My paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Hollaar, grew up on a farm in North Dakota with eleven brothers and sisters. Their children – my father’s generation – included fifty cousins. With such a large and widely-dispersed extended family, the Hollaars got into the habit of having a family reunion every five years. In 2005, we gathered at Summit Pacific College in Abbotsford, British Columbia – the theme was “Meet the Rest in the West.”
My parents and grandparents traveled as far as Seattle on the train, where I picked them up at the Amtrak station downtown. As we were driving through Seattle, we came over a hill in the University District just in time to see Mt. Rainier, which is not always visible from the city. The mountain was beautiful that evening, surmounted with a halo of lenticular clouds. My grandmother gasped and said, “That’s a picture only God could paint.”
A bit further north, the Whitestone Church of the Brethren, cradled within the Okanogan Valley between the eastern part of the Cascade Range, has a ritual to end every session of adult Sunday school: participants devote about ten minutes at the end of the hour to sharing what they call “God sightings.” In this beautiful part of the world, along a river valley with mountains on either side and apple and cherry orchards neighboring wild forested lands, there are myriad pictures to be seen that only God could paint.
When I served the Whitestone congregation, my neighbors included coveys of California quail, herds of mule deer, flocks of wild turkeys, bighorn sheep and elk, trumpeter swans, snowy owls, turkey vultures, bull snakes and rattlesnakes, and even cougars and grizzly bears. Thus, God sightings often included beautiful and memorable scenes from nature: a rainbow over Mt. Whisky or sunset behind Mt. Whitestone; raptors roosting in Ponderosa pines or gliding in thermals above the road into town.
I believe that sharing God sightings is a valuable spiritual practice. My friend Saunia calls it “holy noticing”: being awake and aware of the beauty and mystery being revealed moment by moment in the world around us, and taking the time to be consciously aware of and express gratitude to God for it all. When we get into the habit of keeping our eyes open to the workings of God in the world around us, we draw closer to God; our lives become ever more attuned to the movement of the Spirit and God’s calling in our lives. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul enjoins the members of the congregation to “pray without ceasing”; developing a practice and habit of holy noticing is a way to continually engage in contemplative prayer – prayer that contemplates and delights in God and the beauty of God’s creation.
The Hebrew interjection hinnêh, translated “Behold!” in the King James Version and “See!” in the New Revised Standard, occurs 448 times in the First Testament. Similarly, the Greek verb idou, translated with the same two verbs in English, occurs 200 times in the Second Testament. These numbers would seem to indicate that seeing, paying attention, beholding, and noticing are important efforts as we follow our Lord. “Behold!”, “See!”, or hinnêh is what God says in the scriptures to draw attention to what God is doing in the world.
In Isaiah 43, God, speaking poetically through the prophet, declares, “See, I am doing a new thing!” And in the penultimate chapter of Revelation, the one seated on the throne proclaims, “Behold, I am making all things new!” In Lamentations, in the midst of grieving all the destruction around him, Jeremiah assures the reader that the mercies of the Lord “are new every morning.” With all this newness, it is a holy obligation to be awake, eyes open, paying attention, to see where and how God is doing new things, and discover how we might both rejoice and take part in this renewal.
Jewish tradition from the Mishnah – the earliest portion of the Talmud – holds that God’s people are obligated to participate in tikkun olam, often translated as “the repair of the world.” To repair – rejuvenate – restore – refurbish – make new: this is the work of those who love the Lord, to be guided and led to participate in the work of renewal that God already has underway. We ourselves are part of this newness, in Christian understanding: we are baptized into new life, made new in Christ; the old things have passed away. But to see newness and participate in it, we need to stay awake. The person who plants a seed and then never returns to see the new sprout has missed a crucial window in taking part in the growth of new life.
St. Francis of Assisi encouraged the members of his community to take the time to learn of God not only from the book of scripture but also from the book of creation. So many of the metaphors for experiencing and understanding God in scripture are themselves taken from the “book of creation”: Elijah is sent to a mountain to await the coming of the Lord, and first observes a mighty wind, and then an earthquake, and then a fire. After concluding his complaints to God, Job is treated to a discourse on all of the works of God’s hands in bringing forth and sustaining creation. Seeds and sheep and vines and many other tropes from nature figure importantly in Jesus’s parables and teachings.
So, likewise, when we pay attention to our natural environment, the images and descriptions of scripture take on new life and power in our hearts and imaginations. How much more vivid and powerful, for instance, does the description of hawks and eagles in Job 39 become when we see at firsthand majestic raptors soaring upward on thermals, wings outstretched to their greatest span? How much more can we appreciate the rootedness of a tree planted by streams of water in Psalm 1 when we sit down under just such a tree, experiencing its shade and beauty?
The Bible is the book of a highly pastoral people – people who lived intimately with the land, who knew its moods and seasons, who grew their own grain, vegetables, and livestock, who moved through the landscape on foot or on the back of a donkey rather than in trains, planes, or automobiles. The further any of us get from our own ancestral agrarian histories, the more of a challenge it might be to truly immerse ourselves in the embodied pastoral language of the scriptures. Thus, a practice of holy noticing, of spending time in nature and taking the time to fully see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the scent of an approaching rainstorm or the sound of the wind blowing through a wheatfield, can serve to strengthen our understanding of and intimacy with the scriptures themselves.
The artist Georgia O’Keeffe was once asked why she painted so many flowers, and she responded: “Nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small. And to see takes time. Like to have a friend takes time.” We are called to take the time to see the wonder and beauty that God is continually unfolding for us and to become friends of God by noticing, caring, giving thanks. Not only that, taking the time to slow down and really see the flowers – consider the lilies! – is an important corrective to our often rushed and busy lives. It’s no accident that being in nature and allowing ourselves to slowly take in everything that we see and hear is a powerful antidote to stress. It also creates in our hearts, minds, and bodies space to be in contemplation of and conversation with the Divine, the Creator who brought all things into being and sustains them.
This might be an intriguing practice for the preachers among us especially. If you are preaching on John 15, go visit a local vineyard if there is one in your vicinity, and place yourself where you can see and even smell the grapevines. Then read the gospel passage, aloud, slowly, considering what it means for Christ to be the vine and ourselves the branches, called to bear good fruit. Or if you are preaching on the book of Ruth, go observe a grain harvest, and maybe ask some old-timers what it was like when the threshing crews traveled from field to field; consider how much more labor again was involved in Boaz’s workers harvesting by hand and Ruth gleaning behind them.
When I was in seminary, I had the opportunity to take a course entitled “Pottery and Proclamation,” in which our homiletics professor partnered with a ceramic artist and clay studio to create an experience of jointly learning about throwing pots and getting our hands into the clay, and how this might inform our preaching – especially on passages such as Jeremiah 18. At one point during the semester, I told a friend who was not in seminary about the course, and he responded, “Oh, that’s wonderful! We should put together an entire seminary course of study based on the imagery of the Bible: students would learn to throw pots, herd sheep, grow grapes and press wine…” My friend had a good point, I think; the further we get from the hands-on labors of growing and tending and making that are the warp and weft of the biblical fabric, the more abstract these stories and images become for us. Taking the time to reconnect with the natural world re-concretizes the Bible, while at the same time recharging its pastoral language and setting with a new sense of appreciation and wonder.
There is a powerful moment in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, in which Shug and Celie are walking together through the countryside, and Shug remarks (in paraphrase), “I think it makes God mad if we pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” How often do the psalmist and the other biblical writers enjoin us to notice the heavens declaring the glory of God! A beautiful synergy happens when we immerse ourselves in the natural world with an eye to praising and thanking God for its beauty and wonders: we become more fully part of creation, more deeply connected with God, and more energized by entering into God’s praises.
God doesn’t need us to praise – but we are called to join all of creation in praising God because praise has a powerful effect on our souls. When we praise God along with the mountains and seas, the eagles and turtles and deer, we are lifted outside of ourselves and our narrow workaday concerns, into a sense of awe, mystery, and wonder at the power and love of the God who created us and all that our earth contains, all that is needed for each living being to grow and thrive. The first two verses of the hymn “How Great Thou Art,” Stuart K. Hine’s translation and expansion of a devotional poem by Carl Boberg, consist entirely of a meditation on the wonders and beauty of God’s creation, coupled with a soaring movement to praise. The stars, the thunder, the forest, and its birds, the mountains and brooks and their breezes, all lead the soul of the hymnwriter to sing in praise of the greatness of our God.
Of course, Brethren are no strangers to the power of meeting God in nature. Many of us are farmers and orchardists, and outdoor ministries at our camps and conferences are a key portion of the spirituality of many CoB folks. In my first call as a youth pastor at Olympic View CoB in Seattle, I accompanied several of our teens to National Youth Conference in Colorado. After hearing Jared McKenna preach, one young woman, Olivia, felt called to seek baptism. She decided that she wanted to be baptized at camp since camp had played such a huge part in her spiritual formation and that she wanted me to baptize her. So after the evening meal, all the campers, counselors, staff, and Olivia’s parents and grandparents gathered on the shores of the pond at Camp Koinonia in Washington state, under the spreading branches of Douglas fir and cedar, and Olivia was baptized.
Our camps, with their lakes and streams, woods and fields, have for generations nurtured the spiritual growth of Brethren of all ages. We have sung songs of praise around campfires, had outdoor morning devotions, swum and fished and boated and sledded and hiked in beautiful natural surroundings that sometimes might feel closer to God even than singing and praying together in our beautiful meetinghouses.
A trope has emerged on social media as a shorthand way of telling someone they have gotten disconnected from the real world: “touch grass.” While some have argued that this injunction may be somewhat ableist, given that there are those among us who are too disabled, sick, or infirm to go and be in nature, and those in urban areas who cannot spare the time or cost even to get to the nearest city park, I think there is some wisdom in “touch grass.” Our bodies are part of the natural world, and our spirits are revived and refreshed by spending time in it.
If we were talking together, perhaps even at a camp or city park, here’s where I would ask you to share your best memories of experiencing God in nature. Maybe it was a hike in the Appalachians, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevadas, or the Rockies. Perhaps you have been especially moved by outdoor Easter sunrise services, or hearing loons call across a Minnesota lake at twilight. You may be one of those who loves to be on the beach, near the ocean, or enjoys the power of thunderstorms or the quiet beauty of a gentle snowfall.
When I was a young girl, I liked to walk down the hill below our house, past the cottonwood grove, to the wellhead that had been dug by my great-grandfather on our family’s homestead farm. I would sit on the well cap facing west and watch the sunset over the North Dakota prairie. The glorious hues of purple, pink, and orange touching the undersides of the clouds with color and light: this is what I thought angels looked like. Maybe I still do.
Similarly, during my first semester in seminary, I was taking a required course on Constructive Theology from Professor Don White. In it, we had to write a series of three papers delineating our own theologies of every component of Christian faith: our theology of God, our theology of Jesus, our theology of humankind, our theology of the Holy Spirit, etc.
For some reason, this made me very nervous. So I worked really hard on my first paper. I spent nearly a whole day, surrounded by open books, typing away on my word processor.
Stupidly, I didn’t take any breaks. So by mid-afternoon, my brain was fried – I couldn’t think of one-syllable words anymore. I realized that I needed to step away for a bit and recharge. So I closed the books, saved my file, and headed outside.
At the time, I lived just a block away from Powderhorn Park, a huge park – almost 66 acres – with an 11.5-acre lake in the middle of it. I walked to the park, and when I got to the north end of it, I gasped.
It was September, and all the trees in the park were still wearing their bright summer green. Except one – a sugar maple that stood nearest to where I was standing on the edge of the park. It was in full, glorious autumn color – every leaf. And I got it.
It was as though I heard the voice of God saying, “Here’s where I am – not in those fifty-dollar theology words in all your textbooks back at the house. Right here, in the midst of my creation, caring for and sustaining it – and you – and making it beautiful.”
It was my own personal burning bush experience.
Later, while in graduate school, I shared this story with my spiritual director. She was interested in knowing if God had addressed me in any particular way. I told her that it felt like, “Oh, baby girl – here’s where I am.” She smiled and said, “See? You are God’s beloved baby girl!”
God our Creator continually lays a feast of beauty before us for our eyes, ears, skin, noses, and tongues. The wisdom of scripture, the Talmud, St. Francis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alice Walker, and so many other artists and writers who have been driven by a quest to seek and share beauty, is that God earnestly desires for us to pause, notice, pay attention, enjoy, appreciate, be rejuvenated, and give thanks and praise for all this beauty and wonder. And the practice of holy noticing isn’t confined to natural beauty. We are called also to look for the beauty in human kindness, generosity, and love. As Fred Rogers put it, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Loving God for the beauty of creation leads us to more deeply care for and steward that creation. Seeing the beauty of human kindness and love inspires us to be kinder and more loving. Paradoxically, it is because of the great love of Jesus’s sacrifice that even his broken and mutilated body becomes beautiful to eyes that have embraced his grace. Our heartfelt gratitude for Jesus’s self-giving love can lead us to see the beauty even in those who are broken in our world: to see Jesus in them, as Matthew 25 calls us to do.
Revelation 3:20, often seen as a call to accept Jesus, could even more widely be understood as a call to holy noticing, to feast our senses on the beauty of Jesus and the created world. “Behold (idou), I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hear my voice, I will come in and dine with them, and they with me” (KJV).
A banquet of beauty has been spread before us, in the wonders of creation and Christ’s self-giving love. Let us devote ourselves to the work of holy noticing and loving it all. Amen.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.