Imagine a river.
Imagine one river with interlaced channels.
Like a braided river whose source, flow, and destination is Divine Love,
the sacred work of becoming human and holy
involves four interwoven movements that make up, what I call,
The Sacred Braid
~ DJM

More and more I am convinced that there is no authentic spirituality, Christian or otherwise, that does not consciously, intentionally, and passionately tend to what I see as the four strands of THE SACRED BRAID.

• STRAND ONE: Knowledge, acceptance, and love of oneself
• STRAND TWO: Reverence, open-heartedness, deep sympathy, compassionate action, and just relationships with other human persons, especially the most vulnerable
• STRAND THREE: Care for and kinship with the other-than-human community of creation which is sacred, and
• STRAND FOUR: Contemplative and prophetic rootedness in the One in whom we live and move and have our being giving way to grateful praise, compassionate action, and joyful love of God.

When some self-appointed curators of the Christian tradition reduced the Christ-life to “saving souls” and when “saving souls” became shorthand for a ticket to paradise and when paradise became a synonym for heaven and when heaven became shorthand for the afterlife, then life before death was cheapened, reduced either to “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears” or to little more than a way station for biding time. This world — which the Author of Beauty oohed and aahed over, as one story has it, after speaking it into being at the first ever Poetry Slam — became less important, more demeaned, little more than a place to be saved out of, even at times a word that was somehow twisted to mean the antithesis or nemesis of the “other world” where God dwelt even though the evangelist John said “For God so loved the world.”

Then the turning earth, one resplendent planet in one ineffably stunning galaxy in the cosmos about which the prophet Isaiah said is “full of God’s glory” sadly, tragically, shamefully became viewed by some humans as theirs to do with as they pleased. The earth became little more than a playground for their hedonism, a treasure chest to be plundered by human greed rather than a community of life forms with which to be in mutually enhancing relationship with humans caring for the earth as much as the earth cares for humans.

We can no longer abide by such poor theology, by such self-serving cosmology, by such an anthropology that flies in the face of being made in the image and likeness of the Creator Spirit while desecrating what God has so graciously, so lavishly brought into being. To the end of committing ourselves to be integral partners of one another and of all life forms on the earth community to the greater glory of the source and giver of all life, here is a lament, a penitential confession, a call to action, a hope and a prayer offered by the philosopher, writer, and environmental activist Kathleen Dean Moore:

Poets warned us, writing of the heart-breaking beauty that will remain when there is no heart to break for it. But what if it is worse than that? What if it’s the broken children who remain in a world without beauty? How will they find solace in a world without wild music? How will they thrive without green hills edged with oaks? How will they forgive us for letting frog-song slip away? When my granddaughter looks back at me, I will be on my knees, begging her to say I did all I could.

I didn’t do all I could have done.

It isn’t enough to love a child and wish her well. It isn’t enough to open my heart to a bird-graced morning. Can I claim to love a morning, if I don’t protect what creates its beauty? Can I claim to love a child, if I don’t use all the power of my beating heart to preserve a world that nourishes children’s joy? Loving is not a kind of la-de-da. Loving is a sacred trust. To love is to affirm the absolute worth of what you love and to pledge your life to its thriving—to protect it fiercely and faithfully, for all time.

Ring the angelus for the thrushes and the swallows. Ring the bells for frogs floating in bent reeds. Ring the bells for all of us who did not save the songs. Holy Mary, Mother of God, ring the bells for every sacred emptiness. Let them echo in the silence at the end of the day.

Forgiveness is too much to ask. I would pray for only this: that our granddaughter would hear again the little lick of music, that grace notes toward the end of a meadowlark’s song.

Meadowlarks. There were meadowlarks. They sang like angels in the morning.

It is time, long passed the time, we tended especially to the third strand of the sacred braid for our good and the good of all creation. After all, love is a sacred trust.

~ Kathleen Dean Moore, from “A Call to Forgiveness at the End of the Day” in A Sense of Wonder: The World’s Best Writers on the Sacred, the Profane, & the Ordinary, ed. by Brian Doyle