Mark I. Wallace - Finding God in the Singing River

"Mark Wallace's latest book, Finding God in the Singing River, represents a breakthrough in contemporary Christian theological reflection on nature.... Elegantly written, this accessible work will be appropriate for Christian study groups as well as seminary students and undergraduates in upper-level religion and environmental studies courses. It especially deserves a wide readership among Christian theologians and laypeople, but it is also a must read for all who are tracking the evolution of Christian environmental ethics."

BRONTAYLOR

University of Florida, Gainesville

"Wallace enchants the reader not only by his passionate commitment to earth justice, but by his skill in navigating through entrenched positions.... Ethicists will appreciate Wallace's efforts to place responsibility for all ecosystems at the heart of morality, and his grace in steering a middle way between the essentialist/constructionist debate."

MARY C. GREY

University of Wales

Mark I.Wallace

To Ellen, Katy, and Christopher

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love"

-Galatians 5:22

MOST MORNINGS I GET OUT OF BED and walk into my front yard where I turn and face the four cardinal directions. I weave a circle of gratitude and praise as I turn and look in each direction, and I thank God for the day that is about to begin. As I celebrate the bounty of the good earth God has made I pray that I may be a person of compassion who lives in balance and harmony with his surroundings even as the animals and plants around me perform their own important and complementary roles in sustaining the web of life. When I first started this ritual, I didn't know east from west or north from south. I didn't know in which direction the sun rose; or where the migrating birds flying above me were headed in their journeys to their overwintering homes in Central America; or where the day ended in the long twilight of languid summer evenings; or in which direction the first cold Canadian blasts of winter originated. One morning as I spun my circle under a black walnut tree close to the edge of the yard, a squirrel dropped a large woody nut down on top of my head. Was this a random mistake, a sign of greeting, or a gesture of irritation? I wasn't sure, but the feeling that I was connected to other life-forms deepened my sense of relationship with the wider earth community during my morning ritual. I am a college professor, so I have a lot of facts in my head. But prior to beginning this ritual, there was not much music in my heart, or juice in my body; now this simple inaugural routine, sometimes accompanied by walnut fragments in my mop of early morning hair, has restored my sense of vigor and belonging to the lifegiving flow patterns that make human existence vibrant and meaningful.

This daily activity an alchemy of Christian prayer of thanksgiving and Native American sacred hoop ritual goes to the heart of the vision that animates this book. I believe that earth and sky, human beings and other beings, everything that lives and grows in its own time and according to its own nature, is pulsing with a green life force that is sacred, that is eternal, that is God. I also believe that the central biblical teaching that the Holy Spirit is God's abiding and animating presence in the world the ongoing incarnation of divine energy that gives breath and life to all things is an extraordinarily fecund expression of the power of this life force in the visionary language of Christian faith. Reactualizing the power of this ancient life force in my morning prayer wheel ritual is a daily reminder to me that the earth is sacred and should therefore be protected as the place that God indwells and maintains for the well-being of all of us, humankind and otherkind together.

We all need some way to experience a deep sense of belonging to the earth, whether or not we are denominationally religious. Indeed, unless we have that sense of belonging, I fear that the prospects for our continual habitation on this planet are not good. Without a spiritual basis for ecology without a deeply felt sense of kinship with other life-forms--I think that it will be difficult for us to feel motivated to exercise concern for the welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. Reawakening our spiritual relationship to animals, land, and water forges that primal sense of connection to the lifeweb that is necessary for long-term commitments to sustainable living.

My own contribution to enlivening this primitive feeling of connection to the biosphere is to recover the rich biblical collection of images and stories about God as an earthen being who sustains the natural world with compassion and thereby models for humankind environmentally healthy ways of being. The particular earth-centered theological notion I develop in this book is the idea of the Holy Spirit as the fleshly, carnal bird God of the Bible who lives in all things and who enables in us a heartfelt desire to work toward the preservation of earth community in our time. In the Bible and historic Christian thought, the Holy Spirit is a wholly enfleshed, avian life-form made up of the four primitive elements wind, water, fire, and earth that are the key components of embodied life as we know it. As the dove who alights on Jesus at his baptism in the Gospels, God as Spirit is not a distant, invisible abstraction in heaven far removed from earthly concerns. On the contrary, God as Spirit is a sacred animal -a living, breathing life-form like all other life-forms on the planet who shows Godself to us concretely by living in and through the earth. The message of Christian faith, therefore, is that as God loves and cares for the earth, we are to do the same. Thus God and the earth, Spirit and nature, Christianity and environmentalism are one.

Many colleagues, friends, and family members have generously contributed to the writing of this book. Jurgen Moltmann offered early support for the direction of my thinking at a conference on the Spirit at Marquette University in 1998 organized by Lyle Dabney and Brad Hinze. In that same year, Dieter Hessel, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim gave me the opportunity to present my work on the wounded Spirit and Chester, Pennsylvania, at a Harvard University conference on Christianity and the environment. I am grateful to Darby Ray for the invitation to be the Summers lecturer at Millsaps College in 2003, a further occasion for developing my spiritual ecology concerns. Bron Taylor provided a thoughtful reading of the early manuscript and made many helpful suggestions regarding my interpretation of radical environmental movements today. Stephen Dunning similarly read parts of the manuscript and helped me to sharpen my thinking on the relevance of my project to traditional norms in Christian thought. Roger Latham supplied an engaging evaluation of the book's final chapter regarding the Crum Creek in Pennsylvania. Roger Gottlieb, Nathaniel Deutsch, Steven Hopkins, and Mark Cladis have been faithful dialogue-partners in my intellectual journey and I owe them much gratitude for their insights into the topics explored herein. Zulene Mayfield in Chester, and Wilford Guindon in Monteverde, Costa Rica, represent to me the strength and pathos of a prophetic challenge to the world domination system in our time. I am grateful to them for their leadership and friendship.