OCTOBER 27 2021
IS THE EARTH ALIVE?
“The hills are alive with the Sound of music”, sings Julie Andrews. “Praise him, you mountains and hills”, sings Psalm 148. Is the earth alive? Yes, yes.
Reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerrer has further convinced me that the indigenous people saw all elements of creation as alive and worthy of personality, which made me realize that I’ll need eternity to learn the lingering languages of all living matter.
I live among the hills and the forests in Eastern Ontario, and, in my daily ‘forest-bathing’ walk, welcoming the wind and the rain with their distinct melodies. Both Richard Elliott Friedman and Dietrich Bonhoeffer see God alive in his creation. Romans 8 relates how the entire creation is groaning as in pains of childbirth. I sincerely believe that these birth-pangs are now reaching its final stages, as COP26 in Glasgow meets to discuss its medical condition and makes resolutions to prolong the birthing agony.
In the coming weeks all aspects of The State Of The World will be discussed and the dire consequences of our earth-exploiting-activities be laid bare, and remedies proposed. It will be an interesting fortnight.
Dr. Barry Commoner, in his book, The Closing Circle, published 50 years ago, in 1971, wrote FIFTY YEARS AGO! that “we are in an environmental crisis because human beings driven by the urge to conquer nature to produce wealth, have broken out of the circle of life and are destroying the environment. We are on a suicidal course.”
This insightful professor, a teacher of biology and ecology, formulated the four laws of Ecology,
- Everything is connected to everything else
- Nature knows best
- There is no free lunch
- Nothing ever disappears.
Jesus, in John 3, in his dialogue with an important Jewish personage, in verse 13 clearly states that nobody has ever gone to heaven, except Jesus himself. Then he drops this bombshell: (verse16-17 and I paraphrase), “God so loved himself, and the cosmos he created, the firmament, sun, moon, stars, planets, including Planet Earth, that God was willing to sacrifice his only beloved Son, Jesus the Christ, as a ransom to buy back – redeem – his creation from the Great Enemy, so that those who believe that this transaction is legal and binding, have LIFE forever in a new creation.”
In short: Jesus’ mission was to ‘restore creation’ and that process includes redeemed humanity.
Dr. Commoner, probably not a Christian in the accepted sense, has been a real prophet on par with Isaiah and Jeremiah, in seeing the consequences of our destructive actions half a century ago.
Now, Anno Domino 2021, we are reaching the final stages of our ‘trespasses,’ our sins against creation which Jesus mentioned .in The Lord’s Prayer, a prayer centering on “The Coming of the Kingdom”.
Each day we see or read about another record-breaking weather event. Each day there are more confusing stories about sexuality and Covid-related conditions. Each day the data regarding the economy and inflation and shortages have conflicting conclusions. What is certain is that nothing is certain anymore.
On October 24 our Environmental Team led the service in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. There our congregation sang a four-verse hymn of which the first two are:
We live in times of deepest gloom
With Covid and with Climate doom.
The future looks so dire and grim:
Our only hope now comes from Him.
O Holy Earth receive our tears
Console us, still our deepest fears,
We live as exiles in our land,
Oh where, of where, your helping hand?
I cannot sufficiently emphasize the extremity of the dangers we live in, because we keep on ignoring Dr. Commoner’s law regarding “Nature Knows Best”.
Jesus summarized God’s laws in a few lines: “Love God above all else, and your neighbor as yourself”.
We cannot love God as he is beyond knowing, that’s why he left creation for us as THE object of love. His creation is also our neighbor, and our benefactor, the soil providing food, the trees shade and fresh air, the…. And the list goes on and on.
The principal law of ‘nature’ is ‘service’: the sun serving the flowers and grasses, which, in turn, serve the animals and humans, with us as the servants in chief, following Jesus’ rule for his life, as he claimed repeatedly that he did not come to be served, but to serve, even to the extent of washing feet.
IS THE EARTH ALIVE?
Yes, the earth is alive, but not well. It is extremely angry at this point because we have not treated her as an equal, as our source for life, as our neighbor, as the apple of God’s eye.