His Eye is on the Sucker by Leah Kostamo
In these days drawing near to Easter I am mindful of Christ’s work of redemption – of His design to reconcile “all things” to Himself, as Paul says in Colossians. His work of redemption not only transforms human lives, but all of creation as we participate with him in his reconciling work. Allow me to illustrate.
I was strolling across the lawn at A Rocha’s Brooksdale Environmental Centre when one of our summer interns came scurrying by carrying a bucket. When I asked what it held she showed me a grey, wide-lipped fish swimming in a few inches of water. Her voice betrayed her excitement as she related that she was off to the program office to identify it.
Turns out it was a Salish Sucker — an endangered species. Not seen in our watershed sine the 1970’s, this species had been considered “extripritated” in the Little Campbell River system. Needless to say, her find was a very big deal!
When I asked later about the experience of discovering an endangered species, she told me the story of the day. Upon waking she had felt like God was saying to her, “I have a surprise for you today.” She went about her day, doing interny things, wondering all the while when the “surprise” was going to show up. Near the end of the afternoon, she toured some visitors around the A Rocha property and down to the pond where she could check a fish trap which was being used as part of an invasive species monitoring project. In fact, this was to be her last “check” of the season. As she bent to pull the trap out of the water she felt God saying, “Here’s your surprise.”
Her eyes brightened as she told me how she lifted the wire cage and found, not a Pumpkinseed fish or one of the other invasive species she’d been catching all summer, but a strange fish that looked too big to even fit through the opening of the trap. She knew immediately that it was something special.
I grinned widely. “Wow! Amazing!” I said. “How fantastic!” And, in the inner sanctum of my mind, I thought, What a whacko!
I thought this even though the week before someone had prayed for me and I had crumpled to the ground like a deflating accordion, awash in the presence of God. I thought this even though I’d been practicing contemplative prayer for the previous two years and often sensed God’s voice speaking to me uniquely. I thought this even though I believe wholeheartedly in God’s care for all of his creation.
In hindsight I think I viewed this fish-finding intern as a whacko for two reasons:
a) To “hear” God speaking so directly is weird. How presumptuous! But my own knee-buckling episode and my experiences in contemplative prayer had demonstrated that God is quite capable of interacting on a very personal level. Funny how God’s interactions seem so bizarre in other people’s lives but not in one’s own.
b) To assume that God cares about a sucker fish is weird. Sure, I believe, as that old song goes, that “His eye is on the sparrow.” And when it comes to endangered species I am easily convinced that His eye is on the Panda, and the Sumatran Tiger, and even the Vancouver Island Marmot. But on the Salish Sucker? A bottom-feeding, wide-mouthed fish with big lips? His eye is on such an ignoble, unattractive creature? That’s weird.
And so I’m left with the question, who’s the whacko? Maybe God’s the whacko – a God who risks his reputation to earnest interns and middle-aged contemplatives. A God who fixes his eye on the humble, the overlooked, the ugly. A God who’s eye is on the Sucker.
Bio
Leah Kostamo is an Earthkeeper and Storyteller with A Rocha Canada. She can be found online at leahkostamo.com. A portion of this post was adapted from Planted, a Story of Creation, Calling, and Community published by Cascade Books.
Earth Teach Me To Remember.
Today’s Lenten prayer is part of a Native American prayer that I first posted here. It reminds me to take time to listen to the wonder of God’s creation. It reminds me to take notice not just of the majestic mountains outside my window but also of the small and seemingly insignificant creatures that are so vital to the healthy thriving of our world. It also reminds me to sit quietly in the presence of the One who has created all things and whose great love is revealed in every dimension of that creation.
The stillness of the earth speaks of stability and constancy. It speaks of the enduring faithfulness of God who sends the seasons in their due time, who waters the earth with the spring and the autumn rains, who brings forth the harvest to nourish our bodies.
It is certainly time for stillness in my own spirit too and I find that the changing season outside is a wonderful affirmation of that. Learning to hear to the promptings of my spirit calling me to slow down, sit still in the presence of God and listen is not always easy. But it is essential.
So sit still with me today. Drink in the wonder of God. Quieten your spirit and allow God to refresh and renew you.
I am still reeling from the sights I saw earlier today: the mature English wooded garden that has been so green, so vital for my recovery from depression, and such a rich source of photographs from my bed, has been destroyed. Decimated and flattened in order to make way for development. It may just be a piece of suburban garden that has gone, but it is ‘just’ another one, and ‘just’ another one, and ….
The destruction of these trees has hit me like a body blow. The stress and emotional inability to express my grief and outrage has exacerbated an already bad health patch. But as I lay in bed this afternoon, I had to admit that part of my grief was for my own complicity in such acts of cynical greed that are happening all over the planet. Like the plight of the Sengwer people, an ancient tribe in Kenya who have been dwelling in the Embobut forest for centuries. Their tribal lands are being stripped and deforested at a massive rate, removing not only their agricultural livelihood, but also their deep spiritual connections to the earth. How often do I really speak out about these injustices? How often do I fling myself on my face in front of our Holy God and ask for forgiveness, for every time I do not check where my food came from, who made my clothes, how I might dispose of every piece of the rubbish I use?
However long it is since I have been able to leave my house, the point is this: my body is intimately connected to Creation about me, near and far, seen and unseen; so thinking about my felt connection with the cords of the trees sawn down today in my garden also resonated with a further conversation I’ve been having with myself. I have had to spend the best part of four weeks in bed, and I’ve wondered if I need to try some different techniques to ‘befriend the pain’ and so manage it better. My attempts are hit and miss, and I definitely need to keep practicing! I’m currently reading Timothy Keller’s book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, and am struck by the question he poses: Why do we seek to avoid pain at all costs? And why are we, in modern western materialist culture at least, so under equipped to handle all kinds of suffering?
I had intended to write about my own experience of listening to my pain and hopefully communicate my steps along a very ancient path: healing happens when heart, mind, body, soul and spirit sing together. But this ‘oh-so-holy’ attitude immediately came bang smack against my own hypocrisy and my part in the stewardship of creation. I take two, sometime three, different types of pain killers. As such, I am hugely dependent on and complicit in the machinations of big Pharma.
Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply thankful for the work of scientists in the relief of pain: for their education, training, experience, minute attention, patience, inventiveness and desire to find solutions. On the other hand, as I learn to listen to my pain and in silence hear what it might teach me, I wonder about the extent to which, by taking my meds, I dull my senses, and reduce ‘life’ to ‘merely existing’ on the bad days. If I entered fully into feeling and sensing my body, what might I learn instead?
Not that I especially want to do this you understand – pain distracts me from concentrating on studying and writing; it makes me grumpy with those around me when the painkillers’ effect has worn off; and it stops me from twisting my body to get the right angle to take a photograph. But isn’t it worth asking the question: not just for my personal spiritual and physical journey, but also for the economic, scientific and potential transformative power we have given these big companies? What do they take from the earth’s resources to get the ingredients for my pills? How much energy do they consume to make my medications? And what do they put back in the way of polluting chemical outpourings, just in order to make my painkillers? I feel I should know, and am ashamed that I haven’t thought enough about it, or researched the answers.
Would it be a more honest position of stewardship for me to join in with the ‘groaning of creation’ as trees are cut down, rivers polluted, and minerals mined, to refrain from taking my medications?
I showed a draft of this post to my parents, who were very distressed to think I would cease taking my medication; and rightly concerned that no one should think I was encouraging anyone else to stop taking theirs, or making others feel guilt at using what many can and do argue are God-given healing resources made from the grace of human technological progress; nor that anyone should feel I am criticising a medical profession to whom I am profoundly thankful, and their God-given inventiveness at responding to human needs.
But still, the questions proliferate. How do I deal with the irony that as I write this in bed on my Ipad, and others read it on mobiles or laptops, and we are connected in such a way that makes us part of this new community God is building, mining companies are reaping from the earth a fantastic amount of minerals just to feed our social dependency on this type of communication? Can you say hand on heart this industry is ethical or not? because I can’t … And what about those servers in the deserts throwing out all that heat? … I was listening to a programme about Ernst & Young auditing a gold refining company in Dubai who provide gold for all our smartphones, and they couldn’t guarantee that ‘conflict gold’ was not getting through the system and being distributed around the world for vast profit… And … And….
All I want to do is to voice some of the many questions that I ponder because of my illness: if I think I am isolated from Creation, other than what I see outside my window, think again!
Writing these guest-blogs has encouraged me to explore what connects my own physical brokenness to the brokenness of Creation. As Susan Sontag insisted, illness is not a metaphor. My body really does feel broken at the moment, but then so is so much of the world beyond my walls. I am grateful to those like CS Lewis who have thought about some of the theological dynamics of these things ahead of me,
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”
This I know: listening to God in my core points, at least for my own body this day, to a path of healing way beyond any prescribed pharmaceutical intervention.
Bio
Kate Kennington Steer is a writer and photographer with a deep abiding passion for contemplative photography and spirituality. She writes about these things on her shot at ten paces blog.
Yesterday Tom and I visited the University of Washington quad, where together with thousands of others we drank in the magnificence of the cherry blossoms. My soul is singing as I rejoice in the beauty of God’s creation in this springtime extravaganza.
I often find myself conflicted between the season of Lent with its sense of deprivation and the rejoicing of spring and the wonder of what is happening in my garden. There is a tension here that in past years I have not found easy to reconcile. But this year as I have focused on Lent as preparation for transformation, not time for denial and sacrifice, the tension has resolved.
The world is getting ready for transformation and by the grace of God I am able to join in. In the garden I am tilling the soil, loading it with compost and planting the seeds in the depths of the rich, dark soil. Each seed I plant is a promise filled with the hope that it will germinate and be transformed into new life.
There are other promises that the spring planting season brings with it. In many countries starvation and hunger are seasonal. It is during this time of the year, when the stored harvest is depleted that poor families are most reliant on dried seeds, nuts and beans that they eke out with the hope that the new harvest will begin before their stores are finished. Each seed planted bears with it a hope for transformation, a longing not just for the new growth but for the first fruits, the first sprouts that can be eaten and renew life. For some the greatest seal of hopelessness is when they need to use their seeds as food to survive, forcing themselves into hunger and starvation for next year too.
In my heart I am longing for the same germination of new life that has been planted in my soul. I long to see the new sprouts, the promise of a new harvest that I am beginning to catch glimmers of. How often I wonder have I eaten those seeds instead and denied God the ability to grow a new crop in my heart.
The giving of first fruits in cultures that lived on the edge of starvation during the season between planting and harvest must have been a huge sacrifice, an incredible denial of their own needs for nourishment so that their commitment to God could be fed and nourished first. Maybe that is what the denial of Lent is meant to be about. This is indeed a season to put the needs of God, and of others, and of the creation as well, before our own. This is the season above all others when we need to nourish the seeds of God’s transformation and allow it to grow and flourish.
As I work in the garden this week I know that my reflections will continue to revolve around the ongoing transformation God wants to accomplish in my life. Here are the questions I am asking myself:
Where has God planted seeds that have still not sprouted and need to be nurtured? Where have I failed to plant seeds because of a scarcity mentality, feeling that I will starve if I keep back some for next year’s harvest? And where have failed to give God the first fruits because I am so longing for new produce for myself?
This week for our Lenten prayers I plan to post a variety of prayers for creation from different faith traditions. Today’s is from the Jewish tradition and because I love this prayer so much I wanted to get it up early. The daily reflection will follow later.
I love this prayer which I came across in David Adam’s Rhythm of Life: Celtic Daily Prayer. This book has long been a favourite of mine. I love to use it when I travel, finding that the short daily offices help to ground my spiritual practices during what can otherwise be a very disorienting journey.
How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands!
The heavens declare your glory,
the arch of the sky displays your handiwork.
In your love you have given us the power
to behold the beauty of your world in all its splendour.
The sun and the stars, the valleys and the hills,
the rivers and the lakes, all disclose your presence.
The roaring breakers of the sea tell of your awesome might;
the beasts of the field and the birds of the air proclaim your wondrous will.
In your goodness you have made us able to hear the music of the world
the voices of loved ones reveal to us that you are in our midst.
A divine song sings through all creation.
For those of us who live in urban areas the music of God’s world is so often drowned out by the clatter and commotion of the world around us. This prayer reminds me of how much all of us need time amongst God’s good creation to reconnect once more to the divine song that reverberates through God’s world.
Today (March 22 2014) is World Water Day which this prayer is written in honour of.
Lord Jesus Christ,
You call all who are thirsty to come to you and drink from the fresh and living water that flows from your heart. Yet many live in dry and thirsty lands, drink from polluted streams and struggle for access to safe drinking water.
Have mercy on them O Lord.
Lord Jesus Christ,
Forgive our selfish and unthinking actions that have stripped forests, polluted wells and caused toxic waste to enter the water systems.
Have mercy on us O Lord.
Lord Jesus Christ,
We thank you, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.
Have mercy on us O Lord.
Lord Jesus Christ,
We commit ourselves to value and care for your gifts to us. May rivers of living water flow from us with compassion and caring to all who suffer from thirst and pollution.
Have mercy on them O Lord.
Lord Jesus Christ,
We thank you, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with you in your death. By it we share in your resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit
Have mercy on us O Lord.
Lord Jesus Christ,
Refreshed by your spirit, and following in your footsteps, may we continue to serve you, provide cups of cold and refreshing water for the people and creation entrusted to our care.
Have mercy on all of us Lord
And fill us with the waters of life.
Amen
I chose today’s prayer for our Lenten prayer cards because we are at that point where all of us are being to struggle with our commitment to this season of reflection. This path to transformation is not easy. Pray that we may continue on the path.
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