Archives For Good News

Inspiration, Insight, and Song

Nathan Aaberg —  October 30, 2019 — Leave a comment

Psalm 31:24 exhorts us: “Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the LORD!”

But sometimes we need the voices of others to carry us forward. In that spirit, I want to share with you two videos and an essay that have come my way recently.

The first video came from my friend Jon Terry from the Au Sable Institute. Here’s what he wrote about it: “The video is designed to be used by former students in their home church as a way to share their experience at Au Sable and introduce the Biblical mandate to serve, protect and restore God’s earth. Several students have already scheduled a date to show this video in front of their whole congregation as part of the worship service. Others will be showing it at a Sunday School or Adult Ed class and then leading a discussion on the issue.”

The video asks a fundamentally challenging question – will Christians be part of the problem or part of the solution?

It also shows how Au Sable equips young Christians to be part of the solution. The sincere eloquence of the students who appear in the video lifted my heart.

I came across this excellent essay by Jennifer Trafton about the Scottish minister and author George MacDonald through the newsletter of the Rabbit Room. MacDonald’s fairy tales influenced C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as well. Trafton highlights MacDonaldn’s insights into the importance of imagination in the life of the Christian.

My favorite line from Jennifer’s article:

“Revelation is God reaching out to us; imagination is us reaching out to God.”

I hope you will read it. Let us continue to imagine God’s will being done on earth in ways that cause people and Creation to thrive.

And Ryan O’Connor from Madison, Wisconsin, reached out to me recently after a friend pointed him to this blog. During a phone conversation that followed, I shared my struggle and the struggle of others I know with grief. Our hearts break over what is being done to God’s earth.

Ryan sent an email later that, among other things, shared this music video from Christian artist Andrew Peterson. I wanted to share it with you as well. The opening lines resonated deeply:

Do you feel the world is broken?
Do you feel the shadows deepen?
But do you know that all the dark won’t stop the light from getting through?
Do you wish that you could see it all made new?

By the way, the video is done in a crazily inventive way. Peterson’s team shot it all in one continuous take.

Enjoy.

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Yes to Natural Burials

Nathan Aaberg —  November 30, 2018 — Leave a comment
In rolling Ohio landscape hole for burial has been opened in meadow with pine branches nearby for covering after burial.

A site prepared for a natural burial at the Foxfield Preserve in Wilmot, Ohio. (Photo courtesy of Foxfield Preserve)

Interest is growing in natural burials. That’s good news for people interested in living (and dying) in the ways of a whole Christian faith.

I experienced this firsthand when I attended a session entitled “Dying for Conservation” recently at the Land Trust Alliance’s annual conference in Pittsburgh. The session featured representatives from a number of organizations that are operating conservation-oriented natural burial cemeteries in several eastern states.

One of the speakers was Jeff Corney, executive director of The Wilderness Center in Ohio. He spoke about his motivations to more widely promote the organization’s natural burial ground (Foxfield Preserve) and its conservation benefits. When his father died, their family had proceeded with a conventional burial. By the end of the whole experience, he was convinced the whole process was wrong. It was all wrong because it was not in keeping at all with his father’s life or their family’s values. His heart sank.

Foxfield Preserve is one of a growing number of conservation burial cemeteries around the country. In these places people are buried naturally as part of a larger effort to restore and manage natural habitats in those places. A portion of the fees paid for the burial often funds those restoration and management activities. In this way a person’s death contributes to the life of God’s earth.

This is an encouraging trend. Christians should embrace this with enthusiasm and support. In fact, as I wrote in this earlier blog, whole faith churches should make this the new normal.

Because it’s so much a part of our culture, we often overlook a defining moment of disconnection in the usual burial ritual we attend. At the graveside service a pastor will often use the phrase “dust to dust” in reference to Ecclesiastes 3:20. Yet, everything in the way the body has been treated and the way in which it will be buried is intended to prevent our dust from returning to the dust.

There are at least two reasons why this profound dissonance between the worldview of the Bible and how we actually bury our dead matters.

First, if you believe the earth is God’s, then damaging and diminishing God’s earth is something you will want to avoid at all costs,  This should especially be true when it comes to a spiritual-cultural moment of profound meaning.

Yet, we allow the river of culture and tradition to carry us away from our actual values.

Here’s a concise rundown of the cost to God’s Creation that comes from an article in Forbes by Laura Moss in 2011:

Embalming bodies requires cancer-causing chemicals like formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde and phenol — in fact, every year in the U.S. we bury 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid. Plus, caskets are often made from mined metals, toxic plastic or endangered wood. U.S. cemeteries use 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 180,544,000 pounds of steel and 5,400,000 pounds of copper and bronze annually. Casket burials also prevent a corpse from decomposing efficiently, and this slow rotting process favors sulfur-loving bacteria, which can harm nearby water sources.

Obviously, the exact numbers have likely shifted, but the general consequences remain the same.

All of that chemical and industrial activity is designed to prevent the vessel that is our body from naturally being recycled back into God’s earth. Yet, we are compostable!

This is not even to mention the fact that the conventional cemetery itself is a largely sterile and dead landscape. Vast areas of lawn are doused with weed-killing chemicals and mowed regularly by lawnmowers with internal combustion engines.

If your loved one loved God and cherished God’s Creation, you’d have to conclude that the whole process fundamentally contradicts your loved one’s values.

And there’s another reason why our burial rituals matter.

My son and I are reading the Bible together in lieu of confirmation classes. We just finished up Numbers. One of the things we came to better appreciate, especially with the help of the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, was the way God integrated extensive rituals and laws into the everyday life of the people of Israel.

In his essay “Neuroscience and Ritual,” Rabbi Sacks notes that:

…much of our behavior is driven by instincts that lie beneath conscious awareness and the rational, reflective part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. The question then arises: How, if our instincts are largely unconscious, can we change them? The short answer is ritual: Ritual is behavior that bypasses the prefrontal cortex. It is action based not on a ritual decision that this is how we should act. Rather, it is behavior that follows a precise set of rules, a fixed choreography. Doing certain acts repeatedly, we form new “habits of the heart” that work at an unconscious level to form new patterns of instinctual behavior.

In other words, rituals shape the hearts of the people carrying them out. And from those shaped hearts come habits of behavior.

As Jesus said in Luke 6:45: “Good people bring good things out of the good stored up in their heart, and evil people bring evil things out of the evil stored up in their heart…”

Unfortunately, our death and burial rituals form wrong habits of the heart as they relate to Creation. Our unconscious comes to understand that death and mortality are things to be afraid of and to deny. At a heart level we understand that we are separate from the life of God’s earth. We absorb the understanding that our eternal destinies and Creation’s eternal destiny are completely different. We deny a Biblical and scientific truth – we are made of dust.

Above all, our burials and our burial places assert a selfish dominion that is the oppostie of what we see in God. They reflect in their tangible details an odd hybrid of Greek philosophy and American industrial culture.

When our core rituals reflect ways in opposition to God’s ways is it any wonder that the rest of our lives do as well?

In that context, the trend towards narual burials and especially those that contribute to conservation of God’s earth is doubly positive. The trend offers hope for particular patches of land and water where people are buried. We can renew the life of what we have been charged to tend and mend.

What’s more, choosing to bury naturally offers hope for renewing the ground that shapes everything else – the landscape of our hearts and souls.

I plan to post some links to related articles on my Twitter feed. I hope you’ll follow it.

 

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Back to Church for the Easter Weekend

Nathan Aaberg —  April 8, 2018 — Leave a comment

As I wrote earlier, I stopped going to church a while back for a variety of reasons. With my son back from college for spring break, however, my wife and I agreed that we should attend both a Good Friday service and a service on Easter Sunday.

Because of my conflicted feelings about church and my absence from services for a while, I had a heightened senstiviity to what I experienced at those two services. I want to share just a few of my feelings and perceptions.

We attended the Good Friday service at a church we had gone to in the past. I was struck by the power and creativity of the service. It brought together Scripture, music, poetry, and even physical sensation.

We had, for example, our hands washed ceremonially upon entering the sanctuary. And for most of the service we held a smooth stone in our hand as a reminder of our sins. As the service ended, we dropped it in a bucket before a large, rough-hewn cross near the altar.

There were a variety of sounds. Piano and organ music. We sang hymns. The sound of a whip snapping cruelly was heard at one point. We cried out, “Crucify Him!” at another point.

And the music, sounds, and words were offset by moments of silence for reflection on heart-challenging questions.

What struck me most were the gestures of warmth from a number of the congregation’s members, despite the fact that we had not attended regularly there in some time. Smiles from across the aisle. Strong handshakes. People making the effort to come over to us even though it was out of their way. Hugs.

Isn’t this a blessing of the highest order?

We went to the church of some friends on Easter Sunday. It, too, featured creativity and beauty. We first gathered outside on the lawn for opening prayers and words. As we moved into the narthex, we received candles, and these were then lit. We entered the sanctuary and used our candles to light the candles on the altar, on the window sills, and other places. This modestly-sized sanctuary became filled with nearly a hundred small flames giving out gentle, cheerful light. Holiness and hope.

There was great joy throughout the two-hour service in the songs and message. Songs. Clapping. A full-immersion baptism preceded by the singing of “Down to the River to Pray.”

There was one intriguing common element between the two services.  In both services, the beginning of Genesis was read and given prominence.

This was encouraging. By drawing our attention to the amazing goodness of the Creation and the tragedy of the Fall, the two churches drew attention to the full context of Good Friday and Easter. The story and truth of the Bible begins with all of creation in harmony and peace. In the Bible and in the world around us, we see what the Fall has brought – sin and brokeness causing pain to people and to all of Creation on an epic scale. Yet the Bible ends with a new heaven and a new earth where all of creation is again in harmony and peace with God.

Jesus – his life, his words, his death, and his resurrection – is at the heart of all this. God, our loving God, cares for people and all of Creation. Easter should remind all Christians of this. It is truly good news. Awesome news.

Was the note of all Creation being part of the salvation story part of your Holy Week? I hope so.

And I end this post admitting that there is a certain wistfulness in my heart after attending those services.

I long to have a community of faith where Creation matters and where worship and fellowship are part of the rhythm of our family’s life.

 

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What Good Stewardship Looks Like

Nathan Aaberg —  January 30, 2018 — Leave a comment

It’s easy to write about what good stewardship of God’s earth looks like in the abstract. It’s another thing to live it out.

And it’s another thing altogether when you are trying to make a living off of the land, and your particular neighborhood happens to have grizzly bears.

That’s why it was inspiring to read this article by Kristine Johnson of the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. The article describes how ranchers in the Tom Miner Basin in Montana are raising cattle in ways that prevent predation on their cattle without killing the predators.

You’re probably inundated with information, articles, and books. Nevertheless, I urge you to take the time to read this article and ponder it. And if you can, do so before continuing below.

In the Tom Miner Basin in Montana ranchers are trying to live with grizzlies. (Photo used with kind permission of photographer Louise Johns – www.louisejohns.org)

Here are the traits of good stewardship of God’s earth that this story brings to the fore.

“They deserve to be here, too:” Fundamentally, this story of ranchers in Montana is about people who are living by the conviction that grizzlies are part of the fabric of that country. From their ethical perspective, it’s up to them to figure out how to make a living ranching while allowing the whole fabric to continue to thrive. And that means figuring out how to live with predators.

This parallels what we see in the Bible. In Psalm 50:11 we read: “I know every bird on the mountains, and all the animals of the field are mine.” Without doubt, predators are included in “all the animals.”

In Job 38:39-41 we read:

Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
And satisfy the hunger of the lions
When they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
Who provides food for the raven
When its young cry out to God
And wander about for lack of food?

In Exodus 23:10-11, we read of the Sabbath concept of giving a parcel of farmland a rest every seventh year which enabled the poor and wildlife to be able to gather food from that land.

And we tend to forget that God made a covenant with both humanity and the rest of life. Wolves and grizzles were included in that covenant as well.

Acting within Creation’s framework: I was struck by the words in article of Whit Hibbard. A rancher and the editor of The Stockmanship Journal, Hibbard is an advocate for low-stress livestock handling. These are techniques that more peacefully and subtly direct the cattle to do what is needed. Knowing how to get your goals accomplished without being a tyrant is the most obvious sign of a good steward. For ranchers that can mean how you handle your cattle and how you interact with your predator neighbors. For all of us, no matter where we are, that means paying attention to how the ecosystems and the animals and plants around you interact and naturally behave and then trying to fit your place, your activities in those patterns.

Apply our creativity: Genesis tells us we are made in God’s image. I’m convinced that one of the primary elements of that image is creativity. We worship a Creator God, a God who is amazingly imaginative and who has endowed Creation with its own creativity. And we are, similarly, inventive beings. Using God’s earth for our needs while purposefully enabling God’s earth to thrive and even regenerate is one of the most important and most challenging puzzles we face as a species and as communities and individuals. This puzzle should bring out in us our best, most thoughtful,and wisest innovations.

It takes a little extra: Doing the right thing is rarely the easy thing. In comparison to the long-time ranching approach of letting the cattle out on the range for weeks on end with little human presence, having someone riding the range every day takes more time, energy, and money. Seeking out specific breeds of cattle that are better able to fight off predators also requires an investment of energy and research. In page three of the latest newsletter of People and Carnivores, you can read of ranchers learning how to put up special fences with fluttering flags attached (a practice called “fladry”) to scare off wolves without harming them. This is another example of thoughtfulness translated into action.

It reminds me of the parable of the good shepherd. In that parable, Jesus reminds us that an attentive shepherd puts his heart into his task and will search out one lost sheep. That’s neither the easy or simple thing. It might not make pure economic sense. Creation is God’s flock. Are we willing to be the kind of shepherds God wants us to be?

You and I cannot be judgmental spectators of the challenges ranchers face. We should be going to the extra effort of supporting farmers and ranchers like these by buying their products, even if it costs a little more. We should also be good stewards of our own land, even if that is just 20′ x 30′ backyard.

Living with loss: I don’t know how I would react to the killing and consumption of an animal of mine by a wolf or grizzly bear. I know it would be wrenching. This is what makes the stewardship ethic of the ranchers profiled in this article so powerful. They are moving forward even as they know there is danger of loss. Somehow, we must be able to be vulnerable enough to accept some level of hurt as we work to be good stewards.

Boundaries and solemn necessities: Any close relationship will have some friction and reasonable boundaries are needed. Some culling of the most aggressive individuals of predator species is a solemn necessity in places where people and nature live side by side, which is increasingly the future of conservation. Conversely, there must also be abundant preserves, reserves, and national parks where predators and other wildlife can thrive without pressure from humanity.

Right stewardship comes from the right heart: It is not stated directly in the article, but it’s clear from the words and actions of the ranchers that are profiled that everything starts from their hearts. Their actions are the fruits of what is in their hearts. Of course, I don’t know if many ranchers would feel comfortable using the language of “fruits of the hearts” to describe their motivations. Nevertheless, consider the qualities in Galatians 5:22-23 that describe the person in whom the Spirit of God has transformed:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”

I believe these ranchers and their families, regardless of their faith convictions, are showing us what the fruits of the spirit look like when applied to how we live practically on God’s earth.

Experiences of the world in synch: I became very interested in learning more about what values and family cultures compelled these ranchers to adjust their way of life and to put their ranches’ future on the line in the way the article describes. So I made some inquiries and was eventually able to speak with Andrew Anderson. Andrew grew up on a ranch in Montana and works on the J Bar L Ranch, which uses many of the predator-protecting practices mentioned in the article. He said something very interesting towards the end of conversation:

“When I’m on a horse, working with cattle, knowing that predators are on the land around me, it feels great to feel that I’m part of this natural system and not working against it. I love horses. I love working with animals in nonstressful ways. I love being connected with the landscape. And I don’t have to choose. I can have it all. That’s where the real satisfaction comes from.”

This might be one of the better descriptions of shalom, the peace that the Bible speaks about, the peace that is not just the absence of conflict but is all the elements of the world and life in synch.

Committing ourselves to creative Creation stewardship doesn’t mean our hearts will always be in a state of bliss and harmony. Far from it. This is a challenging, difficult world.

Yet, when we respond to God’s call to tend God’s earth, we will have the kinds of moments that Andrew Anderson does.

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Year-End Blessings to You

Nathan Aaberg —  December 29, 2017 — Leave a comment

As 2017 draws to a close, I want to thank each of you for the openness of your heart to God’s abiding concern for all of Creation. I pray that you will be moved to do what you can in your personal life and in your public life to protect and restore God’s earth. May you do so as part of your whole commitment to being a disciple of Jesus.

I pray, too, that you know your gifts and the meaning your life has in your particular circumstances. Tap those gifts! Pursue your meaning and your mission. I would welcome hearing from you what your meaning and mission are and how you are using your gifts.

And how does your personal meaning and mission intersect with God’s earth? Remember – the good news that God offers through Jesus is good news for the whole earth.

Finally, I hope the photo below brings a smile. Earlier this year, which has been a challenging one, our family adopted two kittens – Gus and Maui – from a local shelter. These siblings had been rescued from the house of a hoarder where they were neglected. As a result, they’ve had some ongoing intestinal issues. I’m happy to say, however, that thanks to my wife’s attentive care, they seem to be getting better. (Who knew that pumpkin puree was so healthy for animals and that they would enjoy eating it?)

Both cats have revealed a talent for climbing. Maui in particular has had a habit of climbing up our Christmas tree through the interior. She has then played with ornaments or just observed life in the house. In this photo you see Maui enjoying a nativity moment. Perhaps she hears heaven and nature singing?

I pray that you will both be blessed and be a blessing in 2018.

Black cat perched in Christmas tree with nativity scene ornament in the foreground.

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