A few weeks ago, as April turned into May, I had the pleasure of walking to class on the Western Seminary campus through Centennial Park and down 11^th street past rows and patches and pots of tulips as well as flowering trees and bushes bursting with new greens and unopened buds.

I come to Michigan twice a year to teach in a low-residential D.Min. program. It’s not lost on me that those two weeks are two of the loveliest—spring and fall when plant life is at its most expressive, evocative, and, here and there, animated. Christy Berghoef’s exquisite photography and recurrent reflections on bits of Michigan landscape and lakeside have made me see Michigan with a new depth of appreciation. They make me grateful to be a frequent visitor there. 

Returning home to California I found myself reveling in the greenery in our small back yard—ginko and birch and lemon trees, Japanese maples and azaleas and camellias, geraniums and freesias and crepe myrtle. Descriptors like cheerful, welcoming, and glad came to mind as I looked at them; it took no imaginative stretch into metaphor or personification to recognize them as benevolent living beings.  

Studies published and cited in mainstream scientific journals have reestablished what healers and spiritual teachers have known for centuries: that being in the presence of plant life helps humans thrive. We focus more clearly and learn more quickly; our attention span is longer; we heal more quickly; anxiety dissipates; our blood pressure normalizes and our breathing becomes deeper; the air around us becomes cleaner, not to mention more fragrant. By all measures of wellbeing, plants bless us.

It’s why the Japanese recommend the practice of “forest bathing.” Recognizing that blessing, it makes complete sense that in the Potawatomi language, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, the word for trees is “those who protect us.” Plant remedies are enjoying a resurgence of attention in “integrative medicine” and hospitals and classrooms and office spaces are increasingly being greened. Plants are more than décor: those ficus trees and philodendron and maidenhair ferns are our companions. 

The publication of the “Green Bible” in 2008 reflected and encouraged a renewal of interest in the ways scripture directs our attention to other orders of being. Along with angels and animals, plants are singled out and recognized as beings with their own life force and value—not only utilitarian, or designed to serve human needs, but in themselves.

When Egypt was plagued by locusts, the measure of the curse is taken in a single sentence: “Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.” And in Isaiah 55:12 God’s promise of restoration is given to God’s people in a way that specifically reminds them of their connectedness to all the orders of creation: “For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” 

 A significant point in my own faith journey came when I began to wonder about the insistent anthropocentrism of the preaching I was hearing. Even the Genesis story in which God finds the plants and animals good before any humans are around to put them to use should give us a clue about the value of nonhuman being.

My mother’s affectionate attentiveness to each plant in her suburban garden (and her eagerness to take me out to greet them all when, as an adult, I visited home) was as powerful a testimony to relatedness as any I subsequently heard in more academic theological contexts. She delighted in new rosebuds and ripening figs and the succulents that lived out their slow, sturdy lives, not unlike turtles, in Southern California sun. Her occasional slippage into “who” rather than “what” as she talked about them seemed a perfectly fitting tribute to the friendship she enjoyed with them as well as the hummingbirds and finches. 

She told a story more than once about suffering what was then termed a “nervous breakdown” during college that led her to seek medical advice. The prescription lasted her a lifetime: “Plant a garden. Put your hands into the soil every day.” Reconnect with the earth and its creatures. It healed her and continued to heal her: the first thing she did after a day of public school teaching was give us hugs if we were home, change her clothes, and head for the garden. I’m sure she met God there among the earthworms and sweet alyssum. 

My own path has led me toward poets more often than plant catalogues, but there, too, I found “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” pulsing through words and into the space between us. Hopkins’ summary statement about God’s presence among the “dappled things” in the natural world serves as its own addendum to the Creed: “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: praise him.”

The opening line of another of his best known poems has surely served many of us as a statement of faith: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil . . .” And the wide reach of Mary Oliver’s poetry (I heard her read to a packed auditorium of 1500 one happy evening) testifies to a hunger we largely indoor humans share for restored intimacy with the earth.

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said. So poets have considered them. In every generation, in ways that mirror the needs of the moment, they invite us to reclaim relationship with other orders of creation, fellow beings loved in their own right. Mary Oliver, considering the blue iris, recognizes her own longing to be “the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle” she sees in the flower’s way of being. Walking among trees, she writes, “I walk slowly and bow often.”

The American Romantics I first encountered in my teens, all those anti-institutional New England Transcendentalists, held something in trust that more orthodox folk seemed to be subordinating to moral preachments and the promises of industry. Those biblically literate renegades gave me lines to hold onto when my low-church Protestantism began to run dry. The term “pathetic fallacy” critics have subsequently coined seems an insulting and irreverent way to describe how writers attribute human feelings to nonhuman presences in the natural world. No clapping of hands to be seen or heard from the academic distances they kept. 

It may be that in this historical moment when the hand of greed destroys every natural wonder in its path we may find comfort for our afflictions in those unroofed places where grace is bodied forth with astounding resilience (though I’m not convinced these days, like Hopkins, that it is “never spent”).

It may be a time to seek and find a kindly, intimate, mystical connection with the quiet beings around us, and to retrieve a practice of the presence of God not unlike Emerson’s when he wrote about the small rhodora flower, “Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! / I never thought to ask; I never knew; /But in my simple ignorance suppose / The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.”

All photos by Christy Berghoef