We Are Traveling Towards Love
Earth Theology is how we get from despair amid uncertainty to love amid uncertainty.
Last spring when I applied to theology school, I did not know what the word theology meant. A friend who has a master’s in divinity and doctorate in psychology suggested I consider going to theology school a couple years before. I had laughed. I had no idea what theology was, but it conjured ideas of God, religion and ministry, which I didn’t perceive as part of my world or worldview. I’d pictured myself a scientist since 6th grade. I’d stopped attending church as a college sophomore. I understood that like oil and water, science and God don’t mix.
Note: I use the word God though across faiths, cultures and fields of study, there are many words for a bigger than us presence in the universe. For Love that knows no bounds.
When my friend had suggested theology school, I didn’t yet know How to Know God, so didn’t know I knew God. He suggested theology school, because I was asking a lot of questions that he knew were theological ones. He also felt God guiding him to suggest theology school to me and knew not to say this then, because it might send me running out of the room.
Two years later, I still didn’t know what theology was when I realized I might want to go to theology school. I thought, “how does one do it?“. Apply to theology school. I hadn’t applied for admission to school since 1993 for my PhD program, which was before the internet was normal and email common.
How could I return to school at 51 years old in an area of study I had always known but didn’t know by name?
I took a chance and applied. I was accepted and then declined the acceptance. I chose to do a yoga studies program instead. There was nothing easy about this process. Often, there were tears. Always uncertainty. Then, in a moment of insight last July, I chose to apply to a different theology school, the Iliff School of Theology. There was a beckoning. Just like Willow guided me in Greenland, the way appeared, scholarship funding too. The only choice was to go and do the yoga studies program too. It’s been a busy year.
I’ve taken courses in mysticism, the concept of justice across faiths, and hermeneutics of the Bible as it offers exploration into one’s life. However, my first dive into the vast waters of theology was only this spring in an ‘Introduction to Theology’ course, for which this essay is my final assignment. The prompt was “What importance or relevance does theology hold in the world today?”. My answer is lots.
My expertise is in Earth Science, a PhD and 30 years of living into knowing more about how our planet works. What I’ve learned over a year of theology school is that one can be a scientist and a theologian. This year has been a wonderful weaving of what I know about Earth with how she offers her wisdom to me through Earth Theology.
Is Earth Theology a thing? It is. I think it is old, though when I looked it up on the web it appears new. We are living into its rebirth, into remembering ourselves and all we know through relationship with one another, our planet and the Divine.
For my theology course this spring, we read far more than Christian theology, though this was also covered. And, we were asked to choose a deep dive book. I chose Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow. A friend had given the book to me in November thinking it fit my journey from where I was coming and all that I was living into. “Some of us are born theologians” claims Judith Plaskow. She states this about herself, because from a young age she focused on the BIG, the tragic, the perplexing, and mystery. For as long as she could remember, she wanted to know where God was during the Holocaust. She wanted to know how God allows for genocide, evil and suffering.
There are a few signs this is me too. That I’ve always been a theologian. In 4th grade, I chose to write about Joseph Goebbels for a class report. The task was to write about someone influential in history. I was 10 years old and chose a Nazi propagandist. I wanted to know how the Germans of which I am one, born there and my family has lived in SE Germany for generations, allowed it all – the war, genocide, and the shift in mindset to one ruled by fear. Fear that propagates. Fear that leads to immense suffering. I don’t remember what I wrote or concluded in the report but do recall that other kids weren’t writing about Goebbels-like folks in history.
In 8th Grade, I was expected to affirm my baptism. I did this because it was expected, and I feared not doing it. But I knew I didn’t believe church doctrine. I liked going to church because I had friends there, but I knew very little of what it was all about. Much more social club, less a center of faith for me.
After 8th grade, I went to live for the summer with my Oma in Frankfurt, Germany. My parents paid for the trip, and I spent 6 weeks with her. I paid for trips back after 9th and 10th grades, then paid to do a French exchange program after 11th and a German exchange program to Munich after 12th grade. I was drawn back to Europe the land of my birth, and I wasn’t afraid of being alone in foreign countries with languages I didn’t know well or at all. I was bored at home. Bored in school, most of the time except my senior year English course.
That course was Philosophy of Western Literature. “Quo vadis? Where are we going?”, asked the teacher, Mr. Wilson, at the start of the course, indicating this would be the theme for the whole year. I earned a C on the first essay for which I’d written a solid but dull essay, and B’s on the second and third. So, for the fourth one, I decided to take a chance and write in a way I’d never written for any course before.
I wrote a dialogue of ‘Where we are going’ between Jesus and Santa Claus. They both knew, but didn’t agree. I wasn’t sure what God, who I believed in and feared, would think of my essay. I believed in God a bit like Santa Claus, and the Devil too.
My beliefs were what others thought, what people I knew spoke, not what I knew about myself or the world. I didn’t yet know how to know God. I wrote the essay despite my fear of damnation and turned it in. God didn’t show up to criticize, and Mr. Wilson gave it an A+. He also wrote a note. He had anticipated the possibility in me for this essay based on his instinct. He’d guided me. To dive deep. Deeper than any other high school teacher. Deeper than anyone at church or in my family. He knew. A lot. And he knew how to be a guide.
Our world lacks guides or connection to them. Philosophers. Theologians. Psychologists. Spiritual Directors. Mystics. Doulas of the Liminal. And the Scientists who also inhabit this space. Folks who engage by guiding us through discernment into our true selves – our soul, our essence. And into relationship with All.
Without folks like this in our churches, schools, and workplaces, or maybe it is that they are there but are not safe and cannot serve as a guide, we need these encounters in our families. However, families have been pulled apart by traumas of all kinds, tears that are widened by a culture that prioritizes what we do rather than who we are. We are often without folks in our lives who ask us to ‘go on’ when we feel deep, think BIG, and question everything including our sanity. Perhaps this is questioning our sanity, or perhaps it is that some of us don’t fit into the world as it is and are here to be guides ourselves to be theologians even when we don’t know what this is. To say things, do things, explore, and allow the BIG to arrive for us and for others.
There is under-enrollment in most years at many theology schools. For a degree like the one I am pursuing, a master’s in theological studies, it isn’t clear what I’ll do with it. We have the perception that one should have a plan for what they do with a degree. After years without a guide other than the Earth and the Divine, it is wild to land in a place full of human guides, my professors and classmates.
Our orientation was unlike anything I’ve done before. A revealing of self and our capabilities that are the gifts guides have. Folks who like my high school English teacher can hear what isn’t said and guide through discernment, revelation and love.
Theology is the path. Up the same mountain and up different mountains of the many faith traditions of today and yesterday, the traditions lost because of imperialism and colonialism, and their violence. Theology is a path we can build ourselves rather than follow the ones of the past hundred to thousands of years of increasingly violent wars, devastation of our planet, and loss of knowing ourselves. Of disconnection. Theology is how we begin to see that much of what we think we know is a small fraction of the possibilities that have been considered, and didn’t make the cut when doctrine and practice were being formalized in European faith and science traditions.
Theology offers promise. Theology is talk of all and All. Theology is a deep dive into the nature of knowing and being, and can include relationship with the Divine. Theological education sneaks its way into our world in some places, perhaps a coach, teacher or minister who knows how to guide. It takes place in some churches and could be done in many more. But my thought is that we need space for theology in town squares, at dinner tables, in magazines, film, You Tube videos and on Substack. And we need to include in this Theology of the Earth.
Earth Theology is how we get from despair amid uncertainty to love amid uncertainty.
Theology doesn’t promise that you’ll know all there is to know. Just the part of possibility that you are here to know through exploration of self, the Divine, and a planet that is and will always be full of mystery and love.