Take the Earth Day to reflect on the grandest of creations
Generally, a holiday has to be at least 2,000 years old for me to care about it. I have made an exception for Thanksgiving and Independence Day and Memorial Day but that's about it. I respect secretaries (don't we call them assistants now?), but I just can't bring myself to elevate Secretaries Day into the pantheon of sacred time.
But I also make an exception for Earth Day.
Earth Day falls every year on April 22. There are two main reasons I love Earth Day. The first is that I really love the earth as a creation of God. Read Psalm 19 and you will get what I mean:
"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."
There are traces of God's presence in our sacred texts but there are deep footprints of God's presence in the natural world. When I teach where God lives to kids I usually say, "God lives everywhere in nature and everywhere in us where we let God in." I love the earth as God's revealed creation so much I try to sneak the phrase "here on planet earth" into a lot of my columns even when it does not fit.
The second reason I love Earth Day is that being born in Milwaukee I love all things Wisconsin, and the original Earth Day was created by the beloved late senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, back in 1970.
I am not a fan of the way that Earth Day has become politicized. I believe that people who love the earth can come from all political parties, ideologies, faiths and no faiths. For the same reasons why no ideology or political movement ought to have a monopoly on patriotism, no environmental movement ought to have a monopoly on earth loving. Earth Day is about the earth not the politics of the earth. Of course politics are implicated in caring for the earth, but they aren't one political flavor.
So, in honor of Earth Day I reprint one of my favorite children's Bible interpretations (midrashim) from my first book, "Does God Have A Big Toe?"
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Partners
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