13 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature
By Mark I. Wallace

"The Bible's creation hymns teach us that we are earth creatures, mud people, molded by the cosmic potter out of the clay of earth. But many of us in the postmodern West construe ourselves differently as denizens of a shopping-mall, temperature-controlled, throw-away world in which we have little need for reidentification with the primitive soil of our ancestral origins. Others, however, hunger for a renaturalized Christianity where the palpable sense of divine presence can be touched and tasted and heard and smelled in the push and pull of natural beings and forces."

"I enter a swamp as a sacred place,-a sanctum sanctorum. "¹

"I believe that man is at the top of the pecking order. I think that God gave us dominion over these creatures ... I just look at . . . a chicken ... and I consider the human being on a higher scale. Maybe that's because a chicken doesn't talk."²

It has been said that we live in the "age of the Spirit," a time in which a fragile connectedness with the earth and one another is being felt in friendship with a power greater than ourselves. The medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore prophesied that humankind has lived through the periods of the Father and the Son and has now entered the age of the Spirit. Karl Barth remarked at the end of his life that the Holy Spirit is the proper focus for a theology that is right for the present situation. And other practitioners of nature-based religion, from native peoples to modern Neopagans, claim that a reverence for the Spirit in all life forms, from people and animals to trees and watersheds, is the most promising response to the threat of global ecological collapse.

I

We face today a crisis of unimaginable proportions. Whether through slow and steady environmental degradation or the sudden

Mark I. Wallace, author of The Second Naivete: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology, is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College.

¹ Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), p. 183.
² Manuet Lujan, Jr. [former Secretary of Interior], "The Stealth Secretary," Time (May 25 1992), p. 58.

14 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

exchange of nuclear weapons, the specter of ecocide haunts all human and nonhuman life that shares the resources of our planet home. Many of us have become numb to profiles of the crisis: acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming, food chain pesticides, soil erosion, consumption of nonrenewable fossil fuels, oil spills, agricultural runoff, radioactive wastes, overpopulation, deforestation and desertification, carbon emissions, and loss of habitat.³ In our time, nature has been commodified and domesticated-like a piece of real estate or a consumer item that is bought and sold in order to maximize profits. Nature no longer functions as wild and sacred space for the eruption of the sublime or the manifestation of transcendence. We have exchanged the power and mystery of the earth for the invisible hand of the marketplace, and we are all the poorer for it.

The prospect of slow environmental death is a direct result of human beings' consistent lack of identity with nature. Part of the blame lies with the ancient Western and biblical confusion about nature as alternately a product of God's goodness and a transitory mass of brute forces that are inimical to the self-actualization of specially endowed human creatures. Ecologically speaking, the normative traditions' mixed discourse on the topic of nature has generated two opposing understandings of the human-nature relationship: nature as dumb matter is to be lorded over by God's viceroy, humankind, or nature as God's good creation is to be enjoyed and nurtured by all natural systems, human and nonhuman.⁴ This double vision has had debilitating consequences for the task of sustaining and renewing the earth. Historically, it helped to sacralize humankind's exploitative treatment of nature: If natural objects are dead matter and not imbued with the Spirit (or spirits) of a higher order, then such objects can be used and abused to serve human ends.⁵ Today, this ambivalence towards nature has resulted in a polarization of the national environmental debate both within the churches and the culture at large, pitting "wise-use developers" against "the spotted owl crowd," "tree-killers" against "tree huggers," "mainliners" against "ecoterrorists," and so forth. What is lost in the rancor is the recognition that all life forms are codependent, that nature has intrinsic and not merely instrumental value, and that no one species should arrogate to itself the right to commandeer a disproportionate number of natural resources at the expense of other species' needs to flourish and survive.

In this essay, I maintain that the most adequate response to this debate lies in a recovery of the Holy Spirit as a natural, living being

³ See Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
⁴ See Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), esp. pp. 35-79,150-170, 288-354.
⁵ See Lynn White, Jr., "The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (1967), pp. 1203-1207.

15 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

who indwells and sustains all life-forms.⁶ While some ecological theologians devalue the identity of the Spirit as ethereal and vacant, I believe that an earth-centered recovery of the Spirit is the best hope for healing and restoring our shared earth island home.⁷ An ecological pneumatology that is right for the current crisis will recapture the disorienting freedom of the Spirit as a wild and insurgent natural force in the healing of humankind's violence toward nature. Like the brooding water spirit in Genesis, the dove in the Gospels, or the tongues of flame in Acts, the Spirit reveals itself in the biblical literatures as a living being who works to create, sustain, and renew humans and otherkind in solidarity with one another. A nature-based understanding of the Spirit will not domesticate the Spirit by locating her activity simply alongside nature; rather, nature itself in all its variety and diversity will be figured as the primary mode of being for the Spirit's work in the world. In this framework, the waters and winds and birds and fires will not be regarded only as symbols of the Spirit but rather as sharing in her very being as the Spirit is enfleshed and embodied through natural organisms and processes.

The point is not that the Spirit is simply in nature as its interanimating force, as important as that is, but that the Spirit is a natural being who leads all creation into a peaceable relationship with itself. Spirit and earth internally condition and permeate one another; both modes of being coinhere through and with one another without collapsing into undifferentiated sameness or equivalence.⁸ This may strike some as more pantheistic than panentheistic, but Christian thought has always maintained that nature and grace, world and God, are inseparably interrelated. The eucharistic doctrine that Christ's true

⁶ A note on some matters of style. I have capitalized "Spirit" throughout in order to distinguish the divine personality (Holy Spirit or Spirit of the Lord) from other similar spirit-term significations (spirit of the times, public spirit, and so forth). I also use the female pronoun for the Spirit in order rhetorically to realize aspects of the transgressive freedom the Spirit promises, including the freedom to complicate and confuse her/his/its gender. This complication is not original to me: the term for Spirit in Hebrew is feminine (ruah), neuter in Greek (pneuma), and masculine in Latin (spiritus) and its derivative Romance languages. I refer to divine, human, and nonhuman realities simultaneously as "life forms" or "natural beings" in order to signal the value of construing all entities as interdependent members of a common biotic community.
⁷ See Sallie McFague, for example, who criticizes traditional Spirit language as "amorphous, vague, and colorless" in Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), p. 170.
⁸ An intriguing but troubling implication of an ecological pneumatology of internal relatedness is that it places the divine life at risk in a manner that an extrinsic doctrine of the Spirit does not. If Spirit and earth mutually indwell one another, then the Spirit is vulnerable to loss and destruction just insofar as the earth is abused and despoiled. Native American peoples, as did many other primal cultures, operated under the assumption that the earth is the Great Mother's sacred flesh and that Euroamericans' gold hunting and bison killing did irreparable harm to God's body. Here the death of God is the crisis of mass environmental destruction suffered by all life forms, not the loss of meaning experienced by secular intellectuals. The spiritual terror occasioned by such a crisis is movingly expressed in John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: Simon & Schuster, Washington Square Press, 1972). A similar and yet distinctly Western Christian sentiment is expressed in McFague, Models of God, pp. 69-78.

16 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

body and blood are really present in the Lord's Supper underscores the mutual indwelling of the divine in and with everyday foodstuffs. Put simply, if God can become a loaf of bread or cup of wine, then why can God not become a bird or a beast or a tree or a mountain or a river? Unless one believes that the biological order is nothing more than a cosmic megamachine with no inner spiritual life, then it follows that God in God's freedom can kenotically and vitally indwell and become any and all created beings through the Creator Spirit.

The charge of pantheism may be the understandable response to this approach, and to a degree the charge sticks insofar as I am proposing here a sort of revisionary paganism as the most viable biblical and contemporary response to the prospect of present and future environmental collapse. This ecological approach will seek to reverse centuries of Western Christian hostility toward nonhuman life by again revisioning all of creation as a virtual sacred grove-a living, breathing sacrament-that cries out for our codependent nurture and affection. This approach calls us beyond respect for nature or even reverence for nature toward love of nature, even worship of nature, just insofar as all life, from people and pelicans to wetlands and wildlands, bodies forth the reality of Creator Spirit. Correspondingly, this approach resists the human-centered assumption that lies behind the stewardship model in religious environmentalism in favor of a friendship ideal for an earth ethic: Our task has less to do with being wise custodians of the resources that are "ours" and more to do with simple lifestyles that register minimal impact on the rich and common ecosystems that belong to all of "us." I hesitate to label this approach Christian paganism, but I believe anything less radical is not adequate to the crisis and that only a theology, a thorough-going green theology, that presses the limits of conventional church discourse and runs the risk of heterodoxy is sufficient to the theological and moral tasks before us.⁹

The rest of this essay consists of two main sections. In the first, I consider the Spirit as the power for convivial unity between all beings through her erasure of the culturally constructed boundaries that separate human and nonhuman life forms. In the second section, I take up the promise of biocentrism as an alternative to the servantlordship model for an adequate land ethic. The article concludes with the hope that a nature-based recovery of the Spirit can engender in all of us a sense of organic solidarity with other living beings.

⁹ On the prospects of rapprochement between Christianity, environmentalism, and neopagan traditions, see Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess- Worshippers, and Other Pagans in American Today (Boston: Beacon, 1986), esp. pp. 399-417; Judith Plant, editor, Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989); John Seed et al., Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1988); and Bron Taylor, "The Religion and Politics of Earth First!" The Ecologist 21 (November/December 1991), pp. 259-266.

17 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

II

The historic work of the Spirit has always been understood in terms of communion, mutuality, and the overcoming of divisions. The early Latin Fathers and later medieval iconography conceived of the Spirit in the bosom of the Trinity as the person who unites the Father and the Son in a bond of mutual love.¹⁰ In the inner life of God, the Spirit insures the interrelationship of each person in perichoretic harmony. Likewise in the economies of creation and salvation, the Spirit was regarded in the Creed as "the Lord, the Giver of Life," who, as wind or breath or dove or charisma, is the power of innovation and fecundity in creation. While the Spirit's goal is actively to transform and renew all life forms, the strategy she often follows to this end entails selfeffacement and anonymous other-regard. She refuses to glorify herself or even speak on her own authority in the interest of healing pain and division. Eternally giving of herself, the Spirit is the powerful but still altruistic and often unnamed healer who mediates differences with an eye toward mutuality and reciprocity. As she exists perichoretically within the Godhead to forge communion between the divine persons, so the Spirit exists dynamically but deferentially within creation as the power of unity and cooperation between all natural processes.

Outside the immanent Trinity, the Spirit works to promote intimacy and heal divisions among God's creatures. In Ephesians 4, the community is reminded to "maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" and not to "grieve the Holy Spirit" by descending into "bitterness and wrath and anger and slander." Thus my central question: At a time when the earth is at risk, could we say that the special unity the Spirit seeks to engender today is the unity forged by the erasure of ego boundaries between the human self and the nonhuman other? Persons use conventional boundaries and definitions of what it means to be a "self" in order to secure their identity vis-a-vis the reality of the natural "other." The Spirit's blurring of such distinctions immediately threatens one's identity because of its challenge not to set oneself apart from the other by denying that one belongs to the other. Indeed, the Spirit entreats the self to pass over, as it were, into the being of the other as an extension of the Spirit's own perichoretic union within the Trinity, on the one hand, and with the world, on the other.

In an ecological age, the Spirit works intentionally to muddy the

¹⁰ The classic theological expression of the Spirit as the vinculum Trinitatis, the communion that binds the other two members of the Godhead, is found in Augustine, The Trinity, Book 15. The doctrine is graphically set forth in the trinitarian miniatures of the Rothschild Canticles, where the Spirit is repeatedly pictured as a large dove whose wings enfold the Father and Son and whose talons and tail provide points of intersection for all three figures. In the miniatures, the human Father and Son smile and swirl and dance around the avian Spirit, symbolizing the union of each figure in the sacred bird. For reproductions and commentary, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 118-142.

18 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

time-honored distinctions between humanity and nature. She asks us to resist the temptation to treat the nonhuman other, totally and essentially, under the control of a particular category or taxonomy; she entreats us to realize that oneself and the other are naturally codependent and not separate from one another. The regnant intellectual traditions in Western culture operate according to a series of debilitating binary oppositions separating human beings from natural beings: Humans are dynamic, ensouled, intelligence-endowed, imagebearers of God, while nature consists of soulless, nonrational, inert elements and subhuman plants and animals.¹¹ The persistent and culturally approved preservation of these distinctions insures the separate identities of both opposites, and the Spirit's violation of the polarities in the interest of unleashing mutual belonging strikes at the very heart of individual and corporate definitions of the self and the species that are other-than-self. As long as my sense of self goes no farther than the limits of my own body, I can live comfortably insulated from other life forms within the confines of my own "skinencapsulated ego," as Joanna Macy puts it.¹² As long as I construct myself as a solid rock, not a porous membrane who is sustained by, and through which passes, the variegated life-support systems that make up our common biosphere, I can live the Great Lie of Western technosociety that I am entitled to abuse the earth because I exist a se as a self-subsistent being who needs no one or no thing for my survival. It is only when I am forced to confront that my general health-even my very existence-is codependent upon the welfare of this particular aquifer or that particular food chain that I become sensitive to the Spirit's homogenizing activity.

The Spirit's overcoming of the inculturated distinctions that separate humankind from other beings makes possible a healing of the chronic ecological abuse perpetrated in the contemporary setting. As long as nature remains "other" or "different" from human beings, and only marginal to human flourishing, it remains ripe for exploitation. Large-scale, energy-intensive economic programs that make war on fragile ecosystems make sense if the earth is simply an object or resource to be used and not the creative matrix out of which all life comes and is sustained. The Creator Spirit responds directly to this

¹¹ Mary Midgley argues for human beings' fundamental kinship with the whole biosphere in spite of historic attempts to distinguish humans from otherkind. She debunks the familiar standards that grade humans as superior to other life forms on the biological ladder. Whether in terms of fitness for survival, proportionate brain size, capacity to speak, or ability to reason, Midgley rebuts the popular stereotype of the human being as a more evolved organism (for example, grasses, insects, and rats are less vulnerable to habitat loss than humans, many animals can signify meaning, and so forth). Even our much ballyhooed rationality, Midgley argues, is questionable: If true rationality consists in the recognition that one is dependent on others, a member of a common heritage, and not the center of the universe, then animals are "smarter" than we are. See Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
¹² Joanna Macy, "Faith and Ecology," in The Green Fuse: The Schumacher Lectures 1983-8, edited by John Button (London: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 102.

19 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

challenge by intentionally laboring to obliterate the partitions that separate human beings from the rest of creation.

Personal identity is forged in the crucible of differences, and no individual or corporate group takes well to attempts to erase the distinctions, the identity markers, against which the person or group has staked out its identity. Cultural theorists such as Rene' Girard, Mary Douglas, and Michel Foucault offer distinct, but related, arguments that the maintenance of personal and social order is dependent upon culturally sanctioned moral codes and religious rituals that erect partitions between human and nonhuman, clean and unclean, permissible and taboo, sane and abnormal, natural and unnatural, holy and sinful. These codes and rituals establish a scaffold of distinctions upon which the individual and the community can build its identity. While the scaffold remains in place, social harmony is the result, but when a rebellious outside force is successful in questioning the legitimacy of the established order, the system of differentiation breaks down and social chaos is the result. "Order, peace, and fecundity depend on cultural distinctions; it is not these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another's throats."¹³

In a world at risk, the Spirit confronts the culturally safe distinctions between humankind and otherkind that provide ideological justification for the mass exploitation of common resources. The Spirit's work threatens to tear apart the nature-indifferent imago Dei self-concept many persons prize as their birthright as the Spirit promulgates an imago mundi anthropology instead. Living on the borders of the megamachine as a sometimes anonymous catalyst for disorienting change, the Spirit reminds us that, as God's images, we are earth creatures fashioned from the muck and mire of the soil. This ecological theme is consistent with the scriptural portrayal of the Spirit as a revolutionary force who labors to invert the established social order. Pneumatologically, the Bible is suffused with the rhetoric of reversal. In the Gospel of John, the Spirit brings supernatural peace to a community bereft and divided over Jesus' departure; pentecostal Spiritfire in Acts establishes a multiethnic church where old nationalisms are sacrificed for a new order; and Paul writes that all believers drink of one Spirit through the grace received in baptism and the gifts of the Spirit. The Spirit upsets conventional mores and replaces them with the new fellowship of the pneumatic community. To borrow from Douglas, the Spirit is an agent of "creative formlessness" who dangerously foments "boundary transgression" and the dissolution of "order" into "formlessness."¹⁴ In an ecological age, the Spirit is working to subvert our privileged boundaries between human and

¹³ Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 49.
¹⁴ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, Ark Paperbacks, 1966), p. 161.

20 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

nonhuman species; this subversion strips human beings of their sacrosanct self-understandings as God's hierarchs in the Chain of Being and renders many persons bereft of their taken-for-granted privileges and identities.

John Muir's nature writing is a captivating example of the undifferentiated spirituality that results from an all-consuming earth love. In the latter third of the nineteenth century, Muir exulted in the brilliant displays of the Spirit in the High Sierra Mountains of Northern California. His sojourns in the valleys and canyons and peaks of Yosemite, among other places, signalled his conscious rejection of the Calvinist, book-bound religion of his youth in favor of discovering the substance of the Divine in the drama and splendor of nature. Taking his cues from John the Baptist, Muir became John of the Mountains: a voice crying in the wilderness for all to be baptized into the holy mysteries therein. Muir promulgated a wilderness pneumatology in which flashes of divine presence radiated through the multifaceted complexity of natural beings-from microorganisms in the clefts of glacier-polished stones to the shimmering, icy brilliance of the Tuolumne River in the dead of winter.

Now we observe that, in cold mountain altitudes, Spirit is but thinly and plainly clothed ... When a portion of Spirit clothes itself with a sheet of lichen tissue, colored simply red or yellow, or gray or black, we say that is a low form of life. Yet is it more or less radically Divine than another portion of Spirit that has gathered garments of leaf and fairy flower and adorned them with all the colors of Light, although we say that the latter creature is of a higher form of life? All of these varied forms, high and low, are simply portions of God, radiated from Him as a sun, and made terrestrial by the clothes they wear, and by the modifications of a corresponding kind in the God essence itself.¹⁵

Here the boundaries between Spirit and nature blur, and the "pantheistic-vitalistic strains" of Muir's ecotheology clearly emerge.¹⁶

The loss of distinctions reverberates again in a remarkable passage where Muir writes effusively of a eucharistic feast devoted to drinking the woodsy "blood" from a giant Sequoia, the king tree of the Yosemite forests. "But I'm in the woods woods woods, & they are in me-ee-ee. The King tree & me have sworn eternal love-sworn it without swearing & I've taken the sacrament with Douglass Squirrell, drank Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, & with its rosy purple drops I am writing this woody gospel letter ... I wish I was so drunk & Sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world ... Come Suck Sequoia & be saved."¹⁷ Muir's orgiastic evangelical prose

¹⁵ John Muir, Yosemite Journals, 15 March 1873, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938), p. 138.
¹⁶ See Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 95, as well as the excellent section on Muir and New England Transcendentalism, pp. 80-105.
¹⁷ John Muir, letter to Jeanne Carr, in Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 122.

21 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

locates salvation in the tree sap and wild animals of his mountain church; redemption and healing for the "juiceless world" lies in an overthrow of the sanitized and civilized religion of books and creeds and a total immersion in the wildworld of God's natural beauty. In the wildworld, the lines of division between humankind and other kinds melts away because there are "no harsh, hard dividing lines in nature ... no stiff, frigid, stony partition walls betwixt us and heaven. There are blendings as immeasurable and untraceable as the edges of melting clouds. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, etc., is applicable here, for earth is partly heaven, and heaven earth."¹⁸ Here Muir translates the language of salvation from his conservative Protestant upbringing into a new earthy register. Deliverance lies in losing oneself in what one already is, a creature who needs the fellowship of other earth beings. Adrift in the Yosemite high country and intoxicated with Sequoia blood, Muir blends earth and heaven into an ecospiritual sacrament where a climatic union between spirit and nature, self and other, is passionately consummated.

III

Muir's erotic and ecstatic earth religion seeks to transform the barren emptiness of modern urban existence into lifelong cohabitation with the sacred wilderness of God's mountains and forests. Such a journey upsets the common nature-indifferent, or even antinature assumptions in the churches and wider society. Whatever their professed convictions, both sectors often act as if nature is at best a place for development and recreation, not the proper abode of the one God of biblical history who, let us not forget, made war against the many gods and goddesses of nature worshipped by pagan peoples. For many Westerners, Muir's nature enthusiasm too easily degenerates into "worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator" and should be vigorously resisted. "Destroy their altars, smash their images, and cut down their sacred groves" commands God to his servant Moses in the Book of Exodus. Many modern people's indifference or hostility toward nature is an extension of the biblical mandate to the great prophets to smash the shrines to the plump fat fertility goddesses of rural agricultural peoples by brandishing the Word of God as a weapon against pagan animism and idolatry.

This contempus mundi tradition spells important moral consequences. The historic biblical contest between monotheism and paganism normalizes the ethical conviction that natural beings should be subjugated to their human caretakers for the benefit of human needs. If nature is not sacred place but a potential site for idolatry, then it is properly regarded as the domain of human beings who, because of their superior reason, have been designated by God to be God's viceregents over the entire created order. On this basis, the case can be made for an anthropocentric ethic of stewardship in which

¹⁸ John Muir, Yosemite Journals, 21 August 1872, John of the Mountains, p. 89.

22 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

nature is valued for its utility for humankind as God's gift for the care and preservation of human communities. The problem with this seemingly scripturally-sanctioned, human-centered ethic, however, is that it does not tell the whole biblical story about nature. In particular, biblical wisdom literature offers a telling counterpoint to the normative paradigm.

Consider in this vein the story of Job. The story recounts the life of a religious man who was struck down by Satan for no apparent reason. Job's cry is the perennial complaint of the innocent sufferer, "Why do I suffer, 0 Lord, if I have done nothing wrong?" Significantly, however, instead of providing an answer to Job's complaint, the Divine responds by situating Job within the diversity of the powerful life forms that God has made. Job challenges God to answer his cry for justice, and God answers him with vignettes about nature taken from the geography and bestiary of creation. "I will question you and you shall answer me," says the Lord to Job in the book's latter chapters (Job 38:3; 40:7; 42:4). "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?... Did you give the horse his might and clothe his neck with strength?... Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars and spreads its wings to the sky? ... And behold Behemoth-the hippopotamus-which I made as I made you.... His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron, because he is the first of the works of God" (Job 38:4; 39:19, 26; 40:15, 18-19).

Why does God respond to Job in this manner? Job asks a perfectly legitimate question about unjust suffering, and is right to expect, it seems, a rational theological answer. He expects a response that logically imputes the cause of his suffering to some hidden sin or the higher good of character formation, or some other justifiable cause. But God instead reminds Job of his place in creation-that he was not present at the foundations of the world, that he did not create the horse and the peacock and the lion. Job is reminded that he is a member of a wider biotic community and that he is not superior to other forms of life; he and his kind are not the measure of all things. Moreover, God tells Job that it is the strong but comical hippopotarnus-not his fellow human beings-that is the first of God's works. From the perspective of the divine interrogation of chapters 38-41, it seems that Job in his suffering has assumed that his plight is the center of God's concerns when in fact other beings, like the hippo, possess the same inherent worth as does Job. Their suffering and their needs are as important to God as humankind's. Could it be that the Jobian God is impartial with respect to the needs of different species, that all life forms deserve the Divine's equal concern? Not only in Job but also on the basis of the creation hymn of the first chapter of Genesis, the assignment of equal priority to all species, including the wild hippo, makes sense. According to Genesis, the first thing the Artisan-Creator did after spinning the waters, plants, and heavens into existence was to generate a teeming diversity of living creatures from the oceans, lakes,

23 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

and rivers. Only after this was accomplished was humankind created. This non-human-centered framework provides the scriptural background for God's ironic and humbling ecological answer to Job's question "Why me?"¹⁹

"I understand your pain and anguish," God says to Job, "but you and your human friends are not the center of the universe. Indeed, the lowly hippopotamus that some of your kind kill for bloodsport is the first of my works in the hierarchy of the animal creation. You too are one of those animals. I know that your pain is inscrutable to you, but perhaps if you could learn the lesson that you too are an earthcreature, then your all-too-human assumption that you have a divine right to full creature comforts and an existence free of pain would be tempered. I remind you, my friend, that in strength and fitness for life in the wild, you are lower than the ungainly hippo; by the same token, you share a deep kinship with the hippo and other plants and animals within a common natural order. You search for answers to your questions and for meaning in your life. My answer is for you to resituate yourself in the fragile economy of the wild and sacred world of creation. Become what you are, Job-an earthling who is of the same stuff as other life forms, including the wide and bumbling hippo. Find your answers to your questions in the powers of life and death you see demonstrated always and everywhere in the cycles of the seasons and the rhythms of the wild."

Job's world is an uncomfortable place for religious writers and practitioners who maintain that human beings possess more intrinsic value than nonhuman organisms. The ethical corollary to this "speciesist" assumption is that other creatures, though possessing intrinsic value, are of lesser value and more expendable than human beings in competition for scarce resources and habitats, all other factors being equal. The ideal of biocentric equality-that all life forms possess intrinsic value and no one species, including the human community, enjoys natural priority over any other species-is supported, I have suggested, by the notion of the Spirit as a natural being who renders fluid the lines of distinction between humankind and otherkind and empowers all life-forms to exist in greater dependence on one another. In a Spirit-led love for nature, the human is awash in a loss of distinctions between itself and the nonhuman other. This pneumatological loss of identity and difference serves as a negative condition for an ethic of transgressive, boundless openness to all life in

¹⁹ Bill McKibben makes a similar point in reference to God's care of landscapes apart from their utility for humans: ". . . Job could not hope to understand many mysteries, including why rain falls 'on land where no one lives, to meet the needs of the lonely wastes and make grass sprout upon the ground'[Job 38: 26-7]. God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions" (The End of Nature, p. 76). A related exegesis of the "ecological Job" can also be found in Holmes Rolston 111, "Wildlife and Wildlands: A Christian Perspective," in After Nature's Revolt: Eco-Justice and Theology, edited by Dieter T. Hessel (Minneapolis: Fortress Augsburg, 1992), pp. 130-136.

24 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

which the assignment of moral preference to human needs is permanently suspended.

In the current climate, however, much of the most original writing in the burgeoning field of theology and ecology takes issue with a full turn toward biocentrism. Jurgen Moltmann's work is a case in point. The aim of his masterful God in Creation is to rethink the major topoi of Christian faith along environmental lines. Nature is valorized as the dwelling place of the Creator God who wills the growth and fulfillment of all living beings. But Moltmann's ascription of special privilege to human beings in the cosmic order belies what is otherwise a powerful ecological doctrine of creation and the Spirit. He argues that while the sabbath is the "crown of creation," human beings are the "apex of created things" because they alone are God's image-bearers, God's " proxy," who mediate God's will and glory over all creation and in turn, through prayers and good works, act on creation's behalf as they represent all creatures to God.²⁰ Moltmann avers that only ". . . the human being is able-and designated-to express the praise of all created beings before God. In his own praise he acts as representative for the whole of creation. His thanksgiving, as it were, looses the dumb tongue of nature."²¹ In spite of Moltmann's consistent criticism of the normative traditions' insensitivity to the ecological crisis, his anthropocentric rhetoric of the human as the "apex of creation" who is uniquely suited to loosen the "dumb tongue of nature" repristinates the usual Christian inability to celebrate nature on its own terms and for its own sake-not as lesser than humankind, or in need of human mediation, but as wild and sacred space possessing its own unique and equally important values and goods.

James A. Nash's Loving Nature makes a fuller turn to an integrated "biotic ethic" where all life forms are ends in themselves and not simply means to, or deficient in relation to, human ends. Nash's argument turns on an analysis of the failure of mainstream theology to confront the ecological crisis, on the one hand, and the public policy framework that results from a redefined Christian love for nature, on the other. But Nash hedges his ideal of "ecological love" with the claim that only humans, as image-bearers of the divine, are "creative predators" who can rationally balance their own needs against the interests of other species in the ecosphere:

Only humans, according to traditional Christian doctrine, have the potential to serve as the image of God and to exercise dominion in creation. Despite historical misinterpretations and abuse, these concepts recognize a basic biological fact: humans alone have evolved peculiar rational, moral, and therefore, creative capacities that enable us alone to serve as responsible representatives of God's interests and values, to function as protectors of the ecosphere and deliberately constrained consumers of the world's goods. We alone are the creative predators. In the

²⁰ Jurgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 187-190.
²¹ Moltmann, God in Creation, p. 71.

25 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

light of that fact, it seems unreasonable to put humans on a moral par with other creatures.²²

Echoing Moltmann, Nash makes a comparable appeal to the imago Dei tradition and its legitimation of human beings as God's unique proxy and representative to other kinds. He is nervous about the putative extremism of the so-called "deep ecologists" who maintain that all natural entities possess equal value and should be accorded the right to develop their own potential apart from human influence as much as possible. Nash takes issue with the postulate of biotic equalitythough he defends the principle of intrinsic value for all organismsand concludes by privileging human interests as superior to the needs of the less rational and less creative nonhuman creatures over whom we are to exercise dominion. His book finally falls prey to the same tendency to give priority to human welfare at the expense of other beings, his stated orientation to the contrary notwithstanding.

On biblical and ecological grounds, Moltmann's, Nash's and other theologians' value hierarchy is untenable. Ecologically speaking, it seems odd to claim that humans alone are uniquely equipped to protect the natural order. Given our collective appetite for mass consumption, overpopulation, radioactive energy, fossil fuels, ozone depletion and the like, it would make more sense for us to go to other creatures rather than to ourselves to learn ecological sanity. Indeed, we should "go to the ant, observe her ways and be wise," as the sage in Proverbs exhorts, rather than to resort to human ingenuity to solve the problem. Instead of arrogating to ourselves the role of being divinely appointed stewards over all living things we would serve creation better by refiguring ourselves as temporary sojourners on the earth. We need to grasp how to care for ourselves and others by learning humbly at the knee of our common mother, Gaia, who subsists in and with the Spirit. The demand of the moment is for earth wisdom, not more calls for being "creative predators." We would do well to abandon the regnant rhetoric of protection and stewardship and substitute in its place a new language of humility and caution. Instead of blunting the Spirit's new work by insisting on our dubious roles as benign exercisers of dominion, we should redefine ourselves as dangerous travellers on a

²² James A. Nash, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), p. 149. The tension among religious and ethical thinkers on the question of biocentric equality is intense. We might label the two positions "soft anthropocentrism" and "radical biocentrism." For a further defense of the first view, see John B. Cobb, Jr. and Herman Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon, 1989), esp. pp. 376-400. For the egalitarian biocentric perspective, where equal value and "rights" are extended to all members of the biosphere, see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985): "The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual forms of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization" (p. 67). Analogously, see Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 99-168.

26 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

fragile earth-an earth that has had enough of our enlightened oversight as it cries out for us to leave it alone before it is too late.

From a biblical perspective, the approach of Moltmann and similar voices appears equally troubling. The Bible uses mixed discourse to describe the order and relationship between the human and nonhuman spheres, beginning, as we have seen, with the location of human creation at the end of the cosmogenesis in the opening creation hymn of Genesis to the divine's rebuke to Job that all life forms (including the hippo who is the first of God's works) are candidates for equal treatment and valuation. Exegetes and theologians who oppose biocentrism can and will read the biblical record differently, but that only underscores the point: At worst, the Bible offers conflicted testimony to equality between species, and, at best, it sounds a loud protest against the arrogant human assumption that the original divine command to "subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it" sacralizes preferential treatment of human beings over and against the needs and rights of other species. Moreover, the reunderstanding of the Spirit in our time as a wild life form who transgresses boundaries between humans and otherkind, while threatening to our traditional assumptions and identities, embodies the biblical promise of a new nature-intoxicated spirituality that knocks humankind off its hierarchical pedestal and replants it within the great earth mother, vitalized by the Spirit, who gives life to all beings.²³

IV

The fact of biological interdependence should entail the value of defending the integrity of species life for its own sake. But this particular fact/value dialectic is lost on those of us who do not sense our fundamental interdependence with nature. The Bible's creation hymns teach us that we are earth creatures, mud people, molded by the cosmic potter out of the clay of the earth. But many of us in the postmodern West construe ourselves differently as denizens of a shopping-mall, temperature-controlled, throw-away world in which we have little need for reidentification with the primitive soil of our ancestral origins. Others, however, hunger for a renaturalized Christianity where the palpable sense of divine presence can be touched and tasted and heard and smelled in the push and pull of natural beings and forces. "This universe itself, but especially the planet Earth, needs to be experienced as the primary mode of divine presence, just as it is the primary educator, primary healer, primary commercial establishment, and primary lawgiver for all that exists within this life

²³ In general, ecofeminists regard patriarchy, not anthropocentrism, as the basis of earth violence. The equation of woman and nature is the pernicious root metaphor that underlies the current crisis. See Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 143-172.

27 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

community."²⁴ Without this primal earth connection, however, clarion calls for an ecological spirituality and an earth ethic fall on deaf ears. How can a new vision of the interdependence of all life be restored in a technological age when the umbilical chord between divine, human, and nonhuman life has been snapped long ago?

I have argued that a Muir-like, Job-like ecological pneumatology is the most adequate response to our planetary crisis. If the crisis stems from humans' chronic lack of earth identity, then the Spirit's erasure of distinctions and creation of solidarity between humankind and nonhumankind is the hope of our time. I have sought to show that the Spirit's transgressive and unifying activity is basic to its historic, biblical role as the bond of union within and between the immanent and economic Trinity. But what is now needed is the practical application of the Spirit's identity as the vinculum Trinitatis to the crisis situation at hand by refiguring the Spirit as a natural being-as breath, wind, bird, and fire-even if such refiguration runs provocatively close to neopagan nature-worship. On the question of the environment, Christian theology desperately needs a blood transfusion, and one of the sources for this healing, in addition to rehabilitating the normative trinitarian lexicon, is the provocation of indigenous and neonative folkways and beliefs.²⁵

To live in harmony with the earth is to live inspired (in-spirited, in-the-Spirit). Recently the Presbyterian Eco-Justice Task Force issued, in an otherwise excellent document, a call for a new model of stewardship, an ideal of "servant lordship," as the hope for a revised Christian ethic of ecological responsibility.²⁶ But I believe the time has passed for the recovery of lordship and responsibility language in the crafting of a sound ecological ethic. When the Spirit inspired the formative pentecostal gathering to speak in other tongues, an eschatological rupture from the past occurred in which the ancient prophecy was fulfilled that the Spirit would pour out itself onto all flesh. It was said that the fulfillment would be distinguished by excessive and impossible signs of the Spirit's presence: Some would have visions, others would prophesy, and blood and fire and smoke would cover the earth. Today, the haunting prospect of mass environmental death bears traces of just such a cataclysm. We, too, have entered a new era marked by a similar apocalyptic break with the past where the Spirit is again at work to foment aberrant, unorthodox lifestyles ("these ones

²⁴ Thornas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), P. 120.
²⁵ In addition to the works cited in note 9, Chung Hyun-Kyung's postcolonial Spirit theology responds to this challenge. She crafts a powerful interreligious mediation between the spirits of indigenous peoples, who cry for justice in the struggle for liberation, and the Holy Spirit, who seeks to renew the integrity of all living beings. See Chung Hyun-Kyung, "Come Holy Spirit, Renew the Whole Creation" (Address delivered at Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Canberra, Australia, 8 February 1991).
²⁶ See the Presbyterian Eco-Justice Task Force, Keeping and Healing the Creation (Louisville: Presbyterian Church U.S.A., 1989), pp. 51-60.

28 - The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering The Spirit In Nature

are full of new wine," Acts 2:13). We are being asked to abandon old mores in favor of a new biocentric and nonconformist rhetoric and ethic. We are being wooed by the Spirit to desert custodial language of dominion and stewardship in favor of an earth-centered religious discourse. All creatures are best served when humans abdicate their identities as overlords and defer instead to the wisdom of the Creatrix who renews and empowers the common biotic order. If we allow the Spirit's subtle insurgency to redefine us as pilgrims and sojourners rather than wardens and stewards, our legacy to posterity might well be healing and life-giving, and not destructive of the hopes of future generations.