Animism and The Living God
Advent isn’t waiting for God to arrive; it is waking up to a world already alive. Week Three in the Advent Gospel of Creation.
Returning to the First Textbook of Faith
Psalms 104:1
1. Bless Yahweh, my soul. Yahweh, my God, you are very great. You are clothed with honor and majesty.
It begins with awe. Everything begins with awe. Wonder. Delight. Awe awakens us to the interconnection between us and all things. Awe is the root of all of our spiritual experiences.
When we see the psalmist bless the holy name of God, we know that name is being itself. It is the foundation of existence. God is our being, our interbeing, our interconnection, that thing that binds all the cosmos together. It is the field in which we take action, the very breath we breathe.
Our ancestors connected the wind and breath with the idea that we have as soul or spirit. That unseen movement that is life at its most basic level, an unseen force that is, that moves, that animates, and that makes everything possible.
When we contemplate the deep mysteries of time, we find ourselves faced with conundrums like why does anything exist? Why did the great fountain of particles and energy flare forth? If there was nothing, we could not ask these questions. And so, as someone on the inside, it is difficult for us to puzzle out the causes. We are dumbstruck in awe both in its meaning of wonder and its meaning of fear. If things had been slightly different, nothing would be that is. All throughout time, we see these moments where life in the universe could have gone a different way, but it didn’t. From our perspective, this looks like fate; it looks like we were always destined to become. But the future is uncertain. Only the past has been written.
We swim daily in a great river of possibilities. So many things could happen, but only a few will. When we start understanding this great unfurling of time, and our deep interconnection between everything that is and ever will be, we start to see that wonder at the root of everything. That panentheistic truth that God is in all things and all things are in God, that animistic wisdom that God is in everything, the force that moves the rocks, that swirls the waters, that allows for the heat in the earth’s mantle to convect so the continents themselves move. That force, that power is contained within being itself.
When we ask questions like “why do bad things happen to good people?” or “why must the innocent suffer?” we are neglecting the broader point. Why does anything happen at all? It’s because of this great sea of possibilities, this great current of time that marches forward, chemical processes constantly changing the world around us, individual choices and actions shaping what will be in countless ways that we cannot imagine. All of this great web of life, this great web of being, of stone and star, of human and animal and plant and microbe, all moving and dancing together in what could be. And we like to pretend that we can project “shoulds” on top of it. Well, it should be this way or it should be that way, when in reality, what we’re seeing is what could be as we work together to make the world to come.
When we recognize and accept the animistic nature of existence:
that one force is moving through all things,
that everything is interconnected,
and that all of our actions play off of each other in ways that we cannot understand
We become clear in that we do not deserve anything that happens to us. We do not bring things about in the way we participate in that oneness and help to drive the course in various directions. But the flow will do what it does, even despite our best intentions.
The magus in me wants to believe that I can control everything. That through will, intention, and faith, I can shape the world in the way that I want it to be. But the human in me knows that it’s not just my will, intention, and faith, but our collective will, intention, and faith. There are so many variables that I can control and that I cannot control, so many that I cannot even see or fathom that go into every moment of life. All we can do is control what is within our sphere to control. We do that through participation, through submission, and through relationship.
Animism teaches us to discern when to submit, when to participate, and when to strengthen and even cut off certain relationships so that we can get to the world to come that we desire. Animism teaches us to see that deeper web beyond our vision, beyond our regular experiences, and to not only accept that it is but to learn to live in that flow that moves both it and us.
When the psalmist sees HaShem clothed in honor and majesty, that is submitting to the very being that makes all things possible, that flows through all things. As the Apostle Paul says, “He is the one in whom we live, move, and have our being.”
Holiness shimmers from every direction. Everywhere we look, we see the majesty and the honor of God, the being in whom we live, move, and have our being. Once we right our relationship with the cosmos, we flow together with it, shaping its course as co-creators towards that world to come that is the desire of our deepest heart.
Creation as Communion
Psalms 104:3-4
3. He lays the beams of his rooms in the waters. He makes the clouds his chariot. He walks on the wings of the wind.
4. He makes his messengers winds; his servants flames of fire.
In this psalm, the wind and the fire have agency, vocation, and relationship. That is an animist position, an animistic way of seeing the world. But I’m not saying that the psalmist was an animist. What is clear from the text is the psalmist is speaking as if animism were true.
It is far too easy for us to get bogged down between poetic symbolism and animistic intent when we try to read ancient texts. What were they trying to say? What was the author’s original intention? Were they speaking from the place of believing that the winds were messengers and that the flames were servants? Or were they speaking poetically, analogizing them to these forces on behalf of the Living God? Functionally, this is a distinction without a difference. Whether or not the psalmist believed that the winds were messengers and that the flames were servants is an unnecessary addition to what is said here. In attributing agency to both the wind and the flame, as well as to other aspects of creation, like he does in the rest of the psalm, the psalmist is encouraging us to see the entire world alive with the glory of God. He is telling us that if we act as if everything is alive, then we will see the power of the Divine and the glory of the Divine in all things. For the glory, honor, and majesty of the Divine.
In practice, when I say that everything is alive, and that there is an animating spirit in all things, it doesn’t matter if that is actually true. What matters is whether it functionally helps us to interact with the cosmos and to live in right relationship with it. I can take you to a river and tell you its life story, where it begins and where it ends, how it flows. We can talk about the moods of the river as it swells in the floods and draws in during a drought. We can talk about the river in many ways that anthropomorphize it, and that is not what we are trying to do from an animist perspective.
Animism is not the anthropomorphization of other things. In other words, we’re not trying to pretend that everything in the cosmos acts as if it were human. What we’re trying to do is engage it on its own terms and get to understand its moods, its wants, its desires, its drives, its actions, and its abilities. When a gem is cut, it is important for the cutter to understand the natural lines and shapes within the crystal so they understand where it will chip and where it will smoothly move out. In getting to know the stone, the mountain, the river, and understanding how it lives its life, we are developing a right relationship with it that will allow us to live in communion with it all the better.
Everything is alive. Everything is a participant, not just a backdrop to the world. When you start to understand this, we can see how our relationship with not just the fish, but the ocean itself interrelates and interconnects with us, and how it will behave given certain circumstances. We would not poison a person, but we allow ourselves to poison the earth, to poison the rivers. We allow a different morality for the plants and the animals and the oceans and the rivers than we do with each other, and often than we do with animals themselves. Once we start understanding this web of interconnection, we feel that need to develop a proper and right relationship with everything that exists in the world.
When we pray or offer to the spirits that live within our house, this is partially a psychological exercise in and of itself, helping us to understand our right relationship with the house. But as a practical experiment, we can start to see if this actually makes our lives better. In our experience, it has infinitely helped us to stop losing things in the house, to have better pest control, and to even have better climate control within the house that we live in. Now some of that is because of our relationship with the spirits in the house and the spirit of the house itself. Part of that is because we now treat our house as a temple, as a place that is alive and worthy of respect, which makes us look for little things that we can do to take care of it.
Animism, like any spiritual action that we take, is about what we do, not what we believe. It’s the little actions that remind us to have that interconnectedness, to live in that true interbeing that makes us who and what we are. That is the message we receive when we look at the wind as a messenger, or the flame as a servant. When we embrace the luminous vision found in this psalm, the whole world becomes alive to us, full of meaning and non-human persons for us to interact with, become accustomed to, and get to know. The world is only a stranger if we refuse to have communion with it.
When we commune with the river, we don’t expect it to speak with human words, or to have human emotion, or human intellect. It has its own wisdom. It knows where its shores are, and it knows where it can run. When more water is entered, it knows where it can overflow and take new land. It has a wisdom all its own, and a language all its own. When we learn to read its moods and emotions and understand the wisdom by which it operates, we can live better with it. We can learn how to interrelate with it, how we should build our homes around it, our cities, our culture. We understand that in poisoning it, we are poisoning ourselves and all of the things that live around it. This level of interconnection helps us to feel one with the world in which we live, and not alone and isolated, as we too often feel.
The Word and Light Embodied in Earth
Psalms 104:10, 24
10. He sends springs into the valleys. They run among the mountains.
24 Yahweh, how many are your works! In wisdom have you made them all. The earth is full of your riches.
The word and light of the living God resonate in all things, as we saw before in the fire and the wind, and in the springs and the valleys and the mountains. The earth itself is full of the riches of the Divine. The Word and Light nourish everything that grows on the earth, the animals on the earth, and the entire cosmos, stirring it into action.
As we learn to see the cosmos as a great luminous field of action, reaction, choices and decisions, love and mercy and kindness and justice and equity, balance and harmony, entropy and change, transmutation, transformation, and all of the great powers of the cosmos working together to unfold itself in a great shimmering landscape of aliveness, we understand how interconnected the vast universe is.
It is popular to talk about how small we are. And we are. We are one organism filled with many small organisms on a planet that is small in our solar system, small on that planet around a small star in a rather unremarkable galaxy, in a rather unremarkable corner of the universe among myriads of countless galaxies, stars, and planets. But when you realize how interconnected and interwoven everything is, that smallness is also huge.
Billions of years ago, a dwarf galaxy flew right through our Milky Way and caused a whole bunch of stars to go nova. In that nova, the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were set free. That series of explosions made room for and provided the materials for our Sun and all of the planets that are here. Through aeons past, all of that coalesced, recombined, and made all of the things that we see here in this infinite dance beyond our seeing. Yes, we are a small speck on a small planet in a small solar system, but it took two galaxies dancing together in the great expanse of space for this place to come into being. We are interwoven into that dance, into those two galaxies, into all of the wonders that came from it, those stars that came before and the ones that will come after. We are part of this vast luminous web that is the light and the word, the power that flows through all things, ever striving for creation, for balance, for homeostasis.
Creation around us is our older sibling. Its incarnation both predates us and comes after us. The mountains were here before we were here, but the animals and the plants often came after. Not all, some of the trees are old and remember the great giants that once walked the earth. They remember when the first humans came in a way that we never can and never will. This light was already working in this world, creating a cradle for our life, for our existence. All of the cosmos is our Bethlehem and the place where we are is that cradle, that place in which the incarnate light shone to give us breath and words to speak and eyes to see and ears to hear.
Countless stars and galaxies and tectonic plates, animals rising and falling, plants growing and dying, species coming and going to get to us, to bring us here. Not that we are the pinnacle or the supreme, but we are the latest stitch in the weave. We are all connected and interconnected in the great interbeing of the cosmos. The light and the Word shining through us all.
The Animism of Awe
Psalms 104:2
2. He covers himself with light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain.
When we gaze up into the heavens, we are enraptured by all. The world seems so tiny in the vastness of space. The beauty of the nebulae, the glory of the heavens, rains down upon us every night. Sometimes, if we’re lucky and we live in the right place, we can see the auroras dancing and shimmering in the sky like magic light, a flowing river celebrating all the glories of the cosmos. It is in this awe that we take our first steps on the path of spirituality. In awe. In that fear and wonder that comes to us in these brilliant moments, we experience the great mystery of life. We see the universe and cannot help but live in awe of it.
The psalmist here is welcoming us into this beautiful world where the cosmos itself is a Divine gesture, a Divine greeting. All the light is but the covering of God, and the heavens themselves are like a curtain drawn open so that we can see the vast glory of the One in whom we live, move, and have our being. When it is closed, it casts a great mystery upon us as to what might be beyond.
In this cosmic shelter, we live, we grow, we celebrate the world, we savor the greatness that rains down upon us every day, knowing how intertwined we are with everything out there. The cosmos is a shelter cast wide, collecting all in its infinite embrace. We see the hospitality, the spaciousness, the openness that exists in all things. And we are reminded to open ourselves up, to savor what we find there, and to have the great hospitality of the universe.
Sometimes when we feel disconnected, we can just go outside and look at the brilliant blue of the day sky, the white clouds, even when they’re silver and gray, the little rings of white that circulate within them as the sun presses down to push its rays through. At night we see all the sparkling stars and the swirl of the galaxies. When we’re fortunate and we live in a place dark enough, we can look out and see the very center of our own galaxy as a great stream across the sky. In that awe, we remember that we are connected. When we are feeling lost, it is in that great wide-open and welcoming sky that we can find our connection again.
The Animism of Silence and Suffering
Psalms 104:20-21
20. You make darkness, and it is night, in which all the animals of the forest prowl.
21. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God.
Just as the One Life is found in the light, we can also find it in the darkness, in the great night of our souls, of the world, in those places with unanswered questions and unheard pleas. The psalmist reminds us that it is in the darkness that the forest is alive and the animals prowl. The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. That One Life living in the lion also lives in the gazelle, and it is the One Life in the gazelle that feeds the life in the lion.
Too many people who practice various forms of spirituality want to make the world a happy place. A place where there is no suffering and no pain. They actually blame the world for pain and suffering existing. They want to force and enforce their will upon all things so that there is no darkness but only light. The darkness is not the home of demons, but of life itself. It is life that makes all things possible, even the pain and suffering. To be alive is to have the possibility of pain, and in the experience of pain, all we can do is open ourselves up and allow space for it to be. Pain is no less sacred than joy.
That does not mean that we seek out pain like the flagellists and the nihilists do. On the contrary, we seek the holy wherever we can find it. In making pain, we inflict harm on the One Life and on the connections that flow between us and it. Yes, we want to relieve suffering. Yes, we want to end pain, but we do not see it as anything other than it is. It is alive in the world as we are.
Pain is often the mother of invention. We do not create what we do not have a need for when everything is well, when everything is acceptable. We do not strive to be more, to have more, to be more. It is in the experience of pain that we are driven to make the world better. It is a motivation, but that is not its reason for being. Like all the cosmos, it is because it is. And I know that’s not a satisfactory answer to a lot of people. We want it to be a punishment or a lesson. Instead, we discover that pain is just a facet of living.
Suffering, on the other hand, is often a choice. Not necessarily a choice made by the person who is in pain, but a choice forced upon them by those who are in power to hoard wealth, technology, medicine, food, and shelter. Those who are fearful and greedy keep from those who are poor and afflicted those things that could help them, because they wish to profit or just out of a coldness in their heart, not to be of aid and support to their siblings.
In this dark womb of creation, we see needs that need to be met, that need to be fixed. And so we go from caves to tents, to huts, to buildings, to skyscrapers. We see sickness in people and we discover medicines in the plants in the world and in our laboratories. It is the pain that births compassion in us. In the awe that we have for nature, and the empathy we have for those who suffer, compassion is born within us, and through that compassion, creativity is stirred. So many technologies that we have today, we would not have if there were not a pain for them to take away.
A world without pain is a static one. But a world without suffering is a compassionate one. In separating in our mind pain from suffering, we can see how the systems that we put into place can inflict suffering on people who otherwise would not be experiencing pain, or would at least have their pain mitigated in some way, shape, or form.
As we learned on the knee of the Black Madonna, here in the deep fertile night, transformation is possible. The light is present even in the darkness, showing us a way through. A way to the other side, to that place where creativity is born.
The Animism of Creativity and Activity
Psalms 104:12, 18
12. The birds of the sky nest by them. They sing among the branches.
18 The high mountains are for the wild goats. The rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.
When creativity is born within us, we see that it too is alive. Creativity has moods. It can be shy or aggressive. It can come at us when we least suspect it, and it can hide and need to be found. Creativity is more than just music, poetry, books, and art. It is more than paintings or cooking. It is all myriad places where we use our imagination. It is the tool that helps us collaborate with the cosmos to make something new or to make something old feel new again.
The psalmist tells us how the mountains and the rocks create homes for the goats and the birds to sing. The whales sing. Insects and frogs sing into the night. Lions roar. The cosmos is filled with music. It is filled with beauty. Some choose to see that beauty is an accident, something that just happens, a byproduct of creation. With an animist eye, we see the intention that is there, that the cosmos wants to be beautiful. And we can see that desire for beauty in how it makes everything beautiful.
We have been trained and we train ourselves to encounter the world ethically. And so we attribute moral goals and ambitions to phenomena that do not have morality. A storm isn’t evil. Neither is an earthquake or a flood. They are the cosmos performing its actions. A wildfire seeks to devour all that it can. It is living in accord with its nature. From a distance we can see the flames dancing through the trees and see the awful, awesome beauty. But if it’s our house that gets burned down, we deem it evil, hateful, or uncaring.
As I said before, we’re not trying to anthropomorphize the cosmos. We’re not trying to say that the elements of the cosmos act like we humans do. We’re trying to see it acting from its own intent. The fire seeks to devour. The more that it can find to feed its hunger, the more that it grows, creates offspring, and spreads. If we do not want it to grow, then we have to cut off its food supplies. The Indigenous people who lived here before we did, did controlled burns, and they cleaned the forest. They made sure that the fuel was not there so that if fire happened it could not get out of control, it could not come after them. In our infinite rational wisdom, we stopped that from happening. In our infinite rational wisdom, we have unleashed all of this carbon into the sky to heat the planet and dry the wood and the land, so it is more susceptible to flame. If there is a moral agency in the flame, in the storm, in the flood, it’s because we did not care what we were doing and through that carelessness brought calamity upon ourselves. You cannot blame the lion for eating us when we open our gates and let the lion in.
This is why it is so important for us to understand that our creativity is both within us and beyond us. It helps us to create, but we are not the only ones creating. Everything that we do has consequences. It is the cause of many effects and the effect of many causes. Creativity helps us to see this web and learn how to collaborate with it. In coming to see that diversity of voices, of actions, of intentions and needs, we learn to live in harmony with them. And yes, that means we need to imagine the needs of the plants, the needs of the fire. Because if we don’t understand the needs of the fire, then when the firestorm comes, it will devour everything.
When we embrace this great diversity of human creativity and non-human creativity, it is a praise sung into the cosmos that helps to bring us all in line, to co-create a world to come that is better than the one that we live in. When we ignore the needs of the rivers, only looking at our need for the water, we cause more harm than good. Yes, we must weigh out the various needs and find ways to balance them. What can we do to preserve the water in the canal? What if we put solar panels over it to shade it so that we didn’t lose as much to evaporation? Then we are creating renewable energy that’s not allowing the heat, not allowing the carbon to build up so that the world heats up more.
When we open ourselves up to our imagination and allow our creativity to flow. In that flow, see the grand diversity of life within the human species and beyond us. We are able to build such a beautiful and glorious world together. When we talk about co-creation, we’re not talking about some abstract theology about how we’re just a little part in a web. We’re talking about daily practices on how we co-create life every day, every moment, every second we are alive. Together, collectively, in grander ways, we affect the world more. When we open our imagination to see all of the human and non-human actors that we are engaging with moment by moment, day by day, and learn all the ways that we can coexist with them, we turn from the solipsism that tells us it’s just about me and start to act as if it is about us, an ever-expanding circle of us. Then we will restore the world and build the great world to come we all desire to live in.
The Animism of Justice and Celebration
Psalms 104:27-28
27. These all wait for you, that you may give them their food in due season.
28. You give to them; they gather. You open your hand; they are satisfied with good.
As we open our imagination and allow our creativity to take its life through us, compassion grows stronger and seeks to go out into the world where we find justice and celebration. We find them as living entities in and of themselves. As the psalmist says, life prepares food in due season, and we gather. The open hand of the cosmos satisfies us with good things. As we’ve learned through our imagination to see that intricate web, now we are bound to protect it and to celebrate its bounty.
Justice is a living, breathing thing. When we see her, we know her. And when we starve her through prejudice, bias, and corruption, we know she grows weak. We can hear her cry. Every time someone is picked up unjustly, treated harshly, imprisoned wrongly, cast out without trial, every time corruption, greed, and the fearful, powerful, power-hungry people take advantage of her, we hear her cries. It is for us to take care of her, to build halls for her to work in, to ensure that she is well taken care of, because she takes care of us. We do not find justice in judges, lawyers, laws, or those that are entrusted with illusory power and authority. We find justice in the principles of equity and righteousness that tell us that we must take care of everyone from the poorest to the greatest. That no one is higher than another.
Hierarchy is a cage that we build around justice to prevent her from taking action. Authority is a whip that is used to beat her so that she cannot help her children. Power is the substitute for equity so that the fearful, the greedy, and the corrupt can pretend that they are doing her work. Justice does not arise with them. It arises from us.
Justice cannot show favoritism. She cannot judge unwisely. We can feel it in our bones like a betrayal of a close friend when she is twisted and bent and forced to work against us. The problem is the power-hungry and the fearful are able to twist their words to make us feel that way, even when it is not true. They turn the very powers and principles that justice is built on into something to be feared because it threatens their hoarded wealth and their imaginary power.
Justice is not a tool of control. Justice is when every being receives what it needs, not through domination, but through right relationship. When we enter into even a moment of that right relationship, celebration breaks out because they are sisters.
Psalms 104:16-17
16. Yahweh’s trees are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon, which he has planted;
17. where the birds make their nests. The stork makes its home in the cypress trees.
We can always see where the waters of justice and life flow most freely because what is there is not shriveled. It is not thirsty, it is not hungry. The poor are cared for and no one is homeless. The sick have treatment, and the refugee finds refuge. We take care of our own. This is the well-watered tree when we take care of that tree of life which has been planted by existence itself so that everyone has a home. A place to build their nest, a place to raise their young where they can flourish and grow.
Justice, equity, hope, peace. These all make us celebrate. Awe, wonder, creativity, openness, spaciousness. These all make us celebrate. Celebrate. Why? Because in these things, life is watered and nourished. In these things, life can flow freely and develop into wondrous new and unimaginable combinations.
To flourish is to worship the One Life flowing through all things. When we find that balance, that celebration flows through us. It is an unstoppable tidal wave of joy born deep down within us that cannot help but escape in hoots and hollers and screams and cries and dances and songs. Celebration is the fruit of joy, and wherever there is justice, there will be great times of celebration.
This is how we live in the kin-dom of God, not the kingdom of man.
Becoming Kin with the Living God
Psalms 104:33
33. I will sing to Yahweh as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have any being.
When we learn to see everything as alive, we cannot help but start living in right relationship with it. We do this all the time without even thinking about it. When we apologize to our mug when we accidentally hit it on the desk, when we greet our car when we get inside it, when we sit in our chair and thank it for letting us get off our feet. This is an instinct born deep within us.
Animism is not a doctrine that you have to accept. It is not a performance that you have to do. It is a test that you can make, a call to live in life resonant with creation. This is the world that is available to us when we start to understand how we interact with each and every thing we encounter. We’re probably already doing this. In the ways that I said before, think about how you treat your favorite shirt, coat, or jacket. Your favorite pair of shoes. Maybe it’s the entertainment center or the music that you love.
We personify so much in our life just out of basic instinct. And when we personify a thing, we develop a deep and rich relationship with it. In this way, we are not humanizing them. We are embracing our own creatureliness, our own wildness. We’re feeling ourselves woven into the same fabric as the wind, the fire, the bird, the goat, the spring, the tree that gives shelter, and the river that brings life.
The light shines, the word speaks, and creation itself listens and responds. We can too. It’s often our fear or other excuses that keep us from this deep level of connection and interconnection. They keep us from acknowledging the great interbeing that exists between us and all things, how much our environment affects our health and our quality of life, and how much our quality of life affects our environment.
There is enough room in our hearts for the mountains and the plains, the rivers and the oceans, the lakes and the clouds, the birds, and the animals. That doesn’t mean that we have to change everything about how we act or how we engage with them. Pests are pests. Just because I acknowledge the One Life in the mosquito doesn’t mean that I want it biting me and potentially delivering disease into my body. But it does mean that anything I do to that mosquito affects me and the environment around me. I need to take into account what that causal chain is creatively so I can measure my actions justly.
That is true on grander scales as well. People do like living close to the water. Maybe we need to be better about building elevated homes. Learning to work with those beings that have evolved to care for the water, like the beaver. Maybe we need to understand floodplains better to decide where and how we build our homes and our lives. We can curse the rain and accomplish nothing, or we can learn its patterns and its ways and how to live best with it.
Prayer is Living God Who Breathes Through Creation
Psalms 104:31
31. Let Yahweh’s glory endure forever. Let Yahweh rejoice in his works.
The first book I ever read by Matthew Fox was Prayer: A Radical Response to Life. In it, I learned that every action I take is prayer. The Apostle Paul says that the Holy Spirit speaks through us in ways that we cannot. This is the power of prayer and what the mystics meant when they said that we should pray without ceasing.
Every action we take is a prayer to the cosmos, a whispered hope and ambition, that we are giving life to and sending out beyond us to reap back some change in the environment around us.
The good news that we have received is that through awe and wonder, openness, spaciousness, letting go and letting be, in creativity, justice, and celebration, we can walk these four paths together into the Oneness of Life where we can find harmony and balance. At any time, we can repent, which means to change our minds, to change our actions, to turn around on the path and go a different way. And in so doing, we restore the world and build a better world to come.
In this wonder, we learn to live a life filled with reciprocity, where we give and take in equal measure, and in everything, we find wonder.
May every breath you take be a blessing, and every word you speak bless others. May the life you live be in blessed harmony with what is around you and within you, so that in the end the glorious kin-dom may shine everlasting and with joy and much celebration throughout the world. Amen.