Family lore: When Mary Ellen was not quite three years old, she visited the Olympic Rain Forest. Standing amongst the enormous trees, huge ferns, dripping moss, she burst out: “Wow. This is better than church.”
Sixty years ago, all the years in between, and now, I meet God in woods, water, mountains and sky. If I want peaceful quiet, want a mystical experience, want an encounter with the divine, I go to the woods.
I’m a pastor. That’s why I find it strange when people say to me: “I don’t go to church because I find God in the woods.”
To me, that’s like saying, “I don’t listen to music because I like to read.” This is not an either/or equation. Church and woods is a both/and one.
The woods will bring you joy and peace. Church may give you that, but it is more likely to give you other things.
Being part of a church may give you a community that brings together different perspectives, challenging you to live out what you say matters to you.
Belonging to a church may provide a “village” to help you raise your children
(or to grow up yourself, for that matter!).
A church may offer you a group, each member of which brings different gifts, perspectives and passions to work toward meaningful change in the neighborhood and world.
The woods give you, give me, a sense of deep peace. But when I had an emergency appendectomy that my insurance declined to cover, the woods were not all that helpful. My church community stepped up and gave sacrificially.
When apartheid and impending revolution were crippling South Africa, the beautiful wild beaches of that country were still gorgeous, but it was largely the church that facilitated meaningful change and a peaceful transition.
Waterfalls are lovely, but they won’t help us find ways to help our needy neighbors; we do that better working with people who know themselves called to be Christ’s hands and feet.
I feel so fortunate that I can meet God hiking along Woods Creek, or at Johnson Falls, or in the glassy surface or rolling waves of Lake Superior. I also see God in the faithful love of my dog, the sun bathing of my cats. I see God in the laughing faces of my grandchildren.
God is in all that is beautiful and good. God can meet and speak to us through poetry, music, even a mundane comment: through almost anything.
So what about God and church? I suspect many people, when they say they’d rather meet God in the woods, have been disappointed by church, by walking through doors expecting to meet God, (or thinking this is where they ought to meet God), and not seeing much there that speaks of God. Instead they’ve encountered judgment, small-mindedness, and petty rules within those walls.
We won’t always meet God in church. But in my experience, God has a pretty good attendance record. I often sense God’s presence in the lives and hearts of people who have gathered in church to be vulnerable and admit their need for something beyond themselves. Or in people receiving bread and wine—a mystery none of us can begin to understand— and finding themselves to be surprisingly fed. Or in a group passionately sharing ideas about how to reach out to their neighbors.
And sometimes God seems to show up for no apparent reason—so that we are surprised by what Charles Wesley called “a strange warming of the heart.”
I love trees. But when we encounter injustice, tragedy, challenges, and evil in the world—we need community. We were never meant to do this alone. Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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