I spend yesterday with a group from a Christian denomination. We wrestle with the future path of the church. How can we be more relevant, attract a larger community, practice our values of inclusion and service?

I am imagining that we’ll talk a lot about Caring for Creator’s Creation: How can we bring more reverence to the mystery and miracle of our planet teeming with life? How can we express our grief over the sacrilege we’ve committed and use our grieving to inspire change so we humans stop plundering God’s gifts? I’m thinking that this community will want to lead in an interfaith movement proposing that the foundation for human transformation needs to be a spiritual one for life to flourish. I am imagining that Christian churches of the western world will be ready to examine their traditions, take into account the new knowledge we have about life in general and human well-being in particular, scientific, psychological, emotional, physiological. We know now that wounded hearts have a hard time loving their neighbors, that humans need to belong and celebrate joy, grief and fear together, that the planet and our universe(s) are not machines, that our bodies are temples not garbage dumps, that matter is sacred, that head thinking separated from the bodymind leads us far astray from Creator’s Creation, and that as scientist, Jude Currivan, points out: We ARE consciousness embedded in cosmic consciousness –

Toward the end of the morning, when none of what I imagine shows up in our discussion, it begins to rain. And as our conversation remains human centered and rooted in the practical, the rain rains harder. Then the rain becomes torrential. The rain pummels the tin roof so loudly, we have to use our outdoor voices! I experience the rain as Earth shouting: Listen up humans, pay attention to how you treat me, – church can no longer be just about humans but needs to be about your human relationship with me, with the sacredness of what has been provided for you by forces and sources way beyond you! I birthed you, not the other way round.

A stranger sitting across from me at the table, whispers, “Earth is crying!” We smile with unexpected solidarity.

After lunch, I mention my experience of Earth crying to a small group that includes the rector. He responds with “that’s not our tradition…you’re talking more from an Eastern perspective, maybe pantheistic or panentheistic, but not the western Christian tradition. There is a difference between creatures and Creator.”

I say no more. His response reveals the enormity of the thinking change being called for in western churches. As our conversation unfolds though, the words spiritual grief and then spiritual pain are named. Spiritual pain hits a responsive chord with many. Varieties of spiritual pain are identified: the climate, meaninglessness, purposelessness, lack of forgiveness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, hatred…I would add to the list of pains: separation from the sacred, the numinous, the mysterious and magical, the awe, the wonder, the enchantment of this sentient world, this conscious cosmos, the divine responsive aliveness everywhere.

Thank God for Jude Currivan’s sacred science. To reiterate from my last post, she points out that science now affirms the reality of experiences we have been taught to deny as “modern/civilized/rational” humans, thus diminishing our capacities for wisdom, truth, communion, creativity, curiosity, imagination, etc. We have been torn from our ancient human origins of belonging to a living world, an extended family of kin. This disenchantment pains us in myriad ways, most of them beyond our awareness. Currivan points out that settled science (that which is no longer controversial) supports the “emergent nonlocally unified cosmology of a multidimensional Universe, which naturally includes supernormal phenomena and attributes. ( intuition, synchronicity, telepathy, pre-cognition, etc ) They’re natural to us. They are our heritage. They’re our lineage.” ( bold font mine )

Jessica Eise, scientist, wrote an article: Emerging Research Links Climate Action with Spirituality. She quotes Robin Wall Kimmerer who “‘contends, the Earth loves us and wants to care for us.’ (Eise asks:) Is this something we are secretly longing for as a society? Hope? A sense of connection? Of being loved, and loving in return? Could spirituality save us?…the time seems nigh to accept that a new approach to the science and politics of climate change is due…I want to qualify my use of the word new. There is, in fact, nothing new at all about seeing the interconnectedness of life and Earth. It is, perhaps, as natural as breathing. And maybe, all this time, we have in fact just been suffocating ourselves with an imposed and limited worldview of what science and society should be.”

I want to rephrase Eise’s last sentence: And maybe, all this time, we have in fact just been suffocating ourselves with an imposed and limited worldview of what science, spirituality and religion should be.