Outdoor Deitists Lent Day 20

All our school chapel services are currently being prerecorded by our chaplain because we can't all be in the chapel together. As a result we are unable to worship and sing together either. Every Tuesday morning I sit with my little tutorship group in my bleak classroom and we tune in to chapel. Its a very odd experience.

Because we cannot sing hymns our chaplain, Kym, plays beautiful worship music videos during the service. As I was watching a particularly lovely one this morning it struck me that most of the Christian music videos that I've watched share a similar feature - most of them contain images of nature in them. Whether it be a heaving ocean, or a vast forest scape or the galaxies in flight the general choice of background imagery in worship music is the natural world. 

When I first met Stephen I discovered on his Facebook profile that he described himself as an 'outdoor deitist'.  Now that I know him slightly better I realise that this statement  is the closest Stephen has ever come to being a hippie. At the time I thought it was rather alarming and had images of Stephen flouncing off into a field with some magic mushrooms and a butterfly net. 

When I asked him about his fairly odd choice in religious beliefs he said that he felt closest to God in nature. And he has a point.

When we are burnt out, exhausted, broken, needing to fix relationships and we are given the opportunity to recharge where do we go?

When we need a moment to compose ourselves and find a sense of peace before facing an obstacle do we choose to stand on the side of a highway so that we can watch cars zoom by or do we find an empty patch of grass?

When we feel closest to God are we more likely to be sitting still on a mountaintop or gazing in wonder at a construction site?

I remember vividly a moment from my adolescence when my Dad went into cardiac arrest at a rugby game at Michaelhouse. Our car was parked near the rose garden under an autumnal tree. I remember looking up into the patchwork of leaves while paramedics tried desperately to resuscitate him. I recall how calming that moment was. It was the moment that God stilled everything and gave me peace. I'll never forget the whisper in those leaves. 

I am certain that God meets us in the noisiest, dirtiest, most human of places. But every now and then it is a wonder to return to His original creation and feel part of a rhythm that existed in harmony with Him long before we were created. 

His Eden still exists and we all instinctively find it out when we are feeling separated from Him. There is so much that we don't understand about the natural world and the source of its pulse. It is so vast, so magnificent, so complex... so Godly. 

And so it is no wonder that when we make music to celebrate Him we naturally accompany the music with images of Him, with images of the world before we got here, with reminders of how it was meant to be and how it will be when we return to Him.