Welcome to the Environmental Chaplain’s blog – a new page where Rev’d David Coleman shares his thoughts and reflections.
- Riches in Heaven – really!
Riches in Heaven, really.
In gathering material for Season of Creation, I’m sorry that I don’t actually have any budget to ‘reward’ contributors. It’s on a ‘riches in heaven’ basis, and I can certainly assure every contributor of my own deep personal gratitude, as someone who, for now, receives the means of their livelihood from work on what should be an indissoluble connection between Christian faith and human care for the rest of the Creation we are.
In the course of this work, I’ve been deeply moved by the simple realisation that, in Bible languages, the spiritualising distinction made in modern English between ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’ is meaningless. That whatever else you mean or need to mean by ‘heaven’, the skyness of heaven should always be kept in view: that God’s Creation of ‘Heaven and Earth’ is one unified Creation.
John Bell wrote a piece a few years ago about astronauts ‘looking down on heaven’ from an orbiting platform. If you can get your head round that, the rest will make sense.
People do love to get carried away with the immensity of the Universe, though this can be a distraction from this particular ‘Sky & Soil’ or ‘Earth Sea and Sky’ of the planet which is shared as home by such a mind-expanding diversity of interdependent life, but the bottle-garden of planet Earth is what we’re given, what we’re part of, what we share. Not as property, but as home.
This is why, a couple of years ago, I grumpily took issue with an internet ‘meme’ from Archbishop Justin Welby, in which he suggested that “Prayer is not about sending requests into the sky. It’s about allowing God to make us more like Jesus Christ.”
No problem with the second half, but the inadvertent implication, that the “sky” is some sort of neutral and pointless dumping ground, rather grated. And indeed, much of what EcoCongregations engage in does involve “requests to the sky”. Or giving, for the good of Creation.
It’s also why, when we do engage, prayerfully and practically in ‘climate’ or ‘nature’ actions, both our of love for the Earth and our fellow creatures, and in response to the crises of nature, climate, and biodiversity, there’s a very real sense, even if it may not be measurable, in which we add to the ‘riches of heaven’ in the health of the climate, the treasures we enjoy and share in a breath of fresh air.
One example Jesus gives is a cup of cold water. Water, of course, is part of the Water Cycle – well-known to the Prophet Isaiah who mentioned it in the same breath as the endlessly recycled and repurposed Word of God (ch 55). That wee bit of reality does help to add meaning, and something of the ‘reward’ Jesus was quite happy to mention, to the horror of those dear folks among us who try so perversely hard to make out that Christian good works have to be without benefit to those who do them.
Perhaps a mid-way is to observe that doing good certainly does us good, in terms of mental health, and spiritually, even if, by the standards of our culture, it may not always be “profitable”.
A while ago, I took the decision to sponsor the planting of a tree in acknowledgment of the carbon impact of each of the video sermons, of which I’m probably making about 12 a year.
It’s a personal action, very much a minimum and in no sense an ‘offset’, in the way which is used by our society to justify the continuation of deadly lifestyles based on burning fossil fuels. Business as usual with fossil fuels is not excused by the odd sapling. But if you fly and plant trees, why not stop flying and carry on with the trees?
Since my wee dozen added to the EcoCongregation Grove is not a ‘secret’ you’ve discovered, but something I’ve shared, yes, ‘I’ve blown that aspect of my reward already’, but it’s not for David. Rather, this is on behalf of the community of our movement, EcoCongregation Scotland. A movement which will only continue to exist due to the sacrificial giving of members and member churches. But a movement which enriches the lives of Scottish Christians -and therefore their communities, human and otherwise.
I’ve just paid for three trees in acknowledgment of my Advent reflections, filmed at locations of pumped-storage hydro power stations. Those words don’t sound glamorous. But they raise questions about the cost of our decisions to the landscape, to nature, to the Earth, to the Heavens.
For me. nonetheless, this grain of reality: a tiny addition to the riches of the Sky, for the good of all makes me smile. As should every ‘climate’ action you undertake, especially as a congregation.
Enjoy your riches in heaven. The Earth will too!
Continue reading → - A talk at Mass, following Corpus Christi
- Hymn Poem for St Columba’s Day [9th June]
David J. M Coleman . Tune – of course – St Columba, trad.
I’ve come to see the many interactions of significant saints with fellow creatures as far more than a trivial or decorative detail in their ‘lives’ as transmitted to us, but rather a vital and authentic affirmation of God at work in these fellow humans as God’s creatures amongst creatures. It might be worth looking into the stories of Mungo/Kentigern, Cuthbert, Brigid amongst others.
This hymn-poem is written to celebrate the Feast of St Columba [June 9th ] : verse 1 references his blessing for the terrifying sea-monster/whale, his personal and honoured welcome for the exhausted migrating crane, and his appreciation of the mourning sadness of the monastery’s cart-horse who was aware that Columba was reaching the end of his life.
Verse 2 recalls his Jacob-like involvement with angels as the connective tissue of sky ands soil/Heaven and Earth: together one unified Creation, and reminds us that the Lord’s Prayer/Our Father is a prayer for the whole of our fragile, threatened world.
And although Columba did seek times of quiet and retreat, he was ready speak and sing out powerfully, ‘armed’ with the Psalms and spiritual song which were his non-violent arsenal for justice and transformation. The discernment of when to intervene boldly in the turmoil of /nature’ , and when to leave well alone is part of our discipleship. All of which can inspire us in our partnership and interaction with our fellow-stakeholders in God’s Rainbow Covenant with ‘All Flesh’, as followers of Christ, the Word become Flesh.
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1) To bless God’s creatures whom we fear;
to welcome those in need;
to honour care our kind receive
is following Christ indeed.
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2) As Heaven and Earth are woven tight
by angels’ warp and weft;
we pray each day that sky and soil:
be blessed and not bereft
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3) Christ spoke as sternly to the waves
as to our chosen wrong;
to those who speak out: loud and just
Christ’s blessing shall belong
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4) So saints who cherished and who learned
from fellow creatures’ care
shall guide commitment, prayer and deed
and bless the home we share.
Continue reading → - Pentecost : In the same breath…
- Epistle to the trade fair
- Sermon Iona Abbey
- Draft Creation-Inclusive Liturgy for Holy Communion in an ecumenical setting.
A draft building on experience in several settings. Consciously not a ‘neutral’ approach. Just use or adapt what seems useful.
Continue reading → - God with us urgently now. Statement of Faith
Presented for devotional use as a commentary on historic creeds and statements of faith: suggested for use in Creation themed worship, with a consciousness of the Nature & Climate crises. Writer: DJM Coleman. On this page: Downloadable PDF and full text as simple text.
GOD WITH US URGENTLY, NOW
an inclusive statement of Christian faith
We trust Love who is God
before us, beyond us
and urgently now.
Maker, Remaker of life, and life’s limits.
God: working with Earth,
God: attending to birth;
decisive, co-operative,
with seas and with skies.
God for justice by choice.
to be praised by all breathing.
We trust Jesus our Friend
Incarnate in Earth;
Who lives life with creatures
who knows of their frailness
through flesh, blood, and birth
and dependence on care.
Christ who loves, heals, and warns
and repurposes Scriptures;
Christ who honours
the welcome of God in the stranger;
God’s wisdom in creatures, our kin.
Jesus: Welcomed with branches,
then nailed to the Tree.
Abandoned to Death,
Earth alone could receive him.
The third Day Christ rose
to Life Renewed:
with us as surely as Sky;
We trust the Holy Spirit our God;
Wild Wind of beginnings
beyond our control
yet harnessed for justice;
Reshaping perceptions.
Breath of life;
Spirit of healing, forgiveness:
God with us urgently now.
Continue reading → - Up to the top of the hill, and not so far down again
A personal report on a study-leave attendance at a far-reaching, global, ecumenical conference. With Video Blog & Paper on ‘Season of Creation’.
As a URC minister I’m obliged to seek study leave opportunities, with moderate funding available to make this possible. Towards the end of last year, I received an invitation which looked very suitable: Seminar: The Feast of Creation and the Mystery of Creation: Ecumenism, Theology, Liturgy, and Signs of the Times in Dialogue.
The travel involved also meant that I could better fulfil the chaplaincy remit to be in touch with the various training institutions serving the churches within Scotland, by visiting, if they were willing, the Pontifical Scots College in Rome, just after the seminar.
The –unregulated and personal – report is presented, for convenience, as a downloadable PDF
Click here to download the report
Continue reading → - After an un-green Easter…..
Confessions of an EcoChaplain
Thirty and forty years ago, the fashionable whipping-boy still was St Augustine, for the ‘Deadly Disconnect’ between humanity and the rest of Creation. A Disconnect which those of us inclined to see ourselves as definitive of humanity still regarded as ‘universal’.
I was myself caught up in this, even as I moved in my mid twenties from seeing Christianity as a ‘benign museum movement’ to something in which there was real truth and life. And very early in my journey of faith, I stumbled through Augustine’s confessions (Penguin classics paperback), not quite finding there either the harm or healing others suggested should be staring me in the face. What a surprise! Perhaps I would have to trust the verdict of others after all!. A love for Creation did get me into trouble in my studies at Oxford, but somehow I got through the sausage machine. Somehow I looked safe enough, as perhaps by then, after four years of ‘formation’ I actually was, to begin a couple of decades of pastoral ministry in postindustrial small towns, with an interlude of three years in a brutally secularist seaside city. I was sustained throughout in many indefinable ways by the very special family of the Iona Community, preserving in their key prayers the Great Commission of the Risen Christ that had been censored by historical criticism and the committees who gave their all to the Lectionary: to “bring Good News to every creature”.
The practicalities of getting started in ministry can be crushing. But I retained a quiet fondness for the disreputable liberation of those who offered that ‘new, old’, way of care for Creation, purporting, as reformers always do, to be more authentic than the tried and tested. And my ‘finals’ dissertation on the “Spirituality of St Columba” had yielded the treasured insight of the ‘Communion of Creation’ enfolding the Communion of Saints. I carried that with me. And in the years that followed I still smiled from time to time at the good, naïve intent of those who still took the name of Augustine in vain. How can I not love those who mean well?
A key part of this obsession was still, I think, underlyingly, and despite lip-service, a disregard of the spirituality of those in other cultures, who have at least an equal claim to be Christians, but whose outlook was not so constrained by global north assumptions. Or by the insidious influence of colonialism and Empire. Our part looked like the whole. Thank God, though, it’s just a part. Thank God!
The Creation-Spirituality rhetoric against Christianity as a whole was therefore often rather negative as a result: a shooting ourselves in the foot, rather than a repurposing of what we had, what we have, and have yet fully to value. These are Christianity’s roots as a valid spiritual response to threat and injustice, masked and misrepresented by its wanton abuse as a tool of oppression, as if the poor and downtrodden should be robbed of the means of spiritual resilience as well as of all else. As if the dogs really are forbidden the scraps. That totalitarian refusal to recycle. As if vision were single-use. Or else!
So stories were perhaps set on one side in uncomprehending faithfulness, and the bizarre mysteries that incumbent preachers habitually fled, leaving the pulpit free for the dutiful stumbling of visiting students, were pickled in dutiful obscurity. Transfiguration, Ascension, Trinity and more. Creation, Incarnation, Redemption. Transformative Mysteries too easily and despairingly discarded. All of which, taken seriously, should lead us more surely to care for Creation as an imperative of faith. None of which should prompt us, in their celebration, to put away and set aside green things until all the proper holy stuff is out of the way once more. But how green was your Easter just passed?
Even in the objectively very different planet some of us inhabited in the late twentieth century, the manifest results of the Disconnect , there for all to see, were injustice, pollution, warfare, and many such evils. The existential threat of nuclear obliteration offered itself readily as radioactive fuel for anxiety, and yet, I have to say, yet again, we lived on a different planet. One in which oblivion was a possible choice by the irresponsible powerful, but for all that, not yet a slippery slope of inevitability. In that sense, the world could be ‘saved’. Problems could be fixed, rather than only transformed as the best outlook available. Everything still could be all right.
The practicality for the spiritual blame-game of Creation Spirituality, for which I was an onlooker, in the 80s and 90s was that far fewer folks would ever read or ponder on a word of Augustine, than would piggy-back the iconoclasm of those who pinned the blame. Or even get high on it. The hat seemed to fit, and to some extent, perhaps it did. Augustine has of course been very influential in the history of the more elitist aspects of our faith, but not nearly as much as late twentieth century Creation Spirituality would like to be the case. Grassroots Christians are probably limited to one or two decontextualised but inspiring and comforting quotes culled from the enormity of Augustine’s writings. Their souls are “restless until they find their rest in God”, and maybe, sometimes, they do.
The way things have turned out as we conclude the first quarter of the twenty-first century, a far more powerful influence has begun to assume that mantle of universal bogey, namely the rather complex movement of the [European] Enlightenment. And pig-ignorant caricature once more carries with it an infuriating quantum of truth.
As with Augustine, diagnosing a malign influence will to some extent involve leaving aside the optimistic and compassionate concern of so many and diverse Enlightenment thinkers with ‘improvement’ and, indeed, with what they saw as justice – even their legacy of human rights and more. The problem is not the blessings, and yet the ‘curse’ of the Enlightentment, its possibly unprecedented concern with human supremacy, which does very real harm from day to day, is intimately tied up with whatever ‘progress’ we have made in knowledge and technology, if not with the wisdom to know what to do with it all.
The Disconnect in our day, is reinforced by the most perverse conception of maturity. And of the ‘childish things’ that should be ‘put away’. Reinforced by shame and contempt for the very relationships, emotions, and poetic faculties that help humanity find meaning. It does not insult or damagingly romanticise the languages, traditions, feelings and other faculties of fellow creatures to recognise these as meaningful parallels rather than ‘mere metaphor’. To recognise, as did those who adorned Rosslyn Chapel with Green Men, Women & Children, the knowable personalities of Creation, rather than worrying about who should be accorded ‘personhood’.
We approach God not only through, but overwhelmingly with all who have breath, all flesh, all life. They are not mere means to an end, and if Creation is a Book of God’s Works, then we too are the handwriting on their pages. With a special place and purpose. With the chance to choose to be more blessing than curse. Redemption, for now, and for the foreseeable future, cannot mean ‘everything’s going to be all right’. But the solidarity of Emmanuel, God With Us, Sustainer, will have to be enough for now. Content with that, I’m not about to ask for more.
Continue reading →
