Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You (Daniel Cooperrider) - A Review
SPEAK WITH THE EARTH AND IT WILL TEACH YOU: A Field Guide to the Bible. By Daniel Cooperrider. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2022. X + 188 pages.
The Psalmist
declares:
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, great and wide;
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great. (Ps. 104:24-25).
I'm not sure
how I would describe my connection to nature, but I do find a certain affinity
to the natural world. While I'm not a camper, I enjoy spending time in the out
of doors. I grew up in the shadow of Mount Shasta, an amazingly beautiful
mountain, especially when covered with snow. To this day I am awestruck by its
majesty. I've been blessed to spend time among the redwoods and sequoias, at
the coast of Oregon and California, and now the lakeshores in Michigan and
neighboring states. When we spend time in nature, it’s possible, if we’re open
to it, to feel the presence of the Creator. Therefore, I can appreciate the
words of the Psalmist and other biblical writers who ponder the majesty of
God's creation.
Although one can profitably view nature through the lens of
Scripture, Daniel Cooperrider has chosen to view scripture through the lens of
nature. He does so in a way that is inviting and thought-provoking. Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You is beautifully written, making it enjoyable
to read. I think it’s worth emphasizing the word enjoyable because I did enjoy
reading Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You.
The author of Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You: A Field Guide to the Bible, Daniel Cooperrider, is first of all a pastor in
the United Church of Christ. He is also a self-described fly-fisher and
forager. In this book, he draws from his experiences in nature while living and
serving churches in Vermont and now in what he calls the "edge of the
Driftless Area in Madison, Wisconsin." The word "driftless" is
explained late in the book as a region where glaciation did not take place. He
also notes that he lives on Ho-Chunk land, acknowledging the indigenous people
who were present before European settlement.
The starting premise here is the concept that two books of
God exist—Scripture and Nature—both of which reveal something of God. While
trained to look for God in Scripture, he notes that his congregation in Vermont
slowly taught him a different way of reading for God. Through the influence of
this congregation, he learned that could be found revealed not only in
Scripture but also in nature. That is, his church taught him "that the
church is not just a place to read and interpret the written scriptures of God,
but a place to read and interpret the expressions of God that emanate
constantly and from every corner of God's creation." (p. 3). Having been
influenced by Karl Barth’s theology, which includes a rejection of natural
theology, I can be leery of putting too
much stock in nature. As Barth would point out, nature can lead us astray.
Nevertheless, experience has also taught me that if I'm open to nature I can find
signs that God is present in the natural world. In this book, Cooperrider
invites us to pay attention to that other book of God, which is found in the
witness of nature. He traces this idea of God’s two books to such figures as Augustine,
Maximus the Confessor, Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, and many more.
The subtitle of Cooperrider's book is instructive. He offers
it as a field guide to the Bible. While he welcomes people using the book to
explore the world, his "aim here is not to document and describe the flora
and fauna recorded in the Bible. My aim is to reread the Bible in a living,
breathing, yearning, determined search for God from the perspective of
nature." (pp. 10-11). With that goal in mind, he seeks to read scripture
through the lens of the book of nature. In doing this he seeks to
"foreground the presence of the natural world, and to focus on creation
and the more-than-human drama of life as it presents itself in its elemental
forms" (p. 11). With that in mind, he divides the book into four major
sections reflecting the four classical elements of water, fire, earth, and air.
Rather than using those four words as section titles, he chooses to speak in
terms of Rivers (water). Mountains (Fire), Trees (Earth), and Clouds (air).
Each section has four chapters that explore these concepts.
Using these four elements as a means of entering Scripture allows
us to see things that are present in Scripture that we might miss otherwise. Cooperrider
begins the conversation by focusing on water because we begin life in water,
both physically and spiritually. He points out, relevantly, that water is one
of the most important environmental issues of our time. While we are born out
of water and composed bodily of water, Scripture begins in its open words with
the Spirit of God moving across the waters. So that's the starting point.
While water might have biological primacy, cosmologically has
fire primacy. That is because the Big Bang Theory envisions a great explosion
of fire out of which the universe is born. It is this fire that produces
mountains, whether volcanoes or the movement of tectonic plates sitting on a
molten core. Of course, in the biblical story, people, such as Moses and Jesus
often encounter God on mountaintops. As is true of the first set of chapters,
Cooperrider draws here from his own experience with mountains. He writes of the
presence of mountains in scripture, that they "can be both occasions for
theophany and intimate knowing of God, as well as occasions that reveal the
immense gulf or gap in our knowledge of God" (p. 57). Of the latter
consider Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, Jesus'
temptation by the devil while standing on a very high mountain, and finally,
Elijah's experience while huddled in a cave on Mount Horeb. In the final
chapter of this section, he points to Moses' experience of seeing the Promised
Land from a mountaintop while in the wilderness. Cooperrider writes "If
you want to see paradise, the Bible seems to say at the end, go climb a
mountain and look out, and shining through the landscape of the world, you just
might glimpse it—everything fitting together—perfection perfected for a moment—a
panorama of the Promised Land—this earth as the sanctuary, as the holy land, as
la sainte terre, that it is" (p. 94).
From the mountains, Cooperrider takes up the lens provided by
trees, which here stands in for the earth. He reminds us that in the second
creation story, God creates Adam from the adamah, the humus or earth. It
is good to remember that we are made from soil, such that as Jeremiah suggests,
we are "clay in the potter's hand" (p. 95). As for the trees, we must
go back to the Garden where God forms trees after forming Adam. He writes that
"although trees and plants existed for hundreds of millions of years
before humans, Genesis is right to intuit that our stories are fatefully
entwined." (p. 98). When it comes to the trees, I acknowledge their
witness, having spent time among the redwoods and sequoias of California. These
majestic trees are awe-inspiring as they dwarf everything around them. The
thing about trees is that they live in communities. While I’ve known this to be
true, Cooperrider brings this to our attention as a way of reinforcing the
human need for community. Of course, you can't talk about trees and the bible
without noting Abraham and Sarah's act of hospitality at the Oaks of Mamre.
Then, there's the Tree of Life present both in Genesis and Revelation. Of this
tree, Cooperrider writes that "in the biblical imagination, the Tree of
Life is not just a little bit of the future. It is the future. Standing in for
the whole evolutionary unfolding of life, for the whole generative cosmic
itself, finding the Tree of Life flourishing at the end of time teaches us that
our own future is inseparable from the larger, ecological community on which we
are directly dependent" (p. 138). Indeed!
Finally, we get to Air, which is explored here in terms of
the Clouds. Biblically, Cooperrider notes that air is connected to the spirit
or the soul. Consider that in Genesis 2, God breathes life into the clay that
becomes Adam. There is the Ruach, the Spirit, who hovers over the
primordial waters. As for us, "our lives begin with a piercing birth cry
as we gasp for our first breath, and our lives end when we stop breathing, as
our last sigh dissipates and merges back into the universal reservoir of
air" (p. 140). I really appreciated this last section focusing on the
clouds, since, as Cooperrider points out, we often see them negatively.
However, the Bible can envision clouds having a very positive presence. It's
often from clouds that God speaks. And then there's the bow God places in the
clouds that serve as a reminder to God not to destroy the earth with a flood. He
also points out that ecologically those large stratocumulus clouds that cover
two-thirds of the earth serve to cool the earth. Unfortunately, they're
disappearing, and thus their disappearance would be a great loss as this will
lead to more global warming. Then there's that great cloud of witnesses that the
Book of Hebrews speaks of, as it acknowledges our spiritual ancestors.
Ultimately, Cooperrider writes in his epilogue about loving
God through loving the world. As we read Scripture through the lens of nature,
which opens our eyes to elements and dimensions of the biblical story that we
can easily miss without this lens, Cooperrider also reminds us that there is an
ecological crisis, especially a climate crisis, that is present with us. For
example, not long ago it was reported that one hundred dolphins died in the
Amazon as the river water reached a record temperature of 102 degrees. As we
contemplate the witness of the clouds, might we pay attention to what is going
on in nature? Our survival as a species depends on it.
Cooperrider concludes Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You that this moment in time provides us with an opportunity and
urgent call to "fall more deeply in love with the earth.” He believes this
is “the call of our times that is coming to us from the direction of the earth—to
love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and
with all our mind. To love God through loving the world" (p. 180). This
call to love God by loving the world, and not just our immediate neighbor but
the world itself, serves as an important lens to hear a new word from Scripture
about God’s love of the world.
I can say that Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You
is a timely book that speaks to the heart, by pointing us to nature so that in
turn we may read and understand the Bible anew. So, enjoy and be blessed as you
read the book, for it is a field guide to the Bible, helping us recognize that
creation is proclaiming the Glory of God. Oh, and don’t just read the book. Be
sure to step out into nature and enjoy and be blessed by its witness to the
glory of God.
Comments