When God Was a Bird

Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

Mark I. Wallace

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780823281312, 9780823281329
• eBook ISBN: 9780823281336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

2019 NAUTILUS GOLD WINNER In a time of rapid climate change and species extinction, what role have the world's religions played in ameliorating—or causing—the crisis we now face? Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind's exploitative attitudes toward nature through unearthly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. In this regard, Christianity has become an otherworldly religion that views the natural world as "fallen, " as empty of signs of God's presence.And yet, buried deep within the Christian tradition are startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit – the "animal God, " as it were, of historic Christian witness. Through biblical readings, historical theology, continental philosophy, and personal stories of sacred nature, this book recovers the model of God in Christianity as a creaturely, avian being who signals the presence of spirit in everything, human and more-than-human alike. Mark Wallace's recovery of the bird-God of the Bible signals a deep grounding of faith in the natural world. The moral implications of nature-based Christianity are profound. All life is deserving of humans' care and protection insofar as the world is envisioned as alive with sacred animals, plants, and landscapes. From the perspective of Christian animism, the Earth is the holy place that God made and that humankind is enjoined to watch over and cherish in like manner. Saving the environment, then, is not a political issue on the left or the right of the ideological spectrum, but, rather, an innermost passion shared by all people of faith and good will in a world damaged by anthropogenic warming, massive species extinction, and the loss of arable land, potable water, and breathable air. To Wallace, this passion is inviolable and flows directly from the heart of Christian teaching that God is a carnal, fleshy reality who is promiscuously incarnated within all things, making the whole world a sacred embodiment of God's presence, and worthy of our affectionate concern. This beautifully and accessibly written book shows that "Christian animism" is not a strange oxymoron, but Christianity's natural habitat. Challenging traditional Christianity's self-definition as an other-worldly religion, Wallace paves the way for a new Earth-loving spirituality grounded in the ancient image of an animal God.

CHAPTER 1

Song of the Wood Thrush

The Singing Monk of the Crum Woods

Today the wood thrush returned to the Crum Woods.¹ I have been waiting for this event for months. I moved to a house in the forest five years ago, and at that time, I heard a strange and wonderful bird call in the tree canopy. The song of the wood thrush is a melody unlike anything I had ever heard. Liquid, flute-like, perfectly pitched—the thrush vocalizes a kind of duet with itself in which it simultaneously produces two independent musical notes that reverberate with each other. I have read that Tibetan monks can also sing two notes at the same time, a baseline and a melody line in contrapuntal balance, so now I think of the wood thrush as the singing monk of the Crum Woods.²

In the spring and summer, I wake up, and often go to sleep, to the vocal pleasures of a bird that I cannot see but whose delicate harmonies pleasantly haunt my dreams. Like God’s Spirit, I know the thrush is there—I hear its lilting cadence from dawn to dusk—but I’ve only seen one wood thrush during the time I’ve lived in the Crum Woods. I creep around the forest floor looking skyward, hoping for a sighting, but it always escapes my gaze. Instead, I keep my window open at night as a vector for the thrush’s call. Bathed in its music, it is hard for me to distinguish between waking and sleeping, between twilight, midnight, and early morning. At dusk, the thrush is in my ear until I fall asleep; I dream of its call throughout the night; and I wake up after dawn gently moving through the deep of its sweet-sounding counterpoint.

The wood thrush lives in the interior of the Crum Woods and consistently refuses the lure of my feeder. Thrushes prefer just the right habitat blend for sustenance and breeding: running water, dense understory cover, and moist healthy soil full of fruiting plants and insects to eat. In the heart of the forest, foraging in the leaf litter among large deciduous trees, the thrush makes its nest out of dead leaves, mud, twigs, and sometimes found manufactured materials such as paper and plastic. Like other neotropical songbirds, it is threatened by habitat loss through continued development of its home range. It is also endangered by brood parasites, such as brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their own eggs in wood thrush nests, crowding out the host’s eggs and hatchlings. The perdurability of the thrush in the face of these obstacles gives me hope in a time of despair about the world’s future. Henry David Thoreau says, “The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest.… Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.”³ For me, Earth and heaven come alive with mystery and wonder when I hear the thrush’s ethereal song. In my own particular bioregion, the thrush opens to me the beauty of the Crum Woods as a vital habitat—indeed, as a sacred forest—whenever I am graced by its stirring music.

Nature Religion

To call the Crum Woods a sacred forest may seem odd if one is using traditional Christian vocabulary.⁴ Historically, many Christian thinkers avoided ascribing religious value to natural places and living things and restricted terms such as sacred, holy, and blessed to God alone. Central strains of classical Christian opinion desacralized nature by divesting it of religious significance. While the Bible is suffused with images of sacred nature—God formed Adam and Eve from the dust of the ground; called to Moses through a burning bush; spoke through Balaam’s donkey; arrested Job’s attention in a whirlwind; used a great fish to send Jonah a message; and appeared alternately as a man, a lamb, and a dove throughout the New Testament—Christianity, in the main, evolved into a sky-God religion in which God was seen as an invisible, heavenly being not of the same essence as plants, animals, rivers, and mountains. As the theologian E. O. James writes, the Christian “God of heaven … was always regarded as transcendentally distinct from the rest of creation, physical, human, biological.… He was the Sky-god par excellence because, in scholastic terminology, He was ‘He Who is.’ ”⁵ The Welsh “St. Denio” hymn I sing in my church proclaims the same sentiment: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” Hidden and imperceptible, God exists in a far-removed place divorced from the ebb and flow of mortal life here on Earth.⁶ Moreover, God the creator alone is holy, so goes this line of thinking, and everything else in creation, derivatively made by God, is an extension of God’s blessed and benevolent handiwork—but not independently good and holy unto itself.

But in the Earth-centered narrative arc of the biblical stories I recover in this book, this devaluation of nature as devoid of sacred worth is conspicuously absent. Even at the outset of the Bible, God is not an invisible sky-God “transcendentally distinct from the rest of creation, physical, human, biological,” as E. O. James avers, but a fully incarnated being who walks and talks in human form, sprouts leaves and grows roots in the good soil of creation, and—clothed in feathers and flesh—takes flight and soars through the updrafts of wind and sky. An astoundingly rich variety of natural phenomena are charged with divine presence in the biblical accounts, with God appearing alternately in human and plant forms—and in animal form, as I will highlight here.

To this end, let us start with the winged bird-God of creation, the central figure in the Bible’s inaugural creation story. In the beginning, the Earth was formless and empty, and God’s Spirit swept across the dark waters of the great oceans. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void and darkness covered the waters. And the Spirit of God [rûach elohim in Hebrew] hovered [merahefet] over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:1–2). The noun rûach elohim that is used by the Genesis authors to identify Spirit is grammatically feminine, while the feminine-ending verb form that is employed to describe the Spirit’s movement is merahefet, alternately translated as to “hover over,” “sweep over,” “move over,” “flutter over,” or “tremble over.” This feminine, avian noun-verb cluster describes the activity of a mother bird in the care of her young in the nest. One grammatical clue to the meaning of this dynamic expression can be found in Deuteronomy 32:11, where God is said to be a protector of Jacob in a manner akin to how “an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers [merahefet] over its young.”⁷ Using the same winged imagery deployed by the Deuteronomic author, the writer of Genesis describes the Spirit as a flying, feathered being—a bird or something like a bird—to describe its nurturing care over the great expanse (perhaps we should say the great egg?) of creation. Analogous to a mother eagle brooding over her nest, God’s avian Spirit, hovering over the face of the watery deep, is a “giant mother bird,”⁸ a divine-animal hybrid that challenges the conventional separation of the divine order and the animal kingdom in much of classical Christian thought.

Another clue to God’s fleshly identity is found in Genesis 32. In this story, Isaac’s son Jacob is seeking to enter the land of Canaan, the biblical promised land, and reconciliation with his brother, Esau. On the evening before these events, Jacob is alone at the Jabbok River, and there he encounters a strange nocturnal visitor who demands a wrestling match with him, which lasts all night. Neither man can subdue the other, but the night wrangler, vampire-like, eventually cries out to be let go because the first morning light is about to appear. Jacob then insists he must be blessed first, and his opponent accedes to his request, changing Jacob’s name to Israel. At this point, Jacob also does a name switch, calling the place of struggle “The Face of God” (peniel in Hebrew) because here, on the banks of the river, he said, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved” (Genesis 32:30). As in the previous example, God again is creaturely, but now as a man, not a bird. Yet the meaning is clear: Jacob sees God directly in his face-to-face encounter with the mysterious night brawler—and not only survives his altercation with him but is blessed in the process.

A further example of God as a corporeal life-form is Exodus 3, the story of the burning bush at Mount Horeb (or Sinai). Here Moses is surprised to hear God speaking though a bush (seneh in Hebrew, meaning “bramble” or “branches”) that is aflame with a nonconsumptive fire. Because God speaks in and through the bush itself, the story shows how God implants Godself as a fiery bramble but is somehow not consumed in the process of being on fire. As the holy fire plant, God tells Moses, “Do not come near; take off your shoes from your feet because the place on which you are standing is holy ground.… And Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:5–6). In this account, inviolate boundaries between humankind, plant life, and divinity are crossed. The story erases time-honored binary oppositions about who or what God is, and where God is located, in this mix of scrubby fire, commanding voice, and dangerous ground. Again we confront the shock of viscous carnality as Moses hides his countenance because he is afraid to see God face-to-face—God the sacred plant, God the consecrated ground, God the burning fire. Speaking to Moses in a commanding voice on the holy mountain, God in Exodus is an on-fire, earth-rooted vegetation deity (deus botanicus).⁹

What strikes me as common in all three of these stories is that God—as avian, human, and vegetal, respectively—is biologically elemental. Provocatively, in these various forms of God’s feral bodies, God is feathers and bone, blood and skin, leaves and wood. We think we know whom or what God is—for Jews, Torah; for Christians, Jesus—but God often presents Godself to us in somatic forms of life that surprise and challenge our common assumptions. This question, therefore, is the driving question of this book: If feathers, bone, blood, and wood constitute God in the Bible, could not these same wild elements be God’s living presence among us today? If God was the creation bird in Genesis, the night brawler in the Jacob story, and the fiery thicket in Exodus, then could not the birds, people, and plants among us today be God-in-the-flesh once again? Is it possible to reenvision these ancient biblical life-forms—spirit bird, divine man, sacred bush—as precursors of God’s corporeal presence within our own everyday natural existence in the present? And if this is the case, then should we not relate to all things—the birds of the air; every person we encounter; and the brambles, trees, and flowers that grace our existence—as, once again, the miraculously animated manifestations of the birdy, fleshy, leafy God of the biblical witness? If all creation is sacred, in other words, should we not comport ourselves to the natural world with reverence and adulation as the enfleshment of God in the biosphere?

Mother Theresa often spoke of finding God in everyone to whom she ministered, that the “unloved are Jesus in disguise.”¹⁰ Expanding her comments beyond the human to the more-than-human world, could it be that all of the things that we do not value as bearers of the sacred, the “unloved” as it were, that all of what we take for granted within profane, everyday existence, that all of this is God in God’s many wonderful and sometimes terrifying disguises, that the great expanse of the natural world and all of its many denizens is who and what and where God is today? Could it be possible that God is porous and hidden under the veil of common life? That all of the good things God creates—the verdant myriad of our biotic and abiotic kinsfolk who walk, fly, run, creep, flow, and grow roots on, through and in the Earth—are all divine, holy things, now living in our midst in all of God’s various and sundry disguises? If the core grammar of Christianity is that God became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), can we not say, then, that all flesh is sacred, that all nature is blessed, that all things are holy? And if we can say this, is not the Christian religion an exuberant testimony to this spiritual truth, namely, that the sacred is the profane, the heavenly the worldly, the spiritual the earthly, and the godly the carnal?

To be sure, to suggest that all of creation and its many inhabitants are God in a variety of forms and disguises is a difficult notion to swallow for some people of faith. As Karl Barth says, “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to him if he really does.”¹¹ But some Christians find such latitudinarian attitudes excessive. I recently gave a talk to a nearby church group in which I interpreted the biblical stories of the Holy Spirit as an avian form of divinity. I used the account of the bird-God of Genesis noted earlier and said the same imagery of God on the wing is used in all of the Gospels as well (a point I will expand on shortly). Could the dovey Spirit of Christian witness who appears at Jesus’ baptism—fluttering over Jesus in the Jordan River in a manner analogous to the hovering Spirit bird in Genesis—signal that as God became flesh and feathers in biblical time, God could become flesh and feathers in our own time as well? Could this mean, I asked, that the biblical revelation of the avian God of the Bible entails that God could appear again today in the form of a bird or, in principle, any other life-form? At this point, a member of the audience raised her hand and spoke up: “My brother doesn’t like doves. He has mourning doves in his yard. He doesn’t like their whistling when they fly. In the morning they make too much noise, so he gets up and shoots them wherever he finds them.” Speechless, it was clear that my attempt to make a case for God’s full and promiscuous incarnation within the natural world did not make sense according to the deep faith shared by at least some members of this church community.

The Pigeon God

I have suggested, biblically speaking, that an astoundingly rich variety of quotidian phenomena are charged with divinity—the world is a fecund and luxuriant riot of God’s presence—including the bodies of sacred animals, such as the Genesis bird-God. Presumably a critic of a theology of divine animality would object to my interpretation of Genesis 1 as a matter-of-fact description of the Spirit bird in creation as God on the wing and counter that the Genesis account is a figure of speech. Such a critic would likely maintain that the creation bird is a rhetorical device, a birdy metaphor for articulating God’s all-pervasive presence in creation, like a hen over her nest, poetically expressed, but not an actual description of God’s winged body. But when the creation account is read in tandem with the New Testament’s similar descriptions of the airborne Holy Spirit, what emerges is a thoroughgoing biblical pattern of depicting God’s Spirit in avian terms.

In the story of Jesus’ baptism in the four regular Gospels—and in one unauthorized Gospel called The Gospel of the Ebionites, an early-second-century CE narrative about Jesus that harmonizes the other canonical Gospels into one account¹²—the Spirit, much like in the Genesis account, comes down from heaven as a bird and then alights on Jesus’ newly baptized body. All five accounts narrate the same gospel memory, namely, that as Jesus presents himself to be baptized by John the Baptist and is baptized, the Spirit descends on Jesus as a dove from h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Crossing the Species Divide
• 1. Song of the Wood Thrush
• 2. The Delaware River Basin
• 3. Worshipping the Green God
• 4. “Come Suck Sequoia and Be Saved”
• 5. On the Wings of a Dove
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page