God’s First Gift

A tree reached out to me yesterday.
A leaf, fresh from birth motioned
to me to take a look and I
saw thin veins echoing my own.

On this Mother’s Day she
reminds me that many
are the relatives
giving birth.

It is said that it takes a
village to raise a child;
I think that it takes
a forest, or ocean,
or mountain, or leaf
to raise a soul.

There are many ways to
be born, to live, to die but
there is only one way to
know yourself and that is
by paying obeisance to
the earth, our first Mother,
God’s first gift.

Breathless

I’ve been thinking about
my last act and imagine
it to be an exhale. With it
I’ll hallow every breath that
has followed my first act –
inhaling – so many years ago,
fresh from the womb. The tomb,
then, will receive me breathless.
Each in and exhale I’ve made will
have met and made their way
into the world of Spirit – traces
of my days hanging in the air
long after I am dug into the ground,
cradled in the arms of my mother.

People Look Easter

The earth is sacred in so many ways;
here lay our beloved and here
one day the earth will hold
me too, as it did You until
the cardinal sang and You sprang
from the grave where
yesterday underground
You preached to
roots and the fungi clinging to them symbiotically, and to
worm and the soil she so benevolently creates, and to
subterranean water streams and coal seams aching to stay put.
You preached to these and to my ancestors too
as I know You will do the day I make my way
into the earth from whence I came and
from which You shoot forth with
Yours in tow.

Being Between

There is power between
these two trees, where
I sit and ponder
Adam and Eve,
Earth and Life.

In this yard, cicadas sing the day
and crickets night
while quiet holds the between
that both settles and sends.

But now I sit – tree crowns intersect overhead
and under my feet roots intertwine.
I am held by these two friends:
sheltered above, buoyed below with
the earth beneath being Adam of another kind,
and I – a kind of earth, a child of life – am
grateful today to be between
earth to earth,
ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.

Akin to Earth

Yesterday was the spring equinox. It was a glorious and gorgeous day and although a good bit of it was spent inside marking, at one point my wife came in to pull me out to see snow drops raising their holy hooded heads from the ground. I wandered over to the corner of the yard to see how my little bur oak tree is doing, and bending down I could see some buds starting to form on it. Walking back to the house, I notice our backyard maple tree crying sweet tears of joy at the turning of the earth towards the sun. Everything seemed to be waking up.

The day before, I was looking out of my office at this same yard as I was preparing for noon-day pause at “chapel.” It was online and this was the Friday in which we do “Settlers’ Work,” pondering how those who are not Indigenous can educate ourselves around the reality of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, and the Calls for Justice from the national report on MMIWG. We always begin this time with a land acknowledgement, remembering that the land on which Laurier and Luther are located were deeded to the Haudenosaunee with the Haldimand Tract of 1784. This was also traditional territory of the Anishinabeg and Neutral Peoples. As I do this, I often think about a lesson I am learning from the land. On Friday I mentioned that we often talk as if mother earth is waking up in the spring, and suddenly it struck me like a ton of bricks that this same mother earth is falling asleep on the opposite side of the globe! She is waking up and falling asleep at the same time.

I am increasingly informed by the idea that this earth is our relative, our mother – as per Indigenous perspectives. And this invites us to imagine that in some ways we are like the earth, if she is our mother. Interestingly other worldviews share this perspective of our being imaged after the earth. The ancient Greeks considered the human to be a micro-cosmos. And the Hebraic name for the original, mythic male was Adam, derived from the word for dust, or dirt, and the name for female was Eve, derived from the word for life. Humans are living dirt. We are dust and to dust we shall return. We are akin to that from whence we came and to whither we go.

The earth wakes and sleeps at the same time. How about us? How might we experience this simultaneous arrival and departure; taking up and setting down; being born and dying? I suppose this is evident in every transition in life: from being a babe to being a child to being a teenager to being a young adult to being a not so young adult to being an elderly adult. Each stage is leaving behind and a coming to. There is both death and life in birth, life and death. This is the paradox of our existence. Paradox means contrary to opinion, or in opposition to how things appear: death is a being born just as surely as being born is a dying, since life itself is a journey of death and death is a journey of life. Of course we are taught to fear death by many forces. But our mother teaches us that dying is not the end of life but its transitioning into a new form, a point well illustrated in the lessons of Lent, a time of marking the dying in life as life in dying.

At Their Feet

These plants on my windowsill
watch me day in and out,
looking about my office, they
track my comings and goings,
sniggering at my sweltering
sense of self-importance.

These plants are close to the earth
and hold the long view, knowing that
instantaneously – in a geological sense – I
will be in the earth feeding their fellows.

These plants also cheer me on, when I
close my laptop and play with the rocks
in the silica-now-glass container on
“my” oak tree-now-desk.

These plants weep when
I fail to taste my apple, when
I forget to thank them, when
I refuse to listen to their call
to pinch myself
alive.

These plants are poets of the first order:
Aloe Vera and Christmas Cactus – and when
I am wise, I sit at their feet, in a manner of speaking.

Just Before Dawn’s Light

Here is light plating earth;
sliver sightings of a world not yet

green nor gold, a

pre-dawn pewter that

stems birds just

at the cusp of their awakening

taking choristers’

breath away. All of

this before gold

gilds the earth and

me in wonder at its incipient

coronation – a beneficiary – at this

now silvered sight that

calls, nay, bawls us all into being as

earth is born yet again.

Post-Trash Dreams

My middlest daughter, N, has taken up the cause of garbage-less living. She is new to this and shares her enthusiasm infectiously, reporting joys at finding this or that way to circumvent destining bits of life to the trash. She dutifully takes her own cloth produce bags to the grocery store, buys meat at butchers who do not use plastic and has located a bamboo toothbrush which is kind to the environment. N. is committed to the cause but is not ideological. She sometimes breaks her own rules, does not preach her lifestyle, but rather lives it winsomely. She is not in your face about it but makes public choices that signal a different set of values. In a way, she is living out what would be an attractive paradigm for any who are trying to alert others to an alternate lifestyle. Hers is not a coercive, inhumane nor dogmatic approach to a lifestyle change; she leads by attraction rather than shame.

My wife and I are proud of her efforts in this, as are her sisters. In small – and sometimes large – bits we have all taken up the cause in some fashion or another. For a time now, we have pretty much reduced our garbage to food wrapping; our green bin takes care of that which was once destined for landfills and recycling takes over most of the rest. Of course, we are not naïve about this, aware of investigative journalism that has tracked examples of restaurants and such that simply trashed what had landed in refill bins. We know that there are errors and deceits in the world of recycling. But still, this trash-less life is more than a choice about how to be in the world, but also an invitation for how to see the world: as worthy of the deepest care we afford this beloved earth, a gift of God.

We have been trying, in small ways, to lessen the amount of garbage we send to the curb. We try to avoid massive packaging but that is not always easy. Hard choices need to be made often, too often. Part of the problem, it seems is the big box reality that makes quick, daily trips to a local grocer outside of the reach of most. Instead we have to travel across town to acquire what we need and in so doing buy more and more that is deeply packaged. We have been chatting a bit recently around the dinner table about the older days when plastic was not ubiquitous. Memories of paper-bags for groceries as well as the pink paper meat wrapping have taken my wife and me to our childhood. This memory, for example, just this last Saturday inspired me, when buying some fish at the local store, to forgo the plastic bag around my paper wrapped fish. The other day I put my zucchini in my grocery cart without the requisite piece of plastic to protect a skin that I will wash and peel in either event.

I am intrigued by the commitment of many young people on this and like fronts. When I was their age I concerned myself with the most trivial of things. Many of the youth and young adults I know are open to the world and engaged in justice, and for that I am glad. While our contributions and theirs may be incremental, the reach of our actions are far when we live simply with integrity and in joy. Faith communities have much to learn from young activists on this front. May their tribe increase!!

Sacred You

The world is scarred, and
its people bleed; their
tears stain oceans. Earth’s
skin is torn; hope
evaporates. Dreaming
reverts again to nightmared
sleep that leaves, that left
both Mother and child bereft.

 

And yet You come, You
Healer of our Every Ill, You
Balm in Gilead, in Syria, in Ecuador, in Attawapiskat –
rippling across globe like
pebbled waves – as dogged as
spring’s march, sap’s flow, universe’s expanse.

 

You kiss this scar we are
and etch beauty across pain.
You come to us again.
You come.
You.

Charmed Again

I send this missive from Copenhagen, where I am on route from a conference in southern Denmark. I arrived here yesterday and leave tomorrow, and so the day afforded me the opportunity to do a little looking about. This is not the first time I have been to Copenhagen, a city I find to be utterly charming. This morning I made my way to Marmorkirken, a dome marble church across from the Royal Palace. The music was beautiful, and the service meaningful even though my Danish is less than elemental. Today is All Saints Day, and taking communion at a half round altar rail (whose other half extends into eternity, where it is attended by those we remember today) is always a powerful experience. I then went to the Danish Jewish Museum, where I learned a bit more about the incredible (and successful) efforts of the Danish people to protect Jews during the Second World War. Late in the afternoon I took a train ride to the Swedish city of Malmö, not so very far from Denmark and had a lovely walk and meal before returning.

The conference that brought me to Denmark was entitled “Luther from the Subaltern –the Alternative Luther.” Scholars from around the world spoke to themes either neglected in Luther studies or to new challenges that emerge in studying Luther today. My modest contribution addressed the manner in which the earth and its well-being were especially important to Luther and provide us with a meeting place for him and our contemporaries as we consider ecological concerns. I thought of that as I returned from the railway station and passed an electric charging station for cars. Increasingly people are mindful of the need to tread the earth carefully, which is somewhat easier in a place like Copenhagen. Major parts of downtown are car free, and so you see a plethora of bicycles and many people on foot. The public transit is to die for and unsurprisingly people are generally more fit. Of course, to some degree, Copenhagen and like cities are beneficiaries of wise planning in the past and careful contemporary regulations. Rules about the height of new buildings in the city core, and a concerted effort to keep historic buildings beautiful and functional make for a very fetching city.

When I returned from my train trip, I was going to read in the hotel, but the siren call of the city had me out again. It is rather like an affectionate cat wrapping itself around your leg; begging you to pet it (cat haters please insert an appropriate dynamic equivalent here). The city is inviting, well-run and simply fun to be in. It strikes me that the success of the Danes in design might not be unrelated to their living in well-designed cities. Our environment shapes us, and we shape it as well, which brings me back to Luther. In the mid-20th century there was a school of Luther research in Scandinavia that spoke of Luther’s interest in creation and created matter, asserting that it held as much importance for him as redemption. If we read Luther as if all he offers us are insights into the soul then that is all we will get. But if we anticipate that he has interest in caring for the earth too, we might well find some fodder for future reflections. Luther can’t do our theological work for us, but he can give us tools to attend to our relationships with God, one another and the world as well – a world that includes not only natural beauty, but charming urban space too.