Our relationship with Earth can, and must, be rethought and healed. Let's each do our part, and work together, to make the most of our stewardship of this lovely place called home.

We are all better off when we understand and honor our connection to nature. When we learn that we can’t force nature to do what we want and that only by cooperating with nature are the best results obtained. This is an important life lesson also as we deal with everything and everyone in our lives. You can’t make another person like you or do what you want. You can’t force your ideas on anyone. Cooperation with them, however, will get the job done every time.

For the last several decades it is been clear to me that one of the primary goals of the Jesus path is a profound spiritual experience of Oneness with all life. At times I have used terms such as becoming awake to the interconnectedness or interdependency of all creation and creatures. Admittedly, these are only words which attempt to describe an awareness which defies an exact or precise definition. Other spiritual teachers had different ways of describing this phenomenon, though they may have emphasized different steps to experience it. In all cases, a common objective from all the great and enlightened teachers is learning how to live on this earth with awareness that we are all part of one living organism.

Personal transformation occurs every time you enter into nature and stop to delight in its inherent divinity. World transformation occurs when we serve and protect our earth home. And, my friends, this CAN be done one person at a time. Our earth heroes and heroines have been showing us the way- it is time for us follow their lead, or become the new leaders for our future generations.

Environmental stewardship is defined in Wikipedia as “...the responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices.” Inasmuch as most business on the planet is controlled by a small number of corporations, these are the words that must apply to these biggest of multi-nationals: responsible, protection, conservation, and sustainable practices. Would that they did.

All human effort is navigation. Human striving—confronted by the wreckage of the past moment, the state of the soil, the demands of both—finds orientation from a compass with two arrows: moral and physical. I was always interested in ethics, but it took a while for me to notice that the moral spins out from the physical more often than the reverse. “Each of us is made by—or, one might better say, made as—a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things,” writes farmer-poet Wendell Berry. “The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts.”

Good stewardship of the Planet is part of the movement for “Eco-justice”: leaving the resources in the ground; insuring a legacy of life for future generations; treating the Planet as an autonomous organism, whose continuing survival depends on the health of its interconnected systems: the earth, the air, the fire, the water.

When it comes to things like Earth Stewardship, we progressives think that because we hold the value so highly our actions will automatically conform to our aspirations.  But this is seldom the case. In part, we fall short of our most noble aspirations because we are ignoring a big part of the issue.  We forget that we are not nearly as rational as we believe, but are shaped by invisible core beliefs that thwart our genuine desire to act differently.

Every living being on this planet and indeed this universe is interconnected in a deep and meaningful way. We are literally made of the stars, we breathe the air that the trees cleanse for us, and we are in a symbiotic relationship with every creature in this web of life.

In the midst of all this one might well ask: What has happened to the Christian prophetic voice? the voice that says: no, you can’t do that. Christians lately have a tendency to accommodate culture, either by draping the cross with the American flag, or by pretending that new philosophical/theological theories are the answer to the world’s problems. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible had a different take on the divine will. They walked into the king’s court and the king’s chapel, and proclaimed what they believed was the word of God: you cannot do that! We may not like to use the word sin anymore, especially when thought of as “original”. So let us put something else in its place. We are parochial, we do create our own little world, we do put our interests above those of others. And it will haunt us. The eternal now is upon us, and it is time for the Church, progressive and otherwise, to join those prophetic voices that the the world so desperately needs to hear, those voices that cry out: you cannot do this!

Don’t be discouraged or impatient. Nature reminds us that perseverance is not always a linear process but it always involves change. Human beings persevere the same way a leaf falls to the ground- back and forth, two steps forward and one step back. Be prepared to change and fall, many times and then get back up. Life can be a wild and unpredictable ride, but there is always more to come, more to learn and more to become.

This cosmic vision changes everything. The incredible thing is that from the moon, you don’t see people and animals and plants as if they are separate, you see patterns of light and shade. You see one small and fragile ball hanging like a mobile over a baby’s crib. It’s all one and not fragmented into human needs and earth needs. The needs are one and the same. Viewed from outer space, the borders between countries, the distinction between human and non human, rich and poor, man and woman, all become trivial.

If you’re the sort of person who is motivated by getting up close and personal with nature, then create plenty of opportunities to do that. Remind yourself that your life is dependent on the life of the earth, and your life affects the earth in every moment.

If you take an honest look at the problem, it’s hard to ignore the role of our human lifestyle in creating the crisis. But what do you do about it? Is guilt or regret an effective motivator? Can we force ourselves to change our lifestyles, or is this just a band aid on massive scar?

I’m yet to meet anyone who openly admits that they don’t care about the earth. We all SAY we care. The real question we need to ask is, “What are we prepared to do? How far are we prepared to go in our activism? Will we make radical changes to our lifestyle for the cause?”

The idea that we humans have been given dominion over the animals, the trees and the waters is just wrong. At some point we are going to have to admit we have been blind to what we have done and are continuing to do. If we do not begin to function in harmony with all Creation, I am afraid Homo sapiens will have a short history on this earth. Even more tragic, we humans will have missed an opportunity to experience an amazing awareness that could have led to a profound, life changing spiritual experience and a very different worldly experience.

For those like me who see Jesus, not as the divine Son of God in our midst, but as a courageous sage and social prophet, and for those of us who see God as other than an all-powerful distant deity – the language of reverence is rooted in the story of existence and the universe itself. That becomes a religious story whispering of a larger meaning of our existence or in Bumbaugh’s words each of us is “a self present in the singularity that produced the emergent universe; a self present at the birth of the stars; a self related through time to every living thing on this planet; a self that contains within it the seeds of a future we cannot imagine in our wildest flights of fantasy.” That non-traditional evolutionary sacred story invites us to stand in awe; and it calls us to create a whole new vocabulary of reverence even as we commit to cherishing and caring for the earth.

As it always has been with all species that defy planetary order, ours will soon be facing a painful adjustment and even the possibility of extinction. How did we – you and I - get to where we are today? Historically throughout human history we see a certain archetypal pattern repeating itself over and over again. Can this give us an answer? Yes, it can.

We come to the desert at least as much for what is not here as much as for what is. Monastics of every religion are drawn to it. Moses encountered God in a bush on a desert mountain. The first theologians of Christianity were known as the Desert Fathers. In wilderness they prayed, meditated, contemplated – uncluttering their hearts and minds in an uncluttered space. Mohammed went to a desert cave and there he waited until the Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to him. Around the same time, Buddhist monks retreated to the mountainous deserts of Central Asia to meditate.

Thunder lags behind lightning beyond an outcrop of stone slabs framed by clusters of Joshua trees with spikes shivering in the wind. A dark gauzy curtain descends from a boiling mass of cloud. Scattered spits of rain puff dust out of tiny craters they form on impact in the fine dirt. The cooling air fills with the overwhelming scent of wet creosote.

CLEAR is what I want to feel and be when it comes to something that means as much to me as FAITH. I want to be at peace with what I believe and choose to say and do, with regard to my way of living in faith. I want to own it whole-heartedly. I don’t want to apologize or make excuses for beliefs that don’t make sense, saying things like, “You just have to take that in faith. Someday it will make sense to me, even if it doesn’t now. God’s ways are not our ways.” With Clear Faith, I am at peace.

Recently there was a debate at the Creation Museum in Kentucky between its founder, Ken Ham, and Bill Nye, the "Science Guy". If anything resembling scientific evidence mattered to people watching it, they would have been persuaded easily by the Science Guy's arguments. But even Nye implicitly understood that, for many in the audience, the debate wasn't about facts.

I do believe one can make a case from a biblical perspective that we should all eat what grows in the ground, food that can be picked or plucked. More importantly, we know that eating more fresh vegetables, fruit and grains is a healthier way to eat. If we became more aware of what we eat, where it came from and what sacrifices were made to provide it, our eating habits would change. We also might learn to treat Mother Earth as something sacred, rather than something to be used and abused.

Destruction of nature, whether quick and immediate, like the slash-and-burn agricultural practices, or gradual, such as the destruction of the ozone layer, dulls our sensitivity to the presence of God in the natural world.