Green World

If I write a lot about the natural world, it’s because it always has been part of my life, even when I was growing up surrounded by millions of people. The churchyard next to our house had just enough space for some grass and trees and a fish pond (which I fell into as a child, somehow not getting bitten by its resident snapping turtle). My parents liked Saturday walks and Sunday drives in the country, so I was immersed in the smells and sounds and sights of each season as it progressed.

I was fortunate enough to enter a profession that paid me to take walks in the woods. Yet I quickly discovered that many of my students didn’t have a lot of outdoor experience unless they grew up on a farm or were avid hunters. They could not read the sky or see differences in plants or find tracks until I taught them how. And then a new world opened up, and they started telling the same stories about me that I had told about my botany teacher: “He can pick up a dead stick in winter and tell you what it came from!”

This loss of natural knowledge is a great loss, one that some find alarming. For people of faith, it can make the Bible that much more obscure. Some references are universal: surely everyone knows that when “the fig tree and all the trees…sprout leaves…summer is near.” But what about all of those wonderful references to the living world in Psalm 104? Or Jesus’ references to signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars? If we do not know what the sun, moon, and stars usually do, how can we read them?

This Sunday we begin another church year, another year of telling the story of God’s love for us. For me, at least, the experience of that love has come through living things as much as it has come through people. My Green Bible highlights Jesus’ comments about signs in the sky, but not the trees sprouting leaves. Why not? Apparently these trees did not illustrate the Green Project’s “core mission.” Fortunately for us, trees do appear to have been part of God’s “core mission” of creation, God’s ongoing and intimate relationship with the world that Jesus came to redeem. “Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love,” the psalmist writes, “for they are from everlasting…All the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness to those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.”

Someone asked me in church if I’m going to put suggestions for Advent spiritual disciplines on this blog. I’m still chewing on that. For now, at least, I commend to you Jesus’ admonition to “be alert at all times.” Be alert to the natural world around you, but also be alert to what weighs you down, “the worries of this life,”, so that you may know that joy and peace of God that passes all understanding. Search for the place deep within where God comes to you in peace. Watch the sky. Listen to the crows. Prepare yourself once again for Jesus to be born in your heart.

Advent 1: Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36.