Listen to Voices of Nature Earth Day 2024
Listen to voices of nature is important for us this year’s Earth Day. I saw a T-shirt logo, “Earth Day is everyday.” I have learned to listen to nature’s many voices over the many years as I have sought comfort during moments of grieving as well as times appreciating the beauty and sensory feast of nature’s scent, sounds, sharing in cycle of interbreathing oxygen and carbon dioxide with plant life, feeling sun light, wind, and rain. As my embodied senses take in the natural world, our senses become embodied points not only contact but direct consciousness of nature. Often accompanied by my companion dogs, who enjoy the sunlight or being together, I become aware how mindfully they attend the present moment while we humans easily suffer from attention deficit disorder when it comes to nature. In a radio interview, Evelyn Underhill, an author of early studies of mysticism, describes humans as “deaf at a concert.” Here is the full quote:
But so many Christians are like deaf people at a concert. They study the programme carefully, believe every statement made in it, speak respectfully of the quality of the music, but only really hear a phrase now and again. So they have no notion at all of the mighty symphony which fills the universe, to which our lives are destined to make their tiny contribution, and which is the self-expression of the Eternal God.[i]
So many Christians are deaf to the symphony of animacy and subjectivity in nature; they do neither take the time to be attentive to the biophony, the sounds of life, or geophony, the sounds of the natural processes of the bioregions where they live. It raises a thorny question. If we are unable to listen and perceived the S0pirit’s presence in nature, how likely are we able to listen and perceive the Spirit in churches?
We neither appreciate fully our bonds and interconnections to the more than human life around us. We do not slow down to become mindful of what is spatially available and immediate to our senses and feel gratitude for the pre-original gift of the Earth, a gift of the Creator Spirit who provides the necessities for life: air, water, soil, sun and the life around us. Few slow down to realize our relational interconnections unless we practice some contemplative practice somatically engaging our immediate environment. Nature has a sacramental presence of the Spirit and the incarnated Christ. Thomas Berry often quotes, “The universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.” We swim in the presence of life entangled with Spirit.
Pope Francis wrote a prophetic message for World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, September 1, 2022. [ii] He starts out his message, “Listen to the voices of creation…” We need to learn to listen to the voices of nature and learn the languages of the more than human life and the Earth. He writes, “If we learn how to listen, we can hear in the voice of creation a kind of dissonance. On the one hand, we can hear a sweet song in praise of our beloved Creator; on the other, an anguished plea, lamenting our mistreatment of this our common home.”
Listening and learning the various languages of the Earth is to learn and listen to our ancestral parents: God’s Spirit and Mother Earth, ultimately the Sun that spun of her star energy to form the Earth. By listening to the anguished voices of nature/Earth, we become aware how our extractive economies are harming life for a myth of limitless expansion for profit and consumption exceeding the resources of the planet are leading to climate instability, floods, droughts, loss of biodiversity, climate migration, and increased suffering both of human and nonhuman life. It is time for us to listen to nature and allows us to rekindle a love affair with the Earth. If we fall in love with the Earth, we will step up to become Earth keepers.
In listening to the pain of anguished voices of nature, we might discover that that the Spirit and the incarnate Christ have deep roots in life and in the planet. They are found in our midst. In his daily reflection, Richard Rohr made aware of bronze statue of the descent of Spirit of St. Francis of Assisi. Take a look at the figure.[iii] The Spirit is not descending from above, for Francis looking to the dirt of the Earth and finds Spirit in the soil. The Spirit is revealing herself in the soil. It reminds me of the insight of American environmentalist, farmer, author and poet, Wendell Berry, who wrote,
The most exemplary nature is that of topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and the penetrating energy that issues out it its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness, It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it, it keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but a richness, new possibility, its fertility always building out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or funnel by which its past enters into its future.[iv]
In Genesis 2, humanity is born from the soil, and we are part of the soil community. Berry makes an amazing correlation of Christ as topsoil, the most fruit Good topsoil is full of nutrients and full of billions of live bacteria. Topsoil is the foundational of Earth’s ecology; it contains living creatures and non-living nutrients that provide a double ability to drain and retain water that allows good crops as well as provides erosion control. It is the terrestrial matrix for generating risen life, a perfect symbol for tomb in the garden, germinating into the risen Christ (Jn. 12:24-26) The artist of the descent of Spirit upon Franics and Wendell Berry point to a powerful union of resilience for our churches if we take the opportunity to realize that Spirit and incarnate roots of Christ is in topsoil. The topsoil preserves and generates life. The seeds planted in the soil are the Spirit’s churches and numerous groups. We must grow our churches and faith communities and sprout as resilient communities of hope, resistance to nature’s commodification and exploitation, and become Earth Protectors. Watering, sunlight, and good soil as well nurturing and interrelations provide growth. Similarly, our churches must planted in earthen soil and ecological interrelated elements, not am isolationist heavenist salvation escaping earthen life and its responsibilities to our more than human siblings.
The Spirit amidst the symphony of Earth voices calls us peoples of faith to a renewal to connect to the Earth community of life. The Spirit calls for a new creation-centered church to address the climate crisis and catastrophe that we collectively have created. Rev. Brooks Berndt, the Environmental Justice Minister of the United Church of Christ, asks us and our churches to imagine a new ecological Pentecost for Christian churches:
What if we thought of this moment as the beginning of our story (of Pentecost)? In the unlikely circumstances, it is a time for dreaming, for imagining new possibilities. Others might not understand it. They may even disparage it, but the vision of what could be is more powerful than the voices of critics and naysayers.
What is this moment is the dress rehearsal for for your church? It is your chance to try out new ways of being, to enact an alternative to the dismal reality of the present. Like any dress rehearsal it is okay to make mistakes, perfection is not expected. What matters is the effort and practice that is always leading toward the next inspired performance.
Or perhaps, you prefer a different metaphor. What is your church is the training ground, the experimental lab, the flight simulator for budding movement? Whatever the case may be, your church now has the opportunity, a chance to empower its members to go out into the world equipped, trained, and prepared to respond to the call placed upon our present generation. Now it the time, This is our kairos moment. All of have us have the power to act, to be vessels of the divine, and to make possible the world to which we dream.[v]
Our ecological kairos as individuals and communities stand before us a decision to make this Earth Day. Are we to be grafted to Spirit and the Incarnated Christ and commit to become Earth lovers and Earthkeepers? Or do we fail to listen to the voices of Earth and nature?
[i] Ibid.
[ii] Read Pope Franics’ message: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2022/documents/20220716-messaggio-giornata-curacreato.html
[iii] https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/St.-Francis-Statue-Original.jpg Richard Rohr, “The Transformation of Art,” Daily Meditation, April 15, 2024, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGxSlPVsbgvTkqTjpWvWsMhQVzn
[iv] Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House, (New York, Harcourt Brace and World, 1969, 204
[v] Brooks, Berndt, Cathedral on Fire: A Church Handbook for Climate Change, Cleveland, United Church of Christ, 2020, 54.