by Joelle Novey
I remember it so vividly. I am 10 years old, sitting on the banks of a lake at mid-morning, between tall grasses on all sides that closed around and over my head. I am a camper at Jewish summer camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and usually we pray the regular weekday morning liturgy, from books, on benches inside. But this morning, the counselors have told us to spend the prayer time each by ourselves, to go somewhere outside.
It is quiet. I feel very at home here, very still. Suddenly the wind picks up, rushing through the enormous trees that line the lake, and my heart lifts. The book of Kings describes the ark of the covenant—a place the Israelites built as an earthly dwelling place for God. Though they know that “even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God,” they long to know that there is a place toward which people can turn, on earth, to connect with the Divine.
People long—have always longed—to know where to go to be in the presence of God, to find the place that God dwells. “My soul,” writes the psalmist, “longs, yes, longs for the courts of the Lord.” When I ponder this longing, I am a 10-year-old at camp, experiencing deep awe surrounded by tall grasses on the shores of the lake. The prayer book sits closed on my lap, but I am, intensely, unquestionably, at prayer.
In the book Love God, Heal Earth is a story by an African-American Baptist pastor: “I grew up in south central L.A. I was Baptist, and I must have sung How Great Thou Art a thousand times by the time I was 12. Then, one summer, my Boy Scout troop organized a trip to climb Mt. Whitney. It was a very difficult, challenging climb. I had never had to work so hard physically as I did to get to the top of that mountain. But when I did, and when I looked around at the hundreds of smaller peaks that fanned out below where we were standing, when I looked at the huge expanse of land that I could see—then, for the first time, I could say ‘How great thou art’ and mean it.”
God doesn’t only dwell in our hearts but also, somehow, in the pine tree, and in the mountain, and in the lake, and in the other creatures. Perhaps when the psalmist envisions the sparrow, and the swallow, finding nests alongside their human neighbors in the divine court, this is the truth to which they are speaking—that all creation, too, dwells with us in the presence of God.
Listen to what the natural world is telling us about how our climate is changing. The cherry blossoms on the National Mall are blossoming a week earlier on average than when they were planted. The invasive vine called kudzu is no longer only the vine that ate the South, but is well established in Illinois and beyond. Blueberries, the iconic crop of Maine, now grows better over the border in Quebec. There are tens of thousands of changes in plants and animals that testify to us about the rapid rise in global average temperature over the last 150 years. We need to understand how our climate pollution from burning fossil fuels is trapping heat in our atmosphere, and we need to think personally, communally and politically about how to respond, quickly, and together.
I have attended many faith gatherings all over DC to speak about climate change. Every one of these communities honor and praise God as they do their work and live most of their lives—indoors. Most of the green team meetings are likewise indoors, and most of the work we do, signing postcards to the EPA and testifying in hotel conference rooms and undertaking energy audits or hashing out solar financing agreements, are indoors. But even in the course of our unnatural indoor lives, we have had moments in nature when God has shown up. We have each glimpsed a deeper truth—that the mountains and the lakes and the forests and the desert are places God dwells, that we are bound up with the divinity in those places, and that we are called to honor that sacred reality.
I believe that staying in touch with those experiences—cultivating, naming and sharing our experiences of spirit in the natural world—will enable us to be more deeply grounded in our work to protect the natural world.
My prayer for all of us as we begin another beautiful autumn is that we will take time to be attentive for opportunities for expanded communion. That we attend to not only our longing to dwell in God’s presence but to opportunities to experience that presence in and through the natural world. The psalmist exclaimed, “How lovely is your dwelling place!” May we know that loveliness, first—and then fight like hell to guard and protect it.
Joelle Novey is the director of Interfaith Power and Light (DC, MD, NoVA), which works with congregations of all faiths to save energy, go green and respond to climate change. This writing is excerpted from a sermon she preached at Seekers Church last year.