Finding God in the Singing River

We live in an age of vast and rapid destruction of habitats and species. Yet Christianity holds great potential for healing this situation. Indeed, the Bible and Christian tradition are a treasure trove of rich images and stories about God as an “earthen” being who sustains the natural world with compassion and thereby models for humankind environmentally healthy ways of being. Mark Wallace’s stimulating book retrieves a central but often neglected biblical theme – the idea of God as carnal Spirit who indwells all things – as the basis for constructing a “green spirituality” responsive to the environmental needs of our time. In the biblical tradition, he writes, God as Spirit is an ecological presence that shows itself to us daily by living in and through the earth. One message of Christianity, therefore, is celebration of the bodily, material world – ancient redwoods, vernal springs, broad-winged hawks, everyday pigweed – as the place that God indwells and cares for in order to maintain the well-being of our common planetary home. Alongside his green reading of the Bible and tradition, Wallace employs the resources of deep ecology, Neopagan spirituality, and the environmental justice movement to rethink Christianity as an earth-based, body-loving religion. He also analyzes color images reproduced in the book. Wallace’s bold yet careful work reawakens our sense of the sacrality of the earth and the life that the trinitarian God creates there. It also grounds the impulses of New Age spirituality in a profoundly biblical notion of God’s being and activity.