REWILDING CHRISTIANITY: FROGS, FIREFLIES, INCARNALITY
Lisa E. Dahill
On the evening of the full moon, nineteen of us ride out of London, Ohio, heading southwest on the Prairie Grass Trail toward South Charleston. It’s a beautiful ten-mile ride. The trail threads through woods, meadows, cultivated farm fields, near homesteads with roadside ditches full of water this June night. The air is thick with humidity and it’s warm as we ride toward the setting sun, appreciating the colors filling the sky long after sundown. I try to notice each potential hazard on the trail: a fallen branch on the outbound side just before a certain road crossing, a pile of brush or scattered debris after another. But mostly I’m enjoying the pull of muscles and the scattered conversations as riders drift forward and back in the group. In South Charleston we get ice cream at the Purple Monkey and enjoy a rest, and when we get ready to ride back it is dark. As we start east again on the trail, suddenly the full moon becomes visible rising huge over a field before us. All the way back it will beckon us forward.
In this return trip, the ride has an entirely different feel. I try to ride solo, staying far from those who outfit their bikes with auto-grade lights that illumine the trail so every leaf casts a shadow. That’s not why I’m here. Given that my bike’s puny light shows only a few feet ahead of me, I would see an obstacle only as I was just about to hit it and crash. That means I don’t want to ride too close to others with similarly weak lights, because the risk of collision is too dangerous. So I look for a spot to ride solo toward the front of the pack as we stretch out, keeping my internalized map of the path’s obstacles in mind as I push into the dark. The dark becomes its own animal, thick and dense and alive, and I sink into it, this space that is shared. With little visual data but the moon and its shadows, I am disoriented into a state of huge sensory impressions. Fascination as the simultaneous heavy stillness of the warm humid air and its bike-generated movement ripple across my skin, the powerful kinetic sense of muscles straining and balance reflexes steering me securely even with limited visual orientation, every neuron firing. Equally I hear sounds, the calls and shrills of frogs and toads fill the world: below me in the ditches to high up in the trees, from seemingly inches away to far across the fields, from species of all kinds and sizes in this water-saturated world. These cries stretch across a staggering musical range, basso bullfrogs to sopranino peepers, their voices layering and pulling my mind and heart in all directions with them as I speed through. And then, as if the feel of the air and its spring scents in my throat and the calls of the amphibian opera were not enough, the fireflies begin—and now the woods and fields sparkle near and far with pulsing lights, bright and dimmer, fast and measured, low and high. The dark itself is a presence, soft, opening into all this perception, this breathtaking, breath-deepening immersion into a world of beings surrounding me on all sides, above and below, the very air filled with insects and microbes and water, the huge white moon slowly rising. When we get back to the trailhead in London, someone has set up a telescope and Saturn is visible: the whole universe, it seems, is present this miraculous night.
Experiences like this—or kayaking or snorkeling; encountering life above, below, around on all sides in a thickness of unaccustomed perception—are what first surprised me into awareness of the astonishing and humbling interspecies world in which we live, of existing by pure grace in a “more-than-human world.”1 On the face of it, experiences like these may not often be what people seem to mean when they talk about experiencing the Christian God—at least such experiences were not where my sense of the divine was primarily shaped growing up in the church, nor in my most powerful and formative experiences as an adult of the Jesus whose unexpected showing up in my life was sweetness beyond measure.
Those experiences proved to be the door through which I eventually moved out into the incarnate holiness of the entire world. Jesus had surprised me in my high-strung early thirties, arriving in my psyche as a huge new reality of mercy opening a space for wild, endless love I had never imagined. Jesus was the experience of being loved and loved and loved, being held in love with complete and unshakable security as a new floor for my being, grounding in a love that gradually allowed me to slow and soften, rest, and go deep into the dreamwork, therapy, shadow exploration that in time healed my childhood traumas and allowed me to step into a new adult self able to love and give myself freely in the world. For sixteen years, through grad school, post-doc, and the first six years of my time on the faculty of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, I soaked in this love in worship—for much of that time daily—and in extended daily or near-daily periods of contemplative prayer. I became an oblate of the Camaldolese Benedictine community in Big Sur and Berkeley, California, whose rhythms of contemplative daily communal worship balanced beautifully the fullness of music, aesthetics, intergenerational energy, and social justice of the worship and community life of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco. I thought I would be a lover of Jesus forever and of the trinitarian and cosmic/evolutionary fullness of the divine this love opened up.
And maybe I still am. But in a 2011-2012 sabbatical from Trinity, which I spent mostly outdoors, something shifted. It was as if the chancel walls gave way and I stepped through and realized it’s all chancel, this sacramental world, the real world. This sending was not my own idea; it simply happened, shoving me out into a vast world where religion, in the forms I had known, doesn’t matter. I can’t seem to come back inside; the creation itself is all I want, its wild particularity and beauty, its complexity. And having pondered this for years, I’ve realized that this urge out into the wildness of the world was an invitation not out of faith but into some stranger face of God: being invited to learn from the creation about what is holy in wild languages I don’t understand—bird languages, drought languages, smells and winds, predation, illness, death, life… the natural world my holy book.2
I came to realize that the logic of the incarnation itself was expanding into a full-bodied Earth-filling world-enchanting pantheism: it is not just Jesus but the whole world that is God.
This is not orthodox Christianity. Most Christians, including people like me who all our lives have been passionately world-embracing environmentalists hold a sense of the divine that is at some level conceptually separate from the world. By definition, God is that which gives rise to the world, which perhaps permeates the world intimately but is ultimately not the world; in fact, pantheism is so unthinkable for Christians that, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein explores brilliantly in Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters, it fails to register as a credible theological stance at all.3 Yet over these years, I have been experiencing the world as not only intrinsically holy, but as in fact the divine reality itself. I began finding myself worshiping Earth, a locus of devotion that soon put me at some remove from almost all indoor worship. The God worshiped in buildings designed and scaled and intended for humans only, with language and actions meant for humans only (baptizing, feeding, embracing, preaching), seemed increasingly unreal. Even the hymns and architecture and symbols that had been for me so saturated with love and beauty no longer functioned as icons of real-time spiritual encounter.
Yet the whole religion snapped back into focus and made profound sense again if I simply substituted the word “Earth” for “God” throughout.4 It was magical. For prayers of confession, we confess not to a God but to the actual source of our lives: “O Earth, we confess that we are alienated from you and choosing destructive paths.” That suddenly feels like precisely the truth-telling for which we need collective ritual invitation. For invocations, this substitution might lead to prayers like, “O Earth, powerful and compassionate, you shepherd your people, faithfully feeding and protecting us. Heal each of us, and make us a whole people, that we may embody the justice and peace of . . . Jesus Christ.”5 Each time I made this switch, new questions lit up: what does it mean to consider Earth “shepherding” us, i.e., what would a religion look like that turned to Earth systems and place-based forms of knowing and life together for guidance on how to live as humans? What might “the justice and peace of Jesus Christ” mean within an interspecies and intergenerational Earth community of beings?
At the same time, as a Bonhoeffer scholar I have been moving deeply into Bonhoeffer’s rejection in his Ethics of God-world dualism. A dualism of “realms,” he writes, is the sickness infecting most of Christian history, a “Colossus obstructing our way.”6 The dominant theological conception after the New Testament has been the basic conception [of] two realms [that] bump against each other: one divine, holy, supernatural . . . ; the other worldly, profane, natural . . . . Reality as a whole splits into two parts, and . . . the concern of Christ becomes a partial, provincial affair within the whole of reality.7
That entire conception is false, he asserts, destroying the logic of the incarnation itself. For Bonhoeffer, “reality” (Wirklichkeit) is visible only when the fundamental unity of God and the world in Jesus Christ is perceived, beheld. “There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world.”8 Any attempt to think of “God” and “world” as separate creates an abstraction, in his terms.9 The deeply entrenched Christian tendency to conceive of reality as split, “God” separate from “world,” is for him a millennia-long perceptual error creating abstractions of both halves of the dualism: a God increasingly un-credible to postmodern sensibilities in the “world come of age” and a degraded, desecrated view of the world and biological life stripped of their beauty, holiness, sacredness. The holy dies—for this separative “God” doesn’t exist—and so does the world robbed of its intrinsic holiness, made to be purely commodity. God-world dualism destroys reality.
Thomas Berry takes this insight further: “We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things came into being. Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality.”10 What if culturally normative forms of human religion had been consistently directing our profound religious intuitions and worship in this way to the universe itself, and to Earth, soil, water, creatures, beauty, the patterns and needs of a given place and its multiply interrelated forms of life? What if Christians spent as much time and love and explicitly religious reverence poring over and becoming fluent in the local, regional, planetary, and cosmic languages of the “Book of Nature” as they do the books of scripture?11 Such practices radically de-center the narrowly human perspectives of colonial/economic violence and privilege that white Western Christians have too long asserted as normative; they cast us out into wild new perspectives and webs of relations that may, if we can listen deeply enough soon enough, radically recast our infantilizing habits of mind and action, so destructive of our shared soul. I wish for Christianity this unapologetically Earth-centering, Earth-worshiping practice.
The Christian sacraments are a powerful place to locate these questions. I advocate a return of the practice of baptism to the local creeks, rivers, lakes, and other nearby bodies of wild water, arguing that because the forms of ritual shape participants’ experience on profound levels, the practice of baptism into wild water invites Christians into this experience of the world itself as holy, dripping and swarming and flapping with holiness.12 Similarly, practices of outdoor Eucharist that include ritually the countless non-human members of the worshiping body in a given place (as well as the shocking fact of our nonnegotiable implication with them in Earth’s food webs of eating and being eaten) allow Christians to experience the primal gift of food as the astonishing miracle it is, some creatures’ tissues—their bodies and blood—being given for us, becoming our bodies and blood, which soon enough in turn also becomes theirs.13How might human spiritual and ritual practices more adequately invite worshipers into this “contact and conviviality with what is not human”14 of which David Abram writes so movingly? How might Christianity shed its God-world dualism and relax into the worship of the universe itself? I long to live ever more fully into communion with the amphibians and fireflies of those humid summer rides, the endless layers of creatures’ voices and luminescence, thick textured air, full moon rising into an expanse of mystery, all of it together the divine presence, all of it worthy of worship. Indeed, I am coming to call the vision and experience of that endlessly expansive divine presence incarnality, the holiness of all that is.15 The cosmologically situated animate Earth, our merciful and miraculous God, is our source and wisdom and pattern and home. It is as well—along with countless humans and other vulnerable creatures of this and all future generations—the one/s our economic systems and forms of consumption are in the process of crucifying. May Christians learn anew what worshiping this whole Earth, precisely here, might mean.
1 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1996).
2 Lisa E. Dahill, “Rewilding Christian Spirituality: Outdoor Sacraments and the Life of the World,” in Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, ed. Lisa E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 181.
3 Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Many eco-theologians prefer a panentheistic perspective, including those who image the natural world itself as the primal sacrament; see, e.g., from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, John Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality (London: T&T Clark, 2019). Cláudio Carvalhaes comes close to pantheism in Ritual at World’s End: Essays on Eco-Liturgical Liberation Theology, foreword by Ivone Gebara (York, PA: Barber’s Son Press, 2021).
4 I first proposed this use of “Earth” as a liturgical name for God in “Addressing God with Names of Earth: Bonhoeffer and the Living Reality of Prayer,” Currents in Theology and Mission 43/3 (July 2016): 27-31.
5 Prayer of the Day for Proper 11B/Lectionary 16, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Assembly Edition (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 42.
6 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, et al., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (DBWE), volume 6 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 55.
7 DBWE 6:56.
8 DBWE 6:58. For further exploration of these questions in Bonhoeffer, see Lisa E. Dahill, “One Reality, Not Two: Bonhoeffer, Jesus Christ, and a Membraned World,” in Views of Nature and Dualism: Rethinking Philosophical, Theological, and Religious Assumptions in the Anthropocene, ed. Thomas Hastings and Knut-Willi Sæther (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 173-200.
9 DBWE 6:54.
10 Thomas Berry, “The Wild and the Sacred,” in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Harmony/Bell Tower, 1999), 49.
11 See Belden Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022); and Jacob H. Sherman, “Reading the Book of Nature after Nature,” Religions 11/4 (2020): https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11040205.
12 In addition to “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” I articulate this proposal in “Living, Local, Wild Waters: Into Baptismal Reality,” in Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-than-Human World, ed. Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 151-65; and “This Creek Is the Baptismal River: Baptism as Immersion into Reality,” Call to Worship: Liturgy, Music, Preaching, and the Arts 56/2 (2022): 21-28.
13 Lisa E. Dahill, “Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist,” Religions 204 (2020): doi:10.3390/rel11040204.
14 Abram, Spell, 22. The full passage unpacks ecologically, you could say, Bonhoeffer’s diagnosis of dualistic perception as an abstraction: “Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”
15 My current book project develops this insight more fully in dialogue with Bonhoeffer and many other theological and philosophical voices, from David Abram and Thomas Berry to Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Donna Haraway, and Victoria Loorz. Its working title is Incarnality: Christian Worship of Earth (in process, Fortress Press), inviting readers into a joyfully pantheistic Christian vision.