Karen Hollis | August 6, 2023
Care for the Common Good 1
Genesis 1:24-31 and 2:1-4 translated by Robert Alter
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light”. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day.
And God said, “Let there be vault in the midst of the waters, and let it divide water from water”. And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was. And God called the vault Heavens, and it was evening and it morning, a second day.
And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear”, and so it was. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of waters He called Seas, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth grow grass, plants yielding seed of each kind and trees bearing fruit of each kind, that has its seed within it upon the earth”. And so it was. And the earth put forth grass, plants yielding seed, and trees bearing fruit of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, third day.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and they shall be signs for the fixed times and for days and years, and they shall be lights in the vault or the heavens to light up the
earth”.
And so it was. And God made the two great lights, the great light for dominion of day and the small lights for the dominion of night, and the stars. And God placed them in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth and to have dominion over day and night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, the fourth day.
And God said, “Let the waters swarm with the swarm of living creatures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens”. And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind, and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth”. And it was evening and it was morning, fifth day.
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind. And so it was. And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of every kind and all crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth.
And God created the human in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.
And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it, and hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth.” And God said, “Look, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth and every tree that has fruit bearing seed, yours they will be for food.
And to all the beasts of the earth and to all the fowl of the heavens and to all that crawls on the earth, which has the breath of life within it, the green plants for food.” And so it was. And God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good. And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.
Then the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their array. And God completed on the seventh day the task He had done, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the task He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, for on it He had ceased from all His task that He had created to do. This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
Proverbs 8:1-3, 22-31 Translation by Robert Alter
Look Wisdom calls out,
and discernment lifts her voice.
At the top of the heights, on the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand,
by the gates, at the city's entrance,
at the approach to the portals, she shouts
The Lord created me at the outset of His way,
the very first of His works of old.
In remote eons I was shaped,
at the start of the first things of earth.
When there were no deeps I was spawned,
when there were no wellsprings, water sources.
Before mountains were anchored,
before hills I was spawned.
He had yet not made earth and open land,
and the world’s first clods of soil.
When he founded the heavens, I was there,
when He traced a circle on the face of the deep,
when He propped up the skies above,
when He powered the springs of the deep,
when He set to the sea its limit,
that the waters not flout His command,
when He strengthened the earth’s foundations.
And I was by Him, an intimate,
I was His delight day after day,
playing before Him at all times,
playing in the world, His earth,
and my delight with humankind.
This exploration of Care for the Common Good begins with creation, because everything that is needed to support the common good begins and ends with creation.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
Whenever I hear the entire Genesis 1 reading, it looks the same in my imagination, like a series of paintings. And while it’s not exactly the story modern science tells, through this repetitive convention of storytelling, Genesis invites us to see creation as a process that unfolds bit by bit and stage by stage to create the web of interconnectivity that is our world. Life on our planet evolved to be interdependent – conditions created by one expression of life creates an opportunity for another to live in collaboration. When life is in balance, everyone gives and receives what they need. According to theologian Matthew Fox, this is wisdom at work. What does wisdom want? What is wisdom’s dream? When we talk about seeking wisdom or invoking wisdom in a situation, we’re often talking about things like – getting perspective, considering our impact on others, making choices that affirm dignity in others. As one who was present before creation, an intimate with God during creation, and delights and plays with creation, Wisdom wants our web of interconnectivity to truly live, wisdom wants us to thrive.1 Creation is the primary place to find wisdom . . . it’s tucked into an infinitesimal number of lessons that creation has to teach us.
You may be aware of the indigenous author and botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer braids together in these pages Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and her own story in a way that teaches her readers how to listen to creation’s lessons. I love her teaching about language – I think it’s the most important in her book because it gives us a pathway to move past knowing our interconnectedness intellectually to perceiving and engaging it.
So, language. Who among you speaks more than one language? (raise hands) Keep your hands raised and are there any others like me who took a language in school or made an attempt to learn another language . . . and decided not to pursue it – raise your hands? (put hands down) For those who raised their hands, see if you resonate with this: when I was learning German in high school and university, I found that I began to think in German. Aside from the words themselves, the sentence structure, phrases, and such were a little different from English. It made me think a little differently. For instance, in English I might ask, “what are you doing today?” The German asks, what are you making today? Hmmm, that’s a different way of thinking. Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience with language.
The difference between English and German is nowhere near as vast as the difference between English and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Potawatomi.
In Potawatomi, the word translated “to be,” the word that affirms life and spirit is yawe (y-a-w-e) . . . meaning I am, you are, we are. We know Yahweh, of course, though spelled differently as a Hebrew name for God. Kimmerer asks: “Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of Creation? The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.”2 Yawe, “To be” is integral to the Potawatomi language, because of its affirmation of animacy.
When Kimmerer began studying Potawatomi, she struggled to understand the emphasis on being. Picking up a dictionary, she read, “to be a Saturday,” she scoffed and threw the book down. “Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun.” She looked up more words: “to be a hill,’ ‘to be red,’ . . . ‘to be a bay.’” Then, she writes, “I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word.
But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live.” 3
In Potawatomi, animacy is extended to rocks, mountains, water, fire, places, beings imbued with spirit, sacred medicines, songs, drums, even stories.4 This is a very different way of thinking than in our English. It’s an affirmation of interconnectedness, of family, an intimate relationship with the wisdom of creation.
Animacy is a real struggle in English, because we know in our minds we are connected, we feel connected with our hearts, there is a knowing within us that affirms our kinship, however when we speak, we refer to objects. Kimmerer suggests that we had to be taught to think this way.
Our English learning toddlers, Kimmerer writes, “speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion – until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them to make them forget. When we tell them that a tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple [tree] an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.” 5 This teaching is a bit challenging to take in . . . it always hits me right in my gut. The reference frame our language creates has significant impacts on our ethics and what we will fight for.
Part of me wants to run to North Island College and enroll in Indigenous language classes, which I may indeed do because I feel so drawn in by language of animacy. Still, what can we do with English? It doesn’t bend easily, but it does shift over time . . .
One solvable piece is pronouns. There is a lot of conversation about pronouns and their usage these days. They/them pronouns are widely used now as gender neutral, in addition to their plural usage. Both are grammatically correct. What if we extended they/them pronouns to birds, trees, oceans, rocks, even stories? Here’s what “they” might sound like in a sentence: out my office window I can see a large evergreen tree and often watch their branches blowing with the wind.
At first it may sound odd . . . but practice helps attuned our ears to the language and it becomes more natural. Can you see the alignment start to come together? We are creation . . . we are One.
Our commitment to Caring for the Common Good is perhaps on one level an invitation to continue removing the barriers between us and what we know in our bones is true. This is good work that indeed benefits the whole.
1 Fox. Original Blessing. 9.
2 Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass. 56
3 Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 55
4 Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass. 55-56
5 Braiding Sweetgrass p. 54-57.
