July 16, 2006
Text: Psalm 24
Prayers of the People
God of hot wind and cooling rain, of purple mountain and deep blue sea, of yellow corn and people of myriad color, we give you thanks for the wonder of your creation. We give you thanks for the marvel of all we have come to understand, and the mystery of all we haven’t. We give you thanks for leisure and refreshment, for good work and satisfying labor that earns a life, whether or not it earns a living. We give you thanks for both the solitude in which to reflect, and the community in which to share; for possibility and also responsibility.
We pray for this planet, and all that thrives upon it. Inspire, we pray, our care of it, our reverence for it, and our dependence on it, that among its leaves and waves and breezes and heartbeats we may know ourselves to be in your own presence, O God our creator, sustainer, savior and friend. Amen.
“…and
All That is in It”
We
found an albatross egg. It had been
abandoned, on the Island of Española, in the Galapagos archipelago, not out of
abundance or disregard, but rather simple logistical despair. Albatross eggs, it turns out, have to be
rolled. The embryo needs to remain in
the center of the egg, relatively speaking, and left alone will sink to the
bottom of the egg and die. The father,
then, accepts responsibility for rolling the egg along the ground to prevent just
such an end – until, alas, such time as the egg gets stuck in a crevice from
which the attentive Dad cannot extricate it.
Such was the state of the egg in our view.
I
suppose we felt some momentary grief for the embryonic bird life that now was
not to be, but what struck us most forcefully was the intricate and elaborate
care required to bring any of its kind to full-term. There are, after all, crevices
everywhere. There seemed to us more
opportunities for hazard than hope. And
yet this lava rock-of-an-island protruding from the Pacific Ocean was literally
fluttering with the birds. The fact is –
and despite all the considerable odds against them – the albatross succeeds.
I thought about that marvel almost
every day we were among these enchanted islands that number 13 or 19 or 69,
depending on how large of a mass you want to count, protruding from the Pacific
Ocean some 600 miles west of and belonging to the country of Ecuador. Although there are a few communities
populating a handful of the islands, over 90% of the area is designated
Ecuadorian National Park with 0% allowed development. Highly protected in recent decades, the
islands have been the fascination of Charles Darwin, the haven of pirates, the
laboratory of scientists, and more importantly a home to several endemic
species of critters and creations that exist nowhere else on the planet.
I
thought often, while we were there, about the marvel of life – not simply the
wonder of Albatross life, but of sea lions, marine iguanas as well as their
more land-bound relatives; green sea turtles and giant land tortoises;
blue-footed boobies, flightless cormorants and magnificent frigates – each with
a fascinatingly intricate story of its own.
Take
that latter variety as another example. Something
of an “avian pirate,” the frigate is a lousy hunter. It can fish, but its feathers don’t shed
water so it can’t survive a dive. The
best it can do is pick off the occasional surfacing fish. Its real bread and butter, however, is
stealing. The blue-footed boobie, it
turns out, is an incredible fishing machine.
Flying high over the water, it dives like a rocket to depths of 30 feet to
catch the fish it has targeted. The
frigate has learned to hover nearby. Seeing
the boobie surface in success, the frigate swoops in, sticks its long bill down
the boobie’s laden throat and steals whatever it has caught. If the boobies mind, they seem to tolerate
the hijacking which seems to do them no physical harm. And they apparently catch enough to keep both
species alive. Fascinating!
I know cattle and dogs and cats and
mice; I know chickens and pigeons and sparrows and crows; I know catfish and
bass and gators and gars, but I had not met flightless cormorants or Nazca
Boobies or marine iguanas, palo santo trees or golden cownose rays. I had never followed the path of a vermillion
fly-catcher or watched a red sea crab jet saltwater from its – what? –
nose. I had never yielded the path to a
giant land tortoise or chatted amiably with a sea lion or comprehended the
disastrous consequences of a feral goat or cat or a blackberry bush
artificially introduced and then forgotten.
But
there it is: a world of species and
sub-species, growing, and balanced, adapting and surviving until something
interrupts the design. It is, we
observed, a fragile and intricate web of inter-dependence – unique in its
particularities, but not in its basic equations. A similar web connects life all over the
world, even if, in parts like ours, it’s more difficult to see. Land and sea.
Flora and fauna. Humans and the
whole. And the starting place for
comprehending it – let alone “experiencing it” – at least according to
scripture, is God.
The earth is the Lord’s and all
that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it;
for he has founded it on the seas,
and established it on the rivers.
“The
world, and all that is in it.” The
environment has returned to the news in recent months as gasoline prices have
geysered and renewed concern about global energy supplies; as devastating
storms have called attention to land use and development; and as scientists and
politicians alike have increased the volume on concerns about global
warming. Ethanol has become a buzzword;
water quality is on the public mind; “green” is “in.” Evidence the cover story of this week’s Newsweek which mused, “From Politics to
Lifestyle, why saving the environment is suddenly hot.” The subsequent article talked about
commercial buildings being designed to catch rain water for use, with scraps harvested
from the cafeteria to be fermented elsewhere in the building methane as a
supplementary fuel for generators that partially power the building.
And
if practicalities are driving the attention – comfort, cost of living,
recreation and expanded markets – at least the subject is on our minds. But however compelling may be the utilitarian
arguments for managing natural resources and protecting our future, it is the
theological argument that ought to first claim our attention. The earth, scripture persistently reminds us,
is not ours to plunder, but God’s for us to tend. That’s the message of the creation story in
Genesis – that as stewards, we serve as something like functional stand-ins –
emissaries, if you will – representing, advancing, indeed protecting the
interests of the God who entrusted them to us.
If
Christians need any more forceful clarity about how such stewardship should
proceed, we only have to note that the “dominion” we are given over the earth
in Genesis is a word that shares the same root as the word for “Lord.” Given Jesus’ example of “Lordship” over us,
we needn’t feel confused about the kind of Lordship
God might have intended us to exercise over the earth.
But
we have often gotten it wrong. We have
often forgotten that we, too, are a part of that same creation. Prominent in Christian history is the view
that the natural world exists simply to fulfill human needs – that not only are
we allowed by God to use nature as we
see fit, plundering it, exhausting it, disposing of it; we are expected to. Nature’s value, in other words, is its
utility.
But
such a view, even while holding it philosophically, has never finally satisfied
us emotionally or spiritually. On the
very first page of Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick, the character named Ishmael observes how every Sunday
afternoon scores of city folk who live inland – people he refers to as
“water-gazers” – gather to stare at the ocean.
“They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without
falling. And there they stand. Say you are in the country; in some high land
of lakes. Take almost any path you
please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a
pool in the stream. There is magic in
it…. Yes, as every one knows, meditation
and water are wedded forever.” [1]
Water
and, most of would eventually add, mountains and forests and deserts and
fields. Nature has always been for us more
than its tangibles and consumables. Time
and again we have stumbled unexpectedly upon bushes or into meadows or onto
summits that we later realized to be “holy ground” – the very gates of heaven –
and have known life renewed. And we have
known its opposite, as well, when concrete and glass and carpet and steel have
begun to suffocate us.
Among
the Greek stories of Hercules is one about his encounter with Antaeus, one of
the giant offspring of Mother Earth, who always slept on the bare ground in
order to conserve and increase his already colossal strength. Whenever he touched the earth, his strength
revived. Hercules, in a wrestling match
with the giant, noticed that every time he got the best of him and threw him to
the ground, the giant’s muscles swelled and a healthy flush suffused his limbs
as Mother Earth revived him. So Hercules
threw him down no more but held him high in the air, cracking his ribs one by
one until he died.” [2]
When we lose our grounding – when we
lose our connection with soil and water and leaf and wind; when we forget our
relation to feather and fin and hoof and paw – we wither, like Antaeus, into
impotence.
The earth is the Lord’s and all
that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…
And the ones who find there way to
heaven, if I might paraphrase the psalmist, are the ones who finally “get it” –
who look around themselves at the people they touch, the flowers they tend and
the fauna they foster; at the air they breathe and the water they drink and the
soil they plow and almost speechlessly name it “holy; God’s precious own.”
The earth is the Lord’s and all that
is in it – boobies and frigates and fools and friends;
-- all that is in it.
And heaven is the gift to those whose spirit-eyes can
see it.