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.

1. 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.

2. 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.