Dear Church Family,

Words can barely express how joyful I felt to finally get to take the youth on a retreat again. Some things can be adapted to online, hybrid, or socially-distanced iterations, but late night bonding of teenagers under the stars doesn’t adapt well, and it was 2019 when last we got to go on a retreat together. And that is a long, long time for young people, some of whom were too young to be in youth group back then.

While I was meditating on God’s good creation, sitting out on a rock at Zephyr point, an annoying thing happened. My nature meditation was rudely interrupted by the sound of recorded music, coming from the golf cart of a staff member as they did their daily rounds taking care of the conference center. I tried to tune it out and focus instead on the sound of water lapping and birds singing, but it persisted until finally I gave up and embraced it. I didn’t know why it was so annoying. After all, if it had been birdsong and not recorded humansong I surely would have embraced it as part of the beauty of the place. But I have deeply internalized the lesson that nature is separate from humanity, and that nature is pristine and good while humans are flawed and bad. I realized that I believe this: while birdsong is almost always a beautiful gift from God, human song is only rarely pure and good (think Beethoven), being mostly common, crass, top-40 kind of stuff, like the screeching of a nasty blue jay. Whew. That’s a lot of internalized judgment I uncovered there.

So as I sat there I searched for healthier understandings of human creativity. One thought came to me — something I remembered from a reddit post – that humans are inherently creative creatures. We decorate everything we come across, from paintings in caves, to tattoos on our skin, to dividing time into beats and modulating our voices into tones of a scale. We even program robots to play music, just because we can (note: Curiosity, the Mars rover, sings happy birthday to itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/6sdyxk/a_response_to_those_saying_its_sad_how_the_mars/). Humans are inherently creative, made in the image of a creative God, and we fling our music out to the stars.

And the other thought that came to me was about the ravens in our Bible verse, Luke 12:24 “consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them.” The ravens may not sow or reap, but much like humans, they do collect shiny things. Adolescent ravens, in particular, are known for picking up shiny rocks and bits, just to keep for the curiosity of it…. Just like the human teenagers, who with very little direction created a mandala of nature materials, pinecones and needles and blocks of snow and ice making a swirl of pattern and beauty.

We are not so different from the birds, after all. Perhaps we do a little more agriculture than they, but we are engaged like them in music-making, nest-building, and picking up pretty things to look at on the beach. So may we, like the birds, find our own natural and creative place in this beautiful universe God has created. May we not build our houses like fortresses to keep nature out, but may we stay open and embrace the fact that we are natural creatures too, created beautiful and good.

Every Blessing,

Talitha

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