John's Notes - Austwick Parish Newsletter September 2021
They call this the ‘Creation Season’ in the church - around autumn time - when we pay particular attention to the good earth and all its flora and fauna, humankind included, celebrate its abundance and, increasingly, sadly, lament our contribution to its demise. This year’s Creation Season falls between the publication of the recent intergovernmental report confirming the widespread and 'unprecedented' changes to the climate that are 'unequivocally' the result of human actions, and the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow beginning on the 1st November.
Many are tiring of the noise of the news and social media reducing discussion of this most vital of topics to an opposition between the deniers and the doomsters - those who refuse to believe what is plainly before us and those who believe there’s nothing humankind can do to avoid destruction. Many are concerned to step away from this in search of a deeper, kinder, hopeful, practical wisdom to help guide us through the challenges to adjust our present destructive patterns of living to help to heal our relationships with the earth and its delicate ecology.
Many seeking wisdom in a time of climate change look to the indigenous peoples of the earth: those who ‘despite centuries of political, social and ecological upheavals, have maintained their deep, ancient relationships with their historic lands and waters’. [1] The conservation biologist Gleb Raygorodetsky, after two decades of work with indigenous peoples worldwide, finds wisdom in these people’s 'sort of intimate, spiritual relationship with the land, with the planet… a more holistic way of relating to the land, the animals and our place in this planet.' [2]
Likewise, Christian Aid are finding wisdom in the words of partners and theologians from the global South, publishing a paper on a global theology of climate change featuring voices including that of Uruguayan Guillermo Kerber. He believes that climate change is an urgent question of justice and that it’s about our three-way relationship with God, the vulnerable ones of the earth, and the earth itself. 'Together with the cry of the poor, people, and Christians in particular, should listen to the cry, the groaning, of the earth and respond effectively,' he says. [3]
I often turn for practical and spiritual wisdom to Alastair McIntosh, a self-described ‘human ecologist’, studying ‘the relationships between the natural environment and the social environment… the network of connections.’ This requires a deepening of spiritual vision. ‘Science gives outer sight, but spirituality complements this with in-sight,’ he says. [4]
McIntosh’s search for wisdom embraces all kinds of spiritual practices and traditions, but is firmly rooted in his upbringing in the traditions and time-honoured ways of life of the Isle of Lewis. In his current book Riders on the Storm he addresses the global themes of climate change by taking a walk along the shore of his home village of Leurbost to closely observe how the relationships between people and nature have shaped that particular landscape and how they are now changing. A deep conversation arises on the Leurbost shore, enriched all the more by the companions he has invited on that walk, a delegation of visitors from Papua New Guinea. [5]
The book of Proverbs in the bible says that ‘Wisdom has built her house. She calls us: ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ I suggest that if we’re looking for wisdom, then our place is the best place to begin. To rightly assume that Wisdom has built her house in our particular patch of land. Whilst we may - and we must - learn a lot from the world’s indigenous peoples and those of the global South, and from the ways of nature itself, we must also be confident that we can find the wisdom we need for this time of climate change in our own ‘indigenous’ ways, in the old ways in which we have related to our own soil and each other, those traditional practices on the land and in the home which may have been eclipsed in recent decades by industrial agricultural practices and all the fripperies and distractions of the consumer boom, but which we still value. Making do and mending as an antidote to consuming and discarding. Collaborating as community as an antidote to ploughing on alone.
Through a fatal misreading of the Genesis story Christianity has often justified the ravaging of the earth by presenting it as God’s gift to humankind for us to dominate and exploit. But there is so much within our scriptures which celebrates creation, and illuminates humankind’s deep relationships within it, shares the wisdom of God’s ecology if you like. There is the Wisdom tradition itself, found in the books of Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, which ‘are about everyday life. About how to keep going.’ The Wisdom tradition in scripture ‘focusses on things like misbehaving children and mischievous gossip. It's about chronic illness and how to cope with it. It's about keeping your temper and keeping to time. It's about the perils of making money and the joys of making love. … It is obviously and immediately relevant to the concerns of ordinary people.’ [6]
Where has Wisdom built her house? Here - where our everyday duties meet the life of faith. Wisdom has built her house here - in our world of work and of getting on with other people. Wisdom has built her house here - as we draw on our experiences of life in nature, and our life in this land. Wisdom has built her house here - as we recall the instructions our forebears gave us as to how to live our lives in tandem with nature and its ways. And finally, Wisdom has built her house here, in our little village places of worship - as we practice the old religion which is always aligned to the seasons of the year and the ways of people on the earth, as we share in the bread and wine, ‘the ordinary things of the world which Christ makes special’ to us [7], renewing our hearts and minds by allowing ourselves to be reminded of the love God has for us, receiving God’s Wisdom to refresh us in living out the way of that love in our everyday lives.
Here’s a thought. This Creation Season, why not spend some time with the Bible's books of Wisdom:
'Come, eat of my bread, says Wisdom, and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.' (Proverbs 9)
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