Wild Lent and Canadian Winters

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.

Luke 4:1-2

We are about two weeks into Lent, the 40 day (plus Sundays) season of the Christian liturgical year during which we get ready for our celebration of Easter. In Canada we are often still in the throes of Winter as Lent begins with February 4th as the earliest possible date, although that won't happen again until 2285! This means that we're usually huddled inside during the entire season even though at the beginning we hear about Jesus being baptized in the Jordan River and spending 40 days in the wilderness before his public ministry begins.

I never attempted to get people outside for an Ash Wednesday service although I burned palm branches for ashes in a snow storm a couple of times. We're good at ignoring how much of the bible is outside rather than inside, so I like the notion of Wild Lent, a resource from Britain. Here is a portion of the description.

What does it say on the tin?

Wild Lent will change how we all experience and think about Lent. How? Simple! Instead of a nice cosy room, coffee, biscuits and lots of discussion about the meaning of Lent, you’ll be wrapping up warm and heading off into the wilds! It’s time to get close and personal with creation and make a shadow clock, have a sunrise breakfast walk, go on a giant egg hunt, hug a tree, walk barefoot…and share God’s creation with others.
 What do you get?

Rachel Summers is a Forest School Practitioner and this book is designed to help you connect with God’s creation around you. To take time, to slow down and to reconnect with God’s world...Each category features five or six activities connected with that theme, all of which are designed to enable the participant to explore their surroundings and to seek God in them.

As well as the different categories, the author helpfully lists a way to make the most of the material across the book by focusing on six different themes, perfect for using over the six weeks of Lent:

 Putting Down,
Picking Up,
Setting Off,
Journeying On,
Into the Wilderness,
Finding Home.

Despite the risk of frostbite, it sounds worthwhile to me!

 

Holy Rivers

Kumbh Mela Pilgrimage, India

Okay, sometimes I just blow it. I've been meaning to blog about the largest religious gathering on the planet, one which only happens every few years in India. Kumbh Mela  2019 began on January 15 and concluded last Sunday, March 4th. Attendance was estimated at more than 100 million people from across the world, the largest peaceful gathering of religious pilgrims. By comparison, the pilgrimage to Mecca last year attracted 2.5 million.

Kumbh Mela is a Hindu festival during which pilgrims engage in ritual bathing for the forgiveness of sins in several rivers including the Ganges. During this year's gathering there were six bathing dates listed on the government website, the final holy bath taking place last Sunday.



Namaan healed in the Jordan River

I can say with confidence that I would not want to participate in any communal activity with such a vast crowd, and I know that these rivers are highly polluted. Yuck. Yet bathing as a religious activity for healing and repentance is very much a part of our Judeo-Christian tradition. In 2 Kings we read about Namaan, the Syrian commander, who is healed of leprosy after Elisha tells him to bathe in the Jordan river seven times. Jesus refers to this story in Luke 4: "There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."

The gospel of Mark was probably the first of the four to be written and it begins with the baptism of Jesus. John the Baptizer is immersing people in the waters of the Jordan for the forgiveness of sins when Jesus arrives.

It makes sense that water, which is essentially to life on Earth would be considered sacred in different religions. Perhaps we all need to make some effort to acknowledge of the holiness of rivers.
 

Baptism Scene in Brother Where Art Thou

Quakers and...Astrophysics?

My astronomy and my Quakerism have grown up together and are comfortable bedfellows.

When Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a 20-something astrophysics doctoral student at Cambridge University in the 1960's she made an extraordinary discovery. Recognizing radio pulsars became one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century. The 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to her supervisor Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle for this breakthrough and Bell Burnell got...zip. She was included in photographs and asked if she would "unbutton my blouse lower, whilst journalists wanted to know my vital statistics and whether I was taller than princess Margaret".



At the time others in the field of astrophyics protested her exclusion but to no avail, and she downplayed her omission because she was a research assistant.  Bell Burnell went on to a distinguished career and last Fall she was awarded the three million dollar (US) Breakthrough prize, all of which she gave away to help women, ethnic minority, and refugee students become physics researchers.

Bell Burnell has also figured out how to be both a scientist and a Christian -- a Quaker, specifically. In 2013, she gave the Backhouse Lecture in Canberra A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also Be Religious? in which she described her own personal theology/cosmology.

She also spoke on the BBC Radio 4 program Beautiful Minds:

 

I find that Quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In Quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, and there isn't a dogma. There's an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that's very like what goes on in ‘the scientific method’.

Along the way she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom and awarded a Quaker prize for peace and justice.

On this International Women's Day we can celebrate Jocelyn Bell Burnell as a scientist, a philanthropist, and a Christian.

Sea Dragons and Mary Anning

Back in January PBS aired a BBC television special called Attenborough and the Sea Dragon. Sir David Attenborough's name is gold when it comes to projects about the natural world and science, so it shouldn't be surprising that this remarkable nonegenarian gets first billing.

The program is about the discovery and excavation of the fossil remains of a 200 million year old ichthyosaur near Lyme Regis in southern England. Icthyosaurs were up to 16 metres in length and were fierce predators.

There was only passing mention of the first discovery of what was thought to be a form of fossilized crocodile in the same cliffs nearly 200 years ago. It was a young woman from a working class family named Mary Anning who developed a keen eye for fossils in a time when scientists and clergy were beginning to appreciate that there was literally more than the eye could see when it came to an understanding of creation. Mary discovered the first ichthyosaur and was soon sought out the men who were exploring this relatively new and religiously fraught field.



Tracey Chevalier has written a very readable and enjoyable fictional exploration of Mary's life called Remarkable Creatures. It helps readers appreciate the issues of the day, including the general contempt society had for the intelligence of women and particularly those of the "lower class."

In the novel Mary, whose family was religious, asks the Rev. Buckland (an actual Anglican priest and paleontologist of the period) about extinction of species and the implications for the emerging exploration of different theories of evolution. The priest is cautious in his response but responds "God in his infinite wisdom has peppered the world with mysteries for men to solve. This is one of them, and I am honoured to take on the task."

Eventually Mary Anning was recognized for her contributions and last year - two hundred years later --  a room at the Natural History Museum in south Kensington, London, was transformed in her honour. I thought it rather sad that two centuries after Anning's extraordinary discovery Sir David and the crew didn't more to acknowledge this pioneer.

Oh yes, Anning may have been the source of the tongue-twister "she sells sea shells by the seashore!"

Volcanoes and Transfiguration

We have come at Christ's own bidding
  to this high and holy place,
 where we wait with hope and longing
  for some token of God's grace.
 Here we pray for new assurance
  that our faith is not in vain,
 searching like those first disciples
  for a sign both clear and plain.

Voices United 104

When we visited the Azores last September, a group of islands in the Atlantic which are part of Portugal, our final stop of four was to Terceira. Ruth did a great job of researching each island before the trip but it was once we arrived on Terceira that we realized we could climb down into the largest hollow volcano on the planet which is called Algo do Carvao. We drove up and up to get to the summit, then walked down and down, hundreds of steps to the bottom where there is a small lake. It was a stunning experience, perhaps enhanced by not knowing what to expect.  It is a place where choral groups and instrumental ensembles offer events because of the acoustics. We could tell that others were also in awe of the surroundings.

There was something holy about this natural phenomenon, and it was one of the most remarkable places we've ever visited. We did a lot of descending and ascending in different locations that day. When Ruth checked her phone app for physical activity a couple of weeks later (we hadn't realized at the time that it was recording our ups and downs) we discovered that we had walked 18,000 steps and the equivalent of 91 stories that day. No wonder we were weary that evening!


The Transfiguration of Christ -- Earl Mott

We have come at Christ's own bidding
  to this high and holy place,
 where we wait with hope and longing
  for some token of God's grace.
 Here we pray for new assurance
  that our faith is not in vain,
 searching like those first disciples
  for a sign both clear and plain.

Voices United 104

In my Lion Lamb blog today I reflect on the notion of "thin places," which seems to fit with the mystical story of the Transfiguration. Rarely do we speak about the very experience of physical exertion as an aspect of what makes the story of Jesus and his disciples climbing the mountain for their numinous, bewildering encounter with Moses and Elijah, two mountain climbers of Jewish tradition who had been dead for hundreds of years so profound.
https://lionlamb-bowmanville.blogspot.com/2019/03/transfiguration-and-thin-places.html

It seems to me that sitting a pew or seat listening to the Transfiguration passage doesn't quite cut it, although that's the practicality of gathering for worship. Ascending and descending literally take us to places outside our comfort zone where we may experience God through the wonder of Creation and be opened to the presence of the living, present Christ. At times we resist breathing hard, whether metaphorically or physically, when it comes to our faith, yet that's when we have the most remarkable encounters with the holy.

Butterflies and Theophanies

Monarch butterflies -- all butterflies really -- are a gift from God...period. That's about as definitive as I can be on any subject. Butterflies are at once fragile and remarkably durable, not unlike the stained glass windows to which their wings are often compared. For Canadians Monarchs are one of the most if not the splashiest butterflies we're going to see. And we've learned that they undertake a remarkable migration from Canada to Mexico mostly, although Western Monarchs end up in California. Sadly, these creatures which never fail to create in me a sense of wonder have been in a decline which is more like a free-fall. It's estimated that the North American population has declined by 90% or more. Pesticides, elimination of milkweed, and habitat loss have conspired to cause this haphazard path to extinction.

This past Summer and Fall I was heartened to see a lot more Monarchs in different locations across Southern Ontario. My observations are what are termed "anecdotal" by researcher, but lo-and-behold the scientific evidence is that there was an uptick of as much as 150 in populations in some regions. Many municipalities are leaving milkweed and even seeding it to provide this essential breeding and feeding crop. There is actually research into how milkweed can be a viable commercial crop, a win-win for humans and butterflies.

 

I rummaged around in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior, which is about a discontented 28-year-old mom named Dellarobia who stumbles upon a woods full of roosting Monarchs in her rural Tennessee area, where they aren't supposed to be. This discovery changes her hard-scrabble community and enlivens her. When she first sees them it is what we often call a "theophany" in scripture, an unexplainable experience of the holy, the numinous. Dellarobia is quietly cynical about the conservative Christianity of her town, yet:

"Trees turn to fire, a burning bush. Moses came to mind, and Ezekiel, words that occupied a space in her brain but no longer carried honest weight, if they ever had. Burning coals of fire went up and down among the living creatures.

We had this sort of unexpected experience ourselves years ago, walking a trail along the shore of Lake Ontario near sunset. We were puzzled by the movement in tree branches, then realized it was thousand of Monarch butterflies, staging before the arduous flight across the huge expanse of water. It really was extraordinary.

Let's hope that the summer of 2018 wasn't an aberration in the disappearance of a species. Surely the Creator is waiting for us to do the right thing on behalf of these glorious creatures.


https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/tracking-milkweed-save-monarch-butterflies

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-vanishing-flights-of-the-monarch-butterfly

Wandering in the Woods of Climate Change

Map of the Hundred Acre Wood drawn by E. H. Shepard to illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

  He also said to the crowds,

“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’;

and so it happens. 

And when you see the south wind blowing, you say,

‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. 
 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky,
but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

 Luke 12:54-56 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

 We visited the Five Hundred Acre Wood to see the great tree,
one to climb it, three to watch.
And of those who watched,
one perhaps to dream of finding there a door with a knocker and a bell,
 and someone living behind it. Who? Who? Could it be owl?

Christopher Robin Milne    

I've wondered about un-following some Twitter accounts from Britain which have been gushing about the blossoming of Spring, complete with photos of crocuses and other early flowers. Do I really need to be taunted as Winter still has its icy grip on us on the cusp of March? It's bad enough dealing with the smug gloaters on Vancouver Island.

 Actually, this is not normal for the British Isles. There have been record warm temperatures for various parts of Great Britain -- 20C in Wales the other day -- with fires breaking out in forests and on heaths, including the area made famous as the Hundred Acre Wood. A.A. Milne was inspired by a woodland called Ashdown Forest for his creation of the Hundred Acre Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh According to the BBC more than 35 hectares — about 86 acres —  of the 200 hectares in Ashdown were affected.

 

 

Environmentalists are pointing to what is happening in Britain as one more example of the uncertainty created by Climate Change. As with many other parts of the planet, weather is changing and so are the seasons. A new report says that people get used to these shifts within a few years yet plants and animals don't adapt as readily. We actually don't know what psychological and physiological effects result for humans from what's called Shifting Baseline Syndrome. It's likely that a lot of us don't really notice until a catastrophic event or even a relatively minor one which affects a beloved place, usually because someone deems it newsworthy.

 

Jesus seems fairly clear that if we aren't willing to act on what we can clearly see then we are hypocrites suffering from a dangerous form of blindness. Do we really want to be Winnie and Tigger, so befuddled we end up walking in circles? I suppose we already are.

 

                 

 

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article226856249.html#storylink=cpy