My father never lived more than forty miles from his birthplace. My mother never lived more than twenty miles from her birthplace. When I was a child, we would frequently visit my parents’ relatives. At least once a month, we would travel to the farm where my father was born and where he grew into adulthood. The sprawling old house had many rooms. (My father was one of twelve children born to Silas and Annie Zorn.) Everyone in the extended family called this farm and house “the old home place.” My Zorn ancestors had been given a land grant from King George II. George was from Germany (Hanover) and continued to rule Hanover as an absolute monarch. Somehow, those early Zorns managed to receive considerable acreage in the Carolinas. By the time I came along, that land grant had been greatly reduced to 2000 acres. However, on that land could be found a family cemetery where generations of Zorns had been buried. For over 250 years my ancestors had survived and thrived on that land. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting “the old home place” as I played with my cousins, became acquainted with the cows, pigs, and chickens, helped bring in the garden produce, and wandered all over those acres lost in the wonder of creation. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, most of the food (including the meat) eaten at the table was produced through the combined efforts of Zorns and the earth.
On our journey to my ancestral home, we would pass a house which was just outside the town of my mother’s birth. Almost every time we went by, my mother would relate a conversation she had with a woman in her church when she was a child. She said to the woman, “That’s such a beautiful home!” The woman wisely replied, “Dorothy, we don’t know if that’s a home. All we know for sure is that it is a house. And there is a big difference between a house and a home. Only love can make a house a home.” I think my mother repeated that story so many times to impress on me and my brother a fundamental truth about our lives together. Love, respect, nurture, compassion, forgiveness, truthfulness, reconciliation, patience, and faithfulness are all necessary ingredients in making a house a home.
We may have houses, but as a people/a culture, we have no home. We are in exile. We are alienated from the very creation we are a part of.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that we North Americans are a people without a home. We may have houses, but as a people/a culture, we have no home. We are in exile. We are alienated from the very creation we are a part of. We are Adam (the Hebrew word for human beings) alienated from Adamah (the Hebrew word for inhabitable land). In other words, we are earthlings who are no longer in touch with earth. As a result, an essential part of our identities has been lost. In fact, we cannot truly be human without being in harmony and in relationship with the earth. (Human and humus, as in compost, all have the same etymological root: a word meaning ground/earth.) Most of us live in cities and have very little contact with the natural world. We are oblivious to the fact that our very existence depends on the gratuitous bounty of an earth working in balance with the rest of nature. The call of the wild, the grandeur of the mountains, the beauty of wildflowers (which Jesus not only noticed but saw as models for humans in their trust of God), the nourishing fall of rain, the singing of the birds, the humming of bees whose pollination efforts make fecund plants and trees, the regularity of the seasons—all of this and so much more escape our notice. Alienated from the earth and its lessons for life, we become alienated from one another. Instead of harmony, we choose lethal competition. Instead of gratitude, we covet what we don’t have and most often don’t need. Instead of respect, we look out for number one and to hell with everyone and everything else. Instead of joy in simply being, we strive for what can never give us happiness, much less deep joy. We have become orphans. What could be our homes have become houses, early mausoleums where, in the words of Jesus, “The dead bury the dead” because they are dead to what truly makes life abundant.
I would suggest we need to become reconciled to this home called earth. We need to ask her forgiveness for the ways we have abused her.
The word “ecology” comes from the Greek word for “home.” The earth is our home; our ultimate home–and according to the Bible, our final home. In biblical eschatology, heaven is not our final destination. I know that is a shock to most North American Christians who have been brainwashed by “sweet by and by” theology (not to mention the Rapture hoax). Grounded in the creation spirituality of the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament teaches that our final destination is this earth and this heaven redeemed, healed, and transformed. (That, in part, is what the resurrection is about.) In other words, this is our home forever. So, I would suggest we need to become reconciled to this home called earth. We need to ask her forgiveness for the ways we have abused her. We must find new ways to love, respect, nurture, and be faithful to her and her future. According to the Bible, we are redeemed as a part of creation and not apart from it. We are but one single strand in the awesome and vast web of creation. God’s Spirit abides in each part of the universe. The earth is a sacrament of God’s presence and care. As the psalmist says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims Her handiwork!” (Psalm 19:1) But we are deaf to such praise. Our very healing, the very homecoming we most need to become whole (and sane!) requires us to return to “the old home place” and there find our salvation.
We have turned the earth into a dump, a scatological monument to our greed and indifference. We must now do all we can to help turn that dump into a house which in time can become a home worthy of her Creator and worthy of our calling as earthlings created in the image of the Maker of heaven and earth. The Bible ends with a powerful image. The Holy City comes down to earth (the movement is always from heaven to earth and not the other way around as “Beam me up, Scotty” theology would have us believe). And God shouts from the throne, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with humans! She will dwell with them, and they shall be Her people; She will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.” We learn later in Revelation that this redeemed, healed, and transformed earth includes all creation. The goal God has always cherished for Her creation at last comes to fruition. God, humans, and the rest of creation form a home—”a new home place” which transcends and includes “the old home place” as all is made whole.
The truth is simple and blunt: We cannot be in God’s image until we come home and care for Her creation.
The good news is that we need not sit on our blessed assurances or wring our hands in despair. We need not just sit and wait for that final consummation. God’s redemptive work in Christ has already begun. We can experience God’s presence and care right now as we come home to a creation we have neglected and abused. Christ, the Reconciler of the whole creation (See Colossians 1:15-20), is in our midst urging us to recover our original vocation of being earth’s caretakers. The truth is simple and blunt: We cannot be in God’s image until we come home and care for Her creation. According to Genesis 1, that’s what it means to be in the image of God: to be caretakers of God’s creation. In fact, we cannot even be human until we come home in humility (another word going back to the root for ground/earth) and repentance to Mother Earth, the work of God’s own hands and heart.
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Recently I have been doing a lot of reading about Indigenous North American spirituality and Indigenous North American Christianity. I am firmly convinced that the Indigenous peoples of North America can help us find our way home. We must humbly ask for their wisdom as we seek to make reparations to them for all the sins of greed, arrogance, and violence we have committed and are still committing against them. The following is a quote from Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Lakota. Any person with an ounce of sensitivity or humanity will recognize how much at home he and his people feel as they live in harmony with nature.
The Lakota was a true naturalist—a lover of nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people like to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.
(This quote comes from Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence compiled by T. C. McLuhan, p. 6)
That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. . . .
Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So, he kept his youth close to its softening influence.
