The LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.  And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food (Genesis 2:8-9)

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Romans 1:20)

I believe the key element in our recovering the lost theology of nature—a loss that is evident in our often insensitive and utilitarian approach to the natural world—is to recognize that the beauty of the created world is evidence of the Creator himself.  It’s significant that in the Genesis creation account the first fact mentioned about the trees of the garden was that they were “pleasing to the eye” (Gen. 2:9). Yes, they were “good for food,” but apparently what was most striking to Adam and Eve was their beauty.

It’s a worthy goal for us to regularly regard the beauty of the creation before we consider its utility.  It was this approach to the natural world that motivated John Muir to become a successful lobbyist in making Yosemite a national park—an approach that millions of people since that time have been grateful for. This same understanding led to the creation of all our national parks.  The utilitarian approach to Yellowstone, for instance, could have compelled some entrepreneurs to consider it more valuable as a massive geothermal power plant than a park.

"Falls of the Kaaterskill" Thomas Cole, 1826

John Muir believed that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”  The value of natural beauty to the human soul was what inspired the masterful landscape painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting.  With his paintings he wanted to put people back in touch with the Creator.  He hoped his paintings would give city-dwelling admirers a yearning for the outdoors where they too could discover what he had—that “in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle [again] with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate.”

Maybe that’s why I admire Cole’s paintings and not Picasso’s.  If we saw something like a Picasso in nature, we’d know at once it did not come from God’s hands!  Beauty may be nature’s most profound apologist for God.

[Old growth trees photo source: cramsay23]
[Clearcut forest photo source]

How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious,  teeming with creatures beyond number— living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up;  when you open your hand,  they are satisfied with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified;  when you take away their breath,  they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit,  they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the LORD endure forever;  may the LORD rejoice in his works (Psalm 104:24-31).

I was thinking the other day about what we know from Scripture about how the Holy Spirit interacts with the natural world.  We know that from the beginning of creation God the Holy Spirit has been present on the earth.  In the beginning the Spirit “hovered” over the waters. The Hebrew word used there appears only three times in Bible.  The context suggests that the Spirit acted in the creation like the eagle in Deuteronomy 32:11 where the word is used again: The eagle “stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.” We also know from the passage above that the Spirit continues to act in creation by giving life. It seems from these references that the Spirit is a “pregnant” presence vital to each new life-giving and life-affirming natural act (“pregnant” in this sense meaning “full of creative power”).

Jurgen Moltmann in his book on the Holy Spirit and the theology of life (The Source of Life p. 114) elaborates on this truth and this passage:

Through the force of his Spirit [The Creator] forms the community of creation.  In his Spirit everything comes alive; without his Spirit everything disintegrates.  His eternal Spirit is the driving force and the vital spark in all things.  In everything living the passion for life is dominant—and the fear of death.  That is why everything living cries out for God’s Spirit, in which alone it can live and does not have to die.  What exists and cannot endure longs for the eternal existence of God in which it will have continuance. (Romans 8:18-25)

Further, dramatic appearances of the Holy Spirit are mentioned in the context of two other genesis events: the genesis of Jesus’ ministry at His baptism and the genesis of the Church at Pentecost.

This is both marvelous and mysterious.  Full understanding of it is certainly well beyond me.  But I think we can at least draw this conclusion: God the Holy Spirit is all about life and breath.  It is the Spirit who gives and perpetuates the life of all creation.

Yet here is something more personally compelling: This is the same Spirit who indwells you and me who have been rescued by God the Son–maintaining our physical life and giving us our spiritual life.  It’s my belief, therefore, that as we walk upon the face of the earth, the indwelling Spirit will stir our hearts when we observe and take part in the both the birth and death of living, breathing creatures.  Perhaps that’s the reason that God attends the death even of the sparrow (Luke 12:6-7).

George MacDonald is one of my favorite writers.  He was–through his written works–a mentor to C. S. Lewis.  MacDonald too wondered about the interactions of the Spirit within us and the Spirit outside us.  Here are his thoughts about that:

All about us in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs.  Now it shows itself in a daisy, now in a waft of wind, a cloud, a sunset, and this power holds constant relation with the dark and silent world within us.  The same God who is in us and upon whose tree we are buds, also is all about us.  Inside the Spirit; outside the Word [Jesus, as per John 1:1].  And the two are ever trying to meet in us; and when they meet, the sign without and longing within become one.  The man no more walks in darkness, but in light, knowing where he is going.

It’s my earnest prayer that in my interactions with God’s wonderful creation I will be more and more attentive to the Spirit within and the Word without in order that I truly might know exactly where I am going.

[Fawn photo source: bjmccray]

God] is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south. He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted (Job 9:9-10)

Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? ( Job 38:31-31),

One of the many negative aspects of modern urban living is that we are not exposed to the stars night after night.  What a misfortune it is that the lights of the night we see from Los Angeles to Tokyo to Sydney to Frankfort to London are flashing Coke and Sony signs and MacDonald’s golden arches.  Our children can name dozens of commercial products by their lighted signs before they can even read, but my guess is that not one in a hundred could find the constellations Orion or the Pleiades, let alone give them a name. Indeed, how many adults could identify the Pleiades if exposed to a night sky dark enough to actually see that striking cluster of stars? [In fact, my spell checker couldn't even find it!]

Pleiades

How many know the stars called “the Bear and its cubs”?  In Latin their names are Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, meaning Great Bear and Little Bear and are commonly referred to as the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.  And how many know that the brightest star in the Little Dipper is named Polaris—the Pole Star or the North Star—because it is almost directly above the North Pole and has served for millennia as the most important navigational light in the Northern Hemisphere?

Even as near in time as the mid-twentieth century, the majority of people in North America could see most visible stars on a clear night.  On a midsummer’s night the kids in my neighborhood would, like thousands of kids around the country, lie on our backs and chant in unison, “Star light, star bright/The first star I see tonight;/I wish I may, I wish I might,/Have the wish I wish tonight.”  And in our young souls, we would silently ponder deep thoughts about the wonders of the heavens and God.

Living in light-polluted Grand Rapids with cloud cover well over 40% of our days, I seldom see the Milky Way, and I miss it.  What’s truly sad to me, however, is that most children these days don’t even know what the Milky Way is and are almost stunned when they happen to be exposed to it the first few times.  Contrast that with the awe-inspiring aspect children experienced almost every cloudless night before the Industrial Revolution and global urbanization.

Milky Way from Death Valley

Our souls need the stars.  We need to be reminded of the vastness of the cosmos and the smallness of Earth.  We need them to show us the greatness of our Creator.  When we see how grand the universe is, as Job and his “comforters” did, and realize that we are as dust—yet so loved by the Creator/Savior that He chose to walk the earth with us, we cannot cease but to be humbled by the One who “performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted.”

[He]did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-7 NASB).

[Tokyo MacDonald's sign source: nickburcher]
[Star photos from Wikipedia]

And of Joseph he said: ‘Blessed of the LORD is his land, With the precious things of heaven, with the dew, And the deep lying beneath, With the precious fruits of the sun, With the precious produce of the months, With the best things of the ancient mountains, With the precious things of the everlasting hills, With the precious things of the earth and its fullness, And the favor of Him who dwelt in the [burning] bush (Deut. 33:13-16, NKJV).

One of my favorite pastimes is woodworking.  My love for working with wood came essentially from my high school shop class when our first project was to make a small cedar jewelry box for our mothers.  The smell of aromatic cedar had always captivated me—in part because that was the smell that arose whenever my mom lifted the lid on her hope chest in my folks’ bedroom.  It was where her precious things were stored.  Her taking us to that old cedar chest for something was always an adventure—an adventure similar to going to the attic.  Probably what made these quests so enjoyable was that they were almost always accompanied by  stories of my mom and dad’s past.

I believe that chest came from Stickley Brother’s Furniture in Grand Rapids, the first place that my mother had worked as a young woman.  Our dining room suite came from Stickley Brothers as well. And Mother’s first purchase there, a Windsor chair that she got for $7, remains in our home—still solid as a rock after some 85 years of use.  That chair remains while many other cheap pieces of furniture we accumulated over the years have gone to the landfill.  The famous old furniture factories of Grand Rapids, once called the “Furniture Capital of America,” knew the value of both good wood and good work.

Having those influences in my life, I was especially captivated by the words of Wendell Berry in reference to our use of the precious things of the earth that we often fail to properly value:

Wendell Berry

By denying spirit and truth to the non-human Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built—that is, they have legitimized bad work.

Good human work honors God’s work.  Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love.  It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands.  It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty.  To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.  This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing his Spirit.

In the Bible we find none of the industrialist’s contempt or hatred for nature.  We find, instead, a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing, as in [the] verses from Moses’ valedictory blessing of the twelve tribes [above].

Wendell Berry. Christianity and the Survival of Creation. Pantheon Books, 1992-3.
[Cedar chest photo from Lynda True]
[Stickley Brothers photo source]

His anger is but for a moment, and His favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5

At the age of 37 I entered a three-year “dark night of the soul” called mid-life crisis.  No, I didn’t buy a red sports car, abandon my family, and become a beach bum.  Mostly I cried a lot.  Sometimes at night I would go outside, look up at the stars, and ask, “God, where are you?” and weep again because the heavens were brass.  One day I fell crying into my wife’s lap—telling her that I needed God to step out of heaven and tell me that everything will be all right.  Her answer was Spirit-inspired: “God is not going to step out of heaven and tell you that, but I’m here and I’m telling you that everything is going to be all right!”  Marge and my friends became the voice and heart of Jesus during that bleak time.  They took my hand and carried the Light for me throughout the night until morning came again. 

Among the many lessons I learned at that time is when your soul is in anguish, the wonder of creation loses it’s capacity to create joy.  I even wrote a psalm about it—my mid-life crisis psalm. I’d like to repeat it here, but I’ve misplaced it.  The sum of it, though, is that I bewailed the loss of joy in my vocation as a Christian school administrator, in my wife and children, and in the natural world.  Living in Northern California at the time, I had access to some of the world’s most amazing natural wonders: Big Sur, the redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada, Point Reyes, and typically awe-inspiring Yosemite.  Yet they became incapable of giving me joy.  I was heartsick and only God could heal me—which He eventually did.  And I learned the lesson that C. S. Lewis taught in Screwtape Letters:

Sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from [the believer’s] conscious experience, all. . . supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. [Chapter 8]

The creation by itself never satisfies the soul—a fact learned when one is heartsick.  It’s the existence, love, and care of our Creator/Savior and His people that makes joy in anything possible.  If the soul of someone in your sphere of influence is struggling in the night, stay with them and carry the Light; and keep reminding them that joy—and growth—will come again with the morning.

[Yosemite photos Uploaded on November 17, 2009 by ohad*]
[Candle image: www.massbible.org/blog/labels/light.html]