No Bird Sang

Grief

At the end of our Maundy Thursday service at St. Stephen’s last night, the choir sang And No Bird Sang      to help us make the transition from our Maundy Thursday remembrance of the Last Supper to the events of Good Friday. Douglas Wagner’s words begin with this: “Calm was the wind and dark was the sky, when our Lord came to die; Lone on the cross for our sins he did hang, and no bird sang.”

These words resonated strongly for me last night. The Gospels describe the darkness at noon, the way all of creation responded to Jesus' death; the spiritual and the physical are not separated. 

One of my joys this time of year is hearing the birds sing when I wake up in the morning or when I’m outside gardening or sitting on my porch. When I read and think and pray about habitat destruction, pollution, and the effects of global warming on existing ecosystems, I often think about the birds and the joy and comfort their songs and company bring to people. What would our world be like if no bird sang? Even if we grieved nothing else we stand to lose as a result of environmental degradation, the thought of a world with few or no birds brings considerable grief.

Last year Good Friday fell on Earth Day. Last year’s Good Friday post  suggested that grief – our Good Friday grief as Christians and our grief for the ways we have harmed the earth – connected the two, and that the Solemn Collects of our Good Friday liturgy can help us through this grief. When we pray the Solemn Collects, rather than staying stuck under the dead weight of grief, we open our hearts to the concerns of the Church and the world.

This past year has seen more extreme weather events, more floods, droughts, storms, and fires, a continuing rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and thinning of the Arctic Ice. The environmental pressures on human beings and the other things that live on the earth are great. Through it all, we find our ability to cope with our grief and find hope as we did last year:

It can be difficult to know where to begin doing something with our grief for the earth. With no significant national or international effort to address climate change or prevent future oil spills or stop covering the planet with plastic, we know our efforts are valiant but probably not enough. Yet just as our hearts are touched by Good Friday, our hearts are broken open by this grief, too. Prayers for the earth and her people are a good place to begin. We might pray for the Church and all people, praying that we continue to find meaning and hope in our lives even as the chances of sustaining life as we have known it on our planet get increasingly smaller. We might pray for open eyes, ears, minds, and hearts, for the ability to understand what we are facing and the will to do something about it.
 The third of the Solemn Collects asks for the cry of those in misery and need to come to God; it also prays for God to “give us…the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us.” Gathering our strength and doing whatever we can to prevent and alleviate the human misery that results from environmental degradation is the only choice we have as followers of Christ…Making the choice to acknowledge the problems we face and work to address them with so little evidence that we can succeed is where we draw on our faith and our hope; making the choice is where we get out from under our grief and, drawing on our faith for strength, gather energy for the work ahead.

Pigeon Holes, Stewardship, and the Holy Trinity

This coming Sunday I plan to be at St. Matthew’s, Alliance, to preach and to see in person some of the parish’s work toward “going green”. I’m looking forward to this visit and others through the summer and early fall. Several parishes in our diocese have made some changes to be better stewards of creation, and some are looking for ways to do more now that they have found the initial changes to be workable and worthwhile. It will be exciting to see what sorts of grassroots efforts are in progress, and to help make connections between these parishes so that we can all learn from one another.

As I’ve talked with others recently about some of the places I’ll be visiting and about the creation care work I’m doing, I’ve noticed the way some folks immediately (and wrongly) pigeon-hole various communities – expressing surprise that some would have any interest in environmental stewardship, sure that others must already be fairly sophisticated about creation care. These stereotypes are based for the most part on the perceived economic interests along with the average citizen’s economic class and educational level in each community. Along with the community stereotypes there also seem to be some assumptions about the traits of people who would care about God’s creation, about people who would be “environmentalists”.

Of course, faithful stewardship of our time, talent, and treasure isn’t bound by geography or socio-economic level, and faithful stewardship of creation – our dearest treasure, which makes all other treasure possible – isn’t any different. Perhaps it’s the political climate of recent years that makes us so ready to label one another and to view the world in an oversimplified, black-and-white sort of way. However, as people become more and more aware both of the environmental challenges we face and of the things we can do to ensure environmental stability, it becomes obvious that a desire to help care for creation is part of being human. People from all sorts of communities, all sorts of socio-economic groups, and all sorts of political persuasions and religious groups are changing some habits and doing what they can to contribute to the health and wholeness of our natural environment.


Trinity Sunday reminded us that God is a Trinity, a relationship among three Persons: God the Father/Creator; God the Son, incarnate God yet fully human; and God the Spirit, pure spirit. Any attempt to simplify God to any one of these three Persons keeps us from a whole and healthy relationship with the Living God. Similarly, there is a rich and complex web of relationships among God, humankind, and the rest of creation. To be whole and healthy human beings, we tend carefully to our relationships with God and creation as well as with one another. Part of the goodness of stewardship – environmental or otherwise – is that in taking care of all that God has given us, we end up taking better care of one another and of ourselves, and we grow closer to God.

As our understanding of the complexity of environmental stewardship grows, it will become clearer that this is a task that touches everyone and work that belongs to everyone who lives on this planet. In healing the Earth, we may very well come to understand and better appreciate the richness and complexities of one another, to heal our human relationships while we heal our planet.

Contemplation: Abiding in Love

Like many other Nebraskans, I have this year’s vegetable garden planted and spend a little time most days checking on it and weeding, watering, or doing whatever else needs to be done. My garden is small by Nebraska standards: two little rectangles in my yard, along with a few tomato and pepper plants tucked away in containers and odd spots in flower beds. Apart from watering during dry spells, daily maintenance isn’t really necessary, but, like most gardeners, I like to watch the garden grow. What I really do much of the time that I’m “working in the garden” is looking. Some May days the sun’s light and warmth make young plants grow so that the change is evident from one hour to the next.

The looking, though, isn’t confined to my little garden. The longer, warmer days of May give us good opportunity to look at both the plants and animals we live among. In our little piece of Nebraska this spring, I’ve watched baby squirrels figuring out how to climb up and down a tree, a mother rabbit carrying mouthfuls of grass clippings that were mulch for my garden but are now a nest for her babies, and many birds raising their young. And there is more to see: stars, clouds, rainstorms, lightning.

This week I started reading Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons from Black Holes, Supernovas, and Other Wonders of the Universe by Judy Cannato. In the book’s introduction, Judy Cannato talks about contemplation as “a long loving look at what is real” (p. 12). This involves both an attitude of compassion and mercy rather than disapproval, and the ability to discern what is real from things that superficially mimic the real. Finding joy in looking at the world around us is living contemplatively.

When we think about these things in light of our recent Sunday Gospel readings from John 15, we see another dimension of Christ’s invitation to abide in his love. Jesus explains that we are the branches of the vine that is Christ; we are fruitful only if we stay connected to Christ, only if we live our lives rooted in Christ’s love. We will abide in Christ’s love, he says, if we obey his commandments; the commandment he gives is that we love one another.

That love for one another involves a “loving look”, looking at one another with compassion rather than disapproval. The way to stay connected to Christ, the way to be rooted in Christ’s love, is to cultivate gratitude, openness, and love in our hearts. The way to abide in Christ’s love is to learn how to look contemplatively, with compassion and mercy.

Looking at everything in the world in this way helps us to experience our connectedness to one another and to all of creation. We are indeed branches connected to a single vine; if we experience ourselves – either as individual persons or as a species -- as independent of everything else, we have lost sight of reality. The science about pollution of our air and water and about global warming bears this out; everything is interconnected, and when we live as if our actions had no consequences for anyone or anything else, we put our own lives in danger.

A friend reminded me today of something E.B. White said in an interview with Israel Shenker in 1969: "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." The world teaches us this false dichotomy between saving and savoring, between action and contemplation. It’s not only a false choice, but a dangerous way to think about the world.

The vine parable reminds us that we won’t succeed in improving or saving the world unless we take the time to enjoy or savor it; our work won’t be fruitful unless it is rooted in love, and love requires the loving look, the deep knowing, that is contemplation. Savoring the extra hours of looking at the wonders around us this time of year is in the long run one of the most productive things we can do! Enjoy!

Extra bits

The Episcopal Ecological Network has sent out two messages since Friday: one about the Arctic sea ice melting faster than had been expected, and the other one about the ice bridge that held the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place in Antarctica shattering. Both are dramatic changes; both are very sobering. The reality of global warming seems to be hitting us much sooner than scientists had predicted. As ice is lost from both poles, there is more open water, which accelerates the warming of both the air and the oceans.

Our unseasonably wintry weather on the Great Plains this weekend makes it easy to pretend that Earth’s overall climate isn’t warming. Some people joke about needing more global warming but really do understand the bigger picture; others really don’t understand that cold snaps can occur as part of an overall warming trend. (The Dot Earth blog had a useful post on April 3 about temperature fluctuations within an overall warming trend.)

Economic, social, and political instability have dominated the news this week. Some of these issues seem closer to hand for many of us, and may seem more urgent than environmental issues. But without environmental stability, the resources we spend in an attempt to create economic, social, and political stability can’t do their job, and ultimately won't matter. These two news stories from the opposite ends of our planet are a sign that things are changing fairly quickly and dramatically. We live far away from these regions, far away from any seacoasts, but we do live on the same planet, where everything is interconnected – all sorts of places, and all sorts of systems from the economy to personal relationships to the environment.

As many of us spend extra time in prayer and reflection this Holy Week, let's remember our Earth and the work of stewardship that God has given us. Let's remember our brothers and sisters who are most immediately vulnerable to climate change, and pray for people who are working to repair the damage to our atmosphere and restore overall environmental stability.

Looking for Nature

Here in Nebraska we have had a variety of weather the past couple of weeks, with some days inviting us to spend time outdoors, and other days leaving us happy to shelter indoors.

On one of those more inviting days, my daughter and I decided to walk at Lake Hastings, an artificial lake surrounded partly by both residential property and some city parkland. I took my camera along hoping to snap some “nature” photos – trees in early bud, birds, and so forth.

Now we weren’t walking in “nature” as I might usually think of it; we were in a city park walking on concrete, and it was difficult to get a photo without catching some bit of a park bench, disc golf basket, or sidewalk in the photo. I said something offhand about not being able to take “nature” photos there because of all the stuff made by human beings, and that got us into a discussion of what we mean by ‘nature’ and ‘natural’.

If I’m walking along a creek bed and come upon a beaver dam, I consider that an interesting part of a nature walk. Why not view the dam that human beings built to create this lake in the same way? Why distinguish human beings and our creations from everything else in the world? After all, human beings are part of God’s creation.

Human Beings and “Nature”
Setting us and our products apart from other living things tends to dispose us toward just the sort of thinking that most “nature-lovers” want to avoid, the sort of thinking that sees the rest of creation as resources for us to use however we choose for whatever human purposes we choose. It makes it easy to abuse the resources at our disposal to the point where we find ourselves now, slowly waking up to the real limits of certain resources and the negative consequences of our often careless treatment of creation. Alternatively, this distinction between human products and everything else can lead to the sort of thinking that romanticizes “nature” to the point of ignoring the needs of human beings, setting up a clash between environmentalism and issues of human justice.

We do, in fact, use words like ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ to categorize certain experiences and issues. Even if the impact of human beings on the air, water, and web of life on this planet can now be considered to be all-pervasive, it’s still useful to be able to have words that somehow name the idea of something untouched by human activity. On the other hand, it seems very important to remember that the distinction that such words seem to describe is an artificial one. I first heard the phrase ‘built environment’ from my green architect friend Sara Sweeney, and that seems a useful way to name the distinction; it reminds us that what we have built is indeed a part of that interconnected web of everything around us that is our actual environment.

Caring for Creation and One Another
When used carefully, the phrase ‘creation care’ can point us in the same direction, reminding us that Christian stewardship extends to all of creation, including human beings and the things we produce. Caring for creation includes caring for one another. Looking at the eight Millennium Development Goals that are aimed at halving extreme poverty and disease by 2015 is one way to remind ourselves that everything around us makes up our environment; those issues we place in the environmental category when we are speaking more casually are in fact intertwined with several other issues that we might not initially place in this category called ‘the environment’. MDG #7 is the goal of ensuring environmental sustainability in the ordinary sense of the world – reversing the loss of natural resources and increasing the amount of clean water on our planet. This goal impacts other goals related to improving human health and economic development, and the way we achieve those goals will in turn impact environmental sustainability.

The Church has traditionally worked to relieve the suffering of people who are hungry, sick, or living in poverty. In today’s world, working to ensure environmental sustainability is a necessary piece of that traditional church work, and effective work in those traditional areas will include attention to environmental sustainability. When we are being careful with language and using our words with precision, we realize that religious environmentalism is a new perspective on some very traditional concerns of religious folks. And still, when it’s time to relax and retreat and look for God in the world around us, we all know what a “nature walk” is, and we know that it might be just the thing to remind us of the presence of the Creator of all that is in everything around us.

As for my photos that day at Lake Hastings: I ended up with a series of pictures from the edge of the lake. Over the winter, all sorts of plastic objects have been washed up along with the more “natural” debris of sticks and dead fish. The number of bottle caps, pieces of plastic cups, drinking straws, and bits of plastic toys was shocking, and made me wonder what effect all of this has on the fish, birds, and other living things in and around this little lake, and what effect all of that has on the human community. The plastic bits along the shore of our local lake are as much a part of our environment as are the beautiful sunsets and the snow geese that have arrived this week. Removing them from the picture too often allows us to deny the reality of the consequences of our choices, and the reality of the work we have been given as stewards of creation.

Ecology and Homekeeping: Gladdening our Hearts

Most Americans think of February 2 as Groundhog Day. Much is made of Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil and whether he sees his shadow. Here in Nebraska, where we are often blessed with some noticeably warm sunshine at the beginning of February, we have our own Unadilla Bill. Even if it leads to a prediction of six more weeks of winter, it’s hard to feel bad about a sunny Nebraska day at the beginning of February.

In the Church, February 2 is the Presentation of our Lord, when we remember Mary and Joseph presenting the baby Jesus at the temple forty days after his birth. Luke’s account of this event tells about Simeon and Anna recognizing the baby as the Savior, the Messiah. This day is also known as the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, and as Candlemas.

This point forty days after the Nativity is midway between the dates we use now for the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring. Some old calendars considered this to be the beginning of spring, and in places with milder winters, early February does seem like the beginning of spring. Even here in Nebraska, we begin to see the earliest signs of winter’s end. Flocks of geese were in the sky around Grand Island on Sunday, and we know the first migrating cranes will arrive soon. The days are noticeably longer, the sunlight feels warmer, and sunny days usually bring about some thawing of ice and snow.


Homekeeping
The folk traditions around this time of year involve not only trying to predict exactly when winter will end and spring begin, but also have some elements of purification and preparation for new life. We think of spring cleaning as something to do when winter is definitely gone, but the tradition of spring cleaning probably shares it origins with the early February blessing of new candles and preparation for spring. Spring cleaning is something we no longer practice with the gusto of previous generations, but it wasn’t long ago that the work of thoroughly cleaning and airing everything in the home was essential after a long winter in close quarters heated by coal, wood, corn cobs, or dung. Good homekeeping was necessary for both survival and comfort.

The root ‘eco-‘, as in ‘ecology’, refers to an environment or habitat, and comes from the Greek root for house or household. The question of the relationship between human beings and our natural environment, God’s good creation, is in a way a question of housekeeping or homekeeping. A spirituality of how we live in our environment is a wider application of a spirituality of homekeeping.

I think about the women who were homesteaders in Nebraska, living initially in sodhouses that were very different from the sorts of homes they had known “back East” or in Europe. The winters must have seemed terribly long. What joy they must have felt when they saw the first signs of winter’s end! Our challenge in thinking about human beings and the environment is not really very different from the challenge of these homekeepers on the prairie: Given where we find ourselves, given what is, how do we maximize the beauty and comfort of our home so that we not only can survive, but also can nurture the total well-being and health of those living in our home?

Beyond sustainability
There is today a lot of talk of sustainability, of stopping and reversing the damage to our environment so that we can continue to survive. But good ecology, good planetary homekeeping, points beyond mere survival to supporting an environment in which we can thrive and flourish, living fully as God’s sons and daughters. One of the table graces in The Book of Common Prayer (p. 835) says “Blessed are you, O Lord God…for you give us food to sustain our lives and make our hearts glad.” God’s gifts are meant not only for our sustenance or survival, but to gladden our hearts, to give us joy. A well-prepared, nourishing meal shared with good company feeds more than our bodies!

What other sorts of practices in our homes, parishes, and communities lead us to care for creation and one another in ways that help us to go beyond mere survival to thriving and flourishing? What nourishes both body and soul, making our hearts glad? Please click on Comments and share something that sustains both body and soul.