THE RHYTHMS OF THE EARTH
Created on August 25, 2004

The ways of the earth are impressively rhythmical, even seeming to be cyclical.  With or without our knowing, those rhythms control our lives and more of our history than we care to admit.  It is a wonderful experience to ponder earth's many rhythms and how we can find our place on earth within them.  Yet, we are not satisfied with what we can hear and know.  Rather than accepting and enjoying the earth's rhythm, many of us try to live in rhythms of our own design.  Rather than being guided by sunrises and evenings, by the cycle of the moon or the seasons, we try to fit ourselves to clocks and deadlines, but to be uncomfortable with the natural rhythms of our great home is to choose discontent over happiness.  If we could but settle for grace as grace is, then life could go on for all.

So go the words of a catchy Christian hymn.  My father found this song rather troubling.  As a farmer who loved the land, he felt these words were in strong contradiction to the foundation of his religious understanding.  He felt quite at home on the earth.  Nor did earth seem to be a desert drear with danger and sorrow on every hand.  Quite the opposite, earth was a pleasant place of meadows and creek bluffs, of gentle cattle and very interesting wild animals, water creatures and birds.  A growing boy had to make decisions about that because of religious mentors and books that could not include the good earth or nature within the realm of religious concern.  He had to discover that his tradition was too narrow--not necessarily wrong, just too narrow.  If we, like my father, feel love for the planet, we must do what we can to keep it from being further destroyed, and that action begins with our attitudes.

HEALTH AND SALVATION
Created on August 27, 2004

After researching the latin origins of the word “salvation”, I realized that the word really means health, wellness, wholeness, so the hymnwriter’s “health and salvation” are really synonymous.  Salvation is also built around the base of the Greek word for life—soteria, which is a beautiful word that combines our ideas of preservation and security of life along with deliverance from whatever may threaten us.  In addition, salvation in Hebrew means victory—it can be salvation from death, disease, guilt, sin, or anything that threatens us.  In the book of Revelation, I found that its final vision was about salvation of earth itself.  The words led me to see both heaven and earth renewed.  Salvation is not about being taken from the earth but experiencing restoration, health and wholeness as members of earth being saved by her Creator.

Growing up as a farmer's daughter, Jane would dance her way on a gravel road when she thought no one was watching.  Her dancing was informal, natural, free.  And beautiful.  Dancing is an important feature of human behavior, a feature with many patterns and styles.  Throughout history, people have danced and this dance has evolved to reflect our many cultures.   As we dance our modern urban dances, we must ask ourselves, are we dancing farther away from our basic sources of energy?  Are we dancing ourselves apart from the earth, the partner we all together need for our continued health and development?  I often feel we need Jane to lead us back to the gravel roads we once traveled, where the rhythms of the wind can dictate our movements and the symphony of natural life can accompany those movements.

The exciting thought of this psalm is that all creation is perpetually praising the Creator.  Therefore, when we succumb to the power of the spirit of praise, we are joining a magnificent symphony of praise that surrounds us at all times.  Our ears need to be tuned to that symphony.

In one of the very old stories of the ancient middle east a character named Job has just experienced a series of disasters that have taken from him all his property, his sons and daughters and his personal health.  Stunned by these events, he utters words of resignation that include these lines. "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I shall return there."  What mother is this whose womb will receive him again?  What belly can both produce us for birth and receive us in death?  This mother is the one we call Earth. She is the great mother of all.  What we are is what earth is.  Jesus spoke of the water and wind of creation as our true source of being.  That is why, when we die, the dust goes back to the earth as it was.  Dust you are; to dust you shall return.  These words are not a curse.  They are a reminder of something true, a gentle reminder.  To St. Francis of Assissi  they seemed gentle, and so he originated the phrase, "dear Mother Earth."

In times long past, we accepted and recognized that we were governed by the moon.  We feasted its phases and honored the moon for its powers.  We established lunar calendars that are still widely followed in major religions.  Now we rarely speak of it, though our bodies, together with the tides of the seas, still respond to lunar fullness.  In one psalm, it says, "The Lord is your protecting shadow.  The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night."  This comes from the understanding that moonbeams could affect human behavior, adversely as well as positively.  There was a time when folks knew that the moon (luna) could cause lunacy.  Still today, professional police often enlarge the work force during that time of the month.  What the moon does to us is only a token of how totally we remain subject to the forces of God's creation.

A preacher once said “I see no Cross of Christ in all this concern for nature.”  The cross was a dread symbol of Rome’s military domination in the days of Jesus and earliest followers.  The cross is a sign of suffering, a fitting symbol for all suffering like the suffering of Jesus who was handed over to be crucified by the imperial power of Rome. A crowd of Jerusalem mothers followed him to his execution, weeping for him as they had probably wept for many other sons who had been victims of injustice.  Jesus resurrection was God’s answer to that act of Roman imperial power and Jerusalem’s priestly power combined.  Thus, it seems to me that whenever we see suffering at the hands of governmental or religious or economic power that simply forces its will upon others we see a true sign of the cross.  Yet perhaps nature herself endures the same.  When greed drives entrepreneurs to destroy the habitats of other creatures in the process of exploitation, is not nature enduring its multiple crosses of suffering and death?  Perhaps the cross has lost its meaning.  Done in gold or polished stone, it no longer suggests suffering.  We must remember that all unjust suffering—be it persons or ecosystems—in God’s world is a sign of the cross.  Wherever there is such suffering, we must be the agents of healing. 

The Sinai peninsula is an arid, rocky, mountainous desert.  So fiercely and relentlessly does the sun beat upon it that even the water brooks retreat to subterranean flows that can be reached only by removing large rocks and reaching down.  Somewhere in that desert peninsula is a holy mountain, the one upon which Moses heard the voice of God speak the law in the natural language of thunder and lightning, dense cloud and a groaning of the rocks that sounded like a gigantic ram's horn being blown.  Moses translated the language of God into the human language of his people.  What he spoke were the basic laws by which they should live as a people.  There was a time when people thought that all laws come from God, for the laws of nature, with which we cannot argue, surely come from the Creator.  In our modern democracies, however, we make laws for ourselves and fancy that we can make them and change them as we please.  We also fancy that we can tamper with the laws of nature, concocting all sorts of destructive combinations through our knowledge of the chemical elements, engineering genetics as we wish and even fooling around with atoms to make our frightening bombs of mass destruction.  The sense of awe that Moses and his people experienced at the mountain in the Sinai peninsula has all but gone from our consciousness.  We must strive to recapture that sense of awe, that genuine respect for the laws of creation, which are the foundation upon which all others laws must be based.