Sometimes I don't know. Going to church now-a-days I often feel like a third thumb, not really a part of things beyond being a greeter and usher which younger people are generally not interested in. This empty-nest mid-life church crises for older people is very well described in this online Christianity Today article:
All of the above makes me so much more open to a totally new spiritual adventure if I move to Costa Rica. Who knows what kind of church or fellowship or channels of service? And my love of nature and how it puts me right beside God in so many ways was partially spoken to by my favorite newspaper religion writer, Ray Waddle, in today's Tennessean:
Earth saves room for human delights
For The Tennessean
Last week in Montana, my wife and friends and I encountered three grizzly bears walking across our narrow trail, hardly 40 feet away. My group was naturally thrilled. I naturally worried: We could be killed. It was a mother grizz and two cubs. The scene would turn bad if mama bear felt threatened.
Human domination of nature suddenly meant nothing. We were at the bear’s mercy. But she had other things on her mind — raising a family, getting home. We weren’t worth a second thought. She disappeared with her cubs into the brush without a trace, ignoring our cameras and good intentions.
Immersion in a mountainous wilderness (in this case, Glacier National Park) reveals the silent prehistoric earth as it was before human commentary, sacred texts or gasoline. Out there, it’s hard to see how we fit in, except as disrupters.
Scripture says we were made to rule over Earth’s creatures. So we assume we came along early enough to name everything and organize the place, and it’s been our plantation ever since.
Yet science (for the moment) says the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and homo sapiens are maybe 200,000 years old, and we got civilized (started writing) about 5,000 years ago. Which means we arrived late to the banquet. How did God get along without us for 4 billion years? Did God put us on the map only recently because there’s no way we could inhabit the planet for billions of years without destroying it? That’s my guess.
The secret complaint against evolutionary science, I suspect, is not the science but the insult to human ego that a Creator could manage for so long without our companionship. Seen from geologic time, God’s intentions are a bottomless enigma. Yet a miracle abides: our capacity for the poetry of belief, words knitted together against time and chaos in order to bring us closer to the divine spirit. This gift is laid at our doorstep every morning in the golden sunrise.
On this trip I read poet William Stafford, whose verse suggests nature is always watching and waiting, ready to reveal its mind, its balanced economy, its implacable will, its majestic creatures. “The slow current of the life below tugs at me all day,” he once wrote. “When I dream at night, they save a place for me.”
Fierce and patient Earth saves room for human delights — a Tennessee stream, a Kansas plain, a Connecticut autumn, a Montana bear and her cubs, watched from a safe distance.
Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean religion editor and author of a new book, “ Undistorted God” (Abingdon Press). Reach him at ray@raywaddle.com.
All of the above makes me so much more open to a totally new spiritual adventure if I move to Costa Rica. Who knows what kind of church or fellowship or channels of service? And my love of nature and how it puts me right beside God in so many ways was partially spoken to by my favorite newspaper religion writer, Ray Waddle, in today's Tennessean:
Earth saves room for human delights
For The Tennessean
Last week in Montana, my wife and friends and I encountered three grizzly bears walking across our narrow trail, hardly 40 feet away. My group was naturally thrilled. I naturally worried: We could be killed. It was a mother grizz and two cubs. The scene would turn bad if mama bear felt threatened.
Human domination of nature suddenly meant nothing. We were at the bear’s mercy. But she had other things on her mind — raising a family, getting home. We weren’t worth a second thought. She disappeared with her cubs into the brush without a trace, ignoring our cameras and good intentions.
Immersion in a mountainous wilderness (in this case, Glacier National Park) reveals the silent prehistoric earth as it was before human commentary, sacred texts or gasoline. Out there, it’s hard to see how we fit in, except as disrupters.
Scripture says we were made to rule over Earth’s creatures. So we assume we came along early enough to name everything and organize the place, and it’s been our plantation ever since.
Yet science (for the moment) says the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and homo sapiens are maybe 200,000 years old, and we got civilized (started writing) about 5,000 years ago. Which means we arrived late to the banquet. How did God get along without us for 4 billion years? Did God put us on the map only recently because there’s no way we could inhabit the planet for billions of years without destroying it? That’s my guess.
The secret complaint against evolutionary science, I suspect, is not the science but the insult to human ego that a Creator could manage for so long without our companionship. Seen from geologic time, God’s intentions are a bottomless enigma. Yet a miracle abides: our capacity for the poetry of belief, words knitted together against time and chaos in order to bring us closer to the divine spirit. This gift is laid at our doorstep every morning in the golden sunrise.
On this trip I read poet William Stafford, whose verse suggests nature is always watching and waiting, ready to reveal its mind, its balanced economy, its implacable will, its majestic creatures. “The slow current of the life below tugs at me all day,” he once wrote. “When I dream at night, they save a place for me.”
Fierce and patient Earth saves room for human delights — a Tennessee stream, a Kansas plain, a Connecticut autumn, a Montana bear and her cubs, watched from a safe distance.
Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean religion editor and author of a new book, “ Undistorted God” (Abingdon Press). Reach him at ray@raywaddle.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment