Spiritual Exercises
for Atmospheric Alignment
Rev.
Dr. Douglas Olds
Spring
2022
Christians cannot avoid the ramparts of
resistance to climate-driven social and ecological change, either as survivors
or as agents of transformation. To not just survive but to transform our lives
and others requires spiritual resources to develop resilience—to raise
awareness of our dependence on and commitment to atmospheric balances and
cycles.
This Appendix offers a set of spiritual
exercises and practices to build resilient conscientiousness of, and alignment
with, the Atmosphere as the abode of the Holy Spirit and her intimate communion
with all of life. Three sets of examples of leading exercises and praxis of
atmospheric awareness and alignment follow: processing in perpendicular,
atmospheric space, connecting atmosphere and neighborhood, and sacramental
liturgies.[1] These exercises are designed to situate
people in the encompassing bosom of the atmosphere, for them to circle back on
their material inconsequence so to neither wield nor hire big, sky-busting
combustion, thereby growing in, by aligning and giving due honor to, Spirit.
Warmup: Poetic Wordplay, Explore the
parallels
Read the following verse aloud, then
silently focus on single words to locate them in space and time. Rearrange the
parallels. Imagine and recast the verbs as nouns and the nouns as verbs.
“Unfurl over us a shelter of your
peace.”[2]
What does this wordplay suggest about
the dynamics, procession, and interaction of Creation and Spirit?
Now read Genesis 1.1-8. Is your
imagination and spiritual understanding of the atmosphere changed by this
reading? Of Creation or Creator? Journal your insights or share them with any
group in which you are participating in this exercise.
Now consider the desire for the Spirit in our gasps. Focus on the heart’s restlessness. After focusing on this desire of lungs and hearts, the pulse of prayer begins.
Exercise: Recollecting communion with history
Take time to identify an ancestor in
faith or blood who guides you in your activism and commitment to the cause of
earth and atmospheric balance and health. Introduce the group to this figure by
giving thanks for him/her, then share a brief description of how and why this
person enables or inspires you in earth care ministry.
I.
Recollection and Despair: catharsis and
accountability
Despair is an intimacy with fear
generated by closing in on truth (Chödrön 1997, 1), our meeting our match in
the challenges of reality. It may manifest in rage, bitterness, and isolation. Practicing
the virtue of recollection of our past enchantment with nature structures
lament at our displacement and disenchantment inside a degraded present. What
follows may be an individual or group exercise:
Read aloud the opening to the Book of
Lamentations and note how grief is paired with recollection. Consider how
emotion is paired with experience to pierce the heart of its audience. Name
those emotions. How might this structure be useful for liturgy or pastoral care
and counseling? How might this energy be allowed to be, unrepressed and
not silenced among congregants reporting climate despair? Might the experience,
out of nowhere, of emotional catharsis from despair cause our struggles to
cease and train our hearts and minds to relax? (Ibid., 17). How can we identify
with these emotions of pain and isolation?
Socially,
we often avoid grief and deem despair as an enemy. However, consider David as a
personality revealed in the Psalms. He routinely reveals his own struggle with
persecution and trial as he finds refuge in the landforms of wild nature—physical
structures with agency that he attributes to God’s foresight and planning for
him, that allows him to call God his “Rock.” Psalm 7 involves David’s lament of
structural evil. How may your lament
animate expectation of God’s intervention? Is that intervention coming soon, in the
near-term? A result of individual prayer? Or of a necessary massed action of
prayer and resistance right now? Or does God’s resolution of our lament await a
new world or new heaven?
After considering personal materialism
and consumerism pray the psalms of lament (e.g. Pss. 7.1; 10. 1; 13; 17, 77,
86, 88.14; 89.42; 102). Outline their flow, their subjects, their requests, and
their resolutions. Consider playing with the words, syntax, and subjective
structure (as above) to generate new ideas. Adapt lament over global heating
and climate disruption into your own prayer life, considering intercessory
requests for victims of its injustices. Any expression of violence echoes. A
word of grace sings in the soul, touching the motive cords of renewal.
Guided Imagery, Practice 1: Breathing
the virtues of
recollection and gratitude.
Like respiration, spiritual rhythms both take in and let go. In this, the breathing spirit dances with us through space, where meaning is found in the ever-changing middle.
a.
Focus on your breathing--on the air filling your lungs. Recall a time in
your life when you found yourself carried in the bosom of God in nature. Continuing
to focus on your breathing, link that breathing with your recollected memory. Breathe in recollection, breathe out
gratitude.
b.
Say to yourself, “this place and
memory are holy.”
c.
Now move your focus to the place in your throat that gives rise to voice
and anticipate giving voice to your memory. From deep within your lungs,
anticipate how you will offer up your memory to this group. Continue breathing
out gratitude.
d.
Feel the spirit filling your
lungs in anticipation of activating your speech. When you feel ready, tell us
the place you are recalling and the feelings you have about that place.
e.
Does your memory include elegance
(parsimony and beauty) and/or enchantment? How would you define these? How does
God’s role in your life impact your appreciation of beauty and enchantment in
your life under the sky?
Guided Imagery, Practice 2: Via
Negativa (contemplating
the invisible God).
a.
Ground yourself in this place, noting its solidity and your stillness.
Imagine lifting your arms as branches of a tree to take in the atmosphere [carbon
dioxide and water vapor]. Feel the air on your face, hair, and skin. Feel
yourself living inside a compartment of skin, in close contact with the air.
b.
Enter your inner heart and try to
sense the bosom of God in an invisible atmosphere. How do these inner
sensations affect your communion with the invisible, with Spirit?
c.
Now open yourselves to the wonder of a planet racing around the sun, and
the solar system racing through space at unimaginable speeds inside an
expanding universe. Feel the giddiness
and lightheadedness of such imaginable speed as the stars race away from each
other like dots on an expanding balloon.
d.
Take flight in your imaginings through this cosmos, discerning lights
amidst the darkness.
e.
Now return to the earth slowly. As you approach the earth from afar, experience
its shimmer, a blue globe against a black background of space. Sense the thin
haze of atmosphere surrounding it.
f.
Return to the solid earth. Now open your eyes and focus on the empty space
between objects. What do you see? Feel? Can you imagine the atmosphere filling
that space? Can you sense the invisible?
g.
How might you see and hear God’s Holy Spirit in the breath and voice
of other people? In the soothing whispers and murmurs of wind; of leaves; of
water?
B. Circular Movement of embodied desire
and prayer
Come to the place,
where every breath is praise,
And God is breathing
through each passing breeze.
Be planted by the waterside
and raise
Your arms with Christ
beneath these rooted trees,
Who lift their
breathing leaves up to the skies.
Be rooted too, as still
and strong as these,
Open alike to sun and
rain. Arise
From meditation by
these waters. Bear
The fruits of that deep
rootedness. Be wise
In the trees’ long
wisdom. Learn to share
The secret of their
patience. Pass the day
In their green fastness
and their quiet air.
Slowly discern a life,
a truth, a way,
Where simple being
flowers in delight.
Then let the chaff of life just
blow away.[4]
Sit comfortably with feet planted on
ground. Close your eyes. Place your palms flat down on your lap or knees. Calm
yourself, then think of your deepest longing for the Earth that can be
expressed to the Holy Spirit. Slowly imagine how you would embody a petition—a
cry upward. How would you move your palms and
arms? Now embody that movement. Freeze
that movement in some moment as you petition and pray to the Holy Spirit to
answer your longing. After your prayer is finished, slowly return your arms to
your lap. Concentrate on your expectations: how is your posture affected by
waiting on the Spirit? Maintain this posture of waiting and/or expectation. Where
are your palms? What is their orientation?
After a time, imagine receiving an
answer to your prayer in your deepest heart. How do you embody that receipt?
What do you do with your arms, your palms? How do you cradle your receipt of
God’s answer, of the Spirit’s intercession? What circuit have your arms and
palms traveled in the process of contemplation of desire, expression of
longing, waiting, and then reception? How does the awareness of air influence
the pattern and circuit of your arms? How does the starting place and ending
place of this circuit seem different? What have you learned of what is encompassed--of the middle of being?
C. Linearity in Space: Inhabiting the
Genius of Place
Scripture: Ps. 84.1-4, Gen. 1:1-6; Any psalm
attributed to David with nature themes.
Preparatory Poetic Meditation:
I find you in all Things and in all
My fellow creatures, pulsing with your
life;
As a tiny seed you sleep in what is
small
And in the vast you vastly yield
yourself.
The wondrous game that power plays with
Things
Is to move in such submission through
the world:
Groping in roots and growing thick in
trunks
And in treetops like a rising from the
dead.[5]
Exercise: Walk in nature; let an object in it
find you. How can you consider it as a subject: feather, piece of bark, shell, rock?
Being conscious of the air that separates you, slowly move to touch it,
reducing your distance. Spend time trying to experience it for what it is—a
subject. Smell it, focusing on the aroma’s connection with the air that builds
intimacy with the natural subject. Slowly consider: How is object converted into
subject by touch, sight, and smell? Are there sounds in its environment? How
might they link with the experience of this natural subject? How has the air
mediated appreciation of subject? What does this subject reveal about its
agency in the world of the Creator?[6]
Summary Prayer:
When I open my eyes, my God, on all
that you have created
I have heaven already in my hands.
Serenely I gather in my lap
Roses and lilies and all green things
While I praise your works.
My own works I ascribe entirely to you.
Gladness springs forth from sorrow
And joy brings happiness.[7]
Spiral Practice: Feeling Connected to
the global awakening and resistance
Spiral movement: circular, but never returning to the same place, but cognizant of the start’s centripetal and centrifugal forces in the travel (Ps. 107.4-5). Global Heating and Climate Crisis cannot be faced alone. Its huge challenge requires collective commitment and solidarity of support and action.
Walk in a circle and honor or thank
these, our human companions on this extraordinary journey of resisting
combustion-fueled consumerism and Climate Injustice.
Prayer to deliberate and initiate civil
resistance:
What can I do for justice, peace and
creation?
To learn new love for life, my life,
part of creation,
Related to everything that lives and
moves.
To let myself be challenged
When I see around me human destruction
of the world.
To break through the veil of deception
That hides from my eyes brutal facts.
And to resist, wherever I can, with
subversive power.[8]
Perpendicularity as Worship: Reverence toward the Spirit
(Guiding breathing and voice inward and
upward).
Sit
in a circle if in a group. Close your eyes: Slowly focus on your skin: how the
air may tickle, how the hair on your arms and legs pick up the breeze. Become
aware of your breathing, locating the entry of air into your nose and mouth,
its travel into your lungs. Visualize the air in your lungs connecting via
blood to your heart. Focus on your heartbeat. Practice calming. Now anticipate
praying with the Holy Spirit. Feel the breath welling up within as a prelude to
speech, your breath in your lungs ascending into your throat. Feel the life
pulse in your throat’s jugular.
Make some simple vocal sounds,
concentrating on the throat’s voicebox (where Israelites located the nephesh,
the soul). Follow these vocal sounds further upward into the sky, following in your
mind’s eye these words as they seek their ascendant subject. After this
practice, now follow the same awareness as you gently vocalize a petition or
expression of gratitude for the air to the Spirit in the Sky. Allow yourself to
experience intimacy with that Spirit in the involvement of air with breathing
and vocal expression. How does that awareness of your soul/nephesh’s
intimacy of vocal communication, pulse, and breath affect your words? Open your
eyes and look upward. Focus on varying layers of the atmosphere: the nearness
of nature above you, then to the clouds, and then beyond into the blue. What
lies beyond? Keep extending your awareness and opening your senses to the
variety of heights. After a time, close your eyes and again return to prayer. Give
thanks for any new awareness, surrender, or conscientiousness of the intimacy
of Spirit, air, breath, heartbeat, and your soul’s voice and longing. Focus
again on the Spirit inside you breathing out the vocal, blood pulsing
expression of your nephesh’s gratitude.[9] Extend this process to all living
creatures. Experience the communion of the Holy Spirit with material breath in
the voiced word of compassion, the highest refinement of the human soul’s
reverence and hospitality of others (Guardini 1998,175).[10]
Questions for group or individual
reflection: How has the Spirit’s hiddenness and operations inside you become
more revealed to your awareness by this exercise? How has your respect for all
creatures—and all peoples—as equals in intimate connection by these energies of
the Spirit? How do you connect the messages of the Spirit from Genesis 1 to a
reverence of God’s presence? Of God’s process in your life and world?
Closing prayer:
To you, Comforter, we cry;
To you, the gift of Spirit most high,
true fount of life, the coolness of our soul’s anointing by your breaths of
love, let your light impart to all of our senses your eternal and unfailing
might—to strengthen our weakness and give power to your will. Amen.[11]
II.
Liturgical and Sacramental Praxis
The awareness of atmospheric
trusteeship may be promoted by ritual or in a prayerful attitude of the sacred.
Dahill (2015) proposes moving church rituals and sacraments outdoors from the
confines of the built sanctuary into the cathedral of the sky.
- Prayer of Confession
O God, hear our lament over nature’s
“un-creation.” Allow our lament to be rooted in infinite hope so that our
purpose does not whither when its champions are bent low or lopped off. We
confess our participation in what we now lament: an extractive material economy
out of ecological balance. We repent of climate catastrophe and injustice. We
ask, dear God, for the Holy Spirit’s re-vitalizing forgiveness and guidance.
All for the sake of restoring your trust in us to tend and flourish inside your
bright and beautiful creation.
- Baptism in the Wild[12]
Human alienation from nature may be
countered by a Christian spirituality of biocentric re-immersion into reality,
cultivating loyalty to the genius of place and planet. “Rewilding” is a
Christian spiritual practice for the Anthropocene. Perceiving the disconnection
of contemporary human life from its ecological foundation reveals the link
between spiritless consumerism and hasty, combustion-fueled materialism on the
horizontal plane. Human obsession with the horizontal plane of the ephemeral
obstructs the awareness of eternity which integrates verticality and
horizontality in the living rhythms and harmonious alignments of the animated
world inside well-ordered nature. Perpendicularity recognizes the Sky’s
punctuated sustenance of nature in rain, air, storm, the intimacy of plant and
animal respiration—and our own--inside landscaped moieties of human artifice
and wild naturalness. The danger is the
former has irretrievably swallowed up the latter. As a corrective of human alienation
from nature, Dahill (2005) proposes the liturgical renewal of and venue shift
for baptism:
Our bodies have formed themselves in
delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an
animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as
our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the
honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by
our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of
extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds
of their coherence…Out in contact and conviviality [with open-aired nature is]
an astonishing fullness of the baptismal life, a much wilder immersion.
It is after immersion in water that
Jesus re-emerges into air to meet the Spirit “coming as a dove” (Mt. 3.16). These
processive images through water and air recapitulate the sequence of Gen. 1.1-4,
with the immersion of God’s incarnate Son at the historical point of border entry
by the people into the promised Land, a people sent within the covenantal
dispensation of obedience as agents of conquest in the land suffering the
cosmic effects of the fall. The spiritual conquerer Jesus emerges by biological
necessity to meet with the sent Spirit in the Sky, for the restoration of the ontology
of shalom, beauty, and freedom.
Baptism liturgically incarnates the
wild death-in-birth and birth-in-death experience of a liminal, refugee mother
in labor suffocating under social eviction and the threat of extinction (cf.
Rom. 8) then released by joy. Rather than inert backdrops of a solely
spiritualized drama, the water (cf. Hab. 2.14) and atmosphere have agency in
the transmission of the energies of the Trinity manifested by the voice from
heaven, the airborne kinematics of the dove, and the baptismal washing and anointing
that returns forth (in an extension of divine missio) a new family into
the wider cosmos of land and nature. Just as social outsiders and animals were
participants in the messiah’s birthing into the land that was promised, all of intended
Creation becomes incorporated into the promised renewal dramatized in
baptism, intimate agents in the salvific renewal of Eden on this earth. The
cosmos is reaffirmed in both its materiality and infused spiritual essence
flowing from both the Godhead (in union) and now the presence of the new family
of anointed trustees (in communion). God’s new superintendence of gracious love
manifests as maternal and not dominating, ever steadfast in loyalty and
care (hesed). The wails of the newly delivered give way at (and process
in) the mother’s joy—her shouting and singing at the astounding punctuation of
being and history—to become the beneficiary of a new earth. Christ becomes
all-in-all, the Spirit diffuses forth through Creation as the Creator
intended, bringing what is elected in the cosmos home in adoption and
purification, the glorious summation of physical quickening revealed in ringing
eternal praise and shining and blissful theophoric heartbeats.
For
you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the
mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap
their hands
(--Isa.
55:12; cf. Pss. 65:13; 98:7-8; Zech. 2:14).
[1] "With the body, man
stands in fellowship with the earth; with the spirit, which is from above, man
is related to heaven” (Bavinck 2012 [1908], 1).
[2]I
am indebted for the idea of sacred wordplay and for this translation by Cantor
Sharon Bernstein of וּפְרוֹשׂ
עָלֵינוּ
סֻכַּת
שְׁלוֹמֶךָ
(Ufros aleinu sukat sh'lomecha). From the Hashkiveinu, the second
liturgical blessing following the Shema during Maariv recited on the
Sabbath. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashkiveinu.
An
alternative text for this exercise is the song “Breathe,” a recording released
by the performer Michael W. Smith on 9/11/2001. The musical performance of this
song is available on the web by Smith as well as by Rebecca St. James and would
be a suitable preface or complement for a practice, “Finding your Breath.”
(These lyrics could also be introduced to include Spiritual reflection on the
anniversary of that Black Flag day):
This is
the air I breathe--
Your holy
presence living in me;
This is my
daily bread--
Your very
word spoken to me;
And I --I'm
desperate for you
And I-- I'm
lost without you (Howe, Barnett, and Zolleyn 2001).
[3]
A New Zealand Prayer Book (Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and
Polynesia), 163.
[4] https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/beatus-vir-a-reflection-on-psalm-1/
[5] Rilke (2005). “Only where there is praise may lamentation / go.” --Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, I.8.
[6]
This exercise adapts Hamilton-Poore (2007).
[7]
Hildegaard of Bingen [1098-1179), Windows of Faith: Prayers of Holy
Hildegaard, ed. By Walburga Storch, OSB (Liturgical Press, 1997, 65), from
Hamilton-Poore (2007)
[8]
Marga Buhrig (1915-2002). From Hamilton-Poore (2007)
[9] Connect this exercise to
singing, which may be the most exalted form of these connections.
[10]A
contemplation from Bonaventure (The Soul's Journey into God, VI)
emphasizes the relational [atmospheric mediating] foci embodied in this
exercise:
The highest good must be most
self-diffusive. But the greatest self-diffusion cannot exist unless it is
actual and intrinsic, substantial and hypostatic, natural and voluntary, free
and necessary, lacking nothing and perfect…as in the case in a producing by way
of generation and spiration, so that it is from an eternal principle eternally
coproducing so that there would be a beloved and a cobeloved, the one generated
and the other spirated, and this is the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit—unless these were present, it would by no means be the highest good
because it would not diffuse itself in the highest degree…Hence another
diffusion can be conceived greater than this, namely, one in which the one
diffusing communicates to the other his entire substance and nature…If,
therefore, you can behold with your mind’s eye the purity of goodness, which is
the pure act of a principle loving in charity with a love that is both free and
due and a mixture of both, which is the fullest diffusion by way of nature and
will, which is a diffusion by way of the Word, in which all things are said,
and by way of the Gift, in which other gifts are given, then you can see that
through the highest communicability of the good, there must be a Trinity of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
[11]
Adapted from Creator Spiritus by Rabanus Maurus (776-856) presented in
Hamilton-Poore (2007).
[12]
Preparatory reading: Ps. 65. 5-13 on the processive presence and character of
the sustaining Godhead.
