My church is engaged in a study that feels to me both light-hearted and profoundly important. Those who are willing are each taking a Sunday worship service to share what it is they love about nature and why. They can speak for as long or short as they wish about their passion, and I fill in with related hymns, biblical passages, prayers and creation care suggestions to complete our worship experience.
We are only two weeks in, but thus far we have learned that Jerri loves to kayak and appreciates the silence and beauty of being on the water. And Sallie has loved owls since she was a young tomboy child. She met them sleeping in the trees she climbed frequently in the woods around her childhood home.
In my own preparation for this creation care series I heard, in one of the many podcasts I have listened to, the possibility that we may have cared for the earth better through the ages if we had named it “Father,” not “Mother” Earth. This set me to thinking about the designation Mother Earth and how it was derived.
The concept of the natural world as maternal dates back to ancient civilizations. The Greek primordial goddess, Gaia, meaning earth or land, was believed to have given birth to the sky, mountains, and sea.
The Romans worshipped Terra Mater, Mother Earth, in agricultural festivals and rituals that honored the earth. Many indigenous cultures revere the earth as a sacred maternal force, the giver of life. And modern cultures concur, referencing the earth with a feminine pronoun and describing her life-giving, sustaining role.
Recently, a third year student at the University of Guelph in Canada wrote a poem that raised a question that has been asked before: “If Mother Earth were a Father, would we love him more?” Ksenija Krivokapic says of her published poem, “Western imperial power and patriarchy are inextricably linked. Through these systems, women and the earth are both seen as expendable resources to have control over or be conquered in order to create life for and nurture those in positions of power.”
Father’s Day blessings
As I think of the coming Father’s Day on June 21, the Mother Earth concept remains fitting to me as nurturer, but the father earth concept is not without merit either, especially as provider. Both describe the importance of our understanding of the Earth. For Earth is a living being, just as we are, and requires both nurture and provision, maternal and paternal strengths. It requires the care of us all.
I understand the negative associations with the term “father” in some patriarchal societies, religions, and families. I know from my own ministry that there are those for whom “Father God” carries a negative connotation or an ache because of the abuse suffered from earthly fathers by their absence or anger or mistreatment. There are those who long for the blessing of their father, a blessing that was never rendered by him, for whatever reason.
But so many more do feel blessed by their fathers, and I am one of those fortunate ones. My daddy was a remarkable man. Born the last child of 10 in 1927, he was the size of a small coke bottle at birth according to his siblings, sleeping in a shoe box as an infant. While he always remained small in stature, he was large in his spirit of kindness, concern for others, and love for the earth. And his blessed memory guides me still.
He could grow anything, and did, most often from seed rather than established plants. He never met a stranger and helped anyone in need. He was a man of faith who served as a deacon in the church, a Sunday School teacher for 10-year-old boys for decades, and on the grounds committee until his 80s.
He could fix most anything and often did as a frugal steward of family resources or to aid neighbors and church friends who were not so handy. He was loyal to his family and friends and faithful to his values. My sweet daddy delighted in his children and gave all three of us a sense of being deeply loved and respected. A Father Earth like my father would be worth standing up for and caring about.
World Environment Day
During the month of June, communities across the globe have been recognizing the UN based World Environment Day. Held annually on June 5 since 1973, when we first began to acknowledge the damage humans were causing to the earth, it encourages us to listen to the earth and what it is telling us through record-breaking temperatures, more intense wildfires, extreme storms and glaciers disappearing before our eyes reshaping life across the planet.
The UN states that “there is another force gaining momentum across the planet now and that is collective action,” which is what it will take to slow the rising fever of the earth.
I wonder if in honor of dads, we might vow to honor the Earth. It has become critical for us to drop the temperature of the earth. Noted environmentalist, Bill McKibben, says that while it is too late to stop climate change, we can mitigate its devastation by collective action.
Researchers have studied the question of whether anthropomorphizing the Earth helps or hurts the environment? They suggest that the Earth is a living being, as chemist John Lockett described in his Gaia Theory developed in the 1960s while he was working at NASA. He proposed that the Earth isn’t just a place where life simply survives, but rather, is shaped by living organisms, creating a self-regulating system. Bill McKibben writes, “as global warming emerged as the greatest issue of our time, the Gaia theory helped us understand that small changes could shift a system as large as the Earth’s atmosphere.”
So, researchers conclude, if the personification of earth can help people to see the elemental way in which all of life is related, if we need to turn to anthropomorphic terms to feel this connection and subsequently care more for the Earth, it is worth broadening the concept to Father Earth and beyond that to family: seeing an interconnected relationship with our human and non-human brothers and sisters, and with the Mother/Father Earth.
If the Earth is a part of our family, or better yet, we are a part of it and all that lives and grows upon it, how could we ever bring ourselves to harm it?
On this Father’s Day, it is my prayer that we all will find ways to honor our dads, and that those who are estranged will find some opportunity for peace internally or, when possible, in the relationship. And may we all, in appreciation of Mother/Father Earth, make small changes that can help shift a large system in the direction of healing.
The Rev. Candace McKibben is an ordained minister and pastor of Tallahassee Fellowship.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Father Earth? A time for honoring dads and protecting the planet
Reporting by Rev. Candace McKibben, Guest columnist / Tallahassee Democrat
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Rev. Candace McKibben, Guest columnist | USA TODAY Network
