Collisions of Earth and Sky by Heidi Barr

Author:Heidi Barr [Heidi Barr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rewilding Spirituality

How does nature influence your spiritual life?

I grew up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), one of the more “progressive” denominations when it comes to protestant Christianity. We went to church most Sundays, and I can still hear my paternal grandmother saying grace before we dug into meals on the farm table, her voice rising for “Come Lord Jesus,” emphasis on the first three words, and then dropping in tone a bit to finish with “be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed.” My maternal grandparents met working at a Lutheran Bible camp in Illinois. My parents met working at a Lutheran Bible camp in Colorado. My spouse and I met when on staff at a Lutheran Bible camp in Wisconsin. Lutheran Christianity will always be a part of my spiritual story for the simple fact that it’s the first lens through which I consciously thought about God. I learned a lot about love, compassion, and empathy from the church and all those camps, and many communities of faith are doing good work in the world. Of course, organized religion has done its fair share of harm, too, from upholding systemic racism and the Doctrine of Discovery1 (including playing a role in the boarding school system for Indigenous children) to encouraging homophobia to waging wars in the name of holiness. It’s clearly not a sure path to peace. Religion is organized by humans, and humans are imperfect. Contained within the confines of religion is everything on the spectrum of what it means to be human, from life-giving to harmful. I suppose what I’m saying is that my faith and spirituality have been, and will forever be, an evolving story. If yours is too, well, welcome to the club.

These days I don’t like to label myself as any particular brand of belief, though the teachings of Jesus certainly have a place in the evolution of my personal story of what it means to be a human being. I worked at four different wilderness-based ELCA youth camps during college and the years just after, and it’s the fellowship, community, and proximity to nature that made me feel closer to a higher power. Ironically, it was my time completing a master’s degree at a Lutheran seminary that I found myself becoming more welcoming of other belief systems. Less certain of my own. More inclined to ask questions and less inclined to say, “I know the answer.” (Granted, it did take me three tries to pass the required Bible Proficiency Exam that was required for graduation—those ancient maps got me every time.) I found myself caring less about what happens inside a humanmade sanctuary and caring more about what happens outside of the church’s doors, amid the cycles of the earth. I wanted to spend less time dissecting scriptural texts written by men two thousand years ago and more time with the sacred that is nature itself. I wanted to spend more time outside in contemplation, in what my friend and writer L.

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