Healing the Earth / Healing Ourselves
“Let your ways be known upon earth, your saving health
among all nations.” Psalm 67:2
I was
listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and a First Nations member of the
Civil Potawatomie Nation as she combines science with the wisdom of her elders
as to our relationship with the Earth. In her nation’s native language there is
no word for “it,” our much used indefinite pronoun. As a result, one does not
think of, let alone address, a plant, or an animal, or even rocks, rivers and
streams as “it,” anymore than anyone of us would refer to dear old Aunt Grace
as “it.” Science does objectify such things, whereas Kimmerer’s nation treats
everything that is of the Earth as living beings.
“I can’t
think of a single scientific study in the last few decades,” she offers, “that
has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always
the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity
to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in
really understanding the sentience of other beings.”[i]
Psalm 67
reminds us that since the very beginning of creation, we were put on this
fragile Earth our island home to know the Creator’s ways, and that there are
ways to walk upon this planet as participants in the health of all nations –
which ultimately, clearing all the other obstacles of religion, politics and
national identities aside, depends on our stewardship, our caretaking, of all living
things around us.
The problem
with a worldview infected by the Enlightenment and science objectifying
everything around us is that we tend to carry on a one-way relationship with
the things of nature and see this world as objects to be consumed and exploited
with little or no concern for the needs of plants and animals and rocks, rivers
and streams, and the earth itself, let alone any concern for the future not
only of our planet, but of our children and grandchildren. Ironically, Kimmerer
suggests we need to retreat to a child-like way of knowing, which is actually a
worldly-wise way of knowing – a deep kind of attention that we pay as children
can be a “doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to
reciprocity. And it worries me greatly, she says, that today’s children can
recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants.”[ii]
Listening
to this conversation, I was already approaching our lessons in Revelation
21:10, 22-22:5, and John 5:1-9, asking myself, Just what does Jesus healing a
man on the Sabbath and John exiled on the isle of Patmos’s vision of a new
Earth, a new Jerusalem, have to do with Rogation Sunday? With no need for a
cultic center like The Temple, all the rules of sacrifice and healing are out
the window. Instead, there is a “river of the water of life, bright as
crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of
the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with
its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of
the tree are for the healing of the nations.” It’s all there.
We need to
allow this vision to reside in our hearts, not our minds. When we do, we begin
to see that all we need for health and healing, even the healing of nations, has
been given. In all that is alive all around us is all that we need to go beyond
simply finding ways to sustain life on this planet, which is to treat creation
as something we sustain only to be able to consume more and more. The vision
invites us to go beyond sustaining and to open the door to reciprocity – “recognizing
that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been
given to us, is … a really generative and creative way to be a human in the
world. And some of our oldest teachings ask what does it mean to be an educated
person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf
of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift.
And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in
biodiversity, the ecosystem is … too simple. It doesn’t work as well when that
gift is missing.”[iii]
Jesus knows
this reciprocity as he abandons rules that suggest you cannot heal on the
Sabbath. He knows that the man waiting near the pool inside the Sheep Gate of
Jerusalem ought not have to compete with others to get to the healing waters at
just the moment the water is stirred. It turns out that survival does not
depend on who wins and who loses, or who is the fittest – it depends on the
kind of reciprocity, the giving and sharing of gifts, throughout the entire
ecosystem. Jesus gives away his gift of healing. We say we know this, and yet
the allure of greed and conspicuous consumption of resources tempts us to
ignore what even more ancient civilizations have long known. Every plant, every
ant, every drop of water, every molecule of breathable air is essential to the
earth and to one another.
Four times
a year we renew our Baptismal Covenant to shape our knowing God’s ways upon
earth, ways meant to lead to healing a fragile Earth as well as the healing of
relationships with one another, including, says Jesus, our enemies and nations.
Perhaps we need to regularly renew a covenant of reciprocity with Creation
itself. Kimmerer suggests such a covenant might look like this: “We are all
bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and
summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our
elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance
of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it
came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the
passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the
memory of snow.”[iv]
The elders
of the Civil Potawatomie Nation remind us that life is a dance if we remember
that the Earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. Our ceremonies
must always help us to remember, all our dances will be dances of grief and
mourning should we forget to regularly join in the Dance of the Giveaway, the
Dance of Reciprocity, that our hearts and eyes may be opened to see all of
Creation as living, and true, and ready to give back to us the wisdom of
healing that is to be for all peoples, for all nations, for all time. May the
Creator’s ways be known upon earth. Amen.
[i] The
Intelligence of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer with Krista Tippett, On Being,
May 12, 2022 for this and all further references to their conversation, https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants-2022/
[ii]
Ibid.
[iii]
Ibid
[iv] Ibid
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