Ched Myers wrote that Jesus was grounded into “the storied Jordan watershed of his ancestors through which Creator still speaks.” We aren’t used to this kind of animate relationship with the living world, where the Creator still speaks in the dialect of desert and dandelion and deer. But our spiritual ancestors were intimately familiar with it. This idea of conversation with nature is even embedded in the Hebrew language.
A friend of mine and her Israeli husband told me that the Hebrew word midbar, usually translated as “wilderness,” is rooted in the verb dabar, which means “speaking.” Ba-midbar, my friends finished explaining to me, translated in most cases as the wilderness, also means “the organ which speaks.”
Seeing the wilderness as an organ of speech – the part of the body of living Earth that speaks – transforms it from a harsh place of difficulty into a tender place of intimacy.
There is something about being in a wildish place for a long time. Eventually you can hear it: a deeper silence. The invitation to listen to the voice of the sacred. A voice that is deeply your own and also the trees and also God.
This message is excerpted from “Seeing the wilderness” by Victoria Loorz in the September/October 2022 Gather magazine.
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