Archives For Good News

Bravery, Goodness, and Gratitude in 2022

Nathan Aaberg —  December 31, 2022 — Leave a comment

I wrestle with staying hopeful.

My heart and mind are often painfully aware of climate chaos and the ongoing loss of the life of God’s earth

But I know those who follow Jesus and love God cannot help but to also be people who see light and hope. Everyday we are alive on this earth, we should seek out and hold onto gratitude for the goodness around us that comes from God. That awareness feeds our hearts and fuels our persistence.

As you begin a new year, I encourage you to take time to meditate on the year that has just past. What was good? Where did you sense God’s grace? What are you thankful for? What did you learn? In general? About protecting and restoring Creation as part of a whole Christian faith-life?

Here are just some of the things I discovered by looking back at my own year.

1. Bounty from the Garden: My wife Mayumi has been building the soil of our pesticide-free garden for more than 15 years. In 2022, she harvested a wonderful bounty – garlic, Asian pears, beets, kale, green beans, parsley, ground cherries, and even okra. During the height of the okra season, she was harvesting and cooking it in delicious ways almost every day. God’s Creation enables us to taste and see that God is good.

My wife harvesting okra

My wife Mayumi harvesting okra from our garden that she will cook later. Through her careful tending, the garden produced wonderful food again this past year.

2. Earthkeepers Podcast: Early in 2022, James Amadon and Forest Inslee interviewed me for their Earthkeepers Podcast, a production of Circlewood. Circlewood is an organization in the Pacific Northwest that is working to accelerate the greening of the Christian faith. I first interviewed James for this blog back in 2017 when he was still early on in his move from being a church pastor to becoming Circlewood’s executive director. I’m delighted to see that his gifts are bearing so much fruit. I was also honored that I would be chosen to be interviewed. Through the Earthkeepers Podcast, James and Forest are interviewing fascinating people on the edge of faith and ecology.

3. Good and Brave People: In 2022 I had a good conversation with the elder of a church in Davenport, Iowa. He had given a sermon about the Biblical basis and faithfulness of Creation care. He had been nervous but felt compelled to bring up the topic. We need more brave people like him.

Through my work and my own personal seeking, I continue to have the chance to encounter brave farmers. They are willing to go against the current of conventional practices and raise crops in ways that minimize harm to God’s earth. These same ways produce excellent, healthy products, from vegetables and meat to grains and flowers. Farmers like these put their livelihoods on the line in their choice of how they will raise food to sell. Their faith and values are profoundly inspiring to me.

This sign at Broadview Farm in Marengo, Illinois, highlights an area planted with sunflowers specifically to feed goldfinches. I’ve been fortunate to meet many farmers who keep the life of God’s world in mind as they plan the uses of their farm.

Over the past years I’ve had the opportunity work with and help a number of public conservation and forest preserve districts work to improve the sustainability of their farmland management systems. These are public organizations with thousands of acres of farmland which have largely been farmed with a chemical-reliant, production-first approach for decades. I have been blessed to work with staff who care deeply about the land and water under their management.They are creatively advocating within their institutions to move more earth-friendly farming requirements forward. They do this even when others in their institutions don’t get it. I admire them.

During a 2022 field walk at a farm field owned and managed by the Forest Preserve District of Will County, participants were shown a prairie strip planted perpendicular to the downward slope of the field. The strip provides habitat for wildlife while slowing erosion from farmed land. 

4. Food Forest and Land Stewardship Near Galesburg: This summer, my wife, eldest son, and I visited friends who had purchased some beautiful land near Galesburg. Just one of the ways they are tending this land is by replacing conventional corn and bean fields with trees that will produce nuts and fruit. They have a long-term vision and love the land very much. Their willingness to try new things, work hard, and build community inspired us greatly.

Our friend Craig showing us one of the chestnuts he and his wife planted on their land near Galesburg.

5. Positive News in the World: In the midst of many negative forces, we cannot forget that Creation, when given the chance, can begin to rebound. Check out this story about the response of nature in New York Harbor, which used to be a cesspool of pollutants. A key point to remember is that in a world in which we are all tempted to sin, good regulations and laws are needed.

We can also forget that people can push for decency and goodness in their society….and succeed. Check out news of this ruling in Maryland that preserves the right of homeowners to garden and landscape in ways that enable nature to thrive. A brave couple made that happen.

6. Birds of the Garden: We had three surprise avian visitors this year to our largely naturally landscaped yard. Two were birds – a nuthatch and red-bellied woodpecker – that came to the bird feeder and thrive around trees. After 19 years, our yard has three bur oaks, a pin oak, and two hackberries that are all of decent size. I particularly appreciated the nuthatch. It is able to descend headfirst down the trunk of a tree with perky little movements. Its  upturned beak is perfectly suited for seeking out food in the nooks and crannies of tree bark. It also, as this excellent article explains, stockpiles seeds in the bark of trees for accessing later.

The third bird was a red-tailed hawk. It somehow caught a rabbit, despite the restricted air space of our small property. The hawk consumed the rabbit on top of a rain barrel with little concern for the sensibilities of the people looking at it from their dining room.

This red-tailed hawk has the remains of a rabbit on the top of the rain barrel in our yard during a rain day. (Our son Owen snuck up close to get this picture)

7. Thought-Provoking Books: There were two books I read in 2022 about Christianity and Creation that were so thought-provoking that I read them twice – Victoria Loorz’s Church of the Wild and Norman Wirzba’s This Sacred Life. I’m grateful to the authors, their editors, and their publishers for producing these books.

This book was insightful and moving. it also used language far from traditional conceptions of Christianity. I

8. Inspired Words: I continue to find inspiration (and challenge) in reading the Bible. Thanks to my interview with John Kempf, I now have Job 12: 7-10 indelibly etched into my consciousness. How much better would we be faithful servants of God if we actually did ask the beasts, the birds, the bushes, and the fishes of the sea and were willing to listen and learn from them? What if we remembered that our lives and the livings of all living things are in the hand of the God? We are created kin.

What are you grateful for in 2022?

Write those things down. Talk about them. Feed your heart and soul with them. Share them if you would.

Many blessings to you all.

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10 Ways a Commitment to God’s Earth Deepens Your Faith-Life

Nathan Aaberg —  May 30, 2022 — 2 Comments

On Sunday, April 24th, I gave another sermon to the good people of North Suburban Mennonite Church. They asked me to do so with an Earth Sunday theme but otherwise gave me no direction. I had complete freedom.

So I considered ideas and thoughts I had had in the past but had not presented about or written about.

I ultimately chose to call their attention to a number of ways in which a Christian faith-life that includes a deep commitment to shepherding Creation contributes to a whole, loving, God-honoring faith-life. This is something I’ve been intrigued by for some time. In this blog post, I’m going to share ten.

Isn’t it enough, you might ask, to just be 100% committed to the truth that Creation matters to God? In other words, do we really need to justify a commitment to God’s earth as one of the fundamental ways people of the Christian Way should live?

No.

And yet yes.

The reality is that the culture of Christianity in America and in the world is very diverse. And it’s safe to say that most Christian culture still either recoils at the idea that Creation matters or gives it some half-hearted adherence in theology but not in everyday habits and choices.

In the spirit of 1 Peter 3:15, I believe it’s useful to be able to offer a defense, with gentleness and respect, to the non-believer and to the believer, for why we follow Jesus and why our following includes loving Creation. I also believe that a whole faith necessarily holds together better and with more resilience than a partial faith. We should, as I have written, have an ecology of theology.

So let’s dive into the list. A whole faith that includes God’s Earth as a fundamental element of it will bear the following good fruit:

#1 Transformed Hearts

We know from Proverbs 27:19 and from many words of Jesus that our lives reflect the state of our hearts. In fact, the state of our heart is a major point of concern for much of the Bible. Being in God’s earth and understanding it and working to restore it all help to shape our hearts in salutary ways.

This can be the peace we feel and experience when we are on the water of a stream or lake or hiking through beautiful mountain forests. This can also be humility and wonder at the blessings of God’s goodness and creativity.

It can also be what the Old Testament labels “fear,” as in Deutoronomy 10:12 or Proverbs 9:10. From these verses, it is clear that this fear is something we need to have. Fear, of course, doesn’t feel like a 21st century notion of how we relate to God. But this is another example of interpretation that hides the original nuance. The Hebrew word we translate as fear is “yirah,” and it actually doesn’t have a simple equivalent in English. It actually conveys fear, awe, and reverence. All at once. Simultaneously.

Where is the best place to experience awe, reverence, and fear simultaneously? Can there be any doubt? It’s being in Creation, whether it’s observing a jumping spider in a backyard garden or encountering a grizzly in Denali National Park. And that awe, reverence, and fear is what our hearts often desperately need to be opened to the deeper realities of this world and to be open to a fuller conception of God in our hearts and minds.

 

#2 Pervasive Awareness of the Reality of Sin

When life is going well for us in our modern, technological world, it’s actually easy for the reality of sin to seem rather quaint and naggingly troublesome, like a small chronic pain in your knee that won’t quite go away.

The whole equation changes if we believe God holds us accountable for how we individually and as societies treat God’s Creation (and, I would add, the most vulnerable people of our world). If you believe that and pay attention to what we actually do to God’s Creation, then the wounds of sin become powerfully evident.

Consider that fifty percent of the coral reefs have died since the 1950s. And that matters because they are said to provide habitat for 25% of marine life. Factory farms house hundreds of thousands of animals in horrible conditions. Many of the wild animals mentioned in the Bible, like lion and bear and antelope, no longer live in that area because of hunting and human expansion. The existence of some animals on this planet has simpley winked out forever. The list goes on.

The tragedy and loss are clear when we consider that our number one human job is to serve and keep God’s earth. An art museum night guard who took part in the vandalization of some paintings in the museum and allowed others to be stolen and then burned would not be a guard for long  Sin, both individual and collective, is real. Its prevalence in the light of the destruction of Creation is unmistakable and heartbreaking.

This hearbreak illuminates human sin in flashing neon lights. It makes clear to us that we need God’s help and deliverance.

 

#3 Sharpened Wisdom

Immersing yourself in the systems and interdependencies of God’s Creation will grow the nuances of your thinking and perceptions. You will better be able to understand whole systems work. You will become more observant. You will grow the abiltiy to weigh principles and values in particular specific circumstances and choose the best practical course going forward.

That is wisdom. The Bible celebrates wisdom. Being wise in understanding and applying the whole Bible to one’s life uses exacty the same mental and heart muscles that figuring out how to sustainable use and restore God’s earth does. Being an active steward of God’s earth compels us to grow in wisdom. In the process, you can build your ability to be wise in other aspects of your faith-life.

 

# 4 Good Saltiness

We are called to be the salt of the earth. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Enabling Creation to thrive is a way of loving your neighbors near and far. And the neighbors who most benefit from a thriving Creation are often the poor and disadvantaged.

Struggling to prevent wells from being poisoned by agriultural inputs is a way of being the salt of the earth. Designing cities and rural areas in ways that don’t require every family to own many cars is a way to love the poor and build more community. Preventing overfishing so that future generations of coastal communities will be able to live off of the sea as their ancestors did is a way to love one’s neighbor while also cherishing the amazing life God declared to be good.

 

#5 Awareness of the Tempter

When Satan tempted Jesus and offered him the principalities of the world, Jesus resisted. Using and exploiting the resources of this world for unbridled power is the same temptation we, our communities, and our nations face. There are many ways to rationalize taking from God’s earth beyond what earth and the life of God’s earth can bear. But rationalization for our selfish, God-ignoring motives is the way of the Tempter. And one can, as Satan showed in the story, use Bible verses to rationalize things that are against God’s will.

Being alert to the rationalizations all around us in our Christian culture for going along with the harm to Creation will awaken your heart and mind to the efforts of the Tempter in many areas of life.

 

#6 Restraint and Simplicity

We live in a world full of conveniences and a myriad of recreation options, all there to meet every wish and need and hunger. Creating habits to protect God’s earth through our daily life choices requires us to limit ourselves, both individually and collectively.

There’s a strong thread of limits and restraints in the Bible that American Christians often want to ignore or categorize as no longer applicable because of the work of Jesus. The Sabbath, one of the core commandments, calls upon us, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, to be part of a ‘palace in time,’ to rest not only ourselves but also give rest to the land and livestock.

The practice of tithing causes us to live with less and have faith that God will provide.

Jesus fasted. Fasting is about restraint.

Restraints and limits are actually, in other words, blessed things.

The only way we individually and socially will protect and restore Creation effectively is if we restrain ourselves and adopt simpler lives. As a society, that will mean leaving some areas forever wild and even pulling back our human presence in other places. That will mean reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Acting and caring for creation help build our capacity to live simply and with restraint and with generous interdependence. That capacity will bear fruit in other parts of our lives.

 

#7 Resonant Lives and Faith

In the book Simply Christian, N.T. Wright calls the reader’s attention to the fact that around the world people, regardless of whether they are Christian or not, share common dreams of justice and goodness and peace, of what should be. These dream, these yearnings, N.T. Wright says, come from God and from what used to be.

When followers of Jesus ignore Creation and contribute to its destruction and justify its diminishment, we not only harm life that matters we also play a horribly out of tune note that ruins the whole song and the whole chord of what the Christian Way is.

Why would a young person or any person who knows in their heart that prairies and forests and oceans and the teeming life of the soil are all amazing and good, accept the other convictions of the Christian Way if the people following that way foul the world and don’t care that they do so?

On the contrary, when we defend and protect and restore God’s earth, we point to a unifying and compelling whole Way that is beautiful and challenging at the same time. This is a faith and a life that calls out to the heart without any false notes.

 

#8 Strengthened Agape

Attention and devotion to living in ways that provide for Creation grows selflessness in one’s heart. Animals and plants and fish and the vast universe of the soil rhizosphere cannot vote. They generally speaking can’t speak. To be sensitive to their welfare and to act on that sensitivity is to be selfless and loving at a very high level. It is to think and have empathy beyond oneself and even beyond one’s human neighors. This is taking the story of the Good Samaritan to a whole different level.

God calls us to selflessness throughout the Bible. Jesus, of course, is an obvious example. But I am also reminded of the 42nd chapter of Job: Job’s fortunes are not reversed and restored when he repents and acknowledges to God that God’s wisdom and ways are beyond his comprehension. Instead, God calls upon Job to pray for his three friends who had advanced wrong arguments against him and who God required to show repentance. And that is what happens, despite all that Job had already experienced and despite the further grief his friends had caused. Job prays for them. And then his fortunes are restored.

Caring for habitats or rivers or just a small woodlot or our pet all grow that same selflessness that God desires.

 

#9 Missional Impulse

Being convinced that we must keep and protect God’s Creation necessarily drives us to be missional and to have an outward focus. Protecting and restoring God’s earth requires us to go out! If we only change how we live as an individual or family or even a church, we will not have done all we need to. You and I, especially in a democracy, are part of collective systems – employers, local municipalities, state government, even a mighty nation. How they act is partly our responsibility.

By going out and speaking up and bringing about change in ways that stretch our comfort zones, we find that our missional and prophetic muscles also grow. Christ-like also means bold. Strong. Tenacious. Radically candid.

In Alan Hirsch’s provocative book The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church, he writes, “We are a message tribe.” By this he means we are meant to be a sent and missional people. We can’t expect to have people seek us out. We must reach out to them. Organizing and advocating for God and God’s earth takes us out of our homes and our church buildings and into the world. This is where we are supposed to be. This is where we are supposed to share God’s Way.

 

#10 Faith

Anytime we live out the values of the whole faith Way, we will be aware of the necessity of faith.

When we do something that makes us stand out and perhaps endure ridicule, then our faith will grow.

When we work to restore a forest or protect a river, we will not know whether our efforts will ultimately lead to success. But when we do it anyway because it is the right thing to do, then we are acting on faith and building faith at the same time.

 

I pray you will continue to pray and act for the life of God’s earth.

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Salvation is Bigger Than You and Me

Nathan Aaberg —  May 3, 2021 — Leave a comment

There was much that surprised me in N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope.

In the book, the New Testament Scholar and Anglican bishop explains what, in his view, the ultimate future of life will be from a Christian understanding. This includes what our futures will be after we each die. It also includes what God’s ultimate intentions are for this world. And, counterintuitively, he details what response that understanding should prompt in us in our daily lives and in our churches.

I was surprised by, among other things, how strong of a case Wright made for a literal bodily resurrection as our future destiny. This comes from Wright close reading of the Bible. Here, as in other cases, he finds threads that are both conservative and radical at the same time.

But nothing surprised me more than several paragraphs at the end of the chapter that concludes Part II (“Future Plan”). In these paragraphs, Wright forcefully questions our traditional understanding of what salvation is all about.

These paragraphs are so significant that I have shared them below and urge you to read them.

But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing questions that centuries of theological traditions have supposed. The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and recreation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context – not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being “fellow workers with God”) within that larger picture and purpose.

The paragraph does not actually end here but, in my humble opinion, it should have. So I encourage you to read that first section again before going on to the second half of the paragraph below.

And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alterantives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question. The question ought to be, How will God’s new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world? The choice before humans would then be framed differently: are you going to worship the creator God and discover whereby what it means to become fully and gloriously human, reflecting his powerful, healing, transformative love into the world? Or are you going to worship the world as it is, boosting your corruptible humanness by gaining power or pleasure from forces within the world but merely contributing thereby to your own dehumanization and the further corruption of the world?

Below you will find most of the next paragraph. I end my quoting of the paragraph at a natural stopping point.

This reflection leads to a further, and sobering, thought. If what I have suggested is anywhere near the mark, then to insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question – to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world – may be to make a mistake similar to the one made by Jewish people in the first century, the mistake that both Jesus and Paul addressed. Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescure Israel? What the gospel of Jesus revealed, however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all. 

There is so much power in how we frame things.

If the point of Christianity is understood to be the preservation of our individual souls in a heaven that is beyond a earth that is just a temporary place that does not matter to God, then it’s not surprising that Christians ignore or even willingly deplete God’s earth.

But what if the point is, as Wright expressed it above, to be part of God’s desire and purpose to bring everythig God made into peace and harmony?

How different our treatment of God’s earth would be. How different our evangelism would be.

This also puts human exceptionalism into its proper perspective. As I wrote here, “The point of the God-given exceptional role (of humans) is serving God’s purposes.”

We are uniquely gifted in order to uniquely serve.

I find Wright’s framing to ring true in a compelling way.

How about you?

 

I consistently find N.T. Wright’s insights to be both affirming of the coherence of the Bible itself in ways that inspire me and challenging to the ways so many Christians have come to understand God and Jesus. I highly recommend that you read his books and listen to lectures by him. 

 

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Illuminating Message on What Comes Next

Nathan Aaberg —  December 31, 2020 — Leave a comment

I urge you to watch this video of a presentation by N.T. Wright. The YouTube description for this talk at Fuller Seminary in 2014 reads as follows:

In his lecture “What is God’s Future for the World?” delivered at the 2014 Fuller Forum, N. T. Wright, New Testament scholar and former bishop of Durham, delved into Pauline eschatology—a vision not of people leaving the world but of God making the world right.

N.T. Wright is brilliant and one of the best people I have ever heard explain the Christian faith. I believe you will find this invaluable in understanding the Bible, Paul and the future of Creation and our role in it. There really is Good News for us and for all of Creation. This resonates with the message of John Phelan in his book Essential Eschatology: Our Present and Future Hope.

God bless you and your service to God and our Savior in 2021. May your energies for caring and renewing the life of God’s earth as part of your whole faith be renewed and strengthened.

 

 

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Wild Hope – An Interview with Gayle Boss

Nathan Aaberg —  March 24, 2020 — 4 Comments

Cover of Wild Hope

My friend Jon Terry from the Au Sable Institute sent me a surprise gift in the mail – a copy of the book Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing by Gayle Boss. The book has six sections for the six weeks of Lent. Each section features the profiles of four animals, from the Chinese pangolin and black-footed ferret to the Amur leopard and golden riffleshell mussel. Each profile opens your eyes and heart to the wondrous qualities of the animal. Gayle also shares, in an understated yet poignant way, the challenges each species faces to survive.

Because Gayle is such a gifted writer, it’s hard to resist sharing a multitude of excerpts. Here are two from her introduction that get to the purpose of Wild Hope: 

“Attention to the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent. The season means to rouse us from our self-absorption.”

“The promise of Lent is that something will be born of the ruin, something so astoundingly better than the present moment that we cannot imagine it. Lent is seeded with resurrection. The Resurrection promises that a new future will be given to us when we beg to be stripped of the lie of separation, when the hard husk suffocating our hearts breaks open and, like children, we feel the suffering of any creature as our own. That this can happen is the wild, not impossible hope of all creation.”

I highly recommend this book for you and your family. You will more deeply treasure God and God’s Creation. Your heart will also go out to the men and women who are dedicating their lives to preserve the life of God’s earth. Gayle’s writing will affirm your own convictions and heart for the life around us. You’ll be struck by the beautiful art of David G. Klein. And the book will move your heart in new ways during this Lenten season

I’m grateful to Gayle for writing this book. She generously took time to respond to four questions I had for her.

Nathan: You write in the introduction to Wild Hope, “I didn’t hear all creation groaning when my sons were young. I was oblivious to the millions dying, their kinds never to be seen on the earth again.” Can you share how you came to be a Christian, a writer, and a Christian writer called to communicate about the life of God’s earth?

Gayle: I grew up in a church-going family (the Dutch Reformed tradition) and loved all-things-church, even as a teenager! It seemed to me the one public place where what really mattered—who we are and why we’re here—got talked about. That impulse to talk about what matters also drew me into a writing life.

I’ve tried my hand at nearly all creative literary forms, from long-form journalism to haiku. In my early forties I wrote a 535-page failed novel. The wish to write about animals and how close bonds with them make us more deeply human grew on me so slowly I’m not sure I can trace it.

This much seems true: When my sons were young, their love of animals woke a long-dormant attention to animals in me. I remembered how I would cry when my father and uncles hung up deer they’d shot from the branches of a big oak tree to bleed out. And I remembered how the rest of the family laughed at my tears. The venison was part of our winter food supply, my food supply, too.

Led by my children, I let my original tenderness for animals rise again. I noticed how good that felt, even when I experienced an animal suffering. I felt more alive, more free. I now believe that’s because I reconnected with the One Love planted in all things at their creation; the love at my core calls to the love at their core. Restoring that connection is a path back to our deepest selves and back to the beloved community of all created things that we call Eden or The Peaceable Kingdom, where “They will not hurt or destroy in all (God’s) holy mountain.”

Nathan: Please share what your goals were for Wild Hope and why you believe attentiveness to “..the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent.”

Gayle: As with All Creation Waits, I wanted to wake, or fan, in readers the kind of love for animals that was dormant for so long in me—a love that doesn’t “cute-ify” them, but sees each one as “a word of God and a book about God,” as Meister Eckhart said. In that first book, I wrote about animals that many of us see regularly, like skunks, raccoons, and chickadees.

In Wild Hope, I describe animals most of us will never see in the wild, from orangutans to olms. I wanted to describe their magnificence and tell their stories, including the stories of their suffering on a planet we’ve made unlivable for them. I thought that if I could tell their stories in such a way that we readers would be drawn into their worlds, our defenses could melt, and we could grieve their suffering. We could see them as expressions of God’s own self and God’s own suffering—at our hands. Which is the white-hot core of Lent.

It’s important to me that we readers respond to the animals’ stories first with love, not shame and guilt. Because we’ll only make the radical life-changes that will protect the earth for all animals, including us, if we’re motivated by love. Guilt-motivated change may work for the short term, but it can’t be sustained. Over the long haul, we only protect and save what we love.

Gayle Boss in woodsNathan: What animal of God’s earth most captivates your heart? Why?

Gayle: Of course you know that I’m going to say I’m smitten by every animal I see and learn about. And it’s true, I really am!

The “episode” of each animal’s story that most undoes me, though, comes when, faced with impending death, they desperately do everything in their power to protect their young. While researching and writing Wild Hope, I saw that episode occur over and over: The mother polar bear struggling to keep her cubs afloat in seas without ice floes, and failing; Laysan albatrosses watching their chicks sink into lethargy from plastic poisoning, and die; the pangolin mother curling around her baby when the poacher pulls her out of her den. As a mother, to recognize that my actions, our actions, inflict the worst suffering I can imagine on other mothers was almost more than I could bear.

Learning the stories of these animals swelled my love for them, and love wouldn’t let me look away from their suffering. It made me fiercer in my commitment to change parts of my life that contribute to their suffering. We only protect and save what we love.

Nathan: What role do you believe art can play in inspiring Christians to understand God’s love for the whole world (including our “nonhuman kin”), to act on that understanding, and to somehow work through the despair and grief we experience as we see our nonhuman kin suffering?

Gayle: I don’t believe we’ll ever “understand” God’s love for all created things. Understanding is a motion of the mind, and God’s love for all things is way beyond our minds. It can happen, though, that we’re grasped by God’s love for all created things. Somehow, that “beyond us” Love that created the universe finds an opening in the hard husk of our egos and “cuts us to the heart,” as It did those who heard Peter tell the Jesus-story at Pentecost. Once Love has got hold of our hearts, it changes how we see everything. And when we see differently, we behave differently. “If your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light,” Jesus says.

At their best, stories, visual art, dance, and music bypass the mental constructs we use to defend ourselves and our walled-off ways of living. True art is the dart Divine Love uses to cut to our hearts. Suddenly or slowly, it reveals a new way of perceiving a world we thought we knew. Think of how differently the night sky appears once we’ve been struck by Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” What was static is suddenly full of energy and motion and presence.

It’s important to say that art doesn’t always pierce our thick husks with what we find beautiful. Sometimes art seems ugly or threatening, troubling. Van Gogh’s neighbors did not think “The Starry Night” was beautiful. They thought he was a crazy man making unpleasant, offensive paintings – that’s how new his way of perceiving was.

But for those of us who can allow even a crack in our armor, God can use art to peel the scales from our eyes and show us a universe pulsing with Presence, with creative energy unbounded. That vision becomes so compelling, we want to do everything we can to make ways for God’s always-creating energy to manifest in the visible world. “Working for change” isn’t a burden we bear but a dance we cannot help but do. As Paul says in the fifth chapter of Romans, “We rejoice in the hope of sharing in God’s glory.”

At the same time, we also suffer more deeply with the suffering. But as Paul goes on to say, “We rejoice in our sufferings,” because somehow suffering leads to a hope that “does not put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

My limited experience tells me that in suffering we sink more deeply into the heart of God, into the Love that is at the core of the Universe—at our core—and know ourselves to be truly alive. Sunk in that Love, we also know that it is the truest thing in the universe—it’s the origin of the universe—and that Love cannot but have the final say. We carry on in the irrepressible hope that God is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.” (Romans 4:17)

That’s the Wild Hope at the center of the book Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. I hope the stories reveal the pulsing presence of God in each creature and the drive of Love for that creature to survive. That’s a drive I want to join.

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