Some of you may have heard that I have a dog named Ghost. Ghost is a beautiful lady dog, and she’s very particular about certain things. Specifically, she loves being petted, and if you’ve stopped petting her before she’s had enough, she’ll let you know by producing a long, long groan or grunt. She will then proceed to push herself into you and perhaps claw you a bit in an effort to get you to continue. It’s sometimes quite the show, and if you ignore her efforts, she’ll often huff and jump up to leave the room.
Sometimes, I think we all hope that Divinity would do the same in our lives. Not the leaving the room part probably, but the clear concerted effort to get us to start petting, start paying attention and pleasing God again. We feel like it would be nice if the Holy Ghost acted a little more like our Great-Pyrenees and Lab mix, Lady Ghost, and just made her desires clearly, very clearly known.
But perhaps, that’s the difference between Lady Ghost and the Divine Lady. One is very particular about what pleases her, and she wants the same thing from everyone, but the other seems entirely open to our infinite healthy expressions and receptions of her goodness and wisdom in our diversity.
We see this around us in the variety of wonderful faces, each with a holy spark shining from within, but also each being motivated by various things - God expressing herself in the wondrousness of our finite forms. We see this also especially in nature, in the cycles of the seasons of life within and around, and in how the garden of earth strives to create greater and greater expressions of ecology and harmonious community in all their diversity.
So, as it’s alluded to told in many scriptures, God loves abundance of life and will support an infinity of healthy expression. But on an individual basis though, I think the Holy One knows our options, what we like, and probably has some advice on a best course of action based on those things and what’s best for our future. This is where finding our niche becomes important and when listening for how Goddess is calling us deeper into our reception of her comes to the forefront of our daily spiritual practice.
Although we often read Darwin a little differently, in his explorations about evolution he emphasizes the role finding our niche plays in survival. He explores how the forms of life (and even the forms of matter) that serve well in community tend to be the most robust in their stability and ability to thrive they gain support and connection with others around them. All of that lends itself to being the “fittest,” as it’s called. Generally, a posture of domination doesn’t help with this, but what does, is a posture of directed communal service and our own individual type of community awareness and efforts towards our health. It takes a village for life itself to thrive, and there are always better and better expressions to be found, and as humans, we can uplift this understanding intentionally to put evolutionary growth into greater practice.
As a church, we have different interests and skills, but there seems to be certain ideas and efforts that come up that we generally support. Whether it’s our emphasis on interfaith reflection and openness, our affirmation toward the LGBTQ+, our interest in rational spirituality, Swedenborgianism, or our care for each other, nature, and our wider community: we share common core elements that bring us together in warmth. Individually, we may have interest in gardening, woodwork, spirituality, music, friendship, carpentry, or knitting, and to the extent that these things serve us and others, perhaps uplifting our spirits and our spaces, they help make this community a functioning, moving body. With us serving in our own niche ways, we make this collection of diverse peoples an able body, striving to uplift the wider community and itself towards the Higher Power and listening for the ways Divinity is calling us deeper into the diversity within and around us.
Sometimes we may seem far apart and disconnected, but our common interests and communal orientation toward support and justice makes us a one even then.
I believe that nature as a whole also works like a communal body. We learn from Darwin and others that the more an ecosystem can find harmony as it grows and changes (because it’s always growing, changing, in some way) the stronger, more fit it becomes as a whole. Because everything that we know of is actually an ecosystem of somewhat disparate individuals.
Our bodies, for example, are filled with various types of cells and organisms, a variety that allows for our bodily life. Some of these types of cells, we’re told, may have existed in other environments as well, but eventually they found a home in the human body, in animal bodies, and formed a community that makes us “us.” These cells have found that in our bodies, making up our bodies, they can thrive, they can be more fit, they have partners that embolden their work of life further, and there’s a consciousness that they can all get behind. It is as though a human body creates a vision that many different types of organisms can work toward, perhaps in the image and likeness of the kin-dom of God. And when all these things come together, we call them one, we call them me.
Further, without bacteria and certain types of fungus, the ecosystem of our body finds it much harder to survive, which is why we take probiotics after we’ve had to take antibiotics, to fortify our immune and our digestive system. We’re even told that the amount of bacteria in our bodies far outnumbers our cells. Interestingly, the main differentiation between cells that we call part of our body and those we call foreign agents is that “our” cells often read from our DNA, whereas often the other, outsider organisms, have other sets of DNA, other holy books to inspire them. Funny enough, as babies we typically receive both our DNA and our helpful microbes from within our mother.
My only critique of this differentiation is that many of the beneficial “outsider” cells have developed in tandem with us for millions and millions of years, just like we have with each other, honing our DNA as we hone our collective, communal advancement. This communal connection is so deep that the bulk of the waste products from the beneficial bacteria within our guts are antioxidants, substances that mainly help our other cells not be harmed by their use of oxygen in their work.
So in a way, our bodies are each large, diverse ecosystems. And if you think about it, each cell is an ecosystem too, and each element of each cell is an ecosystem. Even atoms are ecosystems of seemingly disparate elements, and on, and on.
We are each a church, in a way, a community of holy embodiment, representing the diversity that leads to the perfection and the infinite growth of the heavenly kin-dom. Emanuel Swedenborg writes in his book Heaven and Hell, that the increasing variety of heaven is what makes it more and more perfect as it grows. The Lady, the Lord, wants to embolden our fitness within our niche, she wants to uplift and inspire our growth toward her in community in our own way and in our own freewill. As an infinite being of infinite fitness, goodness and love, the Glorified Christ Sophia is expressed in all life and creation, and particularly in our willingness and effort to see that and to try to embolden her expressions around and within us, like the gardeners we are.
We’re told in scripture that humanity has a responsibility, not a selfish domination, but a responsibility toward nature. Like with any cosmic superhero gifted great powers, we as humans have great responsibility. And beyond our relationships with each other I can’t think of where this is more poignant than in our relationships with the earth around us.
As a type of cell within the organism that we call earth, we have unfortunately often acted quite cancerous. We look at the world around us, the holy garden of diversity that gave and gives us life, and we too often see only lowly strangers, tools only worthy for our self-gratification. Greenery we trample under our feet, under our chemicals and concrete. Animals we often torture until death in heinous, human-made pins and warehouses erected for our consumption. Even our fellow humanity we in some places allow to be taken advantaged of and consumed by for-profit prisons and for-profit monsters of industry, serving a bottom line that only serves the vastly, outrageously wealthy: people who hoard literal mountains of cash who still seek the few dollars left on the poor’s line of credit, like dragons worthy of fantasy.
Like in a fantasy, our Higher Power calls on us to pick up the sword of wisdom, the sword that we’re told Jesus brought, and start to cut through the sick fantasy of our often heinous system, start to cut through the vines of entanglement that keep us in selfish practices, and disperse the socioeconomic cords that suffocate all too many from blossoming today.
With this sword, let us dutifully prune and cultivate the trees of abundance within and around us to allow for future growth. Let us use wisdom to explore deeper into God’s diverse garden, getting to know the world around us and striving to uplift it into even healthier expressions of Divinity.
To end, I want to say that our church is also a cell of sorts in the body of society, a being in the garden of humanity and earth. We have a responsibility to uplift that garden as a gardener in the likeness of Goddess. We are invited to get to know those around us in order to find our place in this world and to better understand what we can do for others – to find out what our beautiful niche is in cultivating the Divinity that others are already receiving. Amen.
