Sunday
When we are at peace, when we are not fighting it, when we are not fixing and controlling this world, when we are not filled with anger, all we can do is start loving and forgiving.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
The ocean and the river befriended me when I was a child. Here I found, alone, a special benediction. The ocean and the night together surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by the behavior of human beings.
—Howard Thurman
Tuesday
Instead of dismissing the natural world, contemplative spirituality invited me to see the divine in the natural world, to enjoy it for its endless depth of meaning and insight.
—Brian McLaren
Wednesday
To live in communion with the earth fully acknowledging nature’s power with humility and grace is a practice of spiritual mindfulness that heals and restores. Making peace with the earth we make the world a place where we can be one with nature.
—bell hooks
Thursday
I gaze with human benevolence and with a deeper human awareness of our profound, inescapable kinship. I gaze with love. And somehow, the world is made a little better.
—Brian McLaren
Friday
What you love, you try to save, and that’s why so many of us see the natural world around us with such tenderness, with such grief, sometimes with such anger, because what we love is passing away.
—Brian McLaren
Week Thirty-Six Practice
Replenishing the Earth
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. —Revelation 22:1–2
Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) draws inspiration from the Scriptures for her work with the environment:
This is what … prophets dreamed the world might become upon the arrival of the Messiah. The argument is not to reject the world we have now in the hopeful expectation that it will be destroyed and replaced by something better. Instead, I see them depicting an alternative to the degradation of the environment that has turned waters of life here on earth that were “bright as crystal” into mud and silt, and the “tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit” into stumps and charcoal, and has led to nations not being healed, but rather fighting one another for access to remaining clean water and food supplies.… Prophets are asking why we do this to the earth, and they are commanding us to heal and replenish it now.…
We need to rediscover our common experience with other creatures on Earth, and recognize that we have gone through an evolutionary process with them. They may not look like us, with their wings and scales and fur. We may not like some; others like mosquitoes we may detest. But they are part of the process of life beginning and being sustained on this planet. An apt analogy is Noah in Genesis [6:19–20], who found a pair of each species and two by two placed them into his ark, mosquitoes and reptiles among them. Noah was not commanded to pick only those that were useful to him; he sheltered them all. God recognized that they are part of us; they needed the chance to survive as well. And in giving them this chance, God gave us a chance too. Now we must give that chance back to ourselves, and replenish the earth.
Reference:
Wangari Maathai, Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 125, 194–195.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, love and reeds (detail), 2021, photo, Los Angeles. Click here to enlarge image. We love nature as a friend, holding it gently and developing a relationship through our bodies.
