Grounded, Chapter 3: Sky

Grounded, Chapter 3: Sky

Continuing to write the book as half-memoir, BB reflects on the different ways she experienced “sky” on the urban East Coast and then in the desert Southwest.

“I never really knew the sky,” she begins. Driving west, somewhere past St. Louis, “the sky suddenly became part of the landscape. The farther west we traveled, the bigger it became. . . . The sky was huge, with a life-giving force of its own. For someone who grew up under the protective shelter of trees, it was overwhelming.”

Psalm 115 raises the question, “Where is their God?” – and responds with the confession, “Our God is in the heavens.” BB then asks, “What does it really mean to say that God is in the heavens?”

“God is in heaven; God inhabits the sky. It is an ancient and universal answer, so ancient and universal that we do not know when or where human begins first articulated it. And it may well be the first answer that most people know in their own lives – learned in Sunday school or taught by parents or heard on the wind. . . . The psalmist’s words, ‘Our God is in the heavens,’ actually unveil far more complex spiritual possibilities. Unlike the ground and water, sky is beyond our comprehension” (99).

“To say that God is in the sky is not to imply that God lives at a certain address above the earth. Instead, it is an invitation to consider God’s presence that both reaches to the stars and wafts through our lives as a spiritual breeze” (103).

Faith, Science, Cosmology

For BB, faith shares some important features with the wonder, curiosity and humility experienced in the field of science, and particularly in explorations of the cosmos. She walks a Jesuit “Stations of the Cosmos” – a walking path spatially mapping the cosmic journey from big-bang to now. The result: “I looked toward the sky, feeling both amazed and insignificant at the same time. The cosmos is more than we imagine” (104).

Rather than focus on disturbing reports of the large number of Americans who reject scientific ideas, BB instead chooses to highlight that “large numbers of North Americans – religious, spiritual, and secular people alike – are fascinated by science” (105). BB sees in this interest in science and cosmology an emerging spirituality and a changing conception of God.

“The big bang’s simplest insight, and the one with the most profound implication for understanding God and contemporary spirituality, is straightforward: everything that exists was created at the same time; thus all things are connected by virtue of being made of the same matter” (107).

Spirituality, Science, and Social/Environmental Justice

After surveying how virtually all major religious traditions refer to God as Spirit or wind or breath or animating force, BB concludes: “This short survey points to a startling characteristic of world spiritualities: it is impossible to think of God without considering the atmosphere. . . . Perhaps it is right to say that God is the very atmosphere of our lives” (111-112).

Once we turn our attention to “sky” interpreted as “atmosphere,” trouble appears. “The rise in carbon dioxide is throwing off the climatic balance, causing a rise in earth’s average temperature, leading to elevated sea levels, warmer, more acidic oceans, and radically intensified weather patterns” (112). Lest we give ear to the many Americans in denial, BB reminds us that “97 percent of the world’s climate scientists say that we caused it, mostly by burning fossil fuels – oil, coal, and gas – and throwing their emissions into the atmosphere for the last two hundred years” (113).

BB encourages us to read this atmospheric crisis as a crisis calling for faithful action. “The ground is the earth’s body, water its lifeblood, and the atmosphere its lungs. And the planet is sick. . . . the earth is wearing out and will soon become exhausted, incapable of supporting life as we know it” (114).

Yet BB sees a number of groups and initiatives that give reason for hope. Together, these projects constitute “a global spiritual revolution to save (from Latin salvus, meaning, ‘to heal’) the earth. . . . In a natural expression of the spiritual revolution, people are seeking to relocate God and understand their sacred stories in the context of climate disruption. . . . The new vision knits spirituality, science, and social justice into an earthy fabric of meaning and faith” (117).

Vertical Faith

Referring to many American church buildings with steeples, BB notes, “This vertical architecture symbolized the fundamental structure of an old theology: God was in heaven, and humankind was here on earth. A gap existed between God and us, and the church served as mediator between the two realms, communicating the word of God down to us and providing a pathway of salvation up to God.” Here, churches are essentially “elevators” (119).

This popular American way of imagining God, religion, and church finds little basis in Scripture, BB argues. The language of “heaven” in the Bible names not so much a space “up there” but a realm where God’s will is done and therefore where all creation flourishes. The popular image in the gospels – “the kingdom of heaven” – names not some other unearthly place, but names “God’s political and social vision for humanity, an idea that Jesus uses to criticize the Roman Empire’s oppressive domination system” (119). “To speak of heaven, therefore, is another way to speak of the earth” (120).

“The spiritual revolution is the shift from a vertical God to God-with-us. Dirt and water are understandable and tangible, icons of earthy sacredness. But we need the sky to remind us that no matter how close God is, God is still the One who hovers at the horizon” (121).

A serious re-orientation

Taking BB’s re-reading of John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world/cosmos” - is one way to capture what she’s after:

“John 3:16 is not a call to personal salvation or revivalist fervor. Instead, it offers a glimpse of Christianity’s central cosmology. The emphasis is on the first line, and the verse essentially says, ‘God so loved the universe, that God entered the cosmos in the form of a gift, the gift of Jesus, that we might trust in this divine presence and experience abundance.’ It is not a story of getting saved from hell – unless that hell is the one we are making through our destruction of the atmosphere. Rather, it is the Christian way of saying that God dwells in the universe we also inhabit, that we might experience the life of heaven here and now” (122).

To put a finer point on it, BB adds, “The spiritual revolution is, in part, a rejection of the theological questions that have shaped Western religious life for the last four centuries or so” (124).

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