Tag Archives: nature

March 8, 2011 · 14:02

Pebbles

A pebble offers a narrative framework when we start to think about its story. Having emerged from deep within the earth, where rocks run fluid in conditions of very high temperature or else formed in sedimentary deposits of ancient rivers, lakes and seas, the pebble will have undergone many processes on its way to the object we turn in our hand.

It is humbling to know that it will have been around for aeons before we were born, and will continue in existence for long after we have turned to dust. We bring nothing into the world and we take nothing out of it: rocks may be worn away as we walk our earthly pilgrimage but their endurance is immeasurable greater.

Our relationship to stone emerges in multidimensional readings. Habitation, artefact, sculpture, jewellery. And these in turn break out into a network of relationships to people, to things, and to our natural environment. But we have also learned to apply our technology to crush stone for large scale projects, thus separating us from the natural world in which we live. We need a dialogue with modern science and technology, if we are to have a proper faithful response to the potential harm destructive living brings; and to relearn how to understand and to appreciate our surroundings – to enjoy them, and take simple pleasure in them.

A pebble should indicate something to us about its creator. In its shape, colour, texture and hue we may see something of the beauty of God; unselfconsciously in its tactile nature, we should sense the intimacy of God; perceive by its endurance something of the faithfulness of God; and in its longevity a sense of the eternity of God shining through.

In the first of his 2009 Gifford Lectures, Professor Alister E. McGrath considered Newton’s attention to nature and how it signposted something deeper, lying beyond it. Newton said, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

He was reflecting that if we just concentrate on the geological features of a pebble or observe the skin of a shell, we may lose sight of the deeper structures and meanings of the world that lie beyond. McGrath said that the pebble and the shell are images of liminality – the awareness of standing on a threshold.

At the Gathering Event, beginning of our Lent Course ‘Driven into the Wilderness, on Sunday 6th March at St Mary’s Carden Place, Aberdeen, we each chose a pebble, which had been gathered with loving care from the River Dee and one of its tributary streams Neil Burn. This will be carried with us as we journey through Lent. It will become a symbol of those important things we discover, or rediscover, about our relationship with all of creation during our Lenten pilgrimage. When we meet again for the Sending Out service at St Ninian’s, Mar Lodge, by Braemar our pebble will be returned to the River Dee as a signal of our intentionality to live more lightly on the earth.

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Tagged as ecospirituality, nature, wilderness, worship

February 9, 2011 · 15:15

Vox clamantis in deserto

And the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

The wilderness … had taken him, loved him, embraced him got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.

These contrasting passages describe two human beings being tested in the wilderness. In the first extract, taken from the Prologue to Mark’s Gospel, Jesus, ‘a new Adam in Paradise’, is on a spiritual quest having heard ‘the voice crying out in the wilderness’ and is preparing to contend with dehumanising forces; in the second extract, from Joseph Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness, Kurtz has no spiritual resistance, no internal restraint, and has become corrupted by these forces.

The word ‘darkness’ evokes a number of ideas. There is the literal meaning of a physical absence or lack of light, the opposite of day, which itself implies impairment of vision where something may not be quite within one’s field of view, or even blindness, either temporary or permanent; or a mental state of confusion resulting in lack of comprehension. And there is the abstract meaning that is imbued with a sense of something unpleasant, a space where a malign force may be in control.

When Jesus went to the River Jordan to be baptised, he heard a voice from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ Then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. Jesus was alone in the Judean desert, in the sense understood by Mark’s community that the wilderness is a non-human place, but he did not lack divine assistance because angels were with him, a sign of Jesus’ relationship with God. Significantly, he was also ‘with’ the wild animals.

Juxtapose this with Kurtz, the antitype of Jesus, whose typology is of Adam ejected from the Garden, and from God’s presence, who does not lack human company (more accurately, he has enslaved the indigenous people to his demonic task) and is antipathetic towards the wild animals because he is slaughtering elephants for their ivory. Earlier in the novella, we are persuaded to believe in Kurtz is a charismatic leader, yet this is not the whole truth for it is not until the end of the book that we discover that Kurtz’s real motive for setting out to the Dark Continent was to make money. Thus he was an evangelistic free marketeer as well as a poet, a painter, a musician and an orator. Unlike Jesus, who lived in a way that was self-consistent in his central commitment of loving faith, Kurtz had not set out with good intentions and consequently he had been easily corrupted, because he had no spiritual resistance or internal restraint.

…the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core….

When Marlow finally reaches Kurtz, he encounters a moral vacuum within a skeleton, “a speaking soul, a direct effluence from the heart of darkness”. A lost voice crying in the wilderness. Humans, Conrad is saying, are naturally competitive and self-seeking and the story is emblematic of our contemporary ecological crisis; a measure of the gulf between humankind and God’s creation. The potential for darkness exists in every heart. The failure to live sustainably is a failure not only in our material but in our spiritual ecology. Marlow is full of admiration for Kurtz. But Kurtz stares into the future and sees no exit strategy, for Kurtz remains god-like to the last, finally exercising judgement on himself,

I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –

“The horror! The horror!”

In Mark’s Gospel the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness to confront Satan, be ministered to by the angels and to establish an ideal association between a human being and the wild animals, affirming their intrinsic value in God’s love. To inaugurate the Kingdom of God. But as Richard Baukham says in Bible and Ecology, p.129, we do not have to wait to the escaton for this idealistic future, we can anticipate its realisation by respecting and preserving God’s non-human creatures and their environment.

A wood nymph bathing…

1000m up in the Talamanca Mountains, in Costa Rica, is the Rancho Naturalista rain forest reserve. That afternoon we saw a violet-crowned fairy bathing on the wing. It was getting late, near dusk. The ‘grey leaves’ in the forest, ‘thick furred’ as Edith Sitwell puts it in her poem ‘Lullaby for Jumbo’, were dampening down the humid day. There was no sound, save for a trickling stream as it fell, rested in small pools, before falling, falling down the ravine.

Then a dazzling flash of bright violet-blue. And the stream hushed as a staccato, high-pitched chip announced the arrival of the forest’s avian jewel, ‘che tewink tewinck tewinck‘. Hovering over a small pool and sparkling bronzy-green, then violet-blue, this princely adorned wood nymph, weighing hardly more than a spoonful of sugar, dropped into the clear, pure water. Then almost immediately out again. Then back in. Shimmering with water droplets, spinning a blaze of crystals into the gloom of the forest, the bathing beauty shed its rivulets until, with a squeak of tinkling notes, it disappeared.

Somewhere, out on the edge, the grey-greenness became porous, a wild light embraced the heart and the forest gave a deep a sigh.