Back to Eden: Reconnecting With God Through Nature預覽

A Weaving of Christ

It is the first warm day of the year; the first day in which I can believe that summer might be more than a dream. The sky is stop-and-stare blue, with not a cloud in sight, and the sun is climbing holy into the morning.

After the year I’ve had – the year we've all had: pandemics and political crises and horrendous injustices and a climate emergency and the sheer exhaustion of it all – it is a day of much-needed hope. Hope not merely as a concept, but as tangible as the ground beneath my feet, or the warmth of the first day of summer.

I step out onto my small patch of lawn, bare feet sinking into the dew-wet grass. I curl my toes into the soil, close my eyes, and breathe. And then (I don’t know why it happens, but it does) a thought strikes me. 

I am standing amid a weaving of Christ.

The light and warmth of the sun – photons blasted out by a gargantuan ball of nuclear fusion 94 million miles away – are being made by Christ, through Christ, and for Christ.

The grass on which I stand – each blade of which can use those photons to create the very air that we breathe – has been made by Christ, through Christ, and for Christ.

The soil beneath that grass – the great sustainer of life, out of which our food grows, itself an ecosystem of millions of organisms – has been made by Christ, through Christ, and for Christ.

And me. And you. By Christ. Through Christ. For Christ.

We stand amid the weaving of Christ. We ourselves are part of it. We are connected to the rest of creation at that most fundamental level: we have the same maker; we are alike Christ’s handiwork – worm and rock and ocean and mountain and songbird and cloud and tree and human being. The nature of nature is Christ.

This Christ-ness of our world has a startling implication, one that we do not consider nearly as much as we should:

All things in creation are sacred. Wondrous. Divine-tinted. 

All things have their place. All things belong. How could they not, having been brought into being by and through and for Christ? A fallen world is not a Christless world; the fall is a stain upon the fabric, it is not the fabric itself.

Let us begin by recognizing this. By seeing the sacred wonder all around us, and by treating the rest of creation accordingly.

Pray with us:

Christ of creation,

Thank you.

Thank you for the beauty of this world –

this world that is thick with wonder.

Open our eyes and ears and hearts

to the weavings you have wrought –

To the Christ-ness of nature, of which we are a part.

Help us to see creation as sacred,

and to see the beauty and wonder in all things –

including ourselves.

In your holy name,

amen.