Journey of the Spirit

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume One, Number Five
May/June 1992

A JOURNEY OF THE SPIRIT

I have been on a spiritual journey of special intensity over the last few years. A journey about the earth. Like Jacob, nightly I have been wrestling with God and dreaming dreams of God, to discern what God's call is to me. I am not sure I would recommend the process. (There is a bumper sticker that reads "Don't follow me, I'm following my bliss.")

I didn't start out an environmentalist. But a series of coincidences (and I don't believe in coincidences) over a period of years has been happening to me which I have experienced as a "wake up call" from God.

We lost a child in a miscarriage several years ago. And in the midst of that loss I realized just how precious life is and how fragile life is and how I have no control over it. I had a vision of a loss of fertility, that is of the life-giving ability of other women, of other females of other species — a loss in the sense of the creative power of the earth herself. Scarred lands, diverted waters, rain of acid, butchered animals. The whole earth, I sensed, was losing its capacity to be fruitful and bear life.

Some time later I had the profound experience of cleaning oil-soaked birds at Ocean Shores after the oil spill in those waters. I felt the miracle of life in the eyes of those wild creatures, their tiny hearts beating beneath my fingers, and their wild passionate fight to live, and to bite. I felt the irony of driving several hours consuming oil to clean these birds; caught up in a way of life which makes these disasters inevitable.

Then the wonderful vision of the birds after they have been cleaned and rested, released and running toward the water! I felt that as a human being I had been a healer and a restorer as well as inevitably a destroyer.

What has been happening to me, with the gale force winds of the Holy Spirit, is the realization of how fragile our earth is and what a terrible power we have to destroy it. I began to read voraciously -- the classical and the poet environmentalists, books and journals on the scientific dimensions of the ecological crisis.

What happened to me next was the most important step. I started to cry — all the time. Listening to the news at night, I cried. I cried with a friend whose breast milk she realized had more DDT in it than is legally allowed in the milk you buy at the supermarket.

I needed God in the midst of my grief; grief for the birds, and for people, especially the poorest of the poor who bear the biggest burden of our over-consuming lifestyle, in whose yards we entomb our toxic waste.

Then I realized that I had no altar to which I could bring my grief, or to bring my love for the earth. I could pray my own private devotions on my bed at night. But where was the Church? The Church was simply absent and silent on these issues. The Church never mentioned in theology or liturgy any of these things except in passing. Nothing in the Church could help me to interpret my grief, or to find a way to fit my grief within the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I was enraged at God's lousy decision to put so much power in the hands of one species. So I thought, I will invite other people at St. Mark's to see if anyone else is as angry and sad as I was. I put a blurb in the Rubric (newsletter), and lo and behold, 43 people showed up the first night of the Ecology/Spirituality group. The rest is our history.

It has been your ministry to me, my friends, that has led me to say "yes" to the call to be the director of this newly forming Earth Ministry. At the heart of it is a conviction that as a civilization we need to learn the lesson of reverence. The environment (absurd word) is Creation. At every moment it is being held up from nothingness by the hand of God, by the grace and love of God. And we as humans are the one creature that can know this. We are also now the one creature who can decide who lives and who dies on this earth.

What I have learned is trust your tears, as the place of intersection where the cross of the world, not just your own cross, is. And be in that place. Look at the world through your tears, and see things that, tearless, you are not able to see.

Trusting my relationship with God is the most important thing in my life. Part of that is trust in God's timing. Much of the time I don't care for God's timing, so it is hard to trust. Trust in God means that what needs to happen will happen when it needs to happen, however impossible the circumstances may seem. I do not know if we will be able to reverse the course that our race has been on for so long. I do know that our tears and our work are not for nothing and that wonder, awe, gratitude, trust and love are real and true. I do know that each moment of life we have is a gift and that the gift is good.

For more information or the complete sermon, write Carla V. Berkedal, Executive Director, Earth Ministry, 1305 N.E. 47th St., Seattle, WA 98105, (206) 632-2426.