If this makes us pagans...

          Maybe it’s the weird weather of this winter (although a late-arriving frigid blast is expected at this writing). Maybe it’s the rising consciousness of global warming. Or maybe it’s just inspired writing. Whatever the reason, I want to share a few lines from a book called Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor.

          I know plenty of people who find God most reliably in books, in buildings, and even in other people. I have found God in all of these places too, but the most reliable meeting place for me has always been creation. Since I first became aware of the Divine Presence in that lit-up field in Kansas, I have known where to go when my own flame is guttering. To lie with my back flat on the fragrant ground is to receive a transfusion of the same power that makes the green blade rise. To remember that I am dirt and to dirt I shall return is to be given my life back again, if only for one present moment at a time. Where other people see acreage, timber, soil, and river frontage, I see God’s body, or at least as much of it as I am able to see. In the only wisdom I have at my disposal, the Creator does not live apart from creation but spans and suffuses it. When I take a breath, God’s Holy Spirit enters me. When a cricket speaks to me, I talk back. Like everything else on earth, I am an embodied soul, who leaps to life when I recognize my kin. If this makes me a pagan, then I am a grateful one.

          It may take an awful lot of grateful – and determined – pagans to salvage the good earth she writes about for our children’s children.

           People of the Bible (Jewish or Christian) have always found it important to affirm that our Creator and Sovereign exists independently of earth. Carried to extremes, this has often led to a dualism of heaven/earth, good/evil, with the Christian’s goal to be saved to go to heaven. But this ignores the weight of biblical theology which affirms the goodness of creation, of God’s love for earth, even in its fallen state, and of God’s intention to redeem earth and humanity - with Christ being the “first fruit” of this holy project.

          Maybe Christians truly are called to be grateful pagans, who understand that God’s Spirit is deeply interwoven with this endangered planet, and our lives.

Peace,

Rod