When I was very young, I was always incredibly excited by nature and loved this season of spring most of all.

My fundamentalist “Christian” upbringing somewhat repressed this spirituality but it remained an essential part of me, demanding attention but often squashed down till finding happy expression in my discovery of Celtic Christianity.

My mind was less repressed – and a respect for scientific enquiry is integral to my thinking, so here’s the way my theology has evolved…..

In the beginning….Love created everything out of nothing by processes we continue to discover through science. This never ceases to inspire my wonder!

The Spirit (Breath, Wind) of God broods like a mother hen till order emerges from chaos….and God flows (and dances) through all that is.

It is in Love’s nature to create and procreate!

We are free to choose whether to flow with Love, contributing out of our own creativity, or to retreat into risk avoidance (through fear) attempting to manipulate our environment and sterilely protecting what we feel we own.

I am part of creation and all I have is given to me – including my abilities as well as my possessions.

My little world and my participation in the wider world work best when I consciously acknowledge this, express gratitude and recognise that I am loved and have a unique part to play….daily reminding myself to listen inwardly to the Life voice, not the Fear one, the Love voice, not the Death one. Ideally that informs all my decisions – great and small, around my interface with the piece of earth where I live and the wider earth around it.

Lately, I have delighted in feeling closer to nature again and in a sense that I can communicate with other created beings, just through my spirit. This has given me a new reverence and is posing new challenges to my assumptions.

Both environmental science and the Bible teach that things as they are will come to an end. These accounts are consistent with each other (just as the Creation stories are). We are not to conclude anything about the timing but to live in the knowledge that every moment counts, balancing practical, intellectual and spiritual effort individually and collectively where possible to appreciate and co-create beauty and give care.

In the past people often thought the end was near and made wrong decisions because they assumed that physical aspects of life no longer mattered. We are warned against that and also to “Keep awake” and aware of what is happening.

We are warned too against the love of money – which seems to drive everything in current world economies.

In every part of the world, honest and caring people recognise much of this, through their own contemplation or doctrines and St. Paul recognises this universality in Acts 28. 17 (quoting a Greek poet) “In Him we live and move and have our being”

He also says “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.” Rom 8. 22

There are many colourful accounts of what will happen in the end times in the Bible, and some of them seem to be reflected in what is happening to the climate (as well as conflicts between peoples). Still, we are told not to give in to fear or to assume the end is imminent but to be mindful of our attitudes and behaviour, remaining humble and trusting that things will work out. (I sometimes wonder whether the Second Coming of Christ to bring about the “New Heavens and New Earth” might not eventually be fulfilled by our wholesale co-operation in working together as the “Body of Christ”).

This is not to negate the pain and grief facing us in the “tribulation”. It should not come as any surprise.

Stories based on the processes of nature are integral to Jesus’s teaching about how things are materially as well as spiritually, so that the “corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying, thus producing much fruit” shows the way His victorious death is essential for the world’s redemption, which cannot be thwarted by any force of negativity.

I love Mark Nam’s exegesis of Jesus as The Gardener, acknowledged by His under-rated prophet, Mary of Magdalene. and I’m adding that to my thinking about these times. Sometimes gardeners do need to slash and burn, but they do it carefully in boundaried ways in the interests of the land and its produce. Then again, sometimes what they plant will only flourish after their own deaths.