Katrina and I just returned from the Esuaries gathering on the island of Keawe, otherwise known as “The Big Island,” in Hawai’i. This was our third gathering in five years, and it was wonderful. This gathering took a bit of a surprising turn, but we’re all better for it. We were all having a difficult time preparing our teachings, and it seems that the reason was because the Holy Spirit had something else in mind. There’s a lot to this, so much to process through, and I have barely started on that road, but I would like to give you a little window into what happened. On that note, I was buried in reading and prepping for Estuaries the last two weeks, which is why I’ve been absent from Substack for a little while, but I’m back and I hope to continue the pace as before.
A Brief Introduction To Estuaries
One of my closest friends, Christian, and his wife, Christina, co-founded Estuaries around 6 or so years ago and invited Katrina and I, along with three other couples to be part. The “vision,” if I can say it that way, of Estuaries is to engage with culture in a way that is thoughtful and faithful to Jesus. We’ve struggled to nail down exactly what Estuaries is, and we’ve found some peace in having flexible definitions, as is true to our values. Our website says Estuaries “is a first step toward a long-term vision. Our goal is to incite a cultural ecology that fosters spiritually holistic, emotionally healthy, and intellectually rich believers who are capable of engaging meaningfully with culture.”
Cultural ecology - The idea is that no one and no thing exists in a vacuum. We all impact one another, our society, and the land, as well as being impacted by the same. We seek to be and offer healthy “inputs,” both in culture and in the land.
Spiritually holistic - We are mindful of Christian history, being fed by the orthodox faith and practice of Christians of many traditions, learning from them, and building on those legacies. Sometimes we challenge old ideas, but with humility and trembling. We are also people of the Spirit, and value the “charismatic gifts” and have witnessed God move powerfully in our meetings.
Emotionally healthy - We believe in mental health, and we believe that a truly healthy spirituality includes healthy minds, emotions, and bodies. Every gathering we’ve done has had elements of learning how to be emotionally healthy, which contributes to the good of the Estuaries community and equips us to be healthy inputs back home.
Intellectually rich - we used to say “intellectually rigorous,” by which we meant that Christians should do the hard work of study. Estuaries started in part because of the false dichotomy between the charismatic and the intellectual. We wanted a place where both these values could intermingle and impact one another. We realized that “intellectual rigor” might limit Estuaries only to those within academia, which we didn’t want, so we changed it to “rich” in order to keep the door open to those who are intelligent and wise in many different ways and places, not just higher education.
Engaging meaningfully with culture - The idea is that Estuaries would be the beginning or continuation of a journey that leads to culture(s) impacted by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There are many forces at work that are antichrist, antihuman, and anti-creation, and our hope is that we can plant the seeds of a transformed and transformational culture that resonates with the Kingdom of God. We pray for revival, but not (simply) the shake and bake revivals of generations past, but one in which our whole way of life is transformed by the Creator, his Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. 1
Listening to the ‘Aina
The day before Katrina and I arrived in Hawaii, Christian and Christina met with a Hawaiian elder, whom we will call Aunty A. She is a believer, but highly respected among the native Hawaiians and, as a descendent of King Kamehameha V, is a guardian of a sacred space surrounded by a Marriot resort. She challenged them, and us through them, in a few important ways in regards to the Hawaiian people and the ‘Aina (Hawaiian for “land”). From the beginning, we’ve had downtime built into our schedule, more than most, if not all, programs with which I’m familiar. The intention is to not be so pressed by the need to be efficient or productive as defined by a capitalist value system, but to slow down and listen. Aunty A was told about a time we had scheduled to be “in the land,” and she replied, “You’re only going to be there for half an hour!?” She explained that the land, the ‘aina speaks slowly and that if we were going to be able to hear it, we would need to be in it for much longer than half an hour. She recommended a full day.
She also said something that, when relayed to me, struck me deeply, “For [native] Hawaiians, revival looks like each person having their own taro plot and being able to feed the community.” I am not going to go into this at all here, other than to say it impacted me deeply, and that when Scripture says, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” it’s not talking about someone with a humble or gentle disposition, but those who’ve been made destitute by elite and economic powers, much like the US has done to the native Hawaiians.
We reoriented our first session of the first day to be in the land instead of in a teaching session. Ultimately, we still only spent half an hour in the ‘aina our first day. It was the right decision and our time there was good.2 In our first session, the ‘aina itself was our teacher. Listening to the land oriented our minds and hearts to participate in Estuaries 2023 differently, in a manner that was slower and more attentive. This made for a very different experience in the seminar than we’ve had in the past. We still did teachings throughout our time, but everything was reoriented toward land, and as we taught on our various subjects (ritual, boundaries, codependency, trust in God, and Gospel love) people had land on their mind. What can we learn about ritual and boundaries from land? What does the ‘aina’s trust in God teach us about our relationship with him? Often, this wasn’t explicit, but the sentiments were there and came up in conversations.
Listening to Kuamo’o at the End of the World
After a brief introduction to our plan, we travelled down toward the shore to a place called in Hawaiian, Kuamo’o, which translates to Spine. Standing and looking at the jagged, black cliffs formed by the interaction of lava rock and the crashing waves, it’s not difficult to imagine this place as the backbone of Keawe. We asked the participants to find a spot that called to them and to sit in silence, in solitude with the land, and to listen to what it might say.
The cliffs stand high over the ocean and the waves crash violently against them, giving them their jagged shape. Depending on the incoming wave and the tide, the water will spray several feet into the air, but the next wave may not even clear the edge of the cliff. It’s unpredictable. Among other (more important) things, the area is famous for cliff diving, but with the unpredictability of the waves and the position of the cliffs and rocks, it can be quite dangerous, if not deadly. Surrounding the black lava rock is grass and short trees. The communication of the land with itself is interesting and complex, and we were invited into that conversation.
I walked to the edge of a cliff with the warning, “Be careful, because the waves can pull you over the edge.” As I stood there, listening and watching, I couldn’t help but feel a deep, non-verbal sense of death, and in that depth a could see a rebirth. In non-verbal ways, the land was telling me about death and resurrection, of the interplay between destruction and new life. I watched the waves and lava rock interacting with one another as the moku (island) told me that its sense of being or sense of self was made by this interaction of lava and water, volcano and ocean.
When we gathered back together to discuss what we heard, the theme of death came up over and over again.
“I don’t know why, but I couldn’t help but think of death.”
“I felt like the land wanted to take me down, to swallow me up in itself.”
In 1918, two factions of Hawaiians met in battle at Kuamo’o, which translates as Spine in Hawaiian. The two factions were led by the two named heirs of King Kamehameha I, his son Liholiho (Kamehameha II) and his nephew Kekuaokalani. Liholiho wanted to abandon the traditional kapu religious system with its taboos while Kekuaokalani wanted to maintain them. Liholiho, who wanted to end the kapu system, won the battle that day. Kekuaokalani, along with the old religion, died. So the name, “End of the World,” as the place is also known, is not the geographic end of the world, but the end of a way of life for the Hawaiian.
Both armies suffered considerable casualties, and the bodies were interred in lava rock terraces, becoming one with the land in death. There are complex reasons behind these factions and this battle, but for this post, what is important is that almost no one but a few of the leaders knew what this place was. Regardless, the ‘aina was telling us about the death that quite literally dwelt in that place.
Had we gone merely as tourists, there to have fun, if we had gone to cliff jump, would we have been able to hear what the land spoke? It’s hard to say. Different people are all attentive to the land in differing degrees, but that day we were active listeners. We didn’t hear the voice of the ‘aina in the distance or in the background. We sat with the land and paid attention. The land was kind to us in return, and we perceived a significant shift in how the ‘aina welcomed us.
Listening to the Holy Spirit
By now, some of my readers are going to be concerned that we, Estuaries, are promoting animism, a belief that all created things and the earth itself are imbued with their own spirits and wills. That may be a correct assumption. Afterall, if something is going to communicate with us, at the very least it must be alive. More than that, though, it must have a consciousness of some kind. I can’t speak for the other leaders of Estuaries (we call ourselves the “core team,” in order to disabuse ourselves of an overly hierarchical structure), but I would want to promote the idea of a biblical animism. For westerners, and for non-western Christians educated by westerners, the idea of “biblical animism” seems counterintuitive, but I think a certain kind of animism can be defended scripturally, and a key distinctive of biblical animism is that neither “nature” as a whole nor individual creatures—plant, animal, or otherwise—are worshiped as gods.
Listening well to land includes listening well to the Holy Spirit, since it is the Spirit who is envisioned as the Creator Spirit in Genesis 1:2. We had the privilege of meeting with Aunty A as a core team after Estuaries 2023 finished, and in all her talk about land, she kept referencing the Holy Spirit. The Spirit talks in and to land, much like the Spirit talks to and through people. This neither deifies the land nor removes the land’s agency. In fact, for many indigenous believers across the globe, fellowship with the Holy Spirit puts one in fellowship with our non-human brothers and sisters since it is the Spirit who animates all life. As creatures ourselves, Creation becomes the place where God’s revelation comes to us in myriad ways. Oscar Garcia-Johnson, in his essay, “Faith Seeking for Land,” says, “Creation, place, space, and the land are all part of the primary ground (or spatiality) on and in which the experience of the Creator Spirit happens for Indigenous communities of the Americas as well as for other Indigenous communities on the planet.”3
It is as natural to listen to land as it is to listen and talk to your plants, your pets, your family, your church, and to the Holy Spirit. To embrace this biblical animism is to enter more holistically into the community of creation of which we are a part. Animism is simply the idea that creatures, places, and elements of creation (e.g. rivers, mountains, etc.) are persons (not humans) in their own way and know the world in their own way. Trees know and communicate as trees, and the ‘aina knows and communicates as ‘aina.
To adopt a biblical animism is to adopt the idea that the writers of Holy Scripture,4 who worshiped only one God, believed in a Creation inhabited by persons, of which humans were one kind of person. This idea isn’t new, though it’s not been widely disseminated. Well-respected and orthodox theologian Richard Bauckham espoused a similar idea in his books, Bible and Ecology and Living with Other Creatures. A fuller treatment of the idea is given by Mari Joerstad in her book, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics. Her stated goal is to examine the “personalistic nature texts” in the Hebrew Bible,5 which present land or other non-human, non-animal creatures as active subjects. She goes through the major divisions of the Old Testament to show that “the land has moral and cultic [i.e. worship] responsibilities, people and YHWH talk to mountains and the skies, stars participate in warfare, and trees and billows offer praise to God.”6
Moving Forward
The core team of Estuaries and the participants of our 2023 gathering must decide how we will live from here on out. We were invited by the moku o Keawe, the Island of Keawe, the ‘aina of Hawaii, to sit and listen, to learn to listen. In learning to listen to land, we were also instructed in the practice of listening generally, whether that be to land, to another person, or to God. Listening requires attention and stillness. So much of what we call listening and dialogue is merely the bearing with another person’s words only so that we can say our own. Listening, though, as taught by land and commanded by God in Scripture,7 means we take a position of humility and generosity, believing that the other (land, person, God) has something to gift to us through their manner of communication that we cannot attain for ourselves.
As we see the machinations of global capitalism and warfare wreak absolute havoc on the earth, we are all being called to slow down and pay attention. St. Paul said the Creation eagerly waits with eager expectation for the children of God to become the kind of people who live in the good Creation of God as God intended, with justice and care (cf. Rom. 8:19). Creation also groans for new birth in Christ just as we do (cf. Rom. 8:22). The call of the land and the call of the Holy Spirit is for us to embody the way of Jesus now, but in order to do that, we must put off the old way of domination and speech, and put on the new way of slowness and listening.
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These are my takes on how these terms would be defined, but I work with a team of nine other people, and each will have their own flourish and nuance.
I struggle to find an appropriate word to use instead of good. I don’t want to be superlative or hyperbolic, so words like “incredible” or “amazing” won’t do. I am also on purpose staying away from words that evoke the value systems of capitalism. “Productive” could be an appropriate word as long as we’re thinking in an agricultural mode, i.e. plants produce food for a community, rather than “productive” in a consumeristic sense.
Khiok-Khng Yeo and Gene L. Green, eds., Theologies of Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021), 61.
Particularly the writers of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
Mari Joerstad, Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 3.
Ibid. 22. Joerstad provides multiple scriptures references for all these examples, but I left them out for the sake of space and ease of reading.
“Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is One” (Deut. 6:4).