God and Here

Text: For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care by Steven Bouma-Prediger 
     Theologically, this book is traditional, but something about the author's reverence and communion in relation to this world of God's moves me... I found the stories of these three patriarchs particularly to be profoundly integral to a faith-filled vision for the land in which we live.


On Adam:

"The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man = body + soul; the formula there is soul = dust + breath. According to this verse, God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope. He formed man of dust; then, by breathing his breath into it, He made the dust live. The dust, formed as man and man made to live, did not embody a soul, it became a soul. "Soul" here refers to the whole creature. Humanity is thus presented to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together but as a single mystery." - Wendell Berry

This is deep, serious deepness. I've always had issues with the body/soul duality, never believing such a dichotomy to really exist. Sometimes it's like arguing whether a book is prose or satire--why can't it be both? The fact that body and soul are so closely intertwined as to be nearly indistinguishable, the "line" or boundary almost arbitrary, appeals with my intuition much more. There's a difference, of course, as Zen masters would say, between a tree and its "essence," but I doubt there to be that much, or at least not "difference" in the way we normally think "difference" to be. Basho himself commented that one studies poetry by studying the thing in itself, even though truly penetrating a thing is impossible. 


On Noah:

"The Noahic covenant, then, is universal in the widest sense imaginable. It is fundamentally an ecological covenant that includes not only human beings everywhere but all animals--every living being (nepes hayya) ofall flesh that is upon the earth (9:16 repeating what was said in 6:19)." - Bernhard Anderson

The rainbow covenant is not a stretch mark across the sky to promise that God won't flood the earth again in our (human) interest. When we teach Noah in Sunday school it's usually about his righteousness (which saved our planet) and the animals who "went in two by two." The first one, obviously homo-centric, and the second one also a mild form of ecological othering, by which I mean an objectification and imposition of name upon creatures. How many children who learn about the giraffes, elephants, and whatever else has actually seen one (outside the zoo)? or touched one? or really lived with one? I think it's important to teach kids that God loves the animals not just because they're cute or exotic.


On Job:

"There are probably not many ethics courses in colleges or seminaries that spend the first three days in silence--one day in the forest, one day at the shore of the sea, and one night in a field gazing at the stars. Yet something like that is what God requires of Job as the starting point for a new moral understanding." - Newsom, New Interpreter's Bible

Amen. We need this. This brings to mind the old hymn "How Great Thou Art," echoing the silence of trees and song of winds and rhythm of grass. I think the wonder of God's creation completely floored Job. The sheer majesty and unspeakable design would awe me too. I remember the same feeling of vastness sitting in one September afternoon before a Geometry book and letting the power of invisible lines, points, vectors, curvatures swirling through space capture my entire imagination, or studying chemical elements and compounds late into night in the cold of Urumqi, wondering who in the world ordered these electrons to dance in such a cloud? It was mind-boggling and utterly humbling. I have always viewed the fields of mathematics and natural sciences with a lens of beauty, a poetic beauty even. Sine graphs are danse macabre in disguise. (I don't know if this counts as worship.)