When I was a young girl, I spent most days of summer walking the networks of deer trails winding through the acres of woods behind our home. In the woods, I learned how to walk softly – how to minimize the sound of my footsteps so that my presence would not alert the wildlife that I wanted to see more closely. I learned how to imitate various birdsongs. I learned where the wild hawthorn grew and where trillium and mushrooms grew. I learned to identify species of trees and collected leaves in the autumn. I watched closely and quietly as the seasons turned and weather winds moved among the branches. I ventured out during fierce lightning storms and in blizzards. In late summers, I saw the sky turn yellow and trees grow still as the warning signs of near tornados. I felt the earth beneath my feet even as my head tilted upwards to watch the stars and the moon. Connection to Creation was a given to me. I have never doubted that connection at any time in my life or through any trouble.

What I have doubted as an Indigenous woman and Episcopal priest is my connection to the institution of the church, which – being a product of culture – is fully manmade and not natural in structure, in thought, or in behavior. As a socially constructed environment, the church assumes the characteristics of a virtual reality that rewards the egotistical and claps at the theatrical aspects of worship and leadership while demeaning those who are motivated by spiritual experience to speak truth to power and prioritize care of the people over self-advancement. Misshapen throughout its Byzantine, Medieval and Colonial history, Western Christianity has justified war, Indigenous genocide, slavery, and exploitation of natural resources as manifestations of God’s will. The insatiable global appetite of European leaders commoditized Creation as existing for their purposes alone and further fanaticized that when used up, the bereft earth would be replaced with a new one. Within that belief, no one has to take responsibility for the life and wellbeing of Creation, the rich become richer, and those left without home and land fall out of all thought and memory along with other extinct species.  The human habitat became more artificial, more socially constructed, reality virtual with every theological/ideological step taken towards the direction of commerce and away from human connection with Creation.

Every Christmas, the church tells the story of the incarnation of God in Christ, a story in which heaven and earth are essential participants working in tandem. Every Holy Week, the church reiterates the stories of Christ’s mortal life, his death, and his resurrection – all mirrored in the cyclical experience of communal loss, disintegration, renewal and reformation. Christ’s story is the story of us. It is the retelling of an ancient understanding of the cycles of Creation — the “where” where God dwells – not walking in a mythical garden of a genesis long ago, but immanently with us and in us here and now and always. No matter how far we may wander from God/Creation, the Good News is that God/Creation has never left us but is always waiting to be perceived in order for us to love what we see and enter into the sacred work of salvation of this world, this earth. The energy of resurrection is an ongoing dynamic of Creation essential to its nature since its own inception. Human beings are called to partner with the Sacred in illuminating life in all its possibilities for its own sake, cultivating hope and fostering community in the largest sense of inclusion of all that is, from the vast complexes of the universe to the quantum conditions upon which all existence emerges and exists.

Our God is more than fable. Creation is more than myth. Christ is not confined to a scripture that ends just because the cover of the book has been closed. The sacred story continues and is more real than any human institution can control or regulate.  The earth and stars from which we are made, that contributed minerals to our bones and spark life in every cell, that beholds Creation through the eyes given to each of us, longs to be seen and to be embraced in thought, word, and deeds of gratitude and love. The Christ who is Creation calls us to renewal – as a faith, as community, as a global entity. A failed history can find redemption with the same vision as a lunar astronaut – look and see that the Earth is amazing, and we are all its crew, responsible for its and one another’s wellbeing.