The Other Good Book
Maybe it’s just because I knew the weather would finally break this weekend, but as I was reading our text for John this week, I found myself more taken by the scenery of the story than by the action itself. If we jump too quickly to wondering why the risen Christ is making appearances and giving Peter advice about where to throw his nets, we can blow by all the surrounding detail. John tells us: “Just after daybreak, Jesus was standing on a beach”. Stop right there. An early morning sunrise, a beach, a presumably deep blue sea teeming with fish, if you know where to look? Nice, right? To add to it, there’s a boat, a charcoal fire, bread, fish and breakfast on the beach with friends. Sounds like the makings of a beautiful day, and speaking of them…
Friends, today is Earth Day. Since 1970, Americans have held April 22nd as a day in which to celebrate the earth and lay claim to our responsibility for it. Never in the last 37 years has Earth Day seemed more important, more timely, and more than mere lip service to the so-called “environmental movement”. That fact and the text we just heard have reminded me of something that one of our adult education leaders, Matt Boulton, said a few weeks ago when he was visiting us during a 10 am hour. He was talking about how Christians read and interpret the Bible. As part of his remarks, he held up the notion that Christians have traditionally read God’s presence not only in the Bible but also in creation, that there’s not just one good book, but two: the book of scripture and the book of nature. Augustine was one of the first to mention it: “There is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you: "God made me!" (City of God, 11:22). In the 12th century, Hugh of St Victor declared that the whole material creation consisted of letters written ‘by the finger of God’.
What do we read when we flip through the pages of God’s creation today? I drove down to DC with Nancy and the kids for a quick visit with her family. I flew back ahead of them yesterday, with a window seat on a cloudless, just-past-noon sky. I started with the newspaper but found the reading outside far more compelling. Flying 30,000 feet over the coastline, God’s words made known in the poetry of depths and colors of the coastal waters, with the occasional lone rock off shore for punctuation. On another page, the faint hint of the trees growing green, stretches of farm lands, the deep blue lakes, rivers and estuaries, so breathtakingly beautiful and vast it’s almost hard to believe we’ve managed to jeopardize all of it. Of course, there were also pages that held the slurs of human living -- overblown industrial and residential development, giant parking lots, smoke stacks galore, and pavement connecting everything. While it’s hard to imagine from 30,000 feet that we are in fact burning this other good book, the book of nature, when we come down to earth for a more careful read, the message is loud and clear: the very appearance of created things is changing. As one observer has pointed out, if we don’t significantly change the course of our environmental policies, we will be left with “a completely different planet”. The fingers of God have written letters of beauty, love and grace to us that we can read all around us, especially on a day like today. In comparison, we’re sending hate mail in return. How can we re-capture the sense of creation being a sacred gift, a book that we should hallow and treat with as much respect as we do the sacred scriptures of any tradition?
James Caroll had an excellent piece in Monday’s Globe wherein he said this:
We Americans, speaking generally, see a gulf between ourselves and “nature.” From created worlds of concrete, we make occasional forays into given realms of trees, rock, sand, or sea. We go “back to nature” as if we left it behind when, say, we put clothes on or built cities. But this sense of detachment allows us to imagine we can trash nature without trashing ourselves. Conversely, nature’s mechanism for saving itself includes human ingenuity. We humans are not above nature or apart from it. We are of nature.
Indeed, the problem with flying at 30,000 feet is that one gets a clear impression of being above nature. Carroll reminds us that the idea of our reading the Book of Nature, at any level, can be problematic if we don’t realize that we ourselves are already written in the book, inscribed in some small way. We make the mistake when we leave ourselves out of scripture. We abstract ourselves from both of these good books, forgetting that we are continuations of the same story that began so long ago in the beginning. The 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart once offered the following instruction as a necessary corrective to this kind of thinking: “Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God, is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature!”
Speaking of tiny creatures, of the human species at least, I bet Erik’s parents know the feeling. I know I did when I was holding him. Erik, did you know you were a little book that has about a million beautiful things to say about God? For that matter, how many of the rest of us have ever considered our lives to be books about God? Have you ever stopped to think about what your life might tell others about God if it were read like a chapter in a book?
Of course, we are co-authors of these chapters, and the chapters sit amidst the entire Book of Nature of which we are part. Seen in this light, what are we writing, individually and collectively, for the world for future generations to read?
When I flip through the pages of my life, the story of what I have contributed to the Book of Nature, I don’t always like what I see. I read about a person who for many years stood as a friend to environmentalists, but who in his actions, his patterns of consumption, his care for creation in his own body, has been slow to come to what might be considered a healthy and holistic relationship with the larger story of God’s creation. I see a person who has told himself countless times that “you’ve gotta choose your battles, and the environment while close to it, is not at the top of my list.” I’m slowly learning though that the environment is not a choice on a list of ‘do-gooder’ things to be concerned about. I’m learning that it’s precisely this kind of selective thinking that has me, without my even knowing it, trying to write myself out of the Book of Nature. And there’s the problem! By considering ourselves outside of nature, by taking views from 30,000 feet, by taking occasional trips back to nature, we are blinding ourselves to the ways we are always acting in this sacred text, for better or worse, by our every thought, word and deed. We are co-authors, every one of us, and it would seem that we are, collectively, writing ourselves out of the script. Hey Erik, what do you think of that? How will future generations of creatures, perhaps on our soon to be completely different planet, read the manuscripts we are leaving behind?
In the beginning of both Good Books, God gave us the role of being co-creators with God, writing our names into the book right alongside God’s. Sadly, rather than keeping ourselves in stride with God’s work of creation, we are now, as my friend Bill McKibben noted recently, “engaged in a massive rapid act of de-creation.” Yikes.
The good news is that an increasing number of prophets are already about the work of recasting our script and drawing us away from our roles as de-creators and back to our God given role as co-creators. I have to say that from 30,000 feet yesterday, when I imagined the human community that is gathering to write that collective next chapter in the Book of Nature, I could see folks all over the map. I remembered that Last Saturday, at more than 1400 sites, all 50 states, there were rallies that sounded a common call to action: "Step It Up Congress: Cut Carbon 80% by 2050." In Bethesda and on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, on the banks of the Delaware river and at Jones Beach, at green parks in Newport, on football fields in Southern Mass, on our own Boston Common, thousands of people gathered who are faithfully trying to write us all back into the Book of Nature. It’s one day, one example of ways that we are all becoming aware of. Had I been flying over New England last Saturday, I just might have been able to connect the dots, or at least to have seen myself as one of them.
Will these voices and dots be enough? Sadly, I don’t know, and sadly, my faith in God offers me little assurance on this count. I could take Peter as a role model, and trust that Risen Christ is standing on those shores with all of us, guiding us and telling us where to put our nets for the greatest catch of people to bring on board with this new way of living, not above or outside of nature. I wish I had faith enough to say that “all will be well”, with Jesus as our friend and guide. I’m just not there though. Not yet. I just don’t know how the story will carry on, with or without us.
What I do know at this point, or at least what I am learning as I continue to read the book of nature, and my role in it, is what is affirmed in this reflection offered by the Celtic Community at Iona:
This we know, the earth does not belong to us,
we belong to the earth
This we know, all things are connected,
like the Blood that unites one family.
This we know, we did not weave the web of life,
we are merely a strand in it.
This we know, whatever we do to the web,
we do to ourselves.
If we all can know these things while claiming our roles as co-creators in God’s other good book of Nature, and if we can heed the words of our modern day “green” prophets, perhaps we can yet fulfill the words of the prophet Isaiah. For Erik Isaiah’s sake, and for his grandchildren’s sake, and for God’s sake!
Your ruins shall be rebuilt,
You shall raise up the foundations of many generations.
You shall be called the repairer of the breach,
The restorer of the street to live in.
If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,
From pursuing your own interests on my holy day,
Then you shall delight in the Lord,
And I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.
Friends, these lines name the roles that can and should be ours. With God’s help, may we all “step it up” and claim them. Amen.