Pardon me. I have never bothered to talk with you since I was born 79 years ago. It’s like a flower never talking to its roots and like a cloud never talking to the ocean. Like CNN broadcasting silence.

Why does the cat have my tongue? Why do I never talk to “You,” the elephant in my living room? You’re not invisible. My bed rests on you. I walk and drive on you. My heart pumps your living water.

You are talked about, but not talked to. I say, “Good soil, lovely tree, beautiful sky.” My amnesia is like never getting beyond “Hey, listen up about the woman I married” while talking to my wife.

The Bible models second person avoidance. “Let the earth put forth vegetation. Let the earth bring forth living creatures.”  English usage since the time of Shakespeare has named you, but has kept you in a first or third person jail cell.

Our culture knows, religiously and scientifically, that we earthlings live, and move, and have our being within your global sphere.  You’re the awesome birth mother of me, and the flowers I tended and the pizza I ate today. Isn’t it enough that I have done Earth Day every year since 1970 and Earth Hour the last Saturday in March for three years?

Why do I need to be personal with You? Why converse with You? What cultural taboo will I shatter if I say, “Mother Earth, You are dear”?

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Thursday, the evening before, a misshapen bird careens, like a drunk, in a first floor bedroom and in the kitchen. Flap. Scratch. Bonk. The bird’s beak is turned up, rather than forward. It frantically swoops into a living room wall, trying to get a toe hold. How did this invader get into the house? It panics as we chase it. Finally we get it out the front door. I follow. It crashes into a bush on the north side, and I’m afraid to get too close. It’s ugly. After I am convinced it has left the yard, I go back in and insist we carefully sweep the first floor and get all the feathers out. They’ve contaminated our space. I carefully feed feathers to the flames at the back fence in the black night. Only a complete incineration will rid us of the spirit of the ominous intruder.

This Friday evening feels tense, and not only because of the obsessive cleansing and burning of the night before. Doris is pregnant with our first child, to be born in September. Will we have a healthy baby? I remember the birth of my mentally retarded brother. The strange, foreboding personality of an ex-Marine, Ron, rooming on the second floor, infects the house. He’s not a Christian. I am very worried about my sister Jan who lives with us and is showing interest in Ron. I don’t want her to date a non-Christian. Friend Kan Ori from Japan, also rooming with us, is facing his doctoral prelim exam like I am. Some of the peers of Kan and I are having nervous breakdowns as they seek to make sure they’ve memorized everything. Will I pass? Will I be the first in my family to get a PhD? Will I survive the alien environment of secular study, outside the cocoon of my Bible college undergrad community?

Ron and I talk in the living room this evening. With a Bible, I tell him how to accept the Lord. He seems interested. After we agree to meet again, I get a nail and a hammer, intending to wedge a loose screen into place in Jan’s room. While working, I feel claustrophobic. It’s muggy. In gray shorts and white T-shirt, with the nail in my mouth, and my hammer in hand, I begin a walk, announcing, “I’ll be back soon.”

My sandals flip flop. Sun is dying. Spring semester has ended. Feeling generalized anxiety, I head north on Jefferson Street toward the railroad viaduct, and then west on 10th Street. I am now talking earnestly to God about being in a strange land, no longer surrounded by family tradition. I need direction. My walking goes into auto pilot. “God, who are you? Show me who you are.” My meditation intensifies. Cars recede into a dream. Night closes in. A vision develops. I will crumble my troubles by circumnavigating the city of Bloomington, like Joshua encircled Jericho and its walls came tumbling down. God talks to me. “Taste me in the shower dripping down your face. Smell me in the ionized air. Feel your legs. Hear me in the breeze. See me in the shadows.” God and I are having a power talk. The house troubles I have left are now a couple miles away as I circle northwest Bloomington. It doesn’t occur to me that my parting word about being back soon is not true. Time disappears. I am marching with God’s drumbeat into freedom from anxiety. Flip flop.

Today, like the Galileeans, we don’t ask if The One Energy Field, which we’ve labeled the Universe (the One Verse) exists. The One Verse, with black holes, planets, and chemicals in the Periodic Table, is apparent. Yes, of course, The One Energy Field exists.

Then, why have we become skeptics and agnostics about God existing? Because we have let religion define The One in anthropocentric images that seem nonscientific.

The book, Everything is God, by an extraordinary young scholar, Jay Michaelson, has shown me a dynamic interchange among various non-dual ideas. We can summarize reality, Michaelson argues, by this formula: 2=1=0. Diversity (2) exists within a single energy system (1) which exists within energy, like black energy, which cannot be measured (0).

Author Jay Michaelson

God/It/Being/Nothingness/Yahweh/Consciousness—the labels are endless— includes all the oscillations among 2 and 1 and 0.

James Broughton addresses the question, Does It exist?

This is It

And I am It

And You are It

And So is That

And He is It

And She is It

And It is It

And That is That.

Image of Universe based on heat left over from the Big Bang.

Peterson says that as a child she knew that if there were not forests and wildlife in heaven, she did not want to go there. As an adult, she has found heavenly Spirit in exploring interspecies communication with gray whales. Renewing an eco-diverse Garden of Eden here on Earth is for her the way to live rapturously.

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Jesus, whose native tongue was Aramaic , also spoke of heaven on Earth. In Luke, he said, “The kingdom of God is (Aramaic, legau) in, among, and around you.” Here, now, on Earth. In the gospel of Thomas he said, “The Father’s imperial rule is spread out upon Earth, and people don’t see it.”

We keep remembering Jesus, and that remembrance is his Second Coming. He’s a cheerleader for Peterson’s Earth-based agenda.

We adults would do well to be like children who laugh on average 400 times a day.  You Tube child Ethan laughs every time paper is torn.

Our dog, Lavani, happy howls.   Earth laughs with flowers.   Ocean laughs with surf spray.  Buddha, in his stock sculptured look, laughs himself into Nirvana.

Don’t get mad, get funny.  On how to make laughter a contagious health epidemic, see pp. 146-147 in my book, Green Kingdom Come! May the farce be with you.

Jesus laughing drawing by Joe Grabill

Our Lavani by Joe Grabill

Monterrey by Joe Grabill

On Earth Day weekend I visited my home area of Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

In addition to speaking to a group about my book, Green Kingdom Come, I met with staff at Trinity English Lutheran Church. The church building has a green roof and steeple.  In 2009 Trinity was the first congregation to win an Energy Patriot Award from U.S. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana.

The Trinity story stimulated new words for a familiar hand game to show children.

“Here’s the green church.  Here’s the green steeple.  Open the door, and see the green people.”

Trinity, in a $5 million remodeling program in 2008-2009, insulated walls and roof, dug three geothermal wells for heating and cooling, and installed solar panels to generate electricity.

The manager of Energy Star for Congregations, Jerry Lawson, says that the 300,000 houses of worship in the U.S. can conserve $200 million a year by greening their buildings, the equivalent of taking 400,000 cars off the road.  Lawson’s organization has comprehensive on-line guides with cost-tracking software and free Web-based seminars.

Lawson says that the green movement in houses of worship, like the Trinity example, has taken off in the last three years.

Article on Trinity by Rosa Salter Rodriguez, “Divine Power,” Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette, Nov. 7, 2009

Time line of the Trinity green building project

Energy Star for Congregations

Trinity Church photograph by Joe Grabill

“Here is the church”

Jerry Lawson

During other presidencies (John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, FDR) there have been edible gardens on the lawn of the White House.

Americans are learning to “eat their lawns,” saving money and the carbon dioxide emissions required to transport food thousands of miles. They are also sharing food in local friendship exchanges and in Farmers Markets.

A theme of Jesus in the first century was for fair access to food by everyone, as symbolized by communitarian potlucks of bread and fish (the feeding of the 4,000 and the 5,000, plus women and children).

Today sustainability requires a fair distribution of food for all species, as I discuss in my new book, Green Kingdom Come! Jesus and a Sustainable Earth Community.

The dominant singers are an enchanting Woman and her male lover, both thinly disguised as two voices of Mother Earth. Enchanting Woman is wild. She sings, “In sandy Earth or in deep valley soil, I, a wild flower, grow (2:1-3, RSV). “The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle, or a young stag.” He echoes back, “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice (2:8-14). He hastens to her presence, marked by aromatic myrrh, frankincense, and spices (4:6-14). Earth Community members clearly are actors in the musical ensemble. “Living Water, you are a fountain, a well, a river. Come, north winds and south winds! Breathe upon my garden (4:15-16).”

The Song of Songs involves an array of More-than-Humans. There are twenty-five kinds of trees, flowers, herbs, fruits, nuts, and spices. Water manifests itself in torrents, floods, streams, and dew. The hills, clefts, caves, ravines, valleys, groves, and stones of Earth appear, along with cultivated pastures, orchards, and vineyards. Elemental sun, moon, wind, air, and fire figure in the allegory.

Today in a Green Revolution we need for our songwriting to draw upon earthy lyrics from the most green and sensuous book in the Bible, the Song of Songs.