Welcome Home

[Sorry I didn't post something yesterday. I just realized that today is Thursday. It has been a week of fullness. Hopefully this finds your week blessed, too.]

I've been pondering how easy it is to become disconnected from nature when we humans now are considered urban creatures. (I believe it has been in the last ten years that somewhere a few more humans in the world wandered into a city to live that pushed us, as a species, over the border, as it were, from a rural to an urban population.) When we don't experience any wildness, how does that effect our understanding of ourselves, our place in the universe, who God is, our relation to the natural world ... ?

And yet, we long for wildness, in some carefully crafted safe way, because we add parks to our cities. There is a deep seated longing for the wild.

If we are disconnected from nature (or at least are unaware of our connection) how does that impact our countries' policies toward preserving natural "resources" (a biased word?); our companies' policies of extraction; our citizens' choices regarding climate change; or our religions' beliefs about salvation?

"In God we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28) implies that the entire cosmos somehow exists within God. Ephesians puts this a little differently: "There is one God and Creator of all, who is over all, who works through all, and is within all" (Ephesians 4:6).

What if we took this seriously in a deep trinitarian way: celebrating the relationships (or the "web of being") that connect us all?

The crazy thing is that such an idea is in no way new within Christianity. Listen to how Richard Rohr speaks about Bonaventure  (1221 - 1274):

Bonaventure took Francis of Assisi’s lay intuitive genius and spelled it out in an entire philosophy and theology. He wrote: “The magnitude of things . . . clearly manifests . . . the wisdom and goodness of the triune God, who by power, presence and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things.” [1] God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” [2] Bonaventure spoke of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” [3] Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and order of all created things are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God. Now that is quite a lovely and very safe universe to live in. Welcome home!

Are you ready to celebrate being home? 

Blessed be,
Joel

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Quote is from Rohr's Daily Meditations for 30 March 2017.

[1] Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey to God, I, 14, trans. Ewert Cousins (Paulist Press: 1978), 65.
[2] Ibid., 5, 8, 100-101.
[3] Ibid., 5, 8, 100.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “The Great Chain of Being,” Radical Grace, Vol 20 No 2 (CAC: 2007).