Mother Nature

Beauséant and Buckler—15 April AD 2023

Scripture Passage: “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more?” —Galatians 4:8-9

Challenge Message: “Therefore every age hath some secret left for its discovery, and who knows but this intercourse betwixt the two kinds of rational inhabitants of the same earth [humans and fairies] may be not only believed shortly but as freely entertained and as well known as now the art of navigation, printing, gunning, riding on saddles with stirrups, and the discoveries of microscopes which were sometimes as great a wonder and as hard to be believed.” —The Rev’d Robert Kirk

Supernatural Nature

May to me is without question the most beautiful month of the year. Growing up in Pennsylvania, autumn had always been my favorite season, yet since settling in Minnesota I’ve developed a new appreciation for spring—which doesn’t hit until May. Away recedes the ice and snow after six long months of winter, and up pop the sights and sounds and smells of fresh new life, new growth, new warmth. It is simply lovely.

One of the themes to which I have often returned during my year as Grand Prelate has been to debunk the popular notion that Christian holidays are secretly pagan in origin. Halloween, Christmas, and Easter regularly come under fire as the year rolls ‘round, and I find myself pointing out that Christian observances are overwhelmingly Jewish in their origins, as well befits a religion centered upon worshipping a rabbi as our God.

Besides all that, “pagan,” as G.K. Chesterton memorably wrote, is really just another word for human. Seasonal celebrations around the world share similar themes due to our shared human experience of nature. Thus, spring festivals look similar, winter festivals look similar, autumn festivals look similar across cultures and religions, not because one group has stolen from another but simply because they take place in similar climates.

Yet all my normal protestations and qualifications break down when it comes to May. European Christians have welcomed May with fun and frolic for well over a thousand years, not due to any particular biblical injunction or Hebrew predecessor, but simply because May is a joyous, raucous, celebratory time of year. The English honor May Day, the Celts Beltane, and the Germans Walpurgisnacht—and we could call it pagan.

This, again, would be pagan in the sense of something human, something natural, and not as anything innately anti-Christian. It is a good and wonderful thing to welcome spring, especially in colder northern latitudes. Why should Baptism change that? As St Paul says, Christians are to “test all things and keep the good.” The Church dedicates the month of May to Mary and to motherhood, yet before that, it was dedicated to nymph named Maia.

This brings me to another theme of spring which could rightly be classified as both pagan and as Christian: the universal recognition of nature spirits, which is to say, of faeries. Didn’t see that coming, did you? Every culture that I’ve known—Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Shinto, pagan Greek, &c—shares a cosmology whereby immortals live in the heavens while humans dwell upon earth. Yet between these two extremes exist elemental spirits of a middling nature betwixt mortals and celestials.

The Greeks called them nymphs or daemons. Muslims call them genies, Hindus devas, Germans elves, Japanese kami, and English faeries. C.S. Lewis dubbed them Longaevi, the “long-livers,” while Paracelsus and St Paul termed them Elementals. Like angels, they are powerful, ancient, mercurial, and not to be trifled with. They have bodies of “smokeless fire” and “coagulated air.” Like human beings, they frolic, drink, fight, mate, fall from grace, seek forgiveness, and ultimately die.

Just as the Buddhists of Japan saw little difficulty accepting the existence of Shinto nature spirits indigenous to the land, so Christians historically have had no problem welcoming creatures of the fae into our cosmologies. In Iceland, Lutherans erect tiny yet well-furnished elf churches so as to convert the wights to Christ. In France, faerie women marry human men in order to gain immortal souls.

To this day, devout Irish Catholics respect the hawthorn as sacred to the fair folk, and will not uproot such a tree. One Scottish cleric, the Rev’d Robert Kirk, dedicated his life to mission work amongst the elementals, and even wrote a book about his experiences entitled The Secret Commonwealth—before they carried him off, never to be seen again as anything other than a ghostly vision. And don’t get me started on Shakespeare.

Whatever we call them, fae represent the divine spark that we find present within nature all around us. Thus they tend to take on the general temperament of the climate. In the Mediterranean, Oceanids laze about in the waters. In the frozen mountains of Norway, Jötnar prey on humankind. In the bogs of England, will-o-the-wisps lead travelers astray. The majority of European folklore can well be summed up as: “Don’t upset the faeries.”

Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has argued that monotheism implies animism; that is, if God knows all (and He does) then God knows what it is to be a rock—not just what a rock is, but the experience of being the rock itself. And if God’s knowledge is in the rock, is that not a sort of spirit? Does it not have a spark of the divine mind within it? And should we not then respect all of Creation as sacred, as divine? We may no longer worship Nature as a goddess, but we are required to love her as our sister.

You don’t have to hold a literal belief in faeries and nature spirits in order to see the benefit of such stories and traditions. The earth and all that exists has been created good by God, and God upholds and sustains everything in every moment of its being. Thus any strict separation between the natural and the supernatural proves theologically untenable. God is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, closer to us than our jugular.

How then could we do other but to see all of Creation as a living, breathing, joyful wonder? Thus might we grow better equipped to fulfill our roles as the stewards of God’s garden, and strive to make of this world an Eden once again.

In Jesus. Amen.