Where is Your Happy Place? Where is Ours?

If you have not signed up for, or accessed online, NCR’s marvelous Earthbeat series, billed as “stories of climate crisis, faith and action”, please do so. The postings are brief but rich and varied; the suggested actions inspiring and, even better, manageable! 

Beginning September 1 and continuing through October 4, authors, Brenna Davis and Michael Downs of the Ignatian Spirituality Network, are presenting a special Earthbeat series with photographs, brief reflections, and recommended actions centering on “At Home in Creation”.  On Mondays, they will highlight gratitude, on Wednesdays, grieving, and on Fridays, “going forth and creating the world that we imagine”.

The question they asked in the very first reflection always provokes a reaction in me: Where is my happy place? Where is yours?

I’m going to bet it isn’t the Mall!

I’m going to guess it is probably someplace with natural beauty or childhood memories or love found. I just returned from the seashore where I spent a week with family, including my brother. He and I had been coming to the same shore since we were about three years old (I won’t say how long that has been), and we are so “at home with creation” when there. It still has that amazing power, often simultaneously, to leave us both exhilarated and becalmed. Perhaps this is where the phrase comes from, because it does literally shore us up.

But in these days of fires and floods and famines and flight, I am more interested in where ourshared happy place is and how we all get there (And I realize “happy” is much too light a word at this point). We can begin by defining our mission. “At Home in Creation” suggests we seek to find, preserve, and create “places where we feel the ‘caress of God’” and where we are “most at home in the communion of all things.” Then we are to use what we learn there to strive to “ensure that all members of our global household are able to flourish” as we have.

This kind of mission might just work for church reform, too.

On a trip to Paris a few years ago, I was standing among the crowds outside Notre Dame Cathedral when I overheard a teacher give a group of his students this (paraphrased) summary of Catholicism versus Protestantism: “Cathedrals like this one,” he said, “always align East and West. The congregations inside always face East so that, as they pray or hear Mass, they can see the morning sun shines through the rose and stained glassed windows filling the space with color and highlighting the Biblical stories etched in glass. Then they hear the choirs and chants and readings; they smell the incense; they taste the bread and wine. The sensual has been a main part of the Catholic religious experience since Medieval times and before; in Protestantism, it was all about the Word.”

He admitted that, with such a simplistic summary, he was not giving either religion its due, but I was intrigued anyway. We definitely do not feel the “caress of God” only in the Word (with an apology to Protestants for ignoring their complexity and richness by this simple reduction), especially when its recitation and description is relegated to one gender only (with plaudits to Protestants for their pioneering and widespread gender inclusivity). We also need to celebrate the sensual, to love the world around us so deeply we will do all we can – and more – to defend and cherish it as a source of infinite grace.

I promised the “At Home in Creation” series’ actions were manageable. The first day’s recommendation asks us to immerse “ourselves in our local bioregions,” the places that help us find “the nourishment and courage to lovingly care for our global home.” Some are probably not far from our front doors.

The poet, Ikkyu, gives us all wise advice for this journey:

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law

and endlessly chant complicated sutras.

Before doing that, though, they should learn

how to read the love letters sent by the wind

            and rain, the snow and moon.