No images? Click here

Friday, April 21, 2023

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Sixteen: Lamentation

The Land’s Lament

Therefore the land shall mourn. —Hosea 4:3

Ecologist and pastor Andi Lloyd writes of the Hebrew prophets’ understanding that the land itself grieves with its people:

In the Hebrew Bible, mourning is an expansive practice. The people mourn, of course, but so do the land, the pastures, and the deep springs. Even gates and walls lament. The Hebrew verb abal, translated here [in Hosea] as “mourn,” also carries the meaning “to dry up, to wither.” Where a widow might put ashes on her head, the land and pastures and springs mourn by withering and drying up—all ways of speaking aloud the truth of inward grief.

Therein lies the power of lament: to speak the truth that all is not well. Walter Brueggemann writes that grief, spoken aloud, is “the counter to denial.” [1] Lament is prophetic speech. It bears faithful witness to all that is not right with the world and to all that is not right with ourselves. To take the land’s mourning seriously is to ask about its grief—to wonder what truth the land’s grief spoke to the people in Hosea’s day and what truth it might speak to us now.…

The land’s lament speaks a foundational ecological truth: when one part of creation goes awry, the whole suffers. The land’s grief at what the people have done points to the fundamental reality of our interconnection. Perhaps it is the boundedness of our bodies that makes it so easy to overlook the truth of our connectedness. We appear so discrete, so unitary, but we are not.

Lloyd describes our interconnectedness with God, each other, and the earth on which we dwell:

Our lives are held, connected, one to the other and all to God: we are bound up in a beautiful, multicolored, homespun fabric. That fabric is an ecological truth: it describes the deeply interconnected and interdependent world that I came to know as an ecologist. And that fabric is a theological truth, reflecting the world as God made it to be—a relational world, a connected world, an interdependent world.

The land’s mourning speaks simultaneously of a vision of the world as it ought to be—that beautiful fabric—and the truth of the world as it is: too much injustice and too little love fraying the threads that hold us all. The land feels those fraying threads. The land grieves those fraying threads. The land mourns.

Now, as then, the fabric that connects all of creation is badly torn: torn by manifold injustices wrought and perpetuated by the exploitative systems in which we live, torn by ideologies of scarcity that teach us to love too narrowly and too little. To mourn is to speak that truth to the lies that prop up the denial on which the status quo depends.….

Mourning together, in true solidarity, we name the truth of what’s wrong. And in so doing, we begin to make it right.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014), 57.

Copyright © 2022 by the Christian Century. “The Land Mourns Climate Change,” by Andi Lloyd is excerpted by permission from the September 1, 2022 issue of the Christian Century. To read the full article, click here.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—McEl Chevrier, Untitled. Margi Ahearn, Exercise on Grief and Lamentation. McEl Chevrier, Untitled. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

2023 Daily Meditations Theme

The Prophetic Path

Many of us carry deep grief, individually and collectively, due to the barrage of crises we face today. Watch Brian McLaren explain how The Prophetic Path invites us to publicly lament suffering and injustice in the world.

Practice with Us

Meet the Team

Story From Our Community

Recently, I found myself grieving a loss. I remember a time when a robin built her nest over our front door. A well-intended neighbor kept removing it. However, mother robin was persistent. She rebuilt her home as many times as was necessary. On the day that our dear friend died, tiny babies peered over the side of the nest making music with their chirping. Their music contained every spiritual emotion possible: desperation, faith, sadness, hope, longing, mystery but of course the greatest of all, Love. —Diane K.
Share your own story with us.

Was this email forwarded to you?
Subscribe now to the Daily Meditations.

Sign-up for the monthly newsletter from the Center for Action and Contemplation for the latest news about our programs, including new books, podcasts, events, and online learning opportunities.

The work of the Center for Action and Contemplation is possible only because of people like you! Learn more about how you can help support this work.

If you would like to change how you receive these emails you can update your preferences or unsubscribe from our list.