Our Sacred Earth
photograph by Michael Roeder
by Antoinette Voûte Roeder
As we enter this most beautiful of all seasons when the earth pulls out all her stops to seduce us with colour, I am reminded of a recent call from a directee who had been taking a course dealing with the climate crisis and how we humans can respond. She sent me scurrying to look for a poem of mine that she said she had memorized, whose last lines meant so much to her.
Lectio with Leaves
Take this patch
of tawny grasses,
strawberry leaves threading
throughout, leaves as red
as their fruit in another
season; many-petaled sage-grey
lichen, smaller than the tip of your
finger; miniature ferns, green
and sturdy, and bleached-blond horsetail
with stems like bamboo; stone flaked off
a nearby mountain millions of years ago.
Take this sacred bit of ground
and read it, inwardly digest it,
contemplate the exquisite detail,
multiply by infinity and you will have
the sum of this precious earth.
Make space in your heart for her.
Vow to live accordingly.
Well, we haven’t lived accordingly, have we? And lately, even the strongest expressions of what we are experiencing from climate change have fallen from favour while governments all over the world have dropped the words from their agendas and even worse, from their active support of green energy initiatives. Only environmental groups are still talking about the climate crisis, the need to conserve habitat and water, and stop our everlasting dependence on fossil fuels.
We in the spiritual direction community know how valuable, how powerful “naming” can be. Once we can name what we are experiencing, we can begin to understand it and take whatever action is necessary. Over the years, I have often wondered how we could expand the spiritual direction narrative to encourage and grow our awareness of the plight of the Earth and our complete interdependence with the ecosphere and its fate —our fate. We live our lives within ever expanding circles, from the most intimate of the family unit to society, country, world. If we ignore the context in which our lives play out, meaning the bigger picture, then surely we are not telling the whole story,our whole story.
In the last century, scientist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote his “Mass on the World.”
“Since once again, Lord — though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia — I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.”
The Earth is sacred. I would like to think that we in the spiritual accompaniment of our directees could recognize and encourage that awareness and “vow to live accordingly.”
Antoinette Voûte Roeder
completed the Pacific Jubilee Program in Spiritual Direction in 1993 and has never looked back. She continues to offer spiritual accompaniment and supervision, as well as twice-annual poetry retreat days. Her degrees are in music, her first love, to which she also attributes her ability to listen deeply. Her other loves include poetry, people, and the Earth.
Read about Antoinette's spiritual direction practice here.
