Wild Church: Solstice & Essay: Spirituality With the Land

Summer Solstice gathering this Thursday and an essay I wrote

Wild Church: Summer Solstice - Thursday, June 20th

5:30pm Potluck (feel free to bring a dish to share and your own dishware)

6:30 Prayer around the fire

Fire and song, ritual and prayer, community and the land. Sinsinawa Mound: 585 County Rd. Z, Sinsinawa, Wisconsin. We will gather at Cavanaugh Park, located on the west end of the campus across from the sisters’ cemetery. Drive through the St. Clara Academy entrance next to the Post Office on County Road Z. Stay to the left which leads out to Cavanaugh Park and the Sisters’ Cemetery. The event is rain or shine. If possible, please bring a chair.

Spirituality With The Land (a short essay I wrote a few years back)

Two dozen of us processed silently to the far field at St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm and gathered in a circle. It was September 1st and we were nearing the end of a decolonization and land weekend and it was the World Day of Prayer for Creation in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. We stood under Red Oak and Hickory trees while crickets danced at our feet. We sang, called on saints (those officially canonized and not) as well as plants and animals, read from Psalms and the Book of Job, had solitary contemplative time to let Creation preach, and read from Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s hugely important Braiding Sweetgrass. 

Our going to the fields to pray and praise, to contemplate and celebrate, was the culmination of a weekend spent learning about the disastrous, genocidal legacy of western colonization -a process so often undergirded by Christian theology - and examine ways we might live more justly on the land. Rather than appropriating Indigenous spirituality, many of us in that circle sought to re-imagine our own Christian tradition along ecological lines. That impulse was inspired in part by the Wild Church Network, a loose movement of churches and communities who over the last decade have taken church outside. Communities like “Church of Lost Walls,” “Cathedral of the Trees,” and “Burning Bush Forest Church” - at least thirty span the continent - insist that they more than praying in Creation, they are praising and praying with Creation. “All the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Creator” reads Psalm 96. The Spirit has blown these fascinating, important communities outdoors, to renew our primal bonds  with the other-than-human world. 

“In this age of mass extinctions,” the Wild Church statement reads, “we feel burdened by the love of Christ to invite people into direct relationship with some of the most vulnerable victims of our destructive culture:  our land, our waters, the creatures with whom we share our homes.  And, there, people remember that they belong to a larger beloved community.” These Wild Church communities  are reinhabiting the Christian tradition, pointing the way to an important, Earth honoring Christianity, offering this key insight: we  defend only that which we love, revere and find sacred. Maybe our ecological  work, whatever else it entails, may best begin in awe and praise and reverence. 

Fifty years ago, Lynn White Jr., in his essay, “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,”  famously laid the blame for the emerging ecological crisis at the feet of Christianity. Surprisingly, however, he didn’t propose a technological or political solution. He believed that the path out of our crisis lay within religion: either to “make up a new one” or “rethink the old one.” I choose the latter. 

Since I began living more intentionally on and with the land over a decade ago, both at New Hope Catholic Worker Farm and now St. Isidore, I have been slowly transformed by living into the cyclical rhythms of the seasons. Subtly and quietly, I’ve come to learn the seasonal moods and colors, as well as each season’s different work and ways of being. As a way of deepening this experience, in recent years I’ve begun helping facilitate liturgies around the turn of the yearly wheel: marking the four solstices and equinoxes, as well as the four cross-quarters. 

At St. Isidore Farm, we’ve continued offering celebrations of St. Isidore the Farmer on his feast day, May 15th, which coincides with our last frost date. During our decolonization weekend, we offered a liturgy under a Red Oak out in our pasture on  the World Day of Prayer for Creation. Such gatherings have brought together spirit and matter, Creator and Creation - and they feed my hunger for connection with God and the natural world.   

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer laments that the dominant, colonist society has seemingly forgotten the role of ceremony (or liturgy) as a necessary part of our relationship  to the Earth. She calls on the dominant culture to regenerate ceremony as a way to deepen our bond with the land, “without appropriating Native culture.” She challenges non-native people to become not indigenous but naturalized like the healing plant, European plantain,  who has adapted so well to this continent, offering a humble, benevolent presence on this land. Her words remain a helpful prod in my continued journey to find a Christian spirituality for our ecological age. 

Some might be leery that this move toward connecting with the land is just paganism and heathenism dressed in Christian clothes. But maybe we should be more concerned that Christianity has wandered too far into the cities and too often stayed there, cooped up in our cathedrals (though I do still attend the Cathedral in Dubuque). Pagan, after all, originally meant someone who lives rurally; heathen means someone who lives in the heath or uncultivated land. 

I’m convinced that we have a rich, Earth-affirming thread in our Christian tradition and that part of our task is in digging up those gems of our 2,000+ year old story. We have the story in Genesis of adam who comes out of the adamah: we are made from the same soil that gives rise to all other life. In the prophet Isaiah we hear the Cedar trees rise up against the king of babylon, saying that “since you’ve been made low no one comes to cut us down! (Is. 14)” 

We also have the stories of St. Francis who had such a profound sense of kinship with the rest of Creation (“Brother Sun, Sister Moon”). We have Hildegard’s viriditas, her word for God’s healing, greening energy that suffuses all of life. We have the long-held belief that the first and primary “book” of scripture is found in the natural world.

Maybe most significantly, we have our liturgical calendar which in so many ways lines up (at least in the northern hemisphere) with the natural calendar. Christmas, after all, was situated where it is because of the Winter Solstice, the coming of the light. During Lent we prune the trees in the orchard and reflect on ways we need to prune our poor habits. We celebrate the coming of new life in the Spring near Easter, always celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. We honor the dead in November as the leaves fall and plants die back. When we honor the birth of John the Baptist (“I decrease so that He may increase”) we also honor - with bonfire. of course - the Summer Solstice which honors both the peak of light as well as the heralding of decreasing light.

In short, sacred time can shift the way we live in the world, re-claiming that which technological and capitalist society has too often blinded us to: the holy cycles of the year and our lives.    

Over the centuries, Christianity has too often  lost its way, working under the false assumption that we’re nature’s lords and masters.  But we don’t exist apart from Creation; we’re merely a part. It is well past time that we find another way, that we feel inspired by communities like the Wild Church network who urge us to re-read our stories, to go out into the fields, gardens, and forest to find an ancient path that only feels new because it is in fact so old.