In caves and desserts, oceans and jungles, there are
galaxies within universes that are teeming with an intricate and savage beauty that
human eyes will simply never see. Insects crawl from the jungle floor once
every seventeen years, cocoon into moths within twenty-four hours, and spend their
one remaining day of life being a food source.
Translucent glow-worms transform a sunless cavern into a starry sky while
salivating balls of silk into dangling, predatory strings of iridescence more exquisite
than any strand of pearls.
Humpback whales creak like wood as they slide nose-up beneath
the water, their bodies ridged, scraped and dull like their surroundings, like
the underside of a barnacled boat that is sinking. Brightly marked salamanders crawl
out from between grey rocks looking as smudged and carelessly coloured as a chalk
drawing on a sidewalk. Shellacked ducks bob on water, their bodies carved,
bejewelled and painted with a fine point brush.
Fresh water sits impossibly on top of salt water like oil,
in a cave that Elohim forgot when He first separated the waters. Glimmering
pink fish with porcelain-like fins nestle between rocks in a lake of sulphuric
acid. Calcite drips like melting wax from the ceilings of caverns that lie beneath
mountains of limestone, and shapes into glossy pillars of rippled bone. Water and
wind erode stone into deep valleys forming ruffles and hollows resembling
layers of eyelet on a spread-out skirt. Crystals hang opulently in rows in caves like a
hall of chandeliers, or spread across flat land like a blanket of sugar.
All day long, all night long, the earth is singing and
screaming and dancing and dying, gyrating and heaving in one perilously sensual
tango, fluttering like the tinsel on a Christmas pageant halo. Nowhere is desolate
– at its most barren the earth, like the
very Word of God, is living and active. The earth echoes The Name, bears witness to the ways of God, lives and acts as one
body that is continually renewing and being transformed and testifying. It
tells the God story written by the
Divine hand even into the unseen cells of the universe that is our own body.
It makes no difference to me whether creation took six days
or six billion years – whether it was birthed with a bang or a whimper – the earth holds the shape of the fingerprints
of its Maker. The whole earth cries out, Holy
Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty, Who Was and Is and Is to Come.
The earth was my first spiritual teacher. As a child, growing
up in the country, I watched my parents burn out an overgrown brush near our house.
I remember wondering, tearfully and fearfully, why any wise hand would want to
destroy something that had taken so long to grow, that had done what it was told, achieved the purposes for which it was
created and that’s only offence was to grow too
much. I remember my parents explaining, the way only ones whose hands have lived
in the soil can explain, the necessity of death, how it walks hand in hand with
life in and out of season. They used the word faith and taught me to believe in seeds and bulbs and things
unseen, and I learned what it meant to wait
and see.
I saw the charred, shorn ground when the green began its
pushing forth – I saw how the earth is strong, how it bends its knee, how it
receives its renewal without petulance or grudge or need for a better story.
I learned it then, before I had ever tasted the sourness of death,
what it means to die and to be born again.
Something died in me this year. Not cracked, not broken, not spilled out – dead, in the only way that
the living can comprehend the meaning of the word dead.
A good, growing thing inside me was set ablaze by a Wise Hand and razed to the
ground, and it is completely gone. It is so far gone, its place remembers it no more.
If this has ever happened to you, you will know that the first
thing you become aware of – after the fire has died down and the smoke has
cleared and the first new buds of something unidentifiable begin to push out –
is that you are naked. There isn’t a place in the world to hide when you are
being born again. Old words, like old wine skins, like old plows, like old
fig-leaves, must be replaced.
That word Christian
– I do not think it means what we think it means.
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