Photograph: Amboseli National Park, Kenya ©
Marina Cano
Job 38:1 - 42:6
This is a
long section – over four chapters of the book of Job – but well worth reading
from beginning to end! Rather than printing the whole text here, we suggest you
look it up in a bible, and/or listen to it on this week’s dial-up reflection
line.
Psalm 96
1 O
sing to the Lord a new song;
sing to the Lord,
all the earth.
2 Sing to the Lord,
bless his name;
tell of his salvation from day to day.
3 Declare his glory among the nations,
his marvellous works among all the peoples.
4 For great is the Lord,
and greatly to be praised;
he is to be revered above all gods.
5 For all the gods of the peoples are idols,
but the Lord made
the heavens.
6 Honour and majesty are before him;
strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
7 Ascribe
to the Lord, O families of
the peoples,
ascribe to the Lord glory
and strength.
8 Ascribe to the Lord the
glory due his name;
bring an offering, and come into his courts.
9 Worship the Lord in
holy splendour;
tremble before him, all the earth.
10 Say
among the nations, “The Lord is
king!
The world is firmly established; it shall never be
moved.
He will judge the peoples with equity.”
11 Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
12 let the field exult, and everything in it.
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
13 before the Lord;
for he is coming,
for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with his truth.
A
‘cutting’ of tree wisdom: Tree voices (Genny Tunbridge)
“To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its
voice as well as its feature” (Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree).
One voice often noticed is the aspen’s, whose long-stalked leaves quaking in
the wind sound like a shower of rain. For war poet Edward Thomas, aspens talk
of rain and – like poets - conjure memories:
Aspens
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing—
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.
The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,
A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.
And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.
Introduction to the theme (Al Barrett)
This is the second of our
four-week ‘creation season’. Last week, we looked at the two most familiar
stories of the ‘beginnings’ of the universe, of the world God has created, and
all its creatures – including us human beings. And although those stories weren’t
just about human beings, in different ways human beings were at the
centre of both of them: as the last creature to be made, and made ‘in the image
of God’, to have ‘dominion’ over all other creatures (Genesis 1); or as the
‘earth-creature’, made from the dust, placed in the garden ‘to till it and keep
it’ (Genesis 2). This week, we look at the created world from a different
perspective: through the eyes, and with the voices, of its non-human
creatures.
Far too often, over the
course of human history, we humans have imagined that the rest of creation is
there for our benefit: to feed us, to please us, to provide raw materials for
our projects and commodities to enrich us. But what that way of seeing the
world misses is the testimony of Job (one of the texts we’ve chosen for this
week) who offers us a worldview where ‘the natural world in all its wildness is
presented alongside humanity, who remains humbled before its savagery and
ambiguity’, and where ‘God’s authority reigns to support the needs of wildlife,
rather than just that of human beings’.[1]
To Job’s complaints, which come out of a very real suffering, the voice of God
in the midst of the whirlwind replies: ‘look at the wild things’. It’s not that
this God doesn’t care about human beings, it’s that the universe that
God has made is so much bigger and more complex than we humans can even
understand or imagine. ‘Do we yet care,’ asks Catherine Keller, ‘when the
antelope calves, or how the wild ass scours the hills for green? Do we consider
their lives, their patterns of eating, mating, birthing and moving, so far
beneath the dignity of theology, so much less important than human suffering,’
that we have passed over them, and in the process ‘colluded in the rapid discreation
[i.e. destruction] of all these carefully crafted species?’[2]
Across the Psalms too
(Psalm 96 is just one example – look up Psalms 19, 69, 98, 103, 150…), we hear
of all kinds of non-human creatures praising God: the ‘heavens’, the
earth, the sea, the fields, the forests, and all the creatures that inhabit
those places. Akin with the worldviews of other indigenous peoples, this is the
complete opposite of the theologies that most of us have grown up with (shaped
by our own nation’s history of colonialism and capitalism), where the world
‘sits silently, passively, waiting to give itself up and give up what lies
within it’. Instead, we’re offered a vision of life which ‘recognizes the world
as never silent, never passive, but always already … speaking in and through
creatures’ – including, but by no means only, the human creature.[3]
This offers us a different image not just of the world but also of God:
‘as a power for life, balancing the needs of all creatures, not just humans,
cherishing freedom, full of fierce love and delight for each thing without
regard for its utility, acknowledging the deep interconnectedness of death and
life, restraining and nurturing each element in the ecology of all creation’.[4]
When we think about how
we should be living in today’s world, we need to make a choice between these
two ways of viewing the world, as a matter of urgency.
Reflection (Genny Tunbridge)
On the whole I prefer
listening to watching. I’ve had a radio far longer than a TV, and I love
listening to BBC Radio 4, stumbling across new ideas and new voices in many of
its best programmes. One of these, called ‘The Sussuration of Trees’,[5]
was the inspiration for this week’s cutting about tree voices. It made me
realise that, despite all the time I have spent recently getting to know trees
on the Common, I have a long way to go before I recognise their individual
voices. During these last few strange months, however, I have been listening to
three new voices – a nightingale, an oak, and a robin – which have opened up
joyful new ways of thinking about and connecting to nature.
Listening to nightingales
was the highlight of my lockdown spring. Through live-stream organised by
folk-singer Sam Lee, late every night for 2 weeks I was transported into a wood
somewhere to hear the incredible fluid song of this endangered bird, on its own
and duetting with Sam and with other musicians. Sitting outside one night
listening via headphones in the moonlight I was visited by a fox!
As for the oak: not a
tree, but a remarkable teenager from Northern Ireland called Dara McAnulty
(Dara is Irish for ‘oak’) who has just published his ‘Diary of a Young
Naturalist’, written during his 14th year. Dara is autistic and was
struggling with bullying at school, but finds in his intense connection to
nature a place of safety and of joy, which he shares in his writing with
amazing power, beauty and wisdom beyond his years.
The robin is my most
recent discovery, on a podcast[6]
I just stumbled across: Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist of Native American
heritage. She is a bryologist (an expert in moss), a professor of environmental
biology, and works with tribal nations on environmental sustainability. Listening to her talking about the natural
world and our relationship with it filled me with joy and delight. She
contrasts two ways of approaching nature: the scientific way in which she is
trained, and the indigenous wisdom which is her heritage: “Science polishes the
gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and
language”. The scientific approach is all about looking closely, honing the
ability to see, and that gives much knowledge – but it is knowledge of material
reality, seeing the surface, regarding plants and animals as objects not as
subjects. “But in indigenous ways of knowing”, Robin says, “we say that we know
a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect,
but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge
and spiritual knowledge. And that’s really what I mean by listening… And what
is the story that that being might share with us if we know how to listen as
well as we know how to see?”
In other words, she says,
“Science asks us to learn about organisms. Traditional knowledge asks us
to learn from them.” And she gives the example of her beloved mosses:
“As the most ancient of land plants, they have been here for a very long time.
They’ve figured out a lot about how to live well on the earth… in their
simplicity, in the power of being small; mosses become so successful all over
the world because they live in these tiny little layers on rocks, on logs, and
on trees… they are exemplars of not only surviving, but flourishing by working
with natural processes. Mosses are superb teachers about living within your
means.” And they are in conversation: “There is an ancient conversation going
on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the
drift of continents.”
Despite the unhelpful
ways in which some of our scriptures have been interpreted, there is so much in
our own Hebrew and Christian spiritual traditions reminding us that the whole
of creation has a voice and that we humans take our place along with plants and
animals, rocks and stones in relationship with and praise of our Creator. The
four-and-a-bit chapters of Job which we are listening to this week express this
powerfully. In response to Job’s suffering and questioning which have filled
the previous chapters, God answers with questions in turn: who is Job in
relation to all the beings, great and small, created and sustained by the Lord
– from mountain goats, wild asses and ostriches to the mythical land and sea
monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan? Even the stars, the seas, the weather are
part of the conversation, described as having been ‘birthed’, seen almost as
persons, not inanimate objects.
All this is not to mock
or humiliate Job for his insignificance and his powerlessness compared to the
all-powerful creator (though some have read it this way); nor do God’s words
give reasons and justifications for Job’s suffering. Instead they are a
compassionate reminder of Job’s place in the vastness and complexity of the
created order – created and intimately sustained equally by God’s grace. In
Chapter 3 Job cursed the day he was born, and wished himself uncreated. In this
dialogue, God re-creates Job alongside his fellow creatures. The voice of God
here is a gift to Job and to us, challenging us to enlarge our theology to
encompass all of creation, in relationship with God and with each other.
In understanding that
relationship, I was especially moved by Robin Wall Kimmerer speaking about
reciprocity – a better notion than sustainability. Every creature, including humans, has their
gift to give. I’ve tasted these reciprocal gifts in duets between nightingales
and musicians, in Dara’s passionate advocacy for raptors or woodlice, in
Robin’s own writing: “It’s that which I can give and it comes from my years as
a scientist, of deep paying attention to the living world, and not only to
their names, but to their songs…” It’s a song that we are invited not only to
listen to but to join in:
And by the Spirit you and I can join
our voice to the holy cry
And sing, sing, sing to the Maker too.[7]
Reflection (Lyn Lynch)
Over the past weeks I have been deeply moved by all the
reflections on Trees of Life. After reflecting on this week’s theme and
spending some prayer time walking through our local woodland, I have been drawn
more and more to try and understand, not only our deep connections with God,
with each other and with those we meet each day, but with the whole of God’s
wonderful creation that lives and breathes all around us.
We believe everyone has a story to tell, so what are the
stories other species are telling us? If we are ready to listen, we might just
hear their song, the songs that God hears, and perhaps we can join our songs to
theirs, especially if like Saint Francis we see God’s face in all creation.
David Attenborough wrote in his book, Life on Earth:
“it is most important for us to see that we ourselves are part of the natural
world and are dependent on it, and the natural world, since we have become the
most powerful of all creatures, is now dependent on us.” So we come upon a
vision of a God-given interdependence needing a delicate balance of caring and
harmony between all God’s creatures, each of us and every species supporting
one another, living under God’s rule of love. Perhaps we can liken such a
relationship to our vision of the body of Christ. Each member is dependent on
all the other members, one cannot function without the other members, and we
are all dependent on Jesus being at the heart of it all.
I have been watching a documentary following a team of
experts who travelled into the heart of the island of New Guinea, to explore
for the very first time a giant extinct volcano. The indigenous people who
believed this to be a sacred place and had protected it over the generations
sang their requests to enter before leading the team into this blessed place, where
creation lived and grew in abundance, undisturbed and safe, known only to God. Taking
great care not to damage this special place, the team discovered many new and
amazing species of plants and creatures not seen before. Each new species was
photographed and observed in situ, before being left in peace. I was reminded
of one of our prayers of confession: “God our Maker, all creation belongs to
you. Forgive us when we trample the earth carelessly. Lord, have mercy.”
There is still so much about the abundance of creation that
we have yet to learn, and so much remains a mystery, and there are so many more
secrets yet to be revealed to us. Frequently in Scripture, God confronts us
with the vastness and magnificence of creation. Now and again we area confronted
with the awesomeness of God’s glory, as he did with Job in the overwhelming
power, wisdom and mystery of creation. John Calvin, the 16th Century
theologian, said: “human beings possess a God-given sensus divinatis, an
awareness of God. It is by this awareness that we can recognise that all
creation is God’s work of divine love, generosity and abundant blessings.” I
have a deep feeling that all creation has some awareness of God, because we all
carry our maker’s mark, and are given life in abundance.
Thomas Merton wrote, “A tree gives glory to God first of all
by being a tree. For being what God means it to be it is obeying him. It
consents so to speak of creative love. It is expressing an idea which is God’s,
which is not distinct from the essence of God. So a tree imitates God by being
a tree.” So we can see God’s glory reflected in all of creation. At times we
marvel at the vastness of the heavens and the power of nature reflecting God’s
greatness, yet we can also see God in the less spectacular and more familiar
things around us everyday.
So how often do we put a little time aside from our busy
lives to be still, to stop and listen to the sounds of the life and creatures
around us? The more we listen, the more we might hear the songs of all living
things praising God for the gift of life, and by being what God wants them to
be. I wonder what their songs are saying to us, we who have the responsibility
to care for and preserve their wellbeing as we share God’s creation and live
under his rule.
I thought of our beautiful bees, who seem to sing in joy and
harmony as they work in unison for the good of the whole hive. Bees have much
to teach us about the joy of living in harmony together.
As we walk, do we consider the song of the tiny insects and
worms that move beneath our feet and work the earth? Without them the balance
of life would be damaged, so we must tread carefully with respect for the earth
and the work of the smallest, sometimes unseen creatures who are vital in God’s
order of life. We can learn from the life of ants and their colonies that the
best decisions are made together, working with God all our problems will be
solved for the good of all creation.
How often do we hear the movement of the trees as their
leaves sing and rustle in the wind, making music and keeping our air clean?
Perhaps trees are challenging us to think about our use of transport and ways
of world travel that can cause so much damage to our climate and season
patterns.
In our great oceans, dolphins sing their songs that travel
through the water to each other, and they are known to swim alongside sea-going
vessels. They bring so much joy to those who witness such an awesome sight. I
wonder if they are asking us to stop polluting their natural habitat with our
rubbish and mountains of plastics which cause so much damage to all marine
life.
Just as we human beings who share in this world have many
languages to sing our praise and songs of thanksgiving to God our loving
creator, so too must our partners in the natural world. So, can we all join
together and sing in harmony:
All creatures of our God and King
lift up your voice and with us sing:
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!
Let all things our creator bless,
and worship him in humbleness:
O praise him, Hallelujah!
5th
Gospel (Andy
Sheppard)
I grew up in the 1960s and like many children
at the time I was fascinated by astronauts and the space race to the moon. One
of the most exciting moments was getting up in the middle of the night on 20
July 1969 with my dad, to watch on the television as Neil Armstrong became the
first man to step onto the moon’s surface. However exciting as this was the
most lasting and significant image which we saw in the 1960s was the one taken
by Apollo Eight on Christmas Eve 1968. Apollo Eight was the first space mission
to leave earth’s orbit and orbit the moon and as the spacecraft flew over the
moon’s surface taking photographs the astronauts were suddenly startled to see
planet earth rising above the moon’s horizon in front of them. The astronauts
later broadcast the picture from the spacecraft and read out the first ten
verses of the book of Genesis. William Anders the astronaut who took the
photograph of planet earth said afterwards ‘We set out to explore the moon and
discovered the earth’.
Prior to the space race humans could only
climb to the top of a mountain if they wanted to look at the earth but now
thanks to Apollo Eight we could see and begin to appreciate the whole planet as
God sees it; a bright blue, white and multi-coloured shining sphere in the darkness
of space. Encouraged by the image of planet earth the first Annual Earth Day
was held in 1970 to demonstrate support for environmental protection.
When God asks Job in Chapter 38 v 18 ‘Have you
comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
And in v 22 - ‘Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the
storehouses of the hail…?’ in some ways with our satellites and spacecraft we
can see where weather comes from and we can see how wonderful earth is seen
from space. Through film and live broadcasts, we can also see the beauty of
nature and of wildlife all over the earth and in the seas. However, with
knowledge comes responsibility we cannot now say that we do not know how
wonderful planet earth is, or how responsible we are for much of the damage already
done to it. We have all the pictures and all the evidence, and we also know
what we should do as good stewards of the earth to care for it, we just need to
put it into practice.
Questions for reflection / discussion
As I read / listened to the
readings and reflections for this week…
·
what
did I notice, or what particularly stood out for me?
·
what
did they make me wonder, or what questions am I pondering?
·
what
have they helped me realise?
·
is there anything I want to do or
change in the light of this week's topic?
A prayer for this week:
I open my
mouth -
praise takes flight
like a bird on the wing,
soaring, gliding,
fearless, free.
This new
day,
this glorious revelation
of sky and cloud, earth and green,
this gift, this wondrous gift.
Earth and
heaven have cradled this song,
sunlight and starlight have bathed it;
loam and rock, peat and marsh
structure footfall;
ocean and river, stream and pool
crescendo and trickle,
here, a stop;
breath, sheltered by the mountains.
The dawn
chorus prelude is drawn
from the stillness of dewfall.
The lengthening rays of the sun summon
croaking, yelping, mewling, rutting life.
Warmth coaxes seedlings from the soil;
leaves stretch and bow towards the source;
field and fruit suckle and ripen.
And me, I
am ripening too.
Holy hands cup beauty;
wonder opens way.
This song, my life, an offering
made gratefully, made hopefully,
made joyfully.
Earthed in heaven, the heart sings
its way home.
Amen.
(a version of Psalm 96 from Psalms Redux by
Carla Grosch-Miller)
Activities
/ conversation-starters with young & not-so-young people
·
Go
out for a walk – early in the morning, if you’re feeling brave! Find somewhere
where you can stop and listen for a while to the animals, and the trees… what
do you hear? what kind of song might they be singing?
·
You
might want to watch an episode of a wildlife programme (e.g. David
Attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet [BBC], Our Planet
[Netflix] or Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II [BBC]). What was
the most amazing thing you saw or heard?
·
Imagine
Planet Earth with no human beings on it. I wonder what it might be like? What
would be very different to the world as we know it? How could we live
differently, so that we had less of an impact on the planet?
·
Listen
to ‘The Last Songs of Gaia’, a radio programme about musicians, sound artists
and poets responding to the loss of species: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000k99s
·
Choose
an animal, or a plant or tree that you know something about. What story would
they tell you, if you could understand them – of their life, their experiences,
their world? If you’re feeling creative, you might want to write it down or
record it.
[1] Celia
Deane-Drummond, A Primer in Ecotheology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017)
[2]
Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London:
Routledge, 2003)
[3]
Willie Jennings, ‘Reframing the Word: Toward an Actual Christian Doctrine of
Creation’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 21:4 (Oct 2019)
[4]
Carol Newsom, quoted in Keller, Face of the Deep
[5] (still
available on BBC Sounds)
[6] Podcast On Being with Krista Tippett, the episode ‘Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence of Plants’ – full transcript available here: https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants/#transcript
[7]
‘It’s a song of praise to the Maker’ by Ruth Duck
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