What does the environment have to do with faith? That Psalmist who wrote Psalm 24 might reply: “What is there in all the fullness of the world that does NOT have to do with faith?”

For this world, this earth, does not belong to us. From before the universe was so much as a twinkling in our Creator’s eye, the world and everything on it, and everything in it, were related to God: as creation, creature and Creator are inextricably related. The earth is the Lord’s.

Nothing we do, nothing we feel, nothing we think, falls outside of God’s care for all creatures and creation, including the way the Creator’s creatures use or misuse creation.

In February the Portland Quaker Meeting hosted “Awakening the Dreamer? Changing the Dream,” an environmental symposium. I recommend this to you with the hope that by returning to communities of faith the task of raising human consciousness, our experience of God’s care will be reawakened and this may help us to see that we have in fact been dreaming; we have dreamt that the earth’s resources are infinite.

While we have been sleeping in our warm and cozy houses and dreaming that our technology can and will save us, we have been asleep to the fact that everything that we create outside of God’s care, outside of intimate relationship with our Creator will have, must have, inevitable unintended consequences. While we have been dreaming that we can do anything, build anything, fix anything and clean up any mess that we might make, we have created for ourselves a great loneliness of spirit and a lot of unintended consequences.

I returned from Portland wanting to wake up, to stop dreaming or at least to change the dream by the simple act of remembrance: We are not the vine, only the branches, and our capacity to create is a gift to be used wisely. If we remember this there will be fewer and fewer “unintended consequences.”

In God’s care creation may then be resilient, the garden restored.

Daphne Clement is pastor of Durham Friends Meeting.

Clergy Column: Local clergy wishing to write should contact Lois Hart at lhart@gwi.net. Lay ministers as well as ordained clergy may contribute.

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