain, heavenly breezes blow" and we would all move our little hands like we were climbing. I liked that line. I could just picture this happy mountain with a path leading up to a giant sun.
Then there was my favorite: "All Creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing, Alleluia, Alleluia." I loved the way that this poem by St. Francis of Assisi personified the different elements of nature: "Thou rushing wind that art so strong….Ye clouds that sail in heaven along… O praise God, Alleluia ".
This was a joyful hymn, and also one of the few I could understand. It made me feel good. It made me feel connected to creation. It seemed to say that the natural world loved God, and also loved me. It was a time in my life, when in the words of Baudelaire, I could say:
"We walk through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things that look on us with affectionate looks."
How wonderful to be a child and see the world in this way… where there is really no distinction between animate and inanimate… where forests of physical things are also spiritual things… where nature has an affectionate look and joins us in a song of praise to the Creator who sang us both into being!
Among the aboriginee people of Australia there is a creation myth in which the Divine Being sings every creature into existence. Likewise, in his book, The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis describes the creation of Narnia in similar terms. The great golden lion, Aslan, walks through the darkness singing life into birth. As a child, I could see and understand this. My religious beliefs could be summed up not in terms of “original sin” but in the lyrical notes of what Dominican scholar Matthew Fox calls “original sing”.
As I grew older, and after feeling increasing discomfort with the prevalent Christian paradigm I saw in most churches, one that presumed the doctrine of original sin, I have now come full circle and returned to a doctrine of original blessing, or “original sing”. This did not happen overnight but was a gradual process, a faith journey which, in the words of Ecclesiastes, was both a time of casting away and of gathering in.
I found myself casting away theological concepts which were oppressive, killers of joy, or destroyers of environment or community. And, I found myself gathering in the bits and pieces from Biblical texts and the writings of ancient and modern philosophers and poets which resonated with the God I experienced, a God who called all creation "good", and who loved and blessed it.
I began claiming spiritual mentors for my own journey, women and men whose wisdom did not always mesh with the standards of their society or tradition… the early Christian mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Hildegaard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and Francis of Assisi… poets like Wordsworth, Blake, Dickenson, Rilke, and Yeats…. social activists such as John Woolman, George Fox, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi… ecologists like Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry… philosopher scientists such as Teilhard de Chardin.
Now, I don’t feel that I was leaping to a theology that was birthed by Matthew Fox or one of my other spiritual mentors. Rather, I realized that I was in fact recovering an ancient religious wisdom that is part of my own Christian tradition. These teachers and writers simply helped me name the spirituality which I already knew and practiced as my own.
I firmly believe that one of the best things we can do today as church is to speak boldly from the perspective of this minority view, this paradigm that Fox calls "creation-centered spirituality." It begins with a different premise than the Fall and Redemption model. In that tradition, sinful humanity is the center of the spiritual universe. “This is not so,” writes Fox. “The universe itself, blessed and graced, is the proper starting point for spirituality. Original blessing is prior to any sin, original or less than original." (Fox, Original Blessing, Bear & Company, 1983, p.26.)
We are connected to the "physical things which are also spiritual", the forests which look upon us with affectionate glances. We are connected to them because the same divine creative energy flows through us both.
Dylan Thomas puts it this way:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age….
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood.
This force which connects us to the flowers and rocks is the divine creative energy of God. It is what is meant by the Hebrew word, "Dabhar", an active, creating mystery which gives birth to the world. And this word is Jesus, who is also a creator. Jesus is present with God from the beginning, participating in creation. Listen again to the opening words of John (1:1-5):
In the beginning was the word
The word was with God and the word was God
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came to be,
Not one thing had its being but through him..
All that came to be had life in him
And that life was the light of all persons,
A light that shines in the dark,
A light that darkness could not overpower.
This lively, loving word of God is also described as Wisdom in the Old Testament. It is that creative, joyful part of God which speaks in Proverbs (8:22-23,30,31)
God created me when God's purpose first unfolded,
Before the oldest of God's works,
From everlasting I was firmly set,
From the beginning, before earth came into being…
I was by God's side, a master craftsman,
Delighting God day after day,
Ever at play in God's presence,
At play everywhere in God's world,
Delighting to be with the sons and daughters of humankind.
When we see God’s ongoing creative energy in the world around us, then that world becomes transparent and a sacred space where we meet God.
As the mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote: "The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw -and knew I saw- all things in God and God in all things." And Paul sensed this truth when he writes in Acts: It is in God that we live, and move, and have our being. (Acts 17;28) When we can see holiness in this way, then we take off our shoes and stop picking blackberries.
But this way of seeing is something that is still missing in most mainline Christian congregations. And this is where my divided heart tempts me to feel despair. Without a sense of connection and wonder that is built into our theological hard drive, we respond only weakly when our intrinsically holy world is threatened.
Bill McKibben, environmental writer and scholar in residence at Middlebury College, writes in the February issue of The Christian Century that the time is past for words, for philosophical, scientific and theological debate. “The time is so short, and the task so large,” he says, “that eloquence seems almost frivolous.” He goes on to say that although he has been writing about global warming since 1989, he is now trying to organize. Why? Because the climate crisis is bearing down on the world faster than most people realize. We have much less time to act than we thought, and that action has to be dramatic.
Our earlier guesses about gradual global warming were wrong. One study after another now shows that the speed of change is much faster than predicted. And what’s worse, it seems that one problem magnifies another. For example, melting arctic ice leaves more open ocean to absorb more of the sun’s heat, amplifying the warming. Thawing tundra is releasing tremendous quantities of methane, a powerful global warming gas.
McKibben quotes James Hansen, the country’s foremost climatologist, who said last year that we have a decade, ten years, to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere or else we will live on a “totally different planet”.
As McKibben states so bluntly, this means that “the changes we make in our homes and churches as individuals and congregations, vital as they are, can’t deliver the speed or magnitude of change that will slow climate change. It means that we need to change light bulbs- but we also need to change laws. It means that Washington, after two decades of a very successful bipartisan effort to do nothing, needs to spin on a dime.” (McKibben, “Meltdown”, The Christian Century, Feb. 20, 2007).
But Washington won’t move on global warming unless it is a priority for more of us. I glanced at the headlines of the front page article of the News and Observer yesterday (October 13, 2007) and was reminded of this: “Nobel affirms Gore’s clout but climate isn’t a priority for U.S.”
McKibben and other environmentalists writing from a Christian perspective are moving away from finely-tuned theological treatises to a more blunt, even desperate, cry for action. What is needed is a movement that is bigger that our grassroots efforts primarily designed to save watersheds, open space, and scenic views. As McKibben says, the environmentalism of our moment is not built for mobilizing masses of people around one of the most critical moral challenges of our time. Although the national mood has shifted, national policy has not.
And Christians should be at the forefront of this new and bigger environmental movement, unafraid to call for sweeping changes and no longer content to clap approvingly for small, slow, and incremental victories. Our vision must be bigger, for “without a vision, McKibben writes, “the effort will perish, and with it the blooming, buzzing, mysterious, cruel world we were given.”
Biblical writers offered a variety of voices to reflect the spiritual, emotional and situational needs of the Hebrew people: praise and lament, blessing and curse, blistering rebuke and pastoral words of comfort and hope. Ecological Christianity in today’s world needs to make use of all of these voices, as well. Only then can we speak honestly to the complexities of the environmental crisis. Only then can we address both those who pick blackberries and scoff at alarmists, and also those who live in despair because they see the transcendence but believe it is too late to stop the world’s rush toward catastrophe.
My daughter sat at the kitchen table not long ago, tears streaming down her face. She had just graduated from UNC with a degree in environmental science and was heading to Peru to work with ecologists on conservation issues in the rainforests of the Amazon. But, she was not leaving with her idealism intact. “What if it is too late?” she asked me. “What if everything we do now doesn’t really matter?”
Thomas Berry writes that we live in a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine, a moment of grace that combines both crisis and opportunity. I still have a divided heart. But on my good days, my faith in a living God gives me hope that what we do will matter. Somehow. I pray that it will be so, but even more, I will choose to act as if it is so. I can do no less. For earth is indeed crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God. And that is a blessing- in fact, an original blessing.