Holyscapes
Needed this week: A piece of bread
Reflecting on the Infinite, we celebrate the element of Earth; in our bodies, in our world, and in our hearts. In gratitude for our fecund planet, we honor the direction of north which invokes the sleep of winter that promises awakening; the fertile soil where we grow our bodies in the form of food; our Mother Earth, like a single body of which we are but strands in a glorious web of life-death.
4.5 billion years ago, the earth formed from super novae and began to orbit our sun like a whirling dervish. Life, that great Mystery, our primordial elders, emerged shortly thereafter. Evolution is the blossoming of a sacred Tree of Life whose branches meander through time. The dynamic of life and death, predator and prey, living and nonliving gave shape to our bodies.
Our eyes in relation to light.
Our ears in relation to sound.
Our hands in relation to trees.
Our feet in relation to ground.
Our teeth in relation to the bodies of others.
Our hearts in relation to each other.
In the Hebrew creation myth, we were formed from the dust of the earth. Creation is an earthly affair. Our bodies, our stories, our holy books come of the earth. “Passages [from the Bible] that within walls seem improbable…outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders…It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world…will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine…We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.”[i]
“There is nothing in me that is not of earth, no split instant of separateness, no particle that disunites me from the surroundings. I am no less than the earth itself. The rivers run through my veins, the winds blow in and out with my breath, the soil makes my flesh, the sun’s heat smolders inside me. A sickness or injury that befalls the earth befalls me. A fouled molecule that runs through the earth runs through me. Where the earth is cleansed and nourished, its purity infuses me. The life of the earth is my life. My eyes are the earth gazing at itself.”[ii]
The Great Unravelling is threatening the body of the earth with death. The biodiversity on earth is shrinking. The amount of wild animals cut in half over the last half century. The Web of Life is coming apart. “We are losing splendid and intimate modes of divine presence.”[iii] We are living the 6th great extinction.
Response/Participation:
[A loaf of bread is passed followed by one word or phrase elicited by the element of Earth, and the prayer “The bread in my hand is the body of the cosmos.”[iv]
Meditation:
[Focus on listening.]
[i] Wendell Berry, ‘Christianity and the Survival of Creation’ IN Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1993), 103.
[ii] Richard Nelson, The Island Within (New York: Vintage, 1991).
[iii] Thomas Berry The Dream of the Earth 8
[iv] Thich Nhat Hanh
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