The Spirit of Things: The Green God

The Spirit of Things: The Green God

21st Jan 2:18pm

It is a strange thing, but for all the churches i have entered, i have never seen such beauty as that which I have glimpsed through this window. And I find myself frequently wondering, whether man in his attempt to harness and capture the spiritual within such places as churches, mosques, temples or synagogues, has done a disservice to the spiritual and had it wrong from the very beginning?

For didn't Moses see, meet and engage the spirit in a burning bush and receive his directions atop a Mountain? So why have we restricted the spiritual between walls and separated our ourselves from nature? Where would God prefer to rest? Would you find him, or her, or the Alpha and Omega beneath the shade of a tree or laying upon or beneath an altar, or inside a tabernacle, at rest and complete without a view of the stars in their night sky, or a view of the rising or setting sun and the travelling and changing moon - would God give up such things? I doubt it. As William Wordsworth had written:

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And tolls through all things (Tintern Abbey 93-102).

No, I doubt whether the wind that moves through the trees would ever advocate being locked away and enclosed. So why has man taken it upon himself to lock away the spirit, why did he walk away from the green altar and its testimony of moving, swaying, shading and life giving leaves?