Christmas will soon be here and every Christmas morning we hear the same Gospel story, the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John.
Not fit for Hallmark Christmas cards, the words of John are strange to our ears. No mention of the baby Jesus, the poor stable, shepherds in the fields or stars in the skies. Mary and Joseph and the angel Gabriel are nowhere to be found. A Hallmark nightmare.
John goes to the heart of the matter. He reaches way back into the mists of time, even to the time before time, to tell his story. And he speaks of a mystical Word. This Word in the beginning is a creative Word for "all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being."
Could we not say that at the heart of creation, at the heart of nature, is the Word. There is no such thing as "pure nature." Nature is, in the eyes of faith, a "spirited" nature, animated by the Word of God.
One day, during my field research, I glimpsed this hidden Word. Part of my field work involved cutting 5-centimetre-wide discs from the trunks of cut trees, so-called "cookies." During my work, I cut hundreds of "cookies" and measured the relative width of the tree rings that tell their own story of the life history of the forest.
One of those cookies now hangs on my office wall in Toronto. It comes from an old balsam fir tree, about 200 years old. As soon as I cut it from the tree stem in the forest, I couldn't believe my eyes. At the centre of the large cookie was this stunning image of the cross. I could not have created a more exquisite image of a cross that flowed throughout the wooden cookie. It was stunning.
Of course, on one level, the cross is well explained. By chance, I had made a longitudinal cut through a whorl of four branches that had broken off and that had then been entombed by the diameter growth of the tree over the years.
But on another level, a deeper level for me, the cross spoke of the "Word of creation." In the heart of matter, in heart of the beauty of nature, in heart of the boundless diversity of life, lies a truth that speaks ever most softly. In the depth of the human soul, in the heart of creation lies a creative and life-sustaining Word. In other words, nature has a voice, a voice that speaks of Divinity within.
The challenge for us – how to listen to this Word, how to attune ourselves to the Christic heartbeat of the world. Jesus so often proclaimed, "Let those with eyes see and let those with ears hear." Maybe the greatest environmental gift is the listening heart, the discerning eye, the attuned ear that contemplates the heart throb of God in creation.
The Word is woven into the very fabric of life. Listen to the Word. Taste the Word. Smell the Word. Hear the Word.
In the beginning was the Word … and the Word became flesh and lived among us.