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LOOKING UP
A Simple Practice For Connecting
With God’s World
“We’re not fighting for a merely ‘livable’ planet.
We’re fighting for a riotous, wild, gorgeous, generous, miraculous,
life-cradling planet that’s home to a society that works for everyone.”
-Peter Kalmas
In her new book, It All Counts, Natalia Terfa describes a spiritual practice she recently came across that confirmed something she has felt deeply about since she was a little girl. “In 2021, I read the loveliest book called 12 Tiny Things, by Ellie Roscher and Heidi Barr. In the first chapter, Ellie writes about space. The holy practice of creating space. Of saying no, of pausing to breathe, and to create space where there was none before. That first chapter ended with a body practice: ‘Once a day, intentionally look up. Don’t just look up from your phone or your pile of work, look all the way up. Take in the vastness of the universe and feel the space holding you.’ So I did. There were lots of body practices and ideas to try throughout the book but I was totally captured by that one and have not stopped looking all the way up ever since. I do it everywhere. This little practice or tiny thing has fundamentally changed who I am. It regularly connects me to creation, just for that brief moment, and through creation, to the Creator. Looking all the way up is a faith practice. I didn’t know that’s what it was until I started doing it.”
Natalia’s words got me thinking about those times I have also looked up and was transformed by the experience: lying on my in-laws deck at their home up in the Sierras watching shooting stars flash across the sky; looking up into the canopy of redwoods when I was a camp counselor at Mt. Cross in Felton, California; standing in Notre Dame Cathedral looking up at the Gothic architecture above me and being transfixed by the architecture and the light filtering in through the windows; looking at a total solar eclipse with family and friends near Salem, Oregon; sitting on the beach in Oxnard looking at wave upon wave of rippled clouds. The list could go on and on—for instance seeing the northern lights when I was traveling with a youth choir in central Canada. The point is we all have had experiences like that and they can be life transforming.
I am reminded of the words of Psalm 8:
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings
that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
and of Psalm 104:
“Bless the Lord, O my soul.
O Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers
fire and flame your ministers.”
In his book Life After Doom, Brian McLaren tells a parable about looking up that I believe has profound implications for the moment we currently find ourselves in, when everything about the earth’s future seems precarious and uncertain:
Imagine you’re on a large boat with a lot of people crossing a vast expanse of ocean, and there’s a big party going on. Music is playing, people are dancing, and in a moment of carelessness, you fall off the back of the boat and nobody notices you have fallen.
You’re waving your arms and yelling, but the music is so loud that no one hears you. You watch the boat disappear in the distance.
You realize you can’t tread water for very long, but you can float for a long time. So your strategy is to float until they recognize you’re missing and come back to look for you.
Now in order for you to float, you have to relax, because if you tighten up, you sink. So you’re on the vast ocean there, lying flat on your back, the big swells of water rising and falling, rising and falling, and you’re there relaxing. How would you be relaxing? You’d be relaxing very seriously, because your life depends on it. It’s a life-saving relaxation!
Hours pass, Darkness falls. You’re floating on the water, face-up to the sky full of stars that are brighter than you have ever seen before. Hour after hour, rising and falling in the swells, you wait for morning to come.
Unexpectedly in the darkness, a feeling comes over you, seemingly out of nowhere. You look up at the night sky, stars sparkling like diamonds. The swell of the waves feels like the rhythmic breathing of the Earth and suddenly, unexpectedly, you feel part of it all. Floating on the depths of the ocean, beneath the depths of the sky, you feel an unimagined depth open within you, and in that depth, you feel a poignant awareness that whatever happens, you are alive right now, in this moment. You feel yourself embraced in an infinite generosity that will uphold you whether you live or die. Birth and death, beginning and ending, all are taken up into one unfathomable gift of being alive and grateful and awake in this moment, now. You are so overwhelmed by this mysterious feeling of awakening that words fail you and you begin to cry.
Soon, dawn breaks, and out of the corner of your eye you see the boat coming back to look for you.
When your fellow passengers pull you aboard, you are hugging them, saying thank you, thank you, thank you. You begin to laugh. You are so glad they found you.
That night, you have a nice meal. You take a long hot shower and you’re lying in your bunk in a room on the boat, in the dark. You’re so grateful they saved your life. But you know, on some deep level, that your life was really saved out there on the sea, amid the rise and the fall of the waves under the stars, in the darkness, just before dawn.
Your Fellow Pilgrim on the Journey,
Pastor Greg
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