The Earth remains our mother

These were my thoughts on radio Wales this afternoon.

My two year old daughter has reached another milestone in her life. She's sorted out the walking and kind of got to grips with talking, so we reckon that she's ready for the next big challenge:

it's time for potty training.

But if that's a daunting prospect for my household it's nothing to what the Davies family from North Wales have had to cope with on the BBC One programme, Changing Lives.

For those who may have missed it this family of four are part of the Green Wales project, an initiative that's tested the nation to see how environmentally sustainable our lifestyles are. I now that Roy (Noble) and other presenters at the BBC have been doing their bit for this, but as world leaders gather in Copenhagen to discuss the changes in our global climate, it's been the eco-skeptical Davies folk that I have warmed to, swapping their energy guzzling home to live amongst a green community in Powys. There they're learning to generate their own energy, recycle everything and live off the land. Recycling everything has included the challenge of re-using the very stuff my daughter is leaving in her potty.

Meredith and I once spent a week living with twenty other people on a similar project in Scotland. The toilets there were composted too ... the food was mostly home grown and the power sources mainly were sustainable. After seven days there was just one bag of rubbish to remove. On the wall there hung an ancient Celtic prayer reminding us that the whole earth proclaims God's glory ... that there's nothing in the sea, the air, the land that doesn't' contain and reveal God's goodness.

That is not reducing God to nothing more than nature, but it is acknowledging that traces of the Creator can be found in every part of the Creation. It's recognising as St Paul once said, that all things hold together in Christ. And that must means that every thing we see and touch is connected to God, each part deserves our respect, our care and our devotion.

The old prayer on the wall reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who once commented

The earth remains our mother just as God remains our father

and our mother only lays in the father's arms

those who remain true to her

Whether we are leaders of the world in Copenhagen

or families in Wales hoping there's a future for our kids

remaining true to the earth is a challenge none of us can avoid.