Community of Creation

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Forty-Four: Loving God through Creation

Community of Creation

Theologian and Cherokee descendant Randy Woodley considers how the Bible offers insight into relationship with creation:

In the Genesis accounts of creation, I find a world where each part of creation is related to the other. When God makes the first human and I anticipate what will happen next, I see the requirement for Adam to name all the animals. But to name things in an Indigenous way, you have to get to know them, and to know their special characteristics. In the narrative, God is telling Adam to go out and get to know his relatives. The creation narratives in Genesis, like many Indigenous creation narratives, encourage humans to see the wider created order as part of the same “family tree of the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 2:4). [1]

The importance of the narrative is that it is not just about humans. It is also about the animal kingdom and the plants and the water and the sky and everything else.… My theology begins with the land.…

My understanding is that our responsibility as Indigenous people is to be keepers of the land. That means the whole of all the ecosystems and all the human systems…. That is my job on earth. That is the job I take seriously while I’m here. When the land is used badly, and the community of creation is mistreated, everything becomes out of balance and in disharmony. Anywhere on earth can be a place of harmony when you understand your role.…

When land is lost, a history is ended. It takes land to make history. Humanity is in direct relationship with the land and all creation, a principle found throughout the scriptures and in some of the most poetic places, like Job 12:7–10, where Job says,

Just ask the animals, and they will teach you.
Ask the birds of the sky, and they will tell you.
Speak to the earth, and it will instruct you.
Let the fish in the sea speak to you.
For they all know
that my disaster has come from the hand of the Lord.
For the life of every living thing is in his hand,
and the breath of every human being.

Woodley shares other scriptural examples of God’s love for creation:

God loves everything in creation (John 3:16). In the stories we find God counting the clouds (Job 38:37), releasing the rain (Job 5:10), directing the snow (Job 37:6; 38:22), knowing when a sparrow falls (Matthew 10:29), knowing where a donkey is tied (Matthew 21:2), knowing where the fish will swim (John 21:6), adorning the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:29–30), and comparing the ostrich and the stork (Job 39:13). At the time of Jesus, there were lots of modern mechanisms, lots of inventions [including] chariots and wheels and waterwheels and little torches and all kinds of mechanistic things. But we find Jesus mostly talking about the things that grow out of the earth and the things that fly above the earth….

[1] H. Daniel Zacharias, “The Land Takes Care of Us: Recovering Creator’s Relational Design,” in Theologies of Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity, ed. K. K. Yeo, Gene L. Green (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021), 79.

Randy S. Woodley, Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), 57–58, 66–67.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Loïs Mailou Jones, Jeune Fille Français (detail), 1951, oil on canvas, Smithsonian; Textile Design for Cretonne (detail), 1928, watercolor on paper, Smithsonian; Eglise Saint Joseph (detail), 1954, oil on canvas, Smithsonian. Click here to enlarge image.

Creation teaches us to love God in all Her death, decay, fallow times, insemination, growth, blooming and life and death and life.

Following Jesus’ Way – Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation

I believe that we rather totally missed Jesus’ major point when we made a religion out of him instead of realizing he was giving us a message of simple humanity, vulnerability, and nonviolence that was necessary for the reform of all religions—and for the survival of humanity. We need to dedicate our lives to building bridges and paying the price in our bodies for this ministry of reconciliation (Ephesians 2:13–18). The price is that we will always, like all bridges, be walked on from both sides. Reconcilers are normally “crucified,” and the “whole world hates them,” because they are neither on one side nor the other. They build the vulnerable bridge in between, which always looks like an abdication of ground to the supposedly “true believer.”

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Richard Rohr Daily Meditation: God’s Loving Justice

Week Forty-Two: Love and Justice

God’s Loving Justice

God’s power for justice is precisely God’s power to restore people when they are broken or hurt. God uses their mistakes to liberate them, to soften them, to enlighten them, to transform them, and to heal them. No text in the Hebrew Scriptures equates God’s justice with vengeance on the sinner. It might look like that on the surface, but if we read the whole passage and understand the context, chastisement is always meant to bring us back to love and union. God’s justice is always saving justice, always healing justice. What is experienced as punishment is always for the sake of restoration, not for vengeance. Therefore, justice for the people is to participate in this wholeness and spaciousness of God, to be brought into God’s freedom.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (New York: Paulist Press, 2014), 38–40, 87–88.

John 17:20-23

I’m praying not only for them
But also for those who will believe in me
Because of them and their witness about me.
The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind—
Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
So they might be one heart and mind with us.
Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me.
The same glory you gave me, I gave them,
So they’ll be as unified and together as we are—
I in them and you in me.
Then they’ll be mature in this oneness,
And give the godless world evidence
That you’ve sent me and loved them
In the same way, you’ve loved me.

Mark 4:21-25

Jesus said to his disciples, “Is a lamp brought in to be placed under a bushel basket or under a bed, and not to be placed on a lampstand?
For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible; nothing is secret except to come to light.
Anyone who has ears to hear ought to hear.”
He also told them, “Take care what you hear. The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you, and still more will be given to you.
To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”