The direct, palpable experience of God in the earth is one of my earliest childhood memories. As a boy, my family often traveled from Los Angeles, where I grew up, to coastal Mississippi, the site of my mother's homestead. Along the shores of the Singing River in Biloxi, Mississippi, my mother told me the story of my far-removed tribal ancestors, the Pascagoula Indians, who inhabited the banks of the river many generations ago.

My great-grandmother, Francis Hawkins, was a native Seminole woman who migrated to the Mississippi gulf coast probably sometime in the 1890s. (The Seminoles and Pascagoula were distant relatives, I was told.) Little is known about her, but my grandmother, Winona, used to carry with her a dog-eared photograph of her mother in tribal garb. However, the story of my great-grandmother was not well known to my immediate family because, I suspect, the social anxieties of "marrying outside one's own kind" blunted any desire, on my grandmother's part, to talk openly about her Indian heritage. Nevertheless, my mother narrated to me the story of the early conflict between the Biloxi and Pascagoula Indians. Through this story, I learned about the power and mystery of Earth God present within the ebb and flow of the Singing River through the ages.

According to ancient legend, the two communities of Indians had peacefully coexisted along the banks of the Singing River generation after generation. The Biloxi Indians, however, were more war-like while the Pascagoula peoples who were more peace-loving. A mutual détente had held between both tribes since earliest memory. This non-aggression pact entailed the proviso that the Biloxi would never attack the Pascagoula as long as no intermarriage between the two tribes took place. But the pact became threatened by the fledgling relationship between a young man of the Pascagoula families and a young woman of the Biloxi clan. Star-crossed lovers, the boy and girl's growing affection threatened to disturb the peace and stability that existed between the two communities. Fearful of an attack by the Biloxi on their tribe, and not willing to take up arms against their neighbors, the Pascagoula opted for a united course of action to prevent a massacre. They decided to put themselves to death. And they did so, walking single file into the dark waters of the Singing River -- singing a mournful, tribal song in the process.

As a child I was mesmerized by this story. But as intriguing as this story was to me, what I found particularly compelling was my mother's claim that the song sung long ago by the Pascagoula can still be heard in the cadences of the river's waters. She explained that while the Singing River is technically the Pascagoula River, most local people refer to it as the Singing River in deference to the legend. As a child I believed my mother's account. I swam in the river and heard the plaintive song of my ancestors. In the undulating swish-swish of the water flow, I listened to the distant echo of the ancient river music mysteriously preserved in this underwater environment.

As a child swimming in the river, all of my senses were keenly attuned to the possibility of hearing the song of the Pascagoula. In some rough sense, I felt I was encountering God in the river. The river was a site of numinous powers, greater than myself, that both transcended, and interpenetrated, the everyday world of nature I inhabited. God, I sensed, was in the river, but God was also beyond the river. As an adult reflecting on the theological import of my childhood river experience, I now believe that the ancient tribal music I heard in the river deeps was made possible by God's presence within the muddy waters. Down in the dark water of the river, God actualized the ancient song and made it a reality to my listening ears. In this sense, as I now realize, my experience went beyond a hearing of the river song, as strange and miraculous as this might be; moreover, it entailed an encounter with the divine life who made possible the transmission of the native dirge to my comprehension. I cannot exactly explain this double sensibility I felt at that time -- how the hearing of the Indians' song was felt by me to be an instance of God's presence. Yet I knew, somehow, that the God I had learned about in my home and church and Sunday school as a child, this same God, now present to me in the river, was mediating to my understanding the death march music of the Pascagoula.

To claim that the power to hear the river music was generated by the same God witnessed to in the Bible may appear that I am either coopting Native American spirituality, or paganizing biblical religion, or both. On the one hand, it may appear that I am subsuming the story of the Pascagoula under the triumphalist Christian notion of an all-encompassing God. On the other hand, it may seem that I am undercutting the distinctiveness of the Christian doctrine of God by rendering this God an intimate associate of non-Christian cultural and religious traditions. I am not trying to make either of these two claims, however. On the contrary, I am suggesting that God is a living and dynamic presence within the natural order who is greater than the theological models of God within any one particular religion, be it Christian or Native American. The spiritualities of biblical communities and America's gulf coast Indians have their own meaning and integrity and should not be collapsed into one another. Nevertheless, in the light of my own Christian upbringing and my hearing of the ancient dirge in the river, it made sense to me then, and it does again now, to understand the authority and significance of these two dimensions of my life as having a common origin, a divine origin. Alternately, God is the same reality witnessed to by the biblical stories and the source of my encounter with the plaintive song still reverberating within the Pascagoula river. All that is good and wonderful springs from a common source -- a divine source -- toward which the world's religions and cultures strive to understand, and sometimes worship, in their own partial and fragmented ways.

Submerging myself within the waters of the river allowed me, then, to hear the river song and understanding that its conveyance, in my mind, sprung from the God of biblical faith. This double sensibility should not come as a surprise. Throughout my young life at the time, I had been taught Bible stories in my home and church where the divine life was regularly figured as a nature deity. I had learned that God fashioned Adam and Eve from the dust of the ground, spoke through Balaam's ass, arrested Job's attention in a whirlwind, and appeared as a dove throughout the New Testament. If these stories were true, then, similarly, is it impossible to imagine that God could speak again to an eight-year-old boy through the river song?

The pedagogical import of the self-sacrifice of the Mississippi Indians was, to my early understanding, very clearly ethical in nature. In my young mind, the divine message embodied in the river music was clear: the preservation of this tribal melody was an undying memorial to the spiritual and moral integrity of the Pascagoula. In order to prevent bloodshed, the tribe opted to perish collectively in the dark waters of the river. This was the sacred teaching I took away from the river. Literally bathed in the music and message of the river, I felt the divine presence in a direct, viscous fashion that I will never forget. In some sense, I met God in that river and heard God's moral voice speak to me through the ancient song.

But while my boyhood encounter with the religiously-charged river bore profound spiritual meaning for me at the time, as I grew older, and later learned to practice Christianity more reflectively, I initially drifted away from any sustained realizations of God in the natural world. Now I believe I know what I had encountered in the Pascagoula river -- the God of Christian faith revealing Godself to me as a river God -- but as a teenager and young adult I had become mistrustful of my earlier experiences as exercises in wishful thinking, even delusion. Sadly, as I now realize, this drift was aided and abetted by the historic indifference, at times even hostility, of Christian practice to the discovery of God within the environing earth.

In the main, historic Christianity understands the divine life as a Sky God. In nursery rhymes, sermons, hymnody, iconography, and theological teachings, God is pictured as a bodiless, immaterial being who inhabits a timeless, heavenly realm far beyond the vicissitudes of life on earth. Of course, in the person of Jesus, God did become an enfleshed life-form in ancient history. But the incarnation is generally understood as a long-ago, punctiliar event limited to a particular human being, namely, Jesus of Nazareth. Sadly, for many Christians, the incarnation of God in Jesus does not carry the promise that God, in any palpable sense, is continually enfleshed within the natural world as we know it. Rather, for the better part of church history, the divine life and the natural world have been viewed as two separate and distinct orders of being. Occasionally, God may intervene in the natural realm in order to achieve some other-worldly objective -- as in the case of sending Jesus to earth in order to redeem humankind from its sins. But occasional divine visitations do not entail the continual coinhabitation of God in the earth. Indeed, the majority theological judgment is that any suggestion that God is somehow embedded in the earth smacks of heathenism, paganism, and idolatry. Whatever else God is, God is not a nature deity captive to the limitations and vagaries of mortal life-forms. God is not bound to the impermanent flux of an ever-changing earth. God cannot be regarded as existing on a continuum with creaturely life-forms. It is for these reasons, according to majority opinion, that biblical religion forbids the fashioning of graven images as representations of the divine life: God is not a bull or a snake or a lion. On the contrary, so the majority argument goes, God abides in an eternally unchanging heavenly realm where suffering and disappointment are no more and every tear is wiped dry.

My experience of the sacred river instilled within me an abiding uneasiness with the majority argument against God in nature. It was here -- in the swift current of the river -- that I had my first experience of God as numinous power within a natural landscape. But as I grew older, as I have said, I found it easy enough to discount this experience. What had begun for me as an encounter with God in the underwater cathedral of the river evolved, over time, into a distant memory of a youthful enthusiasm. As a young adult, I questioned whether I really did experience God in the river as a boy. I speculated that I was an impressionable victim of auto-suggestion. Based on my mother's tale, I entered the river primed to hear the music of the Pascagoula and, accordingly, thought I heard the ancient song when, in reality, it was simply the roar of the river's underwater power that I was hearing. In following through this line of questioning, however, I began to realize that I was making war against my deepest sensibilities. I was doing damage to my soul. If a person cannot trust his or her innermost stirrings, then we are all captive to the voices of others with no ability to plumb our own inner depths and discover therein what we know to be true. I decided that I would trust my inward certainties and suspend the majority theological conviction that God could not possibly appear and speak profound messages in natural landforms such as the Singing River.

If God long ago spoke through Jesus as the Word of God, is it impossible to imagine that God today could speak again through the muddy waters of a Mississippi coastal river? Alongside Christianity's time-honored source of revelation -- the biblical texts -- could God speak again through an alternative medium to a child primed to hear the song of the river? For me, in those early boyhood swims, the God of the biblical testimonies was a river deity who said to me -- through the requiem of the Pascagoula -- that one should always live one's life in the service of others. I found this ethical message to be in perfect harmony with the biblical teachings. It neither contradicted nor undermined these teachings. It only deepened them. Or perhaps, I now realize, it is the other way around -- namely, that the biblical teachings have their peculiar depth and power in my life because these teachings are fundamentally rooted in spiritually-charged events in my formative years, such as swimming in the sacrificial stream of the Singing River.

We face today an environmental crisis of staggering proportions.¹ We now know this. But we seem confused as to how to address the crisis in a manner that will engender long-term sustainable growth for human communities without sacrificing the vital needs of nonhuman communities to survive and flourish. All of us -- liberal and conservative, religious and nonreligious, so-called third world and first world, rich and poor -- claim to want a balance between satisfying essential human needs and preserving the biodiversity that makes our planet a rich and invigorating place in which to live. Yet we apparently lack the heartfelt commitment to sustainability required for insuring the integrity of humankind and otherkind in unity with one another.

But why is this? Is the cause of our collective inability to address adequately the earth crisis a cognitive failure to understand what it will take to build sustainable communities? Is the problem, in other words, essentially technological, so that if we only had, for example, better pollution controls to protect against the greenhouse effect we might stem the deleterious impact of global warming on public health? Or is the real reason behind our failure to practice earth-healing a matter of the heart? That is, do we not know how to solve the problem or do we not care enough about interspecies integrity to feel motivated to address the predicament at hand? I believe that the fundamental cause of our collective inability to confront the global environmental crisis is our deep-seated unwillingness to change our habits and embrace greener lifestyles. The problem is a matter of the heart, not the head. The problem is not that we do not know how to avoid our current plight but rather that we no longer experience our co-belonging with nature in such a way that we are willing to alter our lifestyles in order to build a more sustainable future. Of course, both on the level of technological innovation and public policy, there is much we can do to stem the tide of environmental degradation. But unless at the core of our deepest selves we are fundamentally committed to sustainable living no amount of eco-efficiency in business and industry will make for long-lasting change.

Moreover, insofar as the environmental crisis is a matter of the heart the crisis at its core is a spiritual crisis. The environmental crisis is a spiritual crisis because the continued degradation of the earth threatens the fundamental interconnections that bind human beings to one another and all other forms of life. At a very deep level we no longer feel our common kinship with other living things. We have lost that primordial sense of belonging to a whole web of life that our kind and otherkind need for daily sustenance.

In saying that the earth crisis is a spiritual crisis, I mean something else as well. I also mean that the problem is explicitly a religious problem in the sense that the promulgation of particular theological teachings has lead to the ravaging of earth communities. In the Christian tradition, for example, one interpretation of the Genesis creation story is that God, a heavenly monarch far removed from the planet, created human beings as God's viceregents to exercise "dominion" over the earth. "God said to humankind, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth'" (Gen. 1:28, emphasis added). In the monarchical reading of this passage, God is a distant potentate who has handed over to his human subjects the created order as a resource under their control and for their use and benefit. If, then, God has given the earth to us as our private possession, then why not do with it what we want?

Lynn White, in a now famous essay, writes that Western Christianity's attack on paganism worked to sacralize the exploitation of nature by putting forward a notion of God as a disembodied Spirit disinterested in earthly affairs.² White writes that Western Christianity's attack on paganism effectively stripped the natural world of any spiritual meaning -- and thereby paved the way for widespread environmental abuse -- by replacing animism with the doctrine that God is a bodiless Spirit whose true residence is in heaven, not on earth. "By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."³ The belief that the Sacred is in rivers and trees and animals was supplanted by the belief that God is a discarnate and dispassionate reality disinterested in affairs on the "lowest order" of being. I believe White is generally accurate in his analysis. The impact of Christianity's antipagan teachings has tended to empty the biosphere of any sense of God's presence in natural things. God is now pictured as a sky-God with little if any connection to natural processes. In turn, human beings, as bearers of God's image, are regarded essentially as "souls" taking up temporary residence in their earthly bodies. In this schema, we are all transient denizens of a material world from which we will be delivered in death in order to return to the disembodied Source from which we have originated. Along the way, these teachings imply or state outright that God is against nature, with the result that they inculcate in human beings an absence of family feeling for other biotic communities. In this sense, therefore, the ecological crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis because certain Christian teachings have blunted our ability to experience co-belonging with other life-forms, rendering us unwilling to alter our self-destructive course and plot a new path toward sustainable living.

I have said that ecocide is a spiritual disease. Like alcoholism -- another disease, as Carl Jung said, that is essentially spiritual in nature⁴ -- ecocide is rooted in addictive behaviors that undermine biological health and well being. The "spiritual" origins of ecocide are apparent in our head-long rush to disaster; as in the case of the alcoholic, we know we are destroying our lives but we can no longer stop ourselves from doing so. In theological parlance, our predisposition toward environmental abuse is an instance of the "bondage of the will" in which we find ourselves unable to stop behavior that we know to be self-destructive.⁵ Why else would the human community push itself further and further toward certain environmental catastrophe -- global warming, irreversible ozone depletion, massive deforestation, chronic loss of arable land, daily extinction of numerous species -- unless it is addicted to toxic habits from which it can no longer escape? But if the root of the environmental problem is deeply spiritual or religious at its core, it is also the case, ironically, that a partial answer to the problem lies in a rehabilitation of the earth-friendly teachings within the spiritual tradition that seems especially hostile to nature, namely, the Christian tradition. If ecocide is a disease of the soul, then it requires spiritual medicine -- the medicine of healthy, rather than toxic, Christian values and ideas. This paradox should not be surprising to us. It is often the case that the seeds for positive change lie deep within the very thing that is the source of the seemingly incorrigible impediments to change in the first place.

Recently, I finished treatment for a severe allergy to beestings that consisted of taking incremental amounts of bee venom in order to build up my immune system in the event that I would be stung again by a bee, wasp, yellowjacket, or hornet. Over time, my system became gradually desensitized to the effects of a bee or wasp sting through venom injection therapy. The regimen I endured was an exercise similar to homeopathy -- "like treats like" -- and it proved successful as a remedy from the near-fatal beesting attacks I had suffered since childhood. In my view, Christianity vis-à-vis the earth crisis is like the venom I took to overcome my beesting allergy: it is both the origin of the problem and its solution. In relation to potential planetary destruction, Christianity is the "cause" of the ecocidal "disease" from which we suffer because it mediates many of the founding stories and images that teach us, in the great chain of being, to exercise lordship and dominion over the created order. As well, Christianity is the "cure" of ecocidal sickness insofar as it provides non-monarchical scriptural and ethical resources for a healthy mindset toward nature that is a prophylactic against nature-hostile attitudes and habits. In my struggle to overcome a fatal allergy to beestings, I had to inject the very thing that made me sick in order to become well again. Likewise, it behooves all of us to digest thoughtfully Christianity's understandings of nature -- for good and for ill -- in order to understand our ecocidal tendencies and to heal the world around us through utilizing the green resources within certain Christian teachings.

Why am I arguing that Christianity is both cause of and cure for the planetary crisis we face? My justification for this claim is historical influence. As the regnant cultural system in Western society -- along with modern science and technology -- Christianity has a privileged role in shaping humankind's place within the natural world. In the new millennium, it is unclear whether Christianity will continue this dominance or whether another symbol system -- for example, global capitalism or information technology or Islam -- will set the terms for articulating the proper relationship between humankind and otherkind. I believe we are moving into an era when a variety of competing thought systems will vie for control over the debate regarding sound environmental policy.⁶ The verdict is out as to whether Christian ideas will continue to play an authoritative role in our environmental thinking or whether this role will be ceded to other players in the debate. Nevertheless, the need is urgent for excavating the deep and complicated origins of the crisis in the foundational texts and symbols fundamentally responsible up to this point for the causes -- and the solutions -- of the global crisis.

If Christianity is both disease and cure in regard to the ecocrisis, then what role can the ancient earth wisdom within Christianity play in making our respective bioregions vital places in which to live and work? Theologically speaking, I believe that hope for a renewed earth is best founded on belief in God as Earth Spirit, the benevolent, all-encompassing divine force within the biosphere who continually indwells and works to maintain the integrity of all forms of life. The Spirit is the enfleshment of God within every thing that burrows, creeps, runs, swims, and flies across the earth. The Spirit is the promise of God's material, palpable presence within the good earth God has made for the sustenance and health of all beings. God continually pours out Godself into the cosmos through Earth Spirit, the driving force within the universe who brings each thing into its natural fruition. In this sense, God is carnal: through the Spirit, God incarnates Godself within the natural order in order to nurture and protect every form of life. The Holy Spirit, therefore, is an enfleshed being, an earthly life-form who interanimates life on earth as an outflowing of God's compassion for all things. The Nicene Creed in 381 C.E. named the Spirit as "the Lord, the Giver of Life." In this book, I will try to make sense of this ancient appellation by reenvisioning the Holy Spirit as God's invigorating corporal presence within the society of all living beings.⁷

Unfortunately, however, many contemporary Christians experience and understand the Spirit -- if they think about the Spirit at all -- as the forgotten member of the Trinity, the shy member of the Godhead, the left hand of God. In the lived practice of God's presence in many non-charismatic Christian communities today, the promise of the Spirit to fill and renew all of God's creation is generally overlooked. This oversight renders present-day Christianity a binary religion, a religion of the Father and the Son, with little if any awareness of the Spirit's critically important work in the world. This neglect of the Spirit saddles Christianity with a backward-looking orientation. It undercuts one of the most important promises of the Gospel, namely, that the departure of Jesus from the world two thousand years ago entails the gift of the Spirit for all who seek the truth. In John 16, Jesus says "I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you . . . . When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth" (vv. 7, 13). The hope of Christianity is the promise of God's omnipresent Spirit to fill the earth with her power and love so that all of God's creatures, human and nonhuman alike, can be brought into a healing and restorative relationship with the truth.⁸ This hope, in effect, renders Christianity a religion of multiple perspectives. In its best moments, Christian spirituality consists, simultaneously, of remembering with gratitude God's goodness and love in the mission of Jesus and looking forward with hope and expectation to the continuation of that mission, under the power of the Spirit, in the new situation of the present and future. The "new situation" that now confronts us is the earth crisis. Jesus has departed this world but in his stead God has offered to us the all-encompassing work of the Spirit -- the Spirit's work of renewal and restoration in a world badly wounded by chronic environmental abuse. In this model, Jesus and Spirit are dual foci within a single ellipse.

Yet many Christians, because of their understandable but exclusive identity with the story of Jesus, are today unable to track the new work of the Spirit in a world under siege. To counteract this tendency, I offer here a forward-looking, earth-centered model of the Spirit as the "green face" of God who sustains the natural order and unifies all of God's creation into one common biotic family. From a religious perspective, this earth-centered doctrine of the Spirit -- as reminiscent of Jesus' love for all creatures testified to in the gospels -- is the best grounds for hope and renewal at a point in human history when our unchecked appetites seemed destined to destroy the planet. A new vision of the carnal God as the Spirit of the earth has the potential to invigorate all of us in our struggles to love and protect the gift of creation.

In historic Western thought, however, the Spirit is not understood as a friend of the earth but as a ghostly, bodiless entity far removed from the concerns of the created order. Conventional understandings of the Spirit evoke images of a vapid and invisible phantom ("the Holy Ghost") divorced from the tangible reality of life on this planet as we know it. These popular notions are rooted in the canonical definition of the Spirit as an incorporeal, bodiless, nonmaterial being that stands over and against the physical world, which is not of the same nature as the Spirit. As one theological dictionary puts it, the Spirit is "immaterial or nonmaterial substance . . . . The term spiritus can therefore be applied to God generally [or] to the Third Person of the Trinity specifically . . ."⁹ Much of Western thought -- including religious thought -- operates according to a series of binary oppositions that separate spirit from body, mind from matter, and God from nature. These dichotomies not only divide the spiritual world from the physical order. They also order the two terms in the polarity in a valuational hierarchy by positing the first term (spirit, mind, God) as superior to the second term (body, matter, nature). In general, therefore, Western thought has not only pitted the spiritual world and the physical order against one another but also subordinated the one to the other. In this schema, the Spirit is regarded as an eternally invisible and incorporeal force superior to the earthly realm which is mired in contingency and change.

This bipartite division between spirit and matter has a long and tenacious history in Western philosophical and religious traditions.¹⁰ Plato's philosophical anthropology, for example, is controlled by metaphors of the body as the "prison house" and the "tomb" of the soul. The fulfillment of human existence, according to Plato, is to release oneself -- one's soul -- from bondage to dumb, bodily appetites in order to cultivate a life in harmony with one's spiritual, intellectual nature.¹¹ Origen, the third century CE Christian Platonist, took literally Jesus' blessing on those who "made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 15:1) and at age twenty had himself castrated. As a virgin for Christ no longer dominated by his sexual and physical drives, Origen became a perfect vessel for the display of the Spirit.¹² But in the Christian West, Augustine is arguably most responsible for the hierarchical division between spirit and nature. Augustine maintains that human beings are ruled by carnal desire -- concupiscence -- as a result of Adam's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Adam's sin is transferred to his offspring -- the human race -- through erotic desire leading to sex and the birth of children. In their fleshly bodies, according to Augustine, infants are tainted with "original sin" communicated to them through their biological parents' sexual intercourse. Physical weakness and sexual desire are signs that the bodily, material world is under God's judgment. Thus, without the infusion of supernatural grace, all of creation -- as depraved and corrupted -- is no longer amenable to the influence of the Spirit.¹³ This long tradition of hierarchical and antagonistic division between Spirit and matter continues into our own time -- an era, often in the name of religion, marked by deep anxiety about and hostility toward human sexuality, the body, and the natural world.

At first glance, some of the biblical writings appear partial to this binary opposition between body and spirit. Consider Paul's rhetoric of spirit versus flesh in the Books of Romans and Galatians as cases in point. In Rom. 8:5-13, Paul emphasizes that "life in the flesh leads to death while life in the Spirit leads to life." This juxtaposition lends credence to the received notion that the material and spiritual orders are fundamental opposites in the New Testament. But while this reading of Paul is understandable given the force of his rhetoric here and elsewhere, this reading is a mistake. In reality, Paul's thought utilizes a threefold anthropology that trades on the terms sarx ("flesh"), soma ("body"), and pneuma ("spirit"). In this schema, the Christian subject is an embodied self (soma) who experiences the inner warfare between impulses that resist life in Christ (sarx) and a power within the self that brings the self into relationship with Christ (pneuma). Each of these terms carries a certain value in Paul's "systems" theory of the self: soma, as the human person in her essential bodily state, is the neutral environment within which the battle between the negative tendencies of sarx and the beneficial influence of pneuma is carried out. As well, Paul's generally positive attitude toward the body is eloquently expressed in I Cor. 6:19, 20 where he writes, "Do you not know that your body (soma) is a temple of the Holy Spirit (hagiou pneumatos) within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." The embodied, somatic Christian subject is a sacred dwelling place -- a temple -- inhabited by the Spirit of God. The Spirit and the body, therefore, are coterminous ideas in Paul's thought.¹⁴

Along with Paul, the vast majority of the biblical texts undermine the split between God and nature by structurally interlocking the terms in the polarity within one another. In particular, on the question of the Spirit, the system of polar oppositions is consistently undermined. In terms of the Spirit, rather than prioritizing the spiritual over the earthly, the scriptural texts figure the Spirit as a carnal, creaturely life-form always already interpenetrated by the material world. Granted, the term "Spirit" does conjure the image of a ghostly, shadowy nonentity in both the "popular" and "high" thinking of the Christian West. But the biblical texts stand as a stunning countertestimony to the conventional mindset -- including the conventional theological mindset. The Bible, rather, is awash with rich imagery of the Spirit borrowed directly from the natural world. In fact, the four traditional elements of natural, embodied life -- earth, air, water, and fire -- are constitutive of the Spirit's biblical reality as an enfleshed being who ministers to the whole creation God has made for the refreshment and joy of all beings. In the Bible, the Spirit is not a wraithlike being separated from matter but a creature like all other created things made up of the four cardinal substances that compose the physical universe.

Numerous biblical passages attest to the foundational role of the four basic elements regarding the biocenric identity of the Spirit. (1) As earth, the Spirit is both the divine dove, with an olive branch in its mouth, that brings peace and renewal to a broken and divided world (Gen. 8:11, Matt. 3:16, John 1:32), and a fruit bearer, such as a tree or vine, that yields the virtues of love, joy, and peace in the life of the disciple. (2) As air, the Spirit is both the vivifying breath that animates all living things (Gen. 1:2, Ps. 104:29-30) and the prophetic wind that brings salvation and new life to those it indwells (Judges 6:34, John 3:6-8, Acts 2:1-4). (3) As water, the Spirit is the living water that quickens and refreshes all who drink from its eternal springs (John 4:14, 7:37-38). (4) And as fire, the Spirit is the purgative fire that alternately judges evildoers and ignites the prophetic mission of the early church (Matt. 3:11-12, Acts 2:1-4). In these texts, the Spirit is figured as a potency in nature who engenders life and healing throughout the biotic order.

Far from being ghostly and bodiless, the Spirit reveals herself in the biblical literatures as an earthly life-form who labors to create, sustain, and renew humankind and otherkind in solidarity with one another. As the divine wind in Genesis, the dove in the Gospels, or the tongues of flame in Acts, the Spirit does not exist apart from nature as a separate reality externally related to the created order. Rather, nature itself in all its fecundity and variety is the primary and indispensable mode of being for the Spirit's work in the world. The Spirit, then, is always underfoot, quite literally, as God's power in the earth who makes all things live and grow toward their natural ends. The earth's waters and winds and birds and fires that move within and upon the earth are not only symbols of the Spirit -- as important as this nature symbolism is -- but share in the Spirit's very being as the Spirit is continually enfleshed and embodied through natural organisms and processes.

There are inklings of nature-centered pneumatology within historic Christianity. In Western theology, the work of the Holy Spirit has always been understood in terms of communion, mutuality, and the overcoming of divisions. The early Latin Fathers conceived of the Spirit in the bosom of the Trinity as the divine power that unites the Father and the Son in a bond of mutual love. Basil of Caesarea wrote that the Holy Spirit is the agent of inseparable union within the Trinity. The Spirit labors alongside the Creator and the Redeemer as the Perfector who strengthens and completes the divine work of salvation in the world.¹⁵ Similarly, Augustine analyzed the role of the Spirit in terms of the vinculum caritatis (bond of love) or the vinculum Trinitatis (bond of the Trinity), the communion that binds the other two members of the Godhead together in dynamic unity.¹⁶ The Spirit enables the mutual indwelling of each divine person in the other. Moreover, as the bond of peace and love universal, these early texts imply (without stating as such outrightly) that the Spirit is not only the power of relation between the other members of the Trinity but also between God and the whole creation as well.

Later medieval iconographers make a similar point but in a pictorial medium. The doctrine of the Spirit as the vinculum caritatis is graphically set forth in the trinitarian miniatures of the medieval Rothschild Canticles, in which the Spirit is pictured as a giant encircling "dove" whose wings enfold the Father and Son, and whose large talons and tail provide points of intersection for all three figures. But in the Canticles, the Spirit is represented less like the domesticated birds or pigeons of traditional church art and more like the wild raptors of the mountain wildernesses. The Spirit-Bird in the Canticles spins and twirls the other two members of the Godhead into amorous and novel combinations and permutations. As the Canticles progress, each life-form within the Trinity loses its separate identity in a blur of erotic passion and movement and color. As the Trinity twists and turns into surprising recombinations, the human Father and Son smile and twirl and dance around the aviary Spirit, symbolizing the union of each figure in the sacred bird -- as well as the union of all life-forms in a common biotic order.¹⁷ The Spirit-Bird of the Canticles insures the interrelationship of each divine person in a ludic celebration of perichoretic harmony.¹⁸ As the Spirit exists perichoretically within the Godhead to foster communion between the divine persons, my proposal is that the Spirit also performs the role of the vinculum caritatis within nature in order to promote the well-being and fecundity of creation.

From the perspective of biocentric trinitarian theology, nature is the enfleshment of God's sustaining love. As Trinity, God bodies forth divine compassion for all life-forms in the rhythms of the natural order. The divine Trinity's boundless passion for the integrity of all living things is revealed in God's preservation of the life-web that is our common biological inheritance. God as Trinity is set forth in the Father/Mother God's creation of the biosphere, the Son's reconciliation of all beings to himself, and the Spirit's gift of life to ever member of the created order who relies on her beneficence for daily sustenance. As creator, God is manifested in the ebb and flow of the seasons whose plantings and harvests are a constant reminder of earth's original blessings. As redeemer, God is revealed in the complex interactions of organisms and the earth in mutual sustenance -- an economy of interdependence best symbolized by Jesus' reconciling work of the cross. And as sustainer, God shows Godself through breathing the breath of life into all members of the life-web, a living testimony to the Divine's compassion for all things.

God's presence in the living Christ through the Spirit's maintenance of the ecosphere is the basis for the greening of trinitarian theology. The then and there incarnation of God in Jesus is recapitulated in the here and now embodiment of the Spirit in the world which hearkens back to the originary Mother God's birthing of order out of chaos. This trinitarian enfleshment of God in nature represents a tripartite movement. The first move to an embodied doctrine of God is signaled by the inaugural hymn of Genesis where the Creator Spirit (rûah) breathes the world into existence and thereby enfleshes itself in the creation and maintenance of the natural order. The embodiment of the divine life in Jesus -- an earth creature like Adam, who himself was fashioned from the soil -- is the second move toward a nature-centered model of the Godhead. And the perichoretic union of Jesus in the Spirit -- like Jesus, an earth being as well but now figured in the biblical tropes of water, dove, fire, and wind -- represents the third move toward a biophilic notion of God. It is the move to embodiment -- the procession of Godself into the biotic realm that sustains all life -- that is the basis for unity within the Godhead. In perichoresis, God as Trinity subsists in interpersonal unity through incarnating itself in all things that swim, creep, crawl, run, fly, and grow upon the earth.

The understanding of the Spirit as a life-form intrinsically related to nature emphasizes a generally neglected model of the Spirit in the history of Western theology. In theory, the Spirit has always been defined as both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of creation. As the Spirit of God, the Spirit is the power of reciprocity between the first two persons of the Trinity, on the one hand, and the interior power of redemption within human beings, on the other. And as the Spirit of creation, the Spirit has been defined as the breath of God who indwells and sustains the cosmos. In practice, however, the Spirit has been almost exclusively understood as the Spirit of God; the stress has fallen on its roles as the source of consubstantiality within the Godhead and the divine agent of human salvation. The result is that the biocentric role of the Spirit as the power of life-giving breath within creation, including nonhuman as well as human creation, has been consistently downplayed.¹⁹

Water, light, dove, mother, fire, breath, wind -- the Spirit reveals herself as a healing life-form in the biblical witness. These nature-based descriptions of the Spirit are the basis of my attempt to shift the theological focus back to the Spirit as the Spirit of the earth. Such a focus neither denigrates nor ignores the regnant understanding of the Spirit's other roles as the power of relationship between the Father and Son or as the agent of human sanctification within the history of salvation. Rather, this emphasis on the Spirit's carnal identity as the divine breath who interanimates all other life-forms readdresses our attention to the Spirit's work in all realms of life -- which includes, but is not limited to, the inner life of God and salvation-history. Part of the burden of this book, then, is to shift the weight of theological emphasis away from understanding the Spirit either theocentrically or anthropocentrically toward an explicitly biocentric model of the Spirit in nature.

To reconceive the Spirit as the enfleshment of God's sustaining power in the biosphere is to emphasize the coinherence of the Spirit and the natural world. Whether manifesting herself as a living, breathing organism like a dove, or an inanimate life-form, such as wind or fire, the Spirit indwells nature as its interanimating force in order to lead all creation into a peaceable relationship with itself. Spirit and earth internally condition and permeate one another; both modes of being coinhere through and with one another without collapsing into undifferentiated sameness or equivalence. The reciprocal indwelling of Spirit and earth is neither an absorption of the one into the other nor a confusion of the two. By the same token, this mutual indwelling is not an outward and transitory connection between the two realities but rather an internal and abiding union of the two in a common life together. Insofar as the Spirit abides in and with all living things, Spirit and earth are inseparable and yet at the same time distinguishable. Spirit and earth are internally indivisible because both modes of being are living realities with the common goal of sustaining other life-forms. But Spirit and earth also possess their own distinctive identities insofar as the Spirit is the unseen power who vivifies and sustains all living things while the earth is the visible agent of the life that pulsates throughout creation.

Under the control of this dialectic, the earth is the "body" of the Spirit. Metaphorically speaking, God as Spirit corporealizes Godself through her interanimation of the biosphere. In breathing life into humankind and otherkind, a fundamental transformation within Godself occurs: God is fully incarnated in the green fuse that drives all forms of life to their natural fruition in a carnival of praise to the Creator Spirit. As once God became human in the body of Jesus, so continually God enfleshes Godself in the embodied reality of life on earth. Quintessentially, then, both Spirit and earth are life-givers: the Spirit ensouls the earth with the quickening breath of divine life and the earth enfleshes the Spirit as it offers spiritual and physical sustenance to all living things. The Spirit inhabits the earth as its invisible and life-giving breath (rûah), and the earth (gaia) is the outward manifestation, the body, as it were, of the Spirit's presence within, and maintenance of, all life-forms.²⁰

This proposal for an ecological pneumatology of internal relatedness presents an extraordinary challenge to the traditional Aristotelian and early Christian doctrine of God as an unchangeable and self-subsistent being fundamentally unaffected by the creation God has spun into existence. One intriguing but troubling implication of ecological pneumatology, therefore, is that it places the divine life at risk in a manner that an extrinsic doctrine of the Spirit vis-à-vis the earth does not. The theological problem is that if Spirit and earth mutually indwell one another then it appears that God as Spirit is vulnerable to serious trauma and loss just insofar as the earth is abused and despoiled. In an earth-centered model of the Spirit, God is a thoroughgoing incarnational reality who decides in freedom, and not by any internal necessity, to indwell all things. But in making this decision, the Spirit places herself at risk by virtue of her coinherence with a continually degraded biosphere. God, then, is so internally related to the universe that the specter of ecocide raises the risk of deicide: to wreak environmental havoc on the earth is to run the risk that we will do irreparable harm to the Love and Mystery we call God. The wager of this model is that while God and world are not identical to one another, their basic unity and common destiny raises the possibility that ongoing assaults against the earth's biotic communities may eventually result in permanent injury to the divine life itself.

Moltmann's The Crucified God (and the wealth of similar books it spawned on the topic of divine suffering) argues that God in Jesus suffers the godforsaken death of the cross. In antitheopaschite terms, the cross does not signify the "death of God" but rather the death of Jesus as a terrifying event of loss and suffering within the inner life of Godself. The cross is not an instance of God dying but an event in Godself where the divine life takes into itself the death of the godless son of God crucified for the sins of the world. In the cross, God now becomes radically discontinuous with Godself by taking up the crucified one.

[W]hat happened on the cross was an event between God and God. It was a deep division in God himself, insofar as God abandoned God and contradicted himself, and at the same time a unity in God, insofar as God was at one with God and corresponded to himself. In that case one would have to put the formula in a paradoxical way: God died the death of the godless on the cross and yet did not die. God is dead and yet is not dead.²²

As Jesus' death on the cross brought death and loss into Godself so the Spirit's suffering from persistent environmental trauma engenders chronic agony in the Godhead. From the perspective of ecological pneumatology, Moltmann's "crucified God" has a double valence: death enters the inner life of God through the cross of Jesus even as the prospect of ecological mass death enters the life of God through the Spirit's communion with a despoiled planet. We see, then, that the Spirit is Christ-like or cruciform because she suffers the same violent fate as did Jesus -- but now a suffering not confined to the onetime event of the cross but a continuous suffering because the Spirit experiences daily the degradation of the earth and its inhabitants. Because this trauma deeply grieves the Spirit, she pleads with God's people to nurture and protect the fragile bioregions we all share. Paul writes that human arrogance causes the whole creation to groan in agony as it waits for deliverance; he continues that as the creation sighs in pain the Spirit on our behalf likewise groans in sounds too deep for words --interceding on our behalf that God's love for all creation will be consummated (Rom. 8:18-39). In the midst of the current crisis, the created order groans under the weight of humankind's habitual ecoviolence; in turn, the Spirit intensely beseeches us to care for our planetary heritage. God as Spirit agonizes over the squalor we have caused and through her abiding earthly presence implores us to stop the violence before it is too late.

From this viewpoint, as the God who knows death through the cross of Jesus is the crucified God, so also is the Spirit who enfleshes divine presence in nature the wounded Spirit. Jesus' body was inscribed with the marks of human sin even as God's enfleshed presence -- the earth body of the Spirit -- is lacerated by continued assaults upon our planet home. Consider the sad parallels between the crucified Jesus and the cruciform Spirit: the lash marks of human sin cut into the body of the crucified God are now even more graphically displayed across the expanse of the whole planet as the body of the wounded Spirit bears the incisions of further abuse. Because God as Spirit is enfleshed within creation, God experiences within the core of her deepest self the agony and suffering of an earth under siege. The Spirit, then, as the green face of God, has also become in our time the wounded God. Earth Spirit is the wounded God who daily suffers the environmental violence wrought by humankind's unremitting ecocidal attitudes and habits. The Spirit is the wounded God even as Christ is the crucified God -- as God once suffered on a tree by taking onto Godself humankind's sin so God now continually suffers the agony of death and loss by bringing into Godself the environmental squalor that humankind has wrought.

One of the many ironies of Christian faith is the belief that out of death comes life, from loss and suffering comes the possibility of hope and renewal. This irony is symbolized in the Creator's emptying of herself in creation so that all beings may enjoy fullness of life; in Jesus' crucifixion where the spilling of his life blood becomes the opportunity for all persons to experience the fullness of new life in him; and in the Spirit's kenotic coinherence with the earth and concomitant willingness to endure our ecological violence so that we can be offered again and again the chance to change our habits and reenter the sorority of the earth and her Creator. Our rapacious habits daily wound afresh the Earth Spirit who breathes life into all things; and daily the Earth Spirit intercedes for us and protects us by allowing us to remain richly alive in spite of our behavior to the contrary. The Spirit in and through the body of the earth groans in travail over our addictions to ecoviolence. But in her wounds we have life because it is in the wounded Spirit that we see God's love overabundant and outpouring on our behalf. In her wounds we see God's refusal to remain aloof from creation -- apathetic, unmoved, uncaring -- just insofar as God decided to enflesh herself in all of the processes and life-forms that constitute life as we know it. We continue unabated in our ravaging of the earth body of the one who has given herself for us so that we might live. But to this point the cruciform Spirit has not withdrawn her sustaining presence from the planet -- a reminder to us that God is a lover of all things bodily and earthly -- and a call to a renewed passion on our part for nurturing and protecting the biosphere that is our common inheritance and common home.

Can a recovery of the ancient, biblical idea of the Spirit as the green face of God provide the necessary focus for the practice of earth-healing in our time? The answer to this question has been the focus of this opening chapter. I have proposed here that one of the most compelling Christian responses to the threat of ecocide lies in a recovery of the Holy Spirit as God's power of life-giving breath (rûah) who indwells and sustains all life-forms. I have suggested that the answer to the increasing environmental degradation in our time is not better technology -- a matter of more know-how -- but a Spirit-motivated conversion of our whole way of life to sustainable living -- a matter of the heart. Such a change of heart can occur through an encounter with Christian earth wisdom. This wisdom for our troubled times can be found in the rich biblical imagery of God as Spirit who sustains and renews all forms of life on the planet; the corresponding belief, since the Spirit vivifies all things, in the interdependence that binds together all members of the biosphere in a global web of life; and the concomitant ethical ideal of working toward the healing of various biotic communities whenever they suffer ecological degradation.

We need today a conversion of the heart to a vision of a green earth where all person live in harmony with their natural environments. May the Holy Spirit, as divine force for sustenance and renewal in all things, come into our hearts and minds and persuade us to work toward a seamless social-environmental ethic of justice and love toward all God's creatures.