Nomad is on the road again, this month making their
way down to Bristol to meet up with Chris Sunderland.
Chris is involved in many Jesus-inspired community
enhancing projects such as Agora, but we wanted to speak to him about Earth Abbey.
Earth Abbey is a dispersed community who are
committed to lives lived in harmony with creation. So after we’d had our
creation theology straightened out by Tom Wright, we thought Chris would be the
perfect person to show us what it means in practice.
I loved Chris’s phrase ‘the spirituality of soil’.
His community talks about soil, soul and society. He believes that soil is
common to all humanity (e.g. working the soil and eating from the soil) and
thus can form a deep human and spiritual bond.
I can see a lot of truth in that. God is an earthy
God. He did after all make the earth, he walked on the earth, formed humans out
of the earth, came as a human to live on the earth, and will return to live on
the earth again. It seems pretty clear that we’re now largely estranged from
this earth, with little idea of how to live in harmony with it. So I love
Chris’s idea of forming communities to figure out together how to better come
into relationship with the earth, and in so doing connecting more deeply with
each other and with God.
Tim
Posts
Really enjoyed and appreciated Chris' perspective and the way he worked it out in life. Such an open, balanced, peaceful, and accepting-of-the-other attitude.
ReplyDeleteThanks guys! Kudos from Arkansas, USA
Tom
Hi Tom,
ReplyDeleteThanks mate, appreciate your comments. Glad you liked where Chris is coming from, he got a bit of a rough ride on our facebook page!
Hope all's well in Arkansas.
Peace.
Tim