Genesis 1:24-2:3
Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly… Hildegard of Bingen
The last time I read this passage from the first creation story in Genesis, I was musing over constructing some kind of a dramatic dialogue to be used in worship… voicing each day in turn, highlighting each singular act of creation and its celebration: and it was very good! I was considering the sixth day of creation, and how often we don’t consider the human creature very good, but instead, mired in sin, and thinking about how I could use that poetic chorus in the assurance of pardon to celebrate the special, divine nature in each human being. Excited, I turned to verse 24 and read and God said, ‘let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. … .And God saw that it was good. Wait a minute: the sixth day began not with Adam, but with cattle? And worse, creeping things? Wild animals are majestic, generally speaking, though kind of menacing, but to affirm the image of God in any of them, especially for confessional purposes, sort of defeated my intent. Irritated, I dropped my half-developed reading into the trash and moved on to a different text. Only later did I realize that the whole telling of creation’s sixth day was reminding me of a story once heard: There once was a man who became lost in the woods, and, after wandering for a long while, was chased by a bear. He ran with all his might, splashed across streams and clambered up rocks in his efforts to escape, but was at last cornered against the trunk of a huge tree. Abandoning hope, he commended his soul to God, and turned to face his fate. Looking up, he saw that the creature was wearing a dangling cross around its massive neck. The bear lifted a mighty paw to strike and the man said desperately, wait! You’re wearing a cross! You must be a Christian bear. The bear acknowledged gravely that he was, indeed, a follower of Jesus. Well, said the man eagerly, so am I! We’re both Christians!!!! Surely we should pray about what you are about to do! Surely you want to consider what God wants of each of us. The bear looked ashamed, and, retracting his claws, sadly lowered his arm and settled down on his haunches. Lacing his forepaws together, he bowed his head, and the man, weeping with gratitude, did the same as the bear spoke to their Creator: Lord, for this food which we are about to receive, make us truly thankful, Amen.
Our place in creation’s order is not so special as we have believed, and we forget our common cause with the earth and its creatures at our lives’ peril. If the H1N1 flu outbreak (or depending on your viewpoint our impending pandemic) teaches us anything at all, it demonstrates how interconnected all the earth is; how our common life and livelihood is, and always has been vulnerable to earth’s creatures—even creatures as small as viruses. Our modern mastery of the ways of dominion has not freed us, as we thought, from the tyranny of nature: rather to the contrary, it has deepened our exposure everywhere. The paleontologist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it this way: Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness. You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.1
In the Dark Ages, in twelfth century Europe, Hildegard of Bingen grew up in the green hills of the Rhineland, and as an adult, became the Abbess of a community of Benedictine sisters, whose descendents today still tend the wine grapes on the abbey’s green hillsides. She lived like us in a time of war and conflict, of peril, plague, and uncertainty. Yet she was a growing spirit. She was the confidant of popes. She was a poet, composer, conductor, and a nurturer of community. Her life rejected the narrowness of religion, and embraced a Christ she called “Greenness Incarnate,” who, she believed, brought lush greenness to shriveled and wilted souls. Greening love hastens to the aid of all. With the passion of heavenly yearning, people who breathe this dew produce rich fruit. Her opera, Ordo Virtutum, sings In the beginning all creatures were green and vital; they flourished amidst flowers. Later the green figure itself came down. Now bear in mind that the fullness you made at the beginning was not supposed to wither.
Because there was no doctrine in the Church that gave expression to her vision of the lushness of the love of God and the creative energies of the Christ of God, Hildegard of Bingen made up the word Veriditas, which means, Greening Power. And that is the holy spirit in whom she lived, moved, and had her being: and with whom her lovely community lived in harmony. The high, the low, all of creation God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.2
Thus Hildegard warned of another possibility as well, that God’s greening people might become seduced by a vision of creation’s order that justified war-making, and bend humanity’s creative power toward subduing and stripping the earth in the name of progress, rather than living alongside it in harmony and gratitude. She said, now in the people that were meant to be green, there is no more life of any kind, she mourned. There is only shriveled barrenness. The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil, selfish goings-on. Thunderstorms menace. The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. There pours forth an unnatural, a loathsome darkness that withers the green, and wizens the fruit that was to serve as food for the people. Sometimes this layer of air is full, full of a fog that is the source of many destructive and barren creatures that destroy and damage the earth, rendering it incapable of sustaining humanity.3 Hildegard saw a nightmare potential in a people who would not realize that holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly… and it came to be, and we are paying the price.
The church in this post-modern era has just begun to find its way back, slowly and painfully, to a spirituality and practice rooted in greening power. Father Teilhard de Chardin worked in the Ordo Desert of China in the 1920s: his understanding of the astonishing holiness of the earth and our modest place in it led him to pen a “Mass on the World ” in celebration of Holy Communion. Since once again, Lord,… I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the world earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world. 4 He raised empty hands in consecration; he offered the world itself as the body of God, the flow of creation as life-blood. His Holy Communion consumed nothing, wasted nothing, used nothing up. It was a consecration of the Earth itself. Can our holy communion be anything less?
We have begun, in our small ways, to believe that our holiness, too is bound up with the earthly, and to learn how to live in communion, not competition with the earth our brother. The retro-fitting and repair of our building has taken ecological theology into the conversation: where possible we have reused and repurposed. We sealed our walls, our windows and our roof in ways that minimize our congregation’s impact on the environment and its use of non-renewable resources. We have given up our annual purchases of pretty easter lilies and flashy poinsettias in favor of enjoying, and then planting a native and sustainable landscape around our church’s grounds. We have changed our lightbulbs, reduced our casual thoughtless use of disposable paper and plastic, and we are beginning our study of how our food consumption could be more locally inflected with today’s lunch and this month’s study of Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful and challenging book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And, searching for local ingredients to bring to our first Sunday lunch, some of us are learning it is not as easy as it seemed!
Behaving as God’s “royal, greening verdancy” is a real faith challenge… an intentional praxis of bringing our greening power of faith to bear on the conventions and conveniences of daily living: paying attention, and changing the way we live. We are going out with homework today—to find one way to reduce our consumption of energy, or live more in harmony with our climate, or become less dependent on non renewable resources. Buy better light bulbs, recycle. Buy a car with better gas mileage. Plant natives. Turn up the thermostat. Lobby for the Everglades, the Florida Bay, the Gulf. Try to eat local, start a garden. Go outside and celebrate the greening love of God that hastens to the aid of all, and produce rich fruit.
I remember one of the old patriarchs of Riviera Church, a retired university professor who spent his spare time testing the water levels in our dying Keys coral reefs and shaking his head over the carelessness and arrogance that was killing the beauty and the life in south Florida’s coastal waters. One time, Gene offered to strip and refinish my desk in the church office, and, when I thanked him after he brought it back, he smirked, looked at the soda can in my hand and told me he had used diet coke as the stripping agent. He paid attention to everything that harmed the earth and its creatures, and he never let up reminding me, nor working for veriditas, the greening power of a people who see holiness expressed in loving what is earthy, and protecting it. Every Sunday, when he and the other ushers brought the morning offering forward, he would begin his prayer in the same way: Lord, I thank you for another beautiful day in South Florida. Honoring his memory, and giving thanks for the work many of you do in your own lives and the life of this church, to make us a greening people, I pray we will have many more beautiful days in south Florida together… and that together, we will make South Florida, and our lives in it, more beautiful as well.
1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in Earth Prayers, p. 131.
2 Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in Earth Prayers, p 69
3 Hildegard of Bingen, in Life Prayers, p. 83.
4 Quoted by Barbara Brown Taylor in “Journal For Preachers,” Vol. 31, #4, p. 27.