Dear Friends,
First, I want to thank you for the enormous response since my first letter went out. There are nearly twice as many of you already and I’m so excited and grateful.
Today is Earth Day and I hope you are having more pleasant and seasonable weather than I am. It snowed here just a few days ago, and it’s been rainy and cold, with the few days of Spring weather we’ve had seeming far in the rearview mirror. This, for me, is a reminder of some of the hard conversations I had with fellow Godly Play teachers during my time at Trinity Wall Street about teaching Noah’s Ark . Think of it: God destroyed humanity in a great storm, and then promised never to do so again - and then climate change happened.
Or rather, we made climate change happen. “Storm of the Century” level events happen every year, sometimes even more often than that. How do we tell that story, now, and speak about the covenant that God made with God’s people? You don’t need to be familiar with Godly Play to grapple with this question. You know how Noah’s Ark goes. Something is broken here.
This Earth Day, I am thinking about the threads that tie our many stories together. In Godly Play, we do this in language - children quickly recognize the links between the waters of creation, the waters of the flood, the waters of the Red Sea, and the waters of baptism, for example. How, then, do we build connections between the world God created and the one we live in now?
My home congregation is new to Godly Play, but among the few stories they’ve heard so far are Creation and the Parable of the Sower, one version of the Kingdom of Heaven. But when I told the Parable of the Sower to some preschool children in my current congregation, which is nestled among many Right To Farm communities, they were baffled by the Sower’s foolishness. Why would the Sower plant seeds in so many unsuitable places? They saw something obvious in this story - that God can give us the earth and the seeds, but we still need to be good stewards of them.
If I had a complete classroom before me right now with which to think through Earth Day, I would begin with Creation, of course.
What might be missing from this story? Do we have all the story we need? Surely we need to introduce the Sower and the seeds, the People of the Great Family, and the animals and prism from Noah’s Ark. What else? What in your home can you add to the story? Do you have plants or pets? Is there a glass of water that reminds you our responsibility to care for our waterways? The priest at my current parish add water from the Connecticut River to the Baptismal Font because that’s our local waterway. We live in a former mill town and the Connecticut River shaped and built this place. All of it shapes us and we are responsible for caring for it.
Here’s the thing about Noah’s Ark and our covenant with God: it has to go both ways for it to work. God can promise not to destroy the Earth, but that doesn’t mean the Earth won’t be destroyed by our hands. We have to make the same promise in return. The more closely we connect with nature at a local level, the easier we may find it to keep this promise.
Earth Day may not be a conventional Feast Day, but we cannot be God’s hands and feet in the world without marking it. Some ways you might live into this Earth Day with your family and community, even as we are all apart:
Watch: My Introduction to Praying in Color and then explore how you might use this practice to pray for the Earth and for your community. Can you use recycled materials from around your home to form your embellishments? Can you learn to make your own paper?
Listen: to this conversation between Krista Tippett and Wendell Berry about being creatures in this world, and about our responsibilities to the Earth and to each other.
Sing: the Hippo Song! I never talk about creation with kids without singing the Hippo Song, which is about as silly as it gets - but I’ve been singing it since I was a teenager and I’m not about to stop now. It was a favorite in the Sunday School where I grew up and I take great joy in having a library of songs in my head that connect with all parts of the Word.
Let me know how you’re marking Earth Day and what it means to reflect on creation in this way.
Until next time, be well,
Bird