At length I found what I was looking for.
This big glass jar.
At one time it had been used to store rice, but with my low-carb diet, and all, it had lain empty for some time, and had been hiding in the back of a high kitchen cabinet.
I rinsed the jar at kitchen sink and filled it with water. Nice clean water, piped in from the aquifer beneath the Montague Plains.
Taking care not to spill the water, I walked the bottle out to the back porch and sat it on the wide wood railing, where I could make a mess without causing too much trouble. The water in the jar caught the afternoon light.
This done, I fetched a hand trowel from the shed and scouted about for a spot in my garden that was not too busy. I dug up a handful of dirt.
After the long winter, the dirt in my upturned palms felt chilly and damp. It was dark and silty and crumbled easily between my fingers. Looking at it, I remembered something I’d read in my garden books – that there are more microorganisms in a teaspoonful of dirt, than there are humans on the planet Earth!
I was holding a little universe in my hand.
I went up onto the back porch again and, leaning over to get a close look, dropped that little universe of dirt into the clear water.
During the last glacial period (which began about 115 thousand years ago, and lasted approximately 103 thousand years) all of New England was covered by an ice sheet that was more than a mile thick. It is stirring to imagine a mile of ice sitting on top of Route 124. To put that into perspective, a mile is 5280 feet, and Mount Monadnock is 3165 feet. So the highest point in this region – the peak of Monadnock would be buried 2115 below the surface of that ice.
At the height of the last glacial period, the Laurentide Ice Sheet that buried Monadnock, buried everything else as well. This vast complex of shifting glaciers extended from the arctic circle as far south as Kentucky.
18 thousand years ago, the atmosphere began to warm, and the Laurentide ice sheet began melting faster than it could move forward, causing it to gradually retreat northward. The runoff from this mother-of-all melts filled what is now the Connecticut river valley making a massive lake that extended over 200 miles from St Johnsbury Vermont to the Long Island Sound. This was Lake Hitchcock, named after the 19th Century Geologist Edward Hitchcock who is credited with first documenting its existence.
In New Hampshire, the receding glaciers left rocks strewn everywhere – some of which are impressive monsters as big as a house, abandoned where, over the millenia, stands of birch and fir have grown up around them. Coming upon one of these lonely Glacial Erratics (as they are called) keeping watch deep in the woods can make for an impressive sight.
Then there are the field stones – glacial scoured bedrock – that were the bane of the early settlers, who had to clear their pastures of them in order to till the land. These, of course, were stacked and stacked to form the long rock walls that line the edges of the fields, plunge into the woods, and swing up along the ridges of the New England hills. It is said that if you strung those walls together in one length it would reach to the moon. Impressive… but I prefer them where they lie.
You can’t find a rock bigger than your fist if your life depended on it, in my backyard, down in Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Montague was covered, for thousands of years, by Lake Hitchcock, and when, in time, the big lake drained away, the Connecticut River took its place, introducing more moving water, more seasonal flooding. The unpredictable meandering of the Connecticut River left behind thousands of years of silt deposits, transforming this region into excellent arable farmland. When a torrential downpour overwhelms the gutters of my farmhouse in late April, a veritable Lake Hitchcock forms in our unfinished basement – but we don’t fret. The silty soil absorbs the runoff in no time.
April 22nd – last Tuesday – was Earth day.
The day before, on Monday April 21st, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man more commonly known as Pope Francis, died.
In addition to being the Bishop of Rome and the spiritual leader for the estimated 1.4 Billion baptized Catholics who live in every corner of the world, Pope Francis was also, it turned out, a committed environmental activist.
Popes set the tone for their papacy by writing what is called a Papal Encyclical – a kind of pastoral letter that, in centuries past, was addressed to the bigwigs of the church – the Archbishops, Bishops and such. Today Papal Encyclicals are sent out to the world. Pope Francis wrote four such Encyclicals during his papacy. The Encyclical that is generally recognized to be at once the most expressive of the Pope’s religious convictions, and the most ground-breaking for the Church, was published in 2015 under the title Laudato Si (Praise Be to You) – a 72 page letter subtitled On Care For Our Common Home.
The letter – portions of which are printed in the bulletin insert for you to take home and read at your leisure – is a passionate and unequivocal call for action to address the climate crisis.
Unlike most such clarion calls, Pope Francis, being the world’s most important spiritual leader, does not frame the problem as one of political will, economic impact or changes in daily routines. The Pope addresses the climate crisis as a spiritual crisis.
The instant that the dirt hits the water is a visually dramatic moment!
The principal visual characteristic of water – the thing that water is known for, and is symbolic of – is its clarity. Water – good water – is clean. It is pristine. It is transparent.
When the dirt hits the water a startling and complete transformation occurs. In that fraction of a second, what was clear becomes murky. What was still, is now a churning swirl of grit. What was static, is now wild chaos. The dirty water now resembles mud. The transformation is instantaneous and complete. What was transparent, becomes opaque. What was pure becomes muddy.
It is hard to not to attribute our prejudices. We like clarity. We like purity. When we cannot see through something, we are nervous. When we look at swirling chaos, we believe that we have lost control.
But it does not take long – perhaps 20 to thirty seconds, for the majority of the dirt to fall to the bottom of the jar. The water is not clear – not by any means – but the swirling chaos has subsided, and the process of the sedimentation has begun.
A few moments before, I held a small universe of dirt in the palms of my hands. Now, as that same dirt begins settles to the bottom of the jar, that universe of dirt is showing me the movement of time, the process of creation. The same movement that is playing out in front of me, is the process that, over hundreds of thousands of years, has created the conditions that have made my backyard what it is.
It feels like I am watching God’s handiwork playing out before me.
Earlier this morning, Rikki read for us from the Book of Genesis. Thank you Rikki.
Nothing against you Rikki – thank you for reading for us! – but this passage contains what I consider to be the single most problematic idea in Judeo-Christian thought.
It comes in the next verse, Genesis Chapter 1 verse 28:
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’
For the first forty years of my life, I was actively disdainful of Christianity – almost exclusively because of this verse. It was clear to me that this belief – that God set us apart from the rest of creation and placed us in a position of dominion – was the belief that enabled generations of Jews and Christians and Muslims to feel empowered to wreak environmental havoc on the earth. It was this passage, I believed, that encouraged a world-view that made it possible to think of our planet, not as a sacred home, but as a resource to exploit.
And I still believe this to be so.
Amazingly, in sections 67 of Laudato Si (which is included in the back page of this morning’s insert if you want to follow along), the Pope agrees with me – passionately disavowing an interpretation of Genesis 1:28 that allows humans to dominate and subdue the earth for their own purposes. I felt almost like Pope Francis was talking to me when he acknowledged my righteous anger.
We are not God. (the Pope writes) The earth was here before us and it has been given to us. This allows us to respond to the charge that Judaeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man “dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church. Although it is true that we Christians have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures, nowadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.
The Pope says – we are not God. This is the basis for his assertion that we do not and cannot have the right to destroy the earth at our own whim. To be placed within creation, the Pope says, is to be put in a state of harmony. When this harmony is disrupted, sin arrives.
The creation accounts in the book of Genesis…suggest that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself. According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin. The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). As a result, the originally harmonious relationship between human beings and nature became conflictual (cf. Gen 3:17-19)
The Pope tells us that the true calling of humanity is not to conquer the earth and exploit it, but rather to work with it. Harmony – spiritual balance – is a balance, not only with our neighbor, and with God, but also with creation.
Creation is good. To misuse it is a sin. And it was this misuse – not any serpent or forbidden fruit – but this laying claim to what is not ours, but God’s – that exiled us from paradise.
The water clears.
It is not for us to claim God’s power over the earth. Such an idea is simply absurd. That we fill the skies with pollution and the seas with plastic, so that a few people can get rich – is, perhaps the greatest sin.
We are called as Christians, to return to harmony with the earth.
When we do this we find our way back to harmony with God – a return to the garden from whence we came.
Amen