Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushroom for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind
Just enough.
Nanao Sakaki
Earth Prayers From Around the World
I wonder what the connection is with "material spirituality", acknowledging the presence of God in materiality - or at the least, the fact that all material things are gifts from God. - verses trying to fill the empty spaces in our lives with 'stuff' - 'stuff' that has been religiously devalued as 'material' instead of 'spiritual' so that it has no hopes of filling what is achingly empty. What if instead of trying to disavow ourselves completely of 'materialistic' tendencies and the value of materiality, we saw all matter as holy and wholly of God? Would we be satisfied with 'enough' - the powerful and marginalized word of a Godly economy? Maybe this pseudo-Puritanical judgement against all things material - as if we can cleanse ourselves of our context of consumption - is moving in the wrong direction. There seems to be a fine line here. If material is good, spiritual, of God, then accumulating material should be a good thing. But the story of the manna witnesses differently. The manna is, without doubt, from God. And there is 'enough' for all - but no more. Any attempts at hording this material end badly. We cannot horde the holy, we cannot build dams to contain the precious and keep it from the rest of the world - not if we want the story to end well. We have to learn the economy of 'enough' while honoring the inherent goodness and God-giftedness of the things that make life possible - and even delightful. Sadly, in our culture, we don't even know what 'enough' looks like. How can we learn?
No comments:
Post a Comment