Pastor and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality Victoria Loorz considers the origins of our traditional images of God:
God as the Patriarch. Christ as the Lord. God as the King. Christ as the One and Only Word. These are all metaphors or images created by people (well, men) at particular times in history to define relationship with sacred reality. These are metaphors that made sense to people who were ruled by violent, imperial monarchs—people who depended on the whims of lords and property owners for their survival. These metaphors also conveniently helped those in charge to legitimate and enforce their power.
Ecotheologian Sallie McFague calls on us to construct new images and metaphors that are relevant to our lives and time in history. For us, living in this century, metaphors for God must somehow experiment with metaphors other than the royalist, triumphalist images, which are clearly inappropriate. They must, she insists, express the ecological interdependencies of life. [1]
Loorz reflects on an image of God inspired by John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word.”
I offer another relevant metaphor for our time, yet rooted in a forgotten tradition: Christ as Conversation. Christ as Conversation says to me that the oak tree and that deer in the meadow are not God. And I’m not God. But we [each] carry the Christ, the Logos, the Tao, the spark of divine love within us. And the conversation between us: that is the manifestation of the sacred, moving forward the evolving kin-dom of grace. The wild Christ….
Jesus as the Christ embodies that in-between presence between the Creator and the created. Between the transcendent and the incarnated. But not just Jesus. All of us. Even the trees and the microbes and the stars are made and imbued with and held together by Conversation. Christ is dynamic, abundant relationship, a cacophony of interrelated connections navigated by conversation. Christ is the opposite, in fact, of a static word, a single utterance controlled by powerful men….
What would a wild Christ—a Conversation who is the intermediary of love between all things, whose divine presence connects wild deer with my own wild soul—evoke in our world? Is it possible to imagine the worldview of kingdoms and empires transforming into a worldview of kin-dom and compassion? Imagine how different life would be right now if Christianity could become a place for sacred conversation: a place to explore possibilities and express doubts and disagree and encourage voices on the edges. Imagine the church honoring sacred conversation by lifting up the voices shut down by empire. Imagine the reconciling role the church could offer in bringing together opposite forces to remember that we are all interconnected.
References:
[1] Sallie McFague, “Imaging a Theology of Nature: The World as God’s Body,” in Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches to Ecological Theology, eds. Charles Birch, William Eakin, Jay B. McDaniel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 208–209, 211.
Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 123, 124, 125.
Jenna Keiper, Untitled (detail), 2020, photo, New Mexico. Click here to enlarge image. God inhabits the rainbow of our being(s). We are all in God and God is represented in all of us, plant, human, animal, earth, star, light, dark.
Story from Our Community:
I discovered the CAC about five years ago through a family member and it has changed my life. When I read about Simone Weil in the We Conspire series recently, I was moved by her compassion and deep understanding of both social systems and God. I can relate to her struggle early in her life to understand the paradox of human existence. I feel so inspired by the legacy she left more than a century after her death! The CAC’s tireless work to promote social change and compassion has helped me to understand what it means to be human—I am forever grateful.
—Stella G.
