leaves and light

…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.

-Ephesians 3:17

 

Seeker,

Can you recall the last time you crumbled earth between your fingers, felt soil between your toes, or dirt under your fingernails? 

(Are these not indicators of being rooted and grounded?)

 

There is no synthetic soul, no virtual holiness.

Neither by agency, rhetoric, nor reasoning

can we manufacture sacredness.

 

Holiness is free-gifted.

Sanctity presents itself,

an essential quality of each and every being.

 

Truth, goodness, beauty,

are graced to the gardener

who has learned to listen to the wisdom of earth.

 

For mercy rains down from heavy heavens,

justice erupts from saturated soil,

peace blossoms from the sublime harmony of living communities.

 

Life is too precious to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love and, finally without hope.    

-Václav Havel

 

So many of us earthlings

now find ourselves exiles

on this precious planet home.

 

Divorced from sun, sea and soil,

we seem destined to despoil

all we touch.

 

Whether boxed in slum squalor,

where neither field, nor forest,

nor flower can grace our days,

 

or barricaded behind

synthetic blinds,

where Nature becomes a screen show,

 

our reverence is thrice removed from raw reality

by heads distracted, hearts divided,

and hands calloused only from continuous clicking.

 

What greater stupidity can be imagined than calling jewels, silver, and gold “precious” and earth and soil “base”?

-Galileo Galilei

 

Life herself, in minute and monumental proportion—

our one bright sanctuary in the cold dark void—

is saturated with sacred mystery.

 

If we no longer sense this living sacramental presence,

we have traded in our birthright for “urbanality”,

and lost our way back to Eden.

 

How sad to so separate

our souls

from the good earth,

 

to desecrate the sanctity of soil

or denounce salt of the earth people as dirty—

pagan, heathen, villain!

 

For followers of a meek master,

once a worker of wood,

touching earth is a spiritual practice.

 

By calling upon us to consider the lilies,

our teacher was taught by God’s planet

to renew our covenant with Creation.

 

Reconnecting with the loam of our lives

we learn that holy is not heavenly.

The humus of our humanity is the only place we actually touch mercy.

 

And it is to the crumbled communion

of countless ancestors under our feet

that every body is commended.  

 

Will you stoop today, touch sacred soil,

and feel the silent stirrings of spring?

Nothing is more vital and urgent for us than growing deeper down.

 

The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.

-Psalm 65:12-13

 

Blessed are you who till and tend and touch

resilient earth,

and therein plant the seeds of hope!

joe

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