Apples and Manna

Donella H. Meadows was the founder of the Sustainability Institute and an important voice in environmental science.  Today for the first time I read something she had written.  The circumstances under which I read a brief but beautifully constructed reflection from Donella Meadows perhaps serve to illustrate the interconnectedness of all things that she described.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours on my own at the St. Benedict Center north of Schuyler. The spiritual directors commissioned in the Diocese of Nebraska gathered here today to check in with one another and then attend a retreat here this weekend.  The St. Benedict Center is set in a beautiful spot, and paths and the land around the retreat center are maintained in a way that makes it inviting and easy to get out and spend time outdoors.

I set out with my camera after lunch today to see what I could see. The orchard is a favorite place for me to walk; the change of seasons seems highlighted by the seasonal changes in the fruit trees. Today the trees were full of apples. They looked so good that I eventually picked one to eat, aware that I hadn’t done such a thing since childhood. It was one of the best apples I’ve ever eaten – fragrant, crisp, juicy, and sweet. Sitting on the grass savoring the apple, I felt a strong connection to everything around me and, through that, to God.

When I had finished my walk and returned to my room to rest a bit before the spiritual directors’ meeting, I picked up Earth Gospel, the book of daily prayers I’ve mentioned before in this blog. The midday reflection was this from Donella H. Meadows:

This fresh apple, still cold and crisp from the morning dew, is not-me only until I eat it. When I eat, I eat the soil that nourished the apple. When I drink, the waters of the earth become me. With every breath I take in I draw in not-me and make it me. With every breath out I exhale me into not-me.

If the air and the waters and the soils are poisoned, I am poisoned. Only if I believe the fiction of the lines more than the truth of the lineless planet, will I poison the earth, which is myself.

Today’s Gospel reading for the Daily Office was John 6:27-40. Jesus compares the manna in the wilderness to the bread of life, “the true bread from heaven”.  The apple itself fed my body; the experience of eating that apple fresh from the tree and then coming back to discover this piece of writing fed my entire being.


*****

Interpreting the Signs

The Gospel lesson for today is Luke 12:49-56. It ends with these words:

54 He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. ⁵⁵And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. ⁵⁶You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?


Jesus was speaking about the signs of what was happening spiritually, signs that were there for the seeing but that people either could not or would not piece together. But God gives us all sorts of signs, all sorts of evidence of what is happening in every aspect of our lives. We can learn a lot if we open our eyes and ears to the signs around us and allow ourselves to see the realities -- the beauty and joy and the pain and sadness -- of our world.


This morning’s Gospel lesson along with our Epistle reading from Hebrews about the “great cloud of witnesses” tells us that Christ’s words weren’t meant to lull us into disengagement with the world around us, but rather to strengthen us to go out into the world in Christ’s name. Allowing ourselves to look and listen and see the signs around us is a necessary part of discipleship.

When I sit down at my computer to do online text study or make notes on the lessons during the week, I see news headlines. Throughout the past week, there were daily headlines about a pattern of extreme weather events that follow the predictions of climate scientists, I wondered about our inability or refusal as a society to piece together the evidence and do what we need to do to lessen the extent and effects of climate change.


Keeping in mind Jesus’ admonition to pay attention to the signs of our times, I'm sharing a list of some of the headlines I noticed this week:

• Huge ice island could cause threat to oil, shipping 
• Hundreds evacuated, 1 dead after flooding in Iowa
• Ames opens drinking water sites for residents
• China landslide: More than 700 people confirmed dead
• Smoke from raging fires coats Moscow
• One-fifth of Pakistan is underwater
• Severe thunderstorms hit areas of DC, MA, VA: Causes flooding, power outages
• Long hot summer of fire, floods fits predictions…

****

(Added at 2:12 CDT)  Here's an additional headline fresh this afternoon from the Associated Press: "UN chief: Never seen anything like Pakistan floods".

More encouraging words: "Eat, pray, love: A new green gospel"

The political response to climate change has been disappointing, but Mallory McDuff in an engaging op-ed piece in USA Today called "Eat, pray, love: A new green gospel" describes how a religious response to climate change can "inspire awe rather than disappointment".

Encouraging Words, the previous post on this blog, talked about others who are looking for hopeful ways to respond to the big environmental challenges we face. To have another piece appear so soon after is perhaps a sign that people who care for the environment -- and especially people of faith who are concerned about the environment -- are not giving in to despair but are bringing a message of hope and renewal into the conversation. This does not deny the severity of the problem, but rather keeps us from the paralysis of despair and keeps us on the path of faith and hope on which Christians are called to walk.

Mallory McDuff, a fellow Episcopalian and GreenFaith Fellow, is the author of Natural Saints: How People of Faith are Working to Save God's Earth, which is due to be released soon by Oxford University Press.

Encouraging Words

Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai shares a parable about a hummingbird as part of today's post on the Speaking of Faith blog.  Anne Breckbill writes this short post about "outrage fatigue", about the feeling that one person's efforts are too insignificant, too little, to make any difference. The hummingbird parable gives us reason to make the effort anyway.

Given the events of this summer -- the oil gushing into the Gulf; the unusual weather, including floods, in many parts of the United States; the terrible floods in Pakistan; the failure of the U.S Senate to pass legislation that would begin to address climate change; the heat, drought, fires, and failure of the wheat crop in Russia among them -- it's good to remind ourselves that there is still reason to try, still reason, as Wangari Matthai says at the end of her story, to do the best we can.

A recent post on the Climate Progress blog summarizes some of the climate data from this summer and talks about the changing attitude toward climate among the leaders in Russia as the reality of climate change unfolds in that country. It's good to look at this post and the news in general as a reality check. Anne Breckbill's Speaking of Faith piece links to a January article from the satirical "news source" The Onion that presents another view of what one person can do: 'How Bad for the Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder. It's good to look at for some dark humor as well as its own sort of reality check.

We Christians know a lot about hope, about living into something that we cannot yet see or even imagine but that faith tells us is something worth pursuing. Something all of us hummingbirds can do on a daily basis is to share our hope and give one another encouragement in what Fr. Thomas Berry called "The Great Work". I recommend reading the short post on Speaking of Faith today and taking a couple of minutes to listen to Wangari Maathai tell the story of the hummingbird!

Like the First Morning...

 Sometime in July I came across a book called Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God’s Creation. Sam Hamilton-Poore, the author, has set  it up in such a way that it can be used for daily personal prayer in the morning, midday, and evening in a four-week cycle. I bought a copy and set it aside to use this month, beginning today, with the dual intention of deepening my own prayers for creation and of sharing my experience with this book on this blog after using it for a couple of weeks or so. I still intend to do both things, but the way today’s morning readings and prayers resonated with the Gospel lesson in our Daily Office cycle led me to share something of today’s experience.

Today’s Gospel lesson was John 1:1-18: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Scripture passage for the first day of Earth Gospel is Genesis 1:1-5: “ In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth… ”

Before introducing the Genesis passage, Earth Gospel began with a quotation from Joseph Renville’s hymn “Many and great”  (Hymn 385 in The Hymnal 1982), followed by the hymn “Morning has broken” (Hymn 8)  which suggests that each new morning is “God’s recreation of the new day", of the first morning God created.

Sitting outdoors on a warm but pleasant morning hearing a variety of birdsongs and seeing flowers in bloom and squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees, I thought about “Morning has broken/Like the first morning” and about Genesis 1:5, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”.  I tried to think about the first time something we would recognize as a bird sang something we would name as birdsong, the first time something we would name as a flower bloomed, the first time creatures we would call squirrels chased each other up and down something we would recognize as a tree. When did the first bird sing, and what was that like? In some way, surely, that first birdsong changed everything! When did the first flower bloom? When did a human being first stand on a beach and play in the surf? When did we first name the sorts of birds I hear in central Nebraska, and how long did they sing before anyone named them?

It is as difficult for me to imagine the “first morning”, the first of all of these things that feed my soul now, as it is for me to imagine the last of them. Thinking about the last birdsong is especially poignant to me, as their songs have brought joy to me since my earliest memories and since we know the birds are in trouble. Loss of habitat, pollution, and climate all endanger a variety of bird species. (See also the March 17 2010 post State of the Birds.) There may be in my lifetime, as I continue living, a last time I hear certain bird songs in my location.

It’s impossible and yet wonderful to try to think about that beginning John describes with the Word that both was with God and was God. Part of the difficulty of that effort is the abstract nature of the Word before the Word became flesh and lived among us. However, that may be a small part of the difficulty, as it seems equally impossible and yet wonderful to try thinking about the beginning of the things we can see and hear around us.

There is some hope in remembering that thinking about both the first and the last brings a profound sense of wonder, despite the first bringing wonder at unimaginable joy and the last bringing wonder at unimaginable grief.  By bringing us to a place of wonder, both remind us of the profound importance of environmental stewardship. The beginning and the end are beyond our understanding, but not so far beyond our minds as to prevent our growing in wonder and gratitude at God’s creation and at our responsibility to join God in the holy work of sustaining the beauty and goodness of creation.

Extra Bits

This morning I read an interesting short reflection, Earth to Humanity: You Are Really Blowing It, by Lillian Daniel about Hosea, the Gulf oil gusher, and "global weirding".  I'm thinking more and more that while all sorts of people can lead us in the practical steps of environmental stewardship -- lowering our carbon footprints, recycling, using fewer chemicals in cleaning and gardening, and so forth -- and that all of those things are important for us to do, the church, the Body of Christ, has a perhaps unique call to be a witness to what humankind is doing and has done to God's creation.  As Lillian Daniel's reflection suggests, we are called to listen carefully and prayerfully to the cries of the other creatures great and small with whom we share this planet.

Hope

Summer mornings are good for the soul. With an early sunrise – just a little after 6:00 in central Nebraska – and pleasant temperatures at the beginning of most days, it’s easy to find time before the day’s activities to step outside and look and listen. For some of us, sitting on a porch or going for a walk while experiencing the sounds, sights, and smells of a summer morning helps us center down into prayer and be aware of God’s presence much more easily than we do indoors on dark winter mornings.  It’s a lovely and encouraging part of the day.

Most mornings this summer I'm sitting outdoors to read the lessons appointed for the Daily Office, spend some time in contemplative prayer, and then pray the Daily Devotions in A New Zealand Prayer Book (He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa).  The peacefulness of this time and the sheer joy of beginning the day with bird song and sunlight, with the greens of the grasses and trees, an often blue sky, and the colors of summer flowers contrasts with the discouragement brought on by the many environmental concerns facing us this summer. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as oil continues to spew into the ocean and, closer to home, the concerns about the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline crossing the fragile ecosystem of our Sandhills are in the news almost every day. Our failure to decrease greenhouse gas emissions when such a decrease might have prevented significant climate change is still there in the background (despite ongoing attempts from some quarters to deny the facts); this summer’s violent storms and flooding rains in the United States give us a reminder of what many scientists say will become our new norm as the oceans warm. Legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an attempt to rein in the most extreme consequences of climate change continues to stall. And, meanwhile, there is a constant if quiet stream of news about plastic pollution, species extinction, etc.

This contrast between, on the one hand, the summer morning feelings of peace and joy in God’s creation and the hope those bring with them, and, on the other hand, the feelings of helplessness and discouragement about our failure to care for creation and the despair about those bring with them, has been part of my reflections in recent weeks.

This morning’s Epistle lesson from Romans begins with Paul talking about the hope that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” and ends with his talking about the nature of hope. We hope, says Paul, not for what we can see happening but for something that we cannot yet see. Along with that reading, the prayers for the Saturday morning Daily Devotions in the New Zealand prayer book include these words (p. 134):

Giver of the present, hope for the future:

save us from the time of trial.

When prophets warn us of doom,

of catastrophe and of suffering beyond belief,

Then, God, free us from our helplessness,

and deliver us from evil.

Save us from our arrogance and folly,

for you are God who created the world.

Hope is not denial of reality. Hope is not pretending that our actions, the way we live our lives today, don’t have very sobering consequences. And hope is not thinking that God will suspend the laws of physics and chemistry and make those bad consequences miraculously disappear.

Hope is trust that God will be with us as we walk into the future we are creating. Hope is confidence that if we turn toward God, abandon our "arrogance and folly", and treat God’s creation with reverence, we have a future; hope says that no matter how difficult the future may be or how different from the present with its many comforts, our lives and our relationships with God, with one another, and with creation will still have meaning.

Gratitude can call us back to hope from despair. A beautiful summer’s morning in Nebraska can open our hearts to that gratitude that leads us to hope.