Seeing What's Right

This book I just finished reading, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer . . . it stirred up so much within me.

And you wouldn’t think that would be so because this isn’t a topic I gravitate to. Kimmerer is a botanist. She writes about plants and the earth and creatures like salamanders and the reciprocity of our relationship with them all. How to keep the land healthy because its health is linked with our own.

But Kimmerer is also a Potawatomie, and so her scientific view of the world is also informed by the values, beliefs and stories of her Indigenous heritage. She speaks of the plants as our brothers and sisters: they were here before us, and they are older and wiser. We would do well to listen to the lessons they have to teach us. She talks about thanking the earth for the things it offers us for our survival, and only taking as much as we need, always with a gift we give back.

I read these stories awed by the beauty of how she sees the world . . . and yet feeling a bit of tension because I’m not sure her view is entirely accurate. It is uplifting and inspiring, poetic and lovely, but it may not be consistent with what I see in scripture. At least, it has some crucial gaps.

There was a time when I would have read this book and all I would have seen was her wrong theology. I would have thought, this smacks of pantheism – the idea that nature is god. Plants are not our brothers. Plants are inanimate. We don’t communicate to them or them to us. We are the beings of spirit that God created, and we are to care for the plants and use them for our benefit as the superior beings of God’s creation. And of course, there’s no mention of Jesus here . . . of sin and redemption . . . new age twaddle . . . yada yada.

But I’m reading her stories and suddenly realizing I’m reading differently. I’m not zeroing in on what is wrong; I’m connecting to what is right. I didn’t use to read that way. I think I used to constantly be afraid of accidentally swallowing the wrong things, of being sent off track, of being corrupted.

The fear of corruption is strong in some Christian circles. Perhaps justifiably so. But that fear also keeps us from connection, which is the only way we can be salt and light. And it turns us into self-righteous prigs that make the gospel look pretty abhorrent. It's hard to love someone whom you see as a pollutant in your world.

A while back, my guy told me he read Phil 4:8 (“Whatever is true, whatever is noble . . . think about such things”) as a call to find the true, noble, right, pure, etc. in whatever we are seeing and focus on that. Interesting. I’ve always heard it as a command to stay away from anything that is not true, noble, right, pure, etc.

Maybe it’s both, depending on the circumstance. But since Paul tells me that we are not given a spirit of fear (2 Tim 1:7), I’m leaning toward my guy’s interpretation now.

In any case, as I read Kimmerer, I submersed myself in the beauty of her worldview and allowed myself to rejoice in the places where our worldviews overlapped. Because there were many. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have it all right. I don’t have it all right either.