07 13 11 God in Creation


There are moments when our connection with with both God and nature seem to leap to the forefront of our awareness. I once was in the village of Atqasuk, Alaska and went goose hunting with a friend and experienced one such moment.


Goose hunting in Alaska is sometimes different than many non-Alaskans might picture it. In this case, the wind was gusting up to 30 mph, and it was snowing like crazy. In short, it was a blizzard—but those crazy geese were still flying! I, at least, was amazed. We traveled by snowmobile (Alaskans call them snowmachines) from the village to our hunting area, dressed in parkas and a white snowshirt over-layer. Then we waited for the geese to come.


As we waited I looked at the snow drift in front of me, the grassy tundra behind me, and the bushes in the hollows. As I watched a stubborn brown leaf on one of the bushes, shaking in the wind, it occurred to me that all of this was here only because of God’s sustaining presence. The laws of physics work consistently, the spark of life evolves tenaciously and the complex weather cycles provide needs adequately because of how they were created. According to Christian tradition, the effective power of God in creation is called the Spirit. That is, the power and presence of God that we can experience and be in touch with—and that created the world, sustains the world and moves the world toward God’s future—is the Spirit.


As that thought hit me, I looked at my hunting partner and realized that God was in him, too. I looked at the clouds and snow and realized God’s presence around me. I looked at myself in time an realized that God was participating in me and I was participating in God. And I looked at it all and found myself standing in a state of great wonder.


At that moment the geese appeared in the sky flying toward us. As a hunter, who provides most of the protein for my family’s diet through hunting and fishing, I get quite excited by hunting. But at that moment, I looked at the geese and realized God was in them, too, and I almost didn’t want to shoot—almost, but not quite. The cycle of give-and-take that go along with life is also of God.


That awareness of God’s presence infused throughout creation also informs and motivates us in our understanding of sustainable living as we develop our bioshelter home. God is in all creation and participates in all the relationships of nature and life. God is not defined by nature, of course, existing before time and space and somehow choosing to make space/time and the natural order possible. Even so, God is also in and through space, time and creation. It is this quality of being in all relationships and also distinct from all relationships that guides us. We need to be in relationship with the land, while also aware of our own decisions and our own responsibility for the land if we are to work for a future in which humans and the land can thrive together.


Part of the joy in this kind of living is the great sense of learning from nature. As we work on growing food, shaping water drainage, etc., we find out how much we don’t know about how things work. As we try to learn such things, we discover that we are being reshaped, both in our awareness and in our habits. We are surrounded—or better yet, immersed—in God’s presence. In our lives we also have the opportunity of participating in what God is doing toward building relationships that allow the whole of life to thrive.



Of course, this also includes living in relationship with neighbors and with the rest of humanity. God is in all of it—if nothing else, through holding us together by the physical and chemical processes of space-time—while we make the choices we make in life. I hope that this awareness of God in all things helps our lives to better participate in where God is leading. Staying aware is important.


God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ (Acts 17:27-28)


(Thanks to Google Pics for the photo)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gardening with a gun on my hip

Image
Yesterday really felt strange to me.   On the one hand it was a great afternoon to be outside.   The snow is gone, the ground is drying out, and the mosquitoes are not biting…much.   I found myself reveling in the work of cutting out some dead wood and making room for the new growth we are planning this year.   I almost never get to do brush-work when there is no snow and no mosquitoes.   What a day! On the other hand, I was doing this work with my Smith-and-Wesson .44 magnum handgun hanging on my hip.   You see, the day before yesterday our neighbor was attacked by an 800 lb grizzly bear .   The bears are particularly hungry this time of year, given that they haven’t had much to eat in six months, and that the salmon won’t be in our river for another six weeks.   The bear chased our neighbor down, clawed him up a bit and the, mercifully, left him alone.   As I enjoyed being outside preparing ground for permaculture-style gardening, it somehow seemed wrong to do with
Read more

06 02 11 Rediscovering Enjoyment

Image
We hadn’t lived in our bioshelter home very long before Cindee began teaching me about permaculture. In brief, permaculture is about a way of life where the land feeds the people, the people tend the garden in a way where gardening feeds the land without chemical fertilizers (more on this later—but some plants actually build up and feed t he soil, even while producing food), and where the waste from each process of life on the land becomes the resource for feeding something else. In short, it becomes a more-or-less self-sustaining system t hat cares for itself with relatively little labor on the part of the people. From my perspec tive the problem of permaculture is that it takes time to develop the plants and the land. This is especially true for us, because we had more than pure permaculture in mind. We are both allergic to cottonwoods, and our whole 1.9 acres is a cottonwood grove. Why not replace the cottonwoods with berries and fruit trees? We need some paths to go
Read more

06 20 11 How to Identify a Weed

Image
The potatoes are up—at least most of them. We planted three varieties of potatoes and plants from two of the three varieties have broken the surface. It is somehow very satisfying to see the plants come up, even though harvest is still months away. Watching things grow, by a mysterious power we call biology, is a wonder. At the same time, the cow parsnip and the fireweed are up in the same garden space. As we have been working on the garden I have been trying to decide how to define what is a weed and what is not. Fireweed is beautiful and technically edible. Cow parsnip surely has its uses, too. Do we remove these plants? Some things that I used to consider obvious weeds are actually quite useful. Dandelions are a case in point. As a kid I remember digging dandelions out of the lawn with a knife. They were too prolific and tended to crowd out the grass (not a weed) in our lawn. Dandelions seemed to me to be pure weed. Later I learned that dandelions
Read more