Nature Bring Wonderment and Awe

Two interesting articles about philanthropic organizations: the role of daughters and the shadow side of things. And speaking of doing things a little differently, how about the launch of the Vermont Sailing Project.

With clear days come clear nights. The stars have been spectacular! And while there is a sense of smallness (Who am I in this huge vastness of space?), there is more wonderment and awe. Then I read the following by Madeline L'Engle.

Oh, I am in awe of the maker of galaxies and geese, stars and starfish, mercury and men (male and female). Sometimes it is rapturous awe, sometimes it is the numinous dread Jacob felt. Sometimes it is the humble awe of knowing that ultimately I belong to God, to the Maker whose thumb print is on each of us. And that is blessing.
          ~ Madeline L'Engle. Glimpses of Grace. Carole F. Chase ed. 1996:196

May your summer continue to be fulling of wonder, awe and blessing.

Blessed Be

Joel

How Is Your Soul? Need Nature?

How's your soul?

Today is a blustery sort of day here - a real spring day. The sun is out, but it hailed (hard!) at 4:30 or so this a.m., and the clouds are scudding by - predicted to hit gusts of 60 km today. The water is white with froth as it moves over the tide-flats.

There is something about nature - and being in nature - that improves my soul's well being. I don't thing I'm the only one. I believe there is something we humans intrinsically know ... that we need to be outside in touch with nature. I think we all know we loose something when we are cut off from it.

I ran into the following 7 minute interview with Commander Bill King of the Galloway Blazer II fame. The interview takes place when King is 102, about a year before he died. He was one of the participants in the first Golden Globe race, where Galloway Blazer capsized, and he gave up the race. He returned to the sea a short time later (after a refit) and completed a solo-circumnavigation in 1973.

But listen to his reasons for going out to sea. At the time of the interview his was the only surviving World War II submarine commander alive, and the only one who was commanding submarines at both the start and end of the war (not to mention during). He talks about trying to figure a way to deal with his anxiety ... what we'd probably now call PSD.

I can't help but wonder if re-connecting returned soldiers with nature might be helpful - not only to them, but to the world.

I'll let Wendell Berry's Poem conclude today's meditation.

Blessed Be

Joel

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry

Hymns of Harmony

[At the going away party, I felt] grateful to be alive then and there with such good fortune and so many loving, special friends. It was almost too much for me, and I had to wander off to the edge of the redwoods to be alone for a little while. I started listening to the insects absently, until I began to hear patterns and waves of patterns in their music. I could hear one chorus end and another start and hear the creatures all shift and syncopate their music to the new wave, and I realized, for the first time in my life, astounded, that they weren't making random noises, that they were actually singing in huge harmonies, harmonies of sweeping waves, harmonies involving thousands of voices! Ripples of subtle shifts were repeated as heard and transmitted for as far in any direction as I could focus my hearing. I looked up at the sky and the clouds and the stars and moon, and I looked at the silhouettes of the magnificent trees around me, the motion of the branches in the gentle wind. I thought of my many friends who loved me, .... I felt that rare oneness with the universe, that sense that maybe it all does mean something. I felt complete.

~ Reuel Parker

I think this sums up why we need "wild places."
How do we remain connected to the wider/larger harmonies of the world, with God's creation, with a sense of Paradise here and now?
As people on the water, where do we find these moments of astounding connection?
How do we share them with others?
How do they shape our lives as Beloved Children of God?
How do we join in this hymn of praise?

Blessed Be

Advent 3, 2011

Advent Readings for the 3rd Sunday in Advent:
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

Eternal God, in your providence you made all ages
    a preparation for the kingdom of your Son.
Make ready our hearts for the brightness of your glory
    and the fullness of your blessing in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(The Book of Worship 1944, Alt.)

Lighting of the Advent Candles: Third Sunday

We light this candle as a symbol of Christ our Joy.
May the joyful promise of your presence, O God,
    make us rejoice in our hope of salvation.
O come, O come, Emmanuel.

(United Methodist Book of Worship)

This week I am discussing the environment that Jesus was born into: not in terms of politics and economics, but the physical environment, the land. I do not have any direct references to these conditions, so I will have to extrapolate.

Peasant is an interactive term for farmers who are exploited and oppressed - a definition presuming that somewhere there must be exploiters and oppressors. ... aristocrats "live off" peasants. Granted that they so live off, where, then, did they live off? In cities, of course. In agrarians empires, peasants and elites imply, in other words, peasants and cities. A peasant without a city is simply a happy farmer. To rephrase Kautsky: cities "live off" peasants.*

Three final comments on peasants and cities. From Robert Redfield: "There were no peasants before the first cities. And those surviving primitive peoples who do not live in terms of the city are not peasants" (31).  From George Foster: "The primary criterion for defining peasant society is structural - the relationship between the village and the city (or the state)" (8). From Moses Finley: "The peasant was an integral element in the ancient city" (1977:322). It is necessary, once and for all, to stop confusing isolated with rural with peasant and to start taking the term peasant as it is used in cross-cultural anthropology and archeologists who do not will simply talk past one another forever. Peasants and cities go hand in hand. They are the necessarily twin sides of an oppressive or exploitative system. **

I know this is "political" rather than "land" based, however, it is necessary to see how cities and peasants interact. Take a look at how much "land" a city would have required in the Galilee to survive, especially when the cities are Roman in nature.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill ... notes the symbolic interaction of water, aqueduct, and bath: "The relationship [of town and country] is more visible if we picture the tentacles spread out by the Roman town into its hinterland in the forms of aqueducts [rather than roads]: symbolically siphoning off ... the resources of the land into the urban center, to feed the public baths where the imported water acts as a focus of sociability, and as a symbol of the 'washed' and civilized way of life that rejects the stench of the countryman. Implicit in the aqueduct is a dynamic of power, flowing between country and town; and if we wish to represent the dynamic as exploitative, we may extend our picture to the sewers to which the water eventually flows ... as an image of the wasteful consumption of the city" (x). Even if the peasants did not miss the water, the high material viability and great costs of aqueducts underlined another flow from country to city, that of taxes and supplies. ... Mireille Corbier adds, "Among the images which evoke the way cities siphoned off resources from their territory, we may briefly recall two centripetal movements: the channeling of water and the stockpiling of grain" (222). ***

Even if the peasants may not have needed the water, I'm sure the land noticed. Crossan spends an entire section on looking at the resources that the two Galilean cities (Sepphoris and Tiberias) consumed, the result being that these two towns, strangely omitted from the Gospels, consumed more than the surrounding countryside could produce.

One more distinction that bears repeating, the land was now seen as a commodity itself, and the peasants were becoming landless and watching things turn for the worse.

When one knows that one's own live depends upon the land, one tends to it as best one can. I don't imply that one cannot know more about caring for one's own land. Merely, I am pointing out that the relationship between a piece of land that will be passed down to heirs and has been inherited is different than land one is only working for someone else. It is the exceptional farmer who treats both sets of land similarly, if not the same. Nor am I implying that the Romans didn't have anything to contribute. Apparently erosion has been a long standing problem in the region. Roman terraces are still in evidence in the region.

We are left with a feeling that the land was deeply under stress in this period. A period into which Jesus was born.

Here's a pdf link I found that examines the current "land" issues in the region: www.kintera.org

Next week, I plan on briefly presenting how Jesus responds.

__________

* Crossan, John Dominic. The Birth of Christianity. 216.
** Crossan. 218 (quoting: Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformation; Foster, "Introduction, What Is a Peasant?" Peasant Society: A Reader; Finley, "The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond" Comparative Studies in Society and History.
*** Crossan. 215-6. (Wallace-Hadrill. "Introduction" ; Corbier. "City, Territory and Taxation" )

Nature Deficit Disorder

During the middle of summer, with many of us out on the water, in the woods, and otherwise enjoying nature, we may not give much thought to being deficient in nature "vitamins." The following is a quote from a men's devotional that a reader sent in after seeing last weeks Creation-Care 365 article. Hope you are enjoying the awe of nature and taking time for those free sunsets (if not sunrises)!

Day 292
Nature Deficit Disorder
My spiritual father, St. Francis, was one of the few later Christian saints who made a consistent and clear connection with nature. Yet much of Christian history has had to do with books, translations, and universities; internecine fights among academics and seminaries; and people arguing about words, salvation theories, and worship styles.
We are suffering from a major case of Christian NDD – Nature Deficit Disorder. At this point, I sincerely believe that the earth is the only thing shared enough, wise enough, suffering enough, and God-created enough to truly change most men [and women]. Get out, stay quiet, be alone, and listen long and happily. “Nature is the primary and most perfect revelation of the divine,” said St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the Bible before the Bible, and we stopped reading it.

How do I spend time with nature? How can I make that time more conducive to spiritual wonder?*

*Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, (Chicago, Loyola Press, 2010), p 301