Reflections Upon Earth

Yesterday I ran outside to check the mail in my bare feet. Hadn’t done that in a while, and I had forgotten how amazing it feels.

Most of the time, I love school and I love thinking about deep questions. But academic life behind a computer can feel so abstract sometimes. Especially in distance learning, it’s a life disconnected from real voices, real faces—in fact, from real people. It lacks a kind of experiential concreteness, which is essential to our natures.

 So when my feet touched the ground outside, I was sharply aware of a contrast. Suddenly I felt that I had come out of a Laputian, abstract head-in-the-clouds world to taste visceral reality in a way that I had been missing. (Catch the Gulliver’s Travels reference there?)  It didn’t seem to matter much whether it was the rough, untamed grass of nature or the smooth, solid asphalt of civilization. They were both of a piece in a world of real things and I loved them for it. All at once I wanted to drop to the ground and kiss it.

But I was in a neighborhood. And those dread creatures known as The Neighbors would see. So of course I didn’t do it. Such is the power of social pressure.

Really, why should we often feel ashamed of such an action as kissing the earth? We only grudgingly approve it in extreme cases, as of a soldier returning to his native land. Otherwise, it’s just…weird…and greenie…or something like that. Worshipping the earth, maybe. 

I’m glad we don’t think the same way about kissing each other. I couldn’t bear to forbid my littlest sister’s slobbery bedtime kisses to me, on the charge that she was worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.  Why can’t we love the earth likewise, without sacrilege? As the crown of God’s material creation, are we so proud as to have forgotten our roots in the dust under our feet? To avoid calling the earth our mother, I think many of us have begun to consider the earth our servant—and you don’t kiss servants much. But Chesterton once said, “The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister,” and as he adds later, “a little sister.” Quite right, for as he says, we have a common Father—a Father who made us both, giving us something more of Himself, but calling all good. We are both a part of nature and something a little more. Same and other. There is no room here for nature worship, but neither is there room for gnostic pride in our “otherness.” The incarnate God has come out in favor of both the groaning creation and the man who causes it to groan—and redeems both.

Guess what? I’ve been inspired. If I kiss the earth behind the garage, nobody will be able to see… :-)