Divine Dirt!

German theologian Paul Tillich is erudite and intuitive when he describes God as the Ground of all Being, and “the whole world as God’s periphery.”

Tillich believed that the ground was saturated with the divine.

Most tribal religions depict God, or gods, as closely connected to the Earth. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a creation story in which the Earth is the embodiment of God’s breath. Although, I don’t take the story of creation of Adam literally, the significance and symbolism of God breathing life into a collection of dust, is breathtaking. It radically alters the status of dust from being dirt to being divine.

Theologian Norman Wirzba’s description of that creation gives me spiritual chills:

God fashions the first human being by taking the dust of the ground into his hands, holding it so close that it can share in the divine breath…It is only as the ground is suffused with God’s intimate, breathing presence that human life — along with the life of trees and animals and birds — is possible at all. God draws near to the earth and then animates it from within.

When we see the Earth as part of the body of God, as a visible presence of an invisible God, we will have an earthshaking experience of God, expanding our notion of holiness in such a way as to embrace every ground as holy.

Today when formal religion is losing ground in the lives of many people, a ground-shifting in our understanding of the Earth is necessary.

But it is hard to believe that inner city America, where gun violence is rampant, is holy ground.

It is hard to believe that a bar where people are drunk, and profanities are exchanged is holy ground.

How do we even consider seeing a house of prostitution as holy ground?

Or a home where children are abused, or a spouse is battered?

It is not easy to see decimated villages in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine or a terrorist haven in Syria as holy grounds.

So, we always have that dual reality in our mind — some places as holy ground and others as unholy.

However, if we believe that God is everywhere, then we must believe that everywhere includes all those places we designate as unholy.

When we remove God from those so-called unholy places, we are sanitizing God and behaving like children of a lesser God.

We are acting like chaperons of a God who cannot handle those imperfect and broken situations we have designated as unholy.

We are controlling and restricting where God can be, or God can go.

When the Vatican declared on March 15, 2021, that the Catholic Church won’t bless same-sex unions because “God cannot bless sin,” the Church is controlling who God can and cannot bless.

No wonder the Church that thinks that it can control God by confining Him to its cathedrals finds those cathedrals empty of both God and humans.

(from Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a heavenly Life)