Southern Springtime

Body of God

“God's love is the power that moves the galaxies and that breaths in our bodies. One way to imagine this relationship between God and the world is with the metaphor of the world as God's body.”
Sallie McFague

When I looked out my kitchen window this morning, the entire neighborhood, as far as my eyes could see, was green with pollen. It hangs in the air, it blows in the wind, and it covers everything. I went back to the bedroom and sprayed antihistamine into my stuffy nose and put drops into my itchy eyes. What a celebration of life is springtime in the Deep South! The pines and oaks bloom and we are all “blessed” by their fecundity. It helps to think of this as God's body, believe me. Otherwise, we'd be cursing the fertility rites of spring.

Seeing the world and everything in it as the body of that creative force which we call God also helps us to value and protect it. The challenge is to stop seeing it as a commodity and start seeing it as the “ground of our being.” There is good Biblical backing for this notion—according to Genesis humans were created by God's hands from...well, dirt. We can call it clay if we want, but essentially, we are the same thing as plain old dirt. If we pollute, and degrade and deplete the soil of this earth for the purpose of making money, we are doing the same thing to ourselves.

The creator is immensely fertile—if you don't believe it, just come look around my neighborhood. Instead of whining about our sinus allergies, let us celebrate the explosion of life that comes with spring. Tomorrow is the Equinox. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

In the Spirit,
Jane