The call to ministry is a call to speak truth, which means that, lovely as meadows and mountains can be, I am required to declare Earth a wild and difficult planet. The natural order is painful and often justice has no place, regardless of what I wish or want, or might even pretend to be.
There's a temptation on a Sunday morning to talk about all those things we find beautiful and benign -- raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens and that kind of thing. But there's a darker side to life on this planet, a side we ignore or hope to escape by building cities and moving from place to place in cars, protected and detached. In this very moment, zebra are running terrified from tigers committed to tearing them apart and polar bears are crashing into icy homes to steal trembling seal cubs from their mothers so as to feed them to their own newborn. Maybe one of those mama seals has successfully protected her cubs, leaving a polar bear to watch her own baby die of starvation. This is the natural way. The python will swallow the mouse whole. The cheetah will consume the antelope.
Earth is wild. Feral. Unsafe. Untamed. Uncivilized. She reveals a ferocious God, a God of hurricanes and earthquakes, a God who has set up a game no one will win, for in the end, we are all swallowed alive. We can find our God in the wilderness, a God who is raw and primal and honest. Every tree and spider and sea lion is an expression of God, is the divine embodiment of all that is wonderful and terrible.
I feel profoundly connected to and celebrate the natural world, but I don't romanticize it. Earth is glorious and awe-provoking, the mother of all life. She is also a beautiful stage for the struggles and painful realities of existence. An authentic faith requires a confrontation with all that's real in the natural world, a celebration of the beauty of a magnolia tree in the early days of May and as well as her fragility demonstrated by each quick wind.
Suffering confronts us at every level of existence and is woven into the very structure of life. There's no way around it, no solution that allows us to bypass these grisly realities. And there is no one to blame.
Taking God seriously requires confrontation with the natural order. To know God is not to pray the coyote away, but to bear witness to her attack on the hen, to embrace the savage. God is all that is. God is known through planetary incarnation and that body is the platform on which we live. Hiding in our houses or malls or skyscrapers doesn't make the inherent savagery of the natural order less real. It does, though, allow us to imagine a God as detached as we hope to be, safe in the heavens, removed from the inherent suffering that embodiment demands.
Our way of life rests on the illusion that we can bypass the rhythms of Earth, that we can build an environment that will keep us entirely separate. Our built environment allows for the illusion that we are not part of the ecosystem. We live as if we've been liberated from the "forces of nature" or from the base existence of our ancestors. What we fail to recognize is that rather than being set free, we have been torn from our roots, from the very Ground of our Being.
A life of faith is profoundly attached and willing to face into the wild and untamed reality of planetary existence. In that confrontation, we know a God who is also living outside our categories of reason and justice, a God who is not docile, who cannot be tamed by our attempts at domestication.
Shiloh Bouvette: Local Food System Needs Leadership, Not Penny-Pinching
GreenFaith Leadership Programs — GreenFaith
Green for God: Religious Environmentalism - The Daily Beast
Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: The Renewal of Religious Environmentalism
The Mother's Earth is often a wild and dangerous place, most especially when we do not pay attention: most especially, for our civilization, when we don't pay attention to what we *do* to and in this place, both a bountiful home and a word of challenge and of birth, death, rebirth and regeneration.
Undue fear or scorn isn't paying attention, either. It's about respect. It's a living world, and while part of our nature is to seek some security, little thrives for long without some challenge. Like it or not, we're part of this world. and it's our responsibility to care for our relationship to her. As well as each other in it.
Here is the catalyst of the problems in the earthly realm.
why humans are the only living being able to do this? no matter how smart is an animal, those species did not level up as much as human did...if we are a product of nature Only, why we are the only living being that is distinctively unique?.. think about this..
Earth is wild, but also humans can show compassion for each other... rich people should help poor people... we can share a lot of things among ourselves... but sadly we end up with people with fat issues, and people suffering starvation..
it's human job to help others... and in case people forget this..
God ordered us in all revelations to help each other... then this wild earth can be almost tamed..
I think our talents and abilities make our function in this living world pretty self-evident: not to subdue, conquer, and overrun it, but to protect it. We're the ones who can say 'Biodiversity' and comprehend 'Extinction Level Event.' We shouldn't be *becoming* one.
humans are a league of its own compared to other beings. it's obvious and no way around it.
what places humans can't live?.. astronauts can live in space you know? humans ability to come up with solutions is something you can't find in other species..
Because how else can you explain 8 million children born with serious birth defects every year, many of whom die before the age of 5. Sure, it's nature, but it's not the act of a loving god.
I would also find it bizarre to worship this god. Unless you're just plain scared of it.
My presupposition is that we create images of God from experience, and I'm suggesting we take seriously the experience of living on this planet as part of our religious convictions. There are plenty of wonderful things we want to be real, and many of them are. But, there are other terrible things that are also woven into the fabric of planetary existence and to pretend they don't exist is to engage in a life half lived.
Not to quibble, but I think the confrontation happens regardless of your position of god(s).
Jewish Theosophy, particularly Isaac Luria and CHABAD Hasidism see creation itself as a dialectical process in which the Infinite unity actualizes within a pluralistic creation. Dialectic reasoning sees everything as being defined by its opposite. The merger of opposites creates a new synthesis which again gives rise to its opposite. The unfolding of values archetypes begin the dialectic process which ultimately results in their actualization within a divers creation. Thus everything is interrelated and of God. We know good only because of the existence of evil. We know something only in relation to nothing. Values that are abstract are not realized or actualized until they become part of a living people. Thus there is a dialectic between Man and God.
Dialectic reasoning allows for the existence of contradiction and multiple truths.
Kabbalah uniquely answers the mood of the 21st Century and is becoming a popular subject of study.
Indeed, when compared to the wasting and sheer size of nature's cruelty, humanity, which is a part of nature, tends to try to do a better job at being just and merciful and kind :3 In fact, it looks like over the eons of time that Earth has been around, there have been more than one time that life itself has almost wiped itself out.
Anyway, good article which I enjoyed :3
The earth is a crucible where all the ignominious acts of man shall be purged
and all vanity cauterized amidst the coals of nature's hearth.
"God is all that is".
"Suffering confronts us at every level of existence and is woven into the very structure of life"
These are powerful statements that you have made. You are correct everything is an expression of the infinite and you can call that vitality and intelligence anything you want.
We are all expressions of that that is. All nature is an expression of that that is. Nature is the source indeed the “incubator†of soul development through an evolution of consciousness process.
Focusing on the physical evolution is an interesting endeavor but in the end leaves one with no purpose and meaning to our lives; so stoicism takes over in their minds.
"God" is all that is. This is correct; infinite is all and all, nothing exists outside of infinite, nothing not even materialists. :-)
Now suffering. This is a very important subject that neither the religious nor the materialists understand the necessity of suffering for expression to exist. Suffering as the Buddha and also the enlightened Hindus have realized is due to ignorance better stated as unawareness.
Find the origin and indeed the necessity for that unawareness for the infinite expressions of oneness to many and a whole new view of the Infinite source of all that is will exist.
Don’t look to the religious or the materialists for answers. They know not.
there was a book written on the god delusion and consciousness was mentioned once. that gives you an idea of how unaware of reality that materialism can become. sold a million of those books to the unaware.
the more unaware the book the greater the sales. including religious and materialist books.
There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion - Thoreau
when a materialist comes to understand what thoreau meant they will begin to see they are on the same coin as the fundamentalist religious folks called unawareness. different sides same coin. :-)
So by that logic, books on Buddhism don't sell at all.
The God Delusion was a book about the non existence of a god, it was not about consciousness in any shape or form.
There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.-Dawkins
way to complex for most scientists and their worshipers to understand.
"God is Red" Vine Deloria
Absolutely. Were I a christian I would agree wholeheartedly. Then I would find myself concerned at the thought of a homosexual god that disapproves of himself since homosexuality is a common occurrence in the animal kingdom and must therefore also be an expression of this god.
Luckily I'm not christian and am not concerned with these things. Otherwise, interesting thoughts.
you are correct homosexuality is a common occurance in the animal kingdom and man is part of that animal kingdom. evolution has taught us that.
those christians concerned about homosexuality have their own homophobia to deal with on a daily basis. compassion is in order for them; they suffer daily with that religious stigma of an eternal hell for such desires.
can one even imagine how many christians out there in religious land have a fear of going to an eternal hell for their homophobic desires? again compassion is in order if one is at a level of consciousness to see the need for compassion for such teachings and acceptance of such ignorance.