On Care for Our Common Home
WISDOM CIRCLE
JUNE 2016
Celebrating Our Common Home and our Cosmos
As we come to the end of our Wisdom Circle year of study, we look back on what we have learned…how each of us doing our small part can be a vessel for change. Pope Francis did a great service to the world with the publication of his encyclical. Capturing the attention of people from many cultures, faiths, and traditions, he made a global impact on the importance of stewardship of the planet.
(The following are selections from: Grounded: Finding God in the World A Spiritual Revolution by Diane Butler Bass)
SOIL
Although the stars still move us to wonder, contemporary people are learning that the soil beneath our feet is as mysterious, complex, and awe-inspiring as gazing into the night sky.
When we stand on the surface of the earth, we’re atop a vast underground kingdom of microorganisms without which life as we know it would not exist.
We are powerfully connected to the ground, and the soil is intimately related to how we understand and celebrate God. The late Irish Catholic priest and philosopher John O’Donohue called the land “the firstborn of creation and the condition of the possibility of everything.” The earth itself, he insisted, “holds the memory of the beginning of all things, the memory of God.”
We are animated dirt. Soil and life joined. From living ground, we were made; to living ground we will return.
Instead of seeing God as distinct and distant from the world, we are acquiring a new awareness that the universe itself is God’s body, a complex and diverse interdependent organism, animated by God’s breath, the spirit of creation. We are with God and God is with us because—and some people may find this shocking—we are in God and God is in us.
“What if,” asks theologian Sallie McFague, “we saw the earth as part of the body of God, not as separate from God…the world, the universe, is the body of God.”
WATER
If the earth is God’s body, as Sallie McFague noted, then water is its lifeblood.
The Hebrew creation story in Genesis begins with water; it is the only thing that exists with God before the rest of world is made.
Ancient biblical tradition suggests that waters—wells, springs, oases—are also places of renewal, hospitality, and spiritual vision, where human beings see God and receive God’s blessing.
In the native traditions of many cultures, water represents fertility and renewal, the feminine aspect of divinity, and often symbolizing birth and spiritual rebirth.
It’s easy to see how water makes us feel better physically and emotionally, but there is a spiritual benefit as well: neurological studies about water bear a striking resemblance to studies conducted on prayer and meditation. Indeed, people who are near or in water express higher levels of happiness and often demonstrate better health outcomes; so too do people who pray and meditate.
SKY
We may walk on the ground, but the rest of our bodies move through the sky all the time—the troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere that extends upward from the earth’s surface to about thirty-five thousand feet. The sky begins at our feet. Thus, we actually live in the heavens now, in the space in which earth and sky meet. God’s “heavenly” presence is the air we breathe.
To say that God is the air we breathe or in the sky that surrounds us does not negate the mystery of God.
The sky is a sacred space, endowed with divine character, giving light, warmth, wind, and rain to the earth.
Not only were we made of stardust long ago, every day more than sixty tons of cosmic dust fall to the earth, where it mixes with existing soil and enters the food chain. Stardust is a source of ongoing creation.
Where dirt, water, and air all come together to feed us, to heal the earth, to produce the atmosphere we need to survive. Paradise, really. Here and now.
From the Wisdom Tradition
The Love of Eternal Wisdom (revisioned by Rabbi Rami Shapiro)
#16
So God blesses us with the power of metaphor
that we might hint of that which we will never see.
The Wisdom of Solomon is filled with such metaphor:
Wisdom is the outpouring of Divinity, the breath of God (7:22).
She is the spotless mirror reflecting without distortion
the workings of God in the world as the world (7:26).
Just as you cannot see your own face except in a reflection,
so you cannot see God’s Face, Eternal Wisdom, except in reflection.
Nature is that reflection,
yet do not limit Wisdom to creation alone, for She is more;
She is creativity itself streaming
from the Ineffable Source of which nothing can be said.
For Reflection
In the preceding readings,Wisdom is seen as all of Creation…as the face of Her creatures, the substance of soil, the flow of water and the vastness of the sky.
What words from the readings were especially meaningful to you?
How then can we celebrate the wonder of Wisdom’s gift…the gift of Gaia, Mother Earth?
How can we celebrate the gift of the Cosmos, the Universe?