The Nature I Love

  

      And the single hawk bursts into flight
      And in the east the whole horizon is in flames
      I feel thunder in the sky
      I see the sky about to rain
     And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

                              -- Rich Mullins, “Calling Out Your Name”

There’s nothing quite like dipping one’s paddle into a northern lake as one’s canoe glides across the water or standing in the crisp air of a winter night and watching Orion chase the Pleiades across the heavens.  There’s something about the smell of piñon pine in New Mexico and the taste of tea made from the needles of the Douglas fir.  The rolling glacial hills of Wisconsin and the towering peaks and sheer valleys of the snow-capped Himalayas.  The serene silence of gently falling snow and the moon so bright you can see as clear as day.  The music of loons and the crackling of a good campfire.

But the glaciers are melting, the trees are being cut down faster than they’re being replanted, and mining waste threatens the northern waters.  The stars shine in radiant glory, but too many of us can barely see them at night.  Species are going extinct at rates not seen in millions of years, and our pollution is warming the planet faster than it can adapt.  We are taking the good gift of God and destroying it for profit and convenience.

And my heart is broken.  

Reflections on the Incarnation in a Time of Ecological Crisis

      As I sit in this coffee shop days before Christmas, I find myself thinking of the rhythm of the seasons or rather the degree to which we’ve lost the sense of them.  We’ve worked hard to insulate ourselves from God’s creation and its rhythms in the name of convenience.  I have very little ideas what fruits and vegetables come into season at what time of year, because at the cost of a massive carbon footprint, I can find the same fresh produce in stores any time of year.  My home is climate controlled so that it can be practically any temperature any time of year, whatever the environmental impact of running my central heat and air to reach perfect comfort.  None of these technological achievements are bad in and of themselves and can even save precious lives, as anyone who lives in a place with cold winters can tell you.  (Irrigated green lawns in the desert, maybe not so much.)  The fruits available at my local supermarket and indoor climate control may seem to have little theological meaning, much less a relationship to Christmas, but stick with me. 

In this season, we celebrate the birth of Jesus our Savior.  In Western Christianity, especially in the Evangelical Protestantism in which I grew up, we have a tendency to see Jesus’ birth as merely a precondition for his death and resurrection, but what we celebrate on Christmas – the Incarnation, God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus of Nazareth – is much more than that.  The union of the human and the divine in one being undergirds all of Jesus’ ministry, His dying and rising, and the life of His people from then until all eternity, and I don’t think we reflect on this or its consequences nearly enough.  

Of course, to attempt to contemplate a being both fully God and fully human, we both enter into something profound and push the limits of our human understanding and its possibilities, running up against what theologians refer to as mysteries of our faith.  In The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware writes that,

In the Christian context, we do not mean by a “mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.

Jesus’ binding us to Himself in His death and resurrection is not only to accomplish a one-time purpose of salvation, it’s both the beginning of a relationship and image of a future reality.  Like in the end of the book of Revelation, God dwells with His people, joining heaven and earth together.  

But in the relationship that God establishes in Christ, He not only dwells with humanity, we are also somehow joined as one in a relationship that can only be described as full of mystery. Jesus even describes this relationship between God and human beings as being like the relationship between the very persons of the Trinity.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His disciples, 

Because I live, you also will live.  In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (14:19b-20)

Later He prays to God the Father,

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (17:20-23)

Likewise, according to 2 Peter 1:4, through Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature”.

Eastern Orthodox theologians think of this in terms of theosis, humans themselves becoming in some sense divine.  In the second century, St Irenaeus speaks of “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”

“You in me and I in you” is both a picture of God’s relationship with us and a picture of the indwelling of the three persons of the Trinity in one another, or perichoresis, what Richard Rohr terms “the divine dance”.  In some way, the Incarnation invites us into the very life of the Trinity.

What does it mean, then, to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) or participants of the “divine dance” in relation to the natural world?

One might expect a Christian message about the environment to talk about how God made the world and gave it to us to live in and take care of and how we need to be better stewards of what He’s given us.  All this is good and true, but I want to explore the picture a little differently, to reexamine some of the roots of that stewardship.  Ecologically, we are part of nature, not standing apart from it at a distance, and I think the same thing is true spiritually.

And this is where Christmas intersects with ecology.

In his Catechism, St Gregory of Nyssa gives us, intentionally or not, a reflection of the Incarnation in our own selves:

Now, by a provision of the supreme Mind there is an intermixture of the intellectual with the sensible world, in order that nothing in creation may be thrown aside as worthless, as says the Apostle, or be left without its portion of the Divine fellowship. On this account it is that the commixture of the intellectual and sensible in man is effected by the Divine Being...God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, and by an inspiration from Himself He planted life in the work of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supramundane.

According to Gregory, humanity is a special point of contact and union between the natural world/matter and the divine.  He has a good point, but how much more so when we are united with Christ?  Through the indwelling union of “you in me and I in you,” God is present in us in like in no other creature.  As the church, the Body of Christ, God works through us in the world.  He inhabits His creation and cares for His creation, in part, through us.  His love for creation radiates through us, and that is a thing of great holiness.

It changes how we think of our stewardship of the world around us.

We can even see an environmental component in the gospel message itself.  The good news Jesus preaches in the gospel texts is not “Pray this prayer so you don’t go to hell,” it’s “Behold, the Kingdom of God is at hand!”  Of course the invitation into the Kingdom through the cross and resurrection involves personal salvation, but the Kingdom itself is more than that.  The Kingdom of God is the very rulership of God, His lordship over everything that results in a revolution in values and the restoration of right relationships between God and humanity and between humans and one another.  If we are created to in some way mediate between God and the natural world and care for that which he loves, this too must be set right, and we can hardly ignore environmental degradation due to human selfishness, greed, and lack of urgency.

Do not mistake me.  I am not saying that environmentalism is the real core of the gospel.  What I am saying is that it is its corollary.  If we are to “partake in the divine nature” and to live out the Kingdom of God, to some degree we are bound to care for the natural world of which we are a part.  Perhaps in doing so, as Gregory writes, “one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation” and the things around us might be drawn more closely into the “divine dance.”

It's Time to Take Sides

It’s time to take sides.

We have a president and administration who are ripping children – even infants – away from their parents and putting them in prison camps where they sleep on concrete floors with bright lights on 24 hours per day and lack proper sanitation, even diapers for babies. They are mocked and abused by guards, and some have died.

Our country demonizes, rejects, and abuses the poor and the desperate, especially those who come to us seeking asylum from destitution, dangerous political instability, and gang violence often targeted at them personally – people who are following US and international law as they seek asylum here, as if that should even concern us half as much as their needs.

Neutrality is complicity.

Matthew 25:31-46:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.  Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.  Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”  Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”  Then they also will answer, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”  Then he will answer them, saying, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”  And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

We American Christianswill be judged.  Do we really think God will say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? (Matthew 25:21)  

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”  Our cruelty and callousness are the nails in the hands and feet of Jesus.

Friends have told me not to say things like this about Christians who disagree with me.  But this is not about Democrats and Republicans, this is about following Jesus’s plainly spoken words.  We can disagree about the size of government or the merits of the welfare state, but true church unity, true loving community, cannot be formed by the kind of Christian “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” (MLK)

The prophet Amos condemned those in his day who lived in luxury while they exploited the poor and maintained systems of inequality and injustice.  According to him, God vehemently rejected these people’s worship:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,
    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
    I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
    I will not look upon them.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters,
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (5:21-24)

We can no longer pretend to be neutral in the name of loving one another.

My friends, it’s time to take sides.

Acquainted with Sorrow

All heavy-laden, 

acquainted with sorrow, 

may Christ in our marrow

carry us home.

            

– Jars of Clay, “This Road”

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.

                        – John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

There’s a lot of pain in the world.

There are others whose experiences are far worse than mine, but I’m going to tell you my own story.

My medical history is a mess.  To begin with, I was born with a heart condition called Tetralogy of Fallot.  It’s a combination of four heart defects. Before surgeries were developed to repair it, patients were lucky to reach seven or eight years old.  Four open-heart surgeries later, I’m thirty-three now and thankful.

I’ve thought about my death since I was a child.  I remember begging God that I wouldn’t die.  I don’t know if I was overreacting, but it doesn’t make much difference when you’re twelve.  As a toddler between my first and second open-heart surgeries, my parents took me as many places as they could so I could experience as much as possible, in case I didn’t make it.  I grew up with constant reminders of my own frailty every recess, gym class, and afternoon outside.  I never got the chance to experience or even expect a life of normalcy, far from the shadow of suffering

Even now I wonder, how long do I have to live?  I’ve always assumed less time than other people.  I don’t know if that’s actually true or not, but my expectations have always been relatively modest.  Is it just a matter of time until things give out?

My heart has been repaired, but I’ll never really be out of the woods.  Artificial heart valves wear out every 10-20 years, requiring another surgical replacement, and I’m especially susceptible to endocarditis, a serious bacterial infection of the heart.  I had that a few years ago.  It ran me into the ground.

You know it’s a bad sign when the hospital gets your blood work and calls you at 6:30 am to tell you to get to the emergency room.  I found myself in a hospital bed with a blood pressure of about 70/40 (that’s really dangerous), lying flat on my back to keep it from getting worse.

I almost died.  Not like on TV, with all the high drama and everything, but if I hadn’t answered my phone and just stayed in bed, I might not be typing this right now.

2015 was terrible.  I cried in the shower.  Five hospital admissions, one ambulance ride, pneumonia, endocarditis, six weeks of IV antibiotics, two surgical procedures including an open-heart valve replacement, and I didn’t feel like I had anything left.

But just wait, add to all that chronic depression, years of misery without end.

Depression is terrible. The magnitude of misery bears little to no relation to one’s actual circumstances.  On the outside, you can have the perfect life with every advantage and blessing imaginable, but inside every day is hellish, as if someone were constantly ripping out your insides and trampling all over them.  Every outer setback is salt in the wound, and no joy seems able to lift the spirit.  

Bind it up with a years-long internal struggle between faith and doubt and the deconstruction of practically everything I was taught to believe, and the word “misery” is not visceral enough. 

And yet, there’s more.

Not too long ago, my son was born with the same heart condition that I was, only more complicated.  It shouldn’t have happened, this condition isn’t supposed to be hereditary.  Despite genetic testing, the doctors don’t know why it happened.  He’s happy and healthy, but he’ll never really live a normal life.  They think that if we have another child, the likelihood of them having Tetralogy of Fallot might well be 50%.  I just pray the mental illness that runs in my family hasn’t gotten passed to him too.  

And now my wife’s mother is dying of fast-moving Parkinson’s Disease.

How could God allow such things?  What could I have done, what could any of us have done, to deserve these things?  Sometimes bad things just happen, seemingly without rhyme or reason.  Is the best of all possible worlds one in which natural processes run amok, doling out harm indiscriminately?

If you take the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Adam and Eve literally, you can perhaps blame it all on them and more or less leave it at that, but for those of us for whom that narrative has been complicated by science, history, biblical criticism, and a deeper look at Scripture in its cultural context, those easy answers long ago stopped being satisfactory if they ever were in the first place.

Where is God in all this? 

I wish I knew.

Years ago, Andrew Peterson wrote a song called “The Silence of God”:

It's enough to drive a man crazy; it'll break a man's faith
It's enough to make him wonder if he's ever been sane
When he's bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heavens’ only answer is the silence of God

It'll shake a man's timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And if a man has got to listen to the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they've got
When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that cross
Then what about the times when even followers get lost?
'Cause we all get lost sometimes

There's a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll
In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold
And He's kneeling in the garden, as silent as a stone
All His friends are sleeping and He's weeping all alone

And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God

Sometimes the silence is all we get.

The suffering can seem overwhelming, but there can be goodness too.

Does love overcome pain? (And I mean here and now, in this life, not just what comes after.)  Maybe it does. It certainly breaks through our darkness in a multitude of expected and unexpected ways.

The world is full of pain, but even in the midst of suffering, we as a species by and large seem to feel that life is still worth living.  Not always, but far more often than not.  And maybe that says something in spite of it all.

By now you may be wondering where the theodicy is in this post?  When am I going to explain that this will be okay in the end, that a suffering Savior shares in your pain and conquered it, along with sin and death on the cross? I believe those things, and I will write about them sometime, but to jump in with all of it right away cuts short our opportunity to reflect on what we and others truly feel.  Healing requires acknowledging our pain.  Have no doubt that there is healing, that it can and does get better, but allow yourself to accept the reality of your own sorrow.

“The aching may remain, but the breaking does not

In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God.”

In the Shelter of Each Other

There is an Irish proverb that says “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”

We forget that we belong to each other.  Like Cain we say to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  

Seventeenth-century poet and minister John Donne once wrote that,

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man's death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom 

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Yet we continue to crow about our own rights, especially with regard to property and wealth, while too often ignoring the possibility that we might have obligations to others.

How can we claim to follow Christ in this manner?

Consider the following:

Exodus 23:10-11: 

            

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.  

Leviticus 19:9-10:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 23:22:

And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. 

Deuteronomy 23:24-25:

If you go into your neighbor's vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any in your bag. If you go into your neighbor's standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor's standing grain.

Deuteronomy 24:19-21:

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over them again. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not strip it afterward. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

In Matthew 22:36-40, a man asks Jesus, 

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love here is more than a warm fuzzy feeling, it’s a prioritization of needs and wellbeing, sacrificially if necessary.  So how do I express my self-love?  When I’m hungry, I feed myself; when I’m thirsty, I drink clean water; I keep a roof over my head; I give myself an education and many other things; and when I’m sick, I go to the doctor.  If this is how I love myself, shouldn’t I strive to secure the very same things for others?  And love here is not contingent on who one’s neighbor is or whether we think they deserve it, Jesus makes it clear that we are to love without condition.  Our rights and personal comfort are supposed to be second to the command to love one another.  It’s a hard thing to do – I’m not very good at it – but it’s the work to which we are called.

It is in the shelter of one another that we are meant to live.