"The Holy Spirit, like the flight of the wild goose in Celtic lore, longs to sweep over the waters yet again. It cries high above the place where the wild geese once soared...summoning the earth to a beauty forgotten, but not lost. In the haunting sound of that cry, says Mary Oliver, we fret at the mess that we've made of things. We embrace a harsh repentance, a new awareness, and a readiness to act. Meanwhile the world continues in its wild and glorious determination to sing, with or without us.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild gees, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Accepting our place in the family of things means doing everything necessary to assure our mutual delight and well-being. It comes ultimately as a gift, a shared longing, a consciousness that we all are one. We recognise it, at last, in the desire of the geese for exuberant song, the desire of the creek to flow unrestrainedly to the sea, and the desire of human beings to join in God's own deep longing for beauty. May it be so."
(Ravished by Beauty. The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. Belden C. Lane. (Oxford, 2011) page 246)
This is one of those books that opens long shut doors in the mind. It is about Calvin, Puritans and Jonathan Edwards. It majors on desire, longing, beauty, and love of diversity in God and in human hearts. Lane is passionate about ecology and theology, love for the natural world and love for God, and especially insisting that these two ways of looking at the world absolutely must be held together in a robust conception of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is.
Belden Lane's first book was similarly unusual, with the tile The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. It's a study of the desert and wilderness as places of encounter with God. I had an email exchange with Belden Lane 10 years ago about his books, and the importance of upholding a strong doctrine of creation as the anchor point of a balanced Christian spirituality that is at once BOTH passionately in love with God AND lovingly protective of all that God has made.
I've included Lane's conclusion to Ravished by Beauty in this Advent series because he offers a theologically informed argument for care of creation, and a passionate plea for a world in ecological crisis. His main resources for his argument on behalf of human curatorship of the natural world are Calvin and Jonathan Edwards - here is one of Calvin's celebratory remarks about the world as theatre and masterpiece of God:
Correctly then is this world called the mirror of divinity; not that there is sufficient clearness for man to gain a full knowledge of God, by looking at the world, but...the faithful to whom he has given eyes, see sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing. The world was no doubt made, that it might be a theatre of divine glory. (Commentary on Hebrews 11.3, quoted in Lane, p. 71-2)
Advent is a season of hope and expectation in a world where hope seems at times overwhelmed by the volume and noise of bad news. Wars rooted in ancient enmities and a sense of grievance requiring lethal violence against others; a global climate in imminent danger of collapse with catastrophic consequences for all the world's inhabitants, including humans; and these two clear and present dangers fuelled by economic rapacity, myths of endless growth, and the consequent destruction of natural resources and world sustaining environments.
The problems are beyond our mere human ingenuity even if we were capable of collaborative and mutual unselfishness in fixing the brokenness we cause. Advent is not, however, a spiritual, intellectual or theological escape mechanism. It is a time when we look to the light that shines in the darkest corners of God's creation. God's investment in our world is full and final in the coming of Christ, the Light of the world - "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." That is Advent, hope, expectation, but with eyes wide open in the darkness.
Belden Lane's book, Ravished Beauty, is a healthy and important reminder that this earth belongs to God. Its beauty in diversity, its life-giving properties, its purpose as home of God's creatures, these are all in the sovereign gift of God. When Lane finishes his book with the image of the Holy Spirit brooding over the world, surprisingly that image can also pull us towards Bethlehem, where by the gift of that same brooding and creative Holy Spirit, "unto us a child is born."
I don't suppose, left to the meditations and machinations of my own mind I would easily make the connection between Advent and climate change. But once hinted, it's hard to ignore, and surprising that I hadn't thought it before. As a final comment on this fine book, one of his brilliant excursuses is titled 'Biodiversity and the Holy Trinity.'
In this essay Lane combines a sobering account of the breakdown of the biosphere, so much of it our own doing, and a plea that we model our behaviour on the Holy Trinity. No, he isn't saying the economic Trinity is the model of human social and political relations. He is arguing that the biodiversity of God's creation carries the fingerprints of the artist, or put another way, "if we are to survive as a family of species in this biosphere, we will have to imitate the exchange of love and reciprocity that characterizes God's own inner being."
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