“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or what you will drink,
or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
And why do you worry about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin,
yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
Matthew 6:25-29
We were on the Salmon River by 7:30 this morning, taking advantage of a reprieve from the rain which was supposed to commence in the early hours. We've been canoeing a lot this summer rather than kayaking because Ruth took a tumble off her bicycle on a trail in Algonquin Park a month ago. It's a bit easier to load a canoe on the roof of a vehicle and two paddlers in one vessel helps.
This shift back to canoeing has meant that I'm often asked to edge in toward something along the shore which might make for a good photo. This morning Ruth wanted to take a picture of water flowers our grandsons saw when we were out with them. They wanted to pick them, but we explained why it would be good to leave them for everyone's benefit.
Today is the first Sunday of Creation Time for 2018 and we took time for drifting contemplation as we paddled a stretch of the river between Highway 2 and the 401, North America's busiest highway with more than 400,000 vehicles a day. The irony is that the "wildest" section of this paddle is closest to the 401, and even early in the morning the hum of traffic is evident. Still we saw the herons and kingfishers and turtles...and the flowers.
In his excellent book, Nature as Spiritual Practice, Steven Chase quotes theologian Dorothee Soelle who identifies five possible "responses to seeing a flower":
Ah!
Oh beautiful -- I want it, but I will let it be!
Oh, beautiful -- I want it, I will take it!
Oh beautiful -- I can sell it!
So?
How do we receive the gift of the world around us without needing to possess or commodify it? As people of an incarnational faith, how do we experience the God made known in Jesus, who paid attention to the world around him and asked us to consider the birds and the flowers for a life beyond anxiety and fear?
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