Owning Our Creatureliness

Paul L. Escamilla is Senior Pastor at Spring Valley United Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, and the author of an intriguing new book, Longing for Enough in a Culture of More.  It’s worthy of small group study, with a free downloadable study guide, and addresses a timely topic – - how to “escape the lifestyle and attitudes of a weighed-down world.”  That’s not my primary reason for recommending it, however.  I think it’s worthy of attention here because it’s relevant for educators as persons. 

In his introduction, Escamilla characterizes the book as a garden, threading that motif throughout 25 short chapters that make it possible to pick it up and put it down as life demands.  For me, it was hard to put down. More than simply issuing one more call to simpler living, Escamilla draws on Christianity’s wisdom tradition, using “the idea of enough in a different tone of voice.”  That tone draws on Abraham Heschel’s notion of creatureliness, with the capacity to need little and offer much “owing to a balanced awareness of being neither any more nor any less than a creature of God’s creation: merely a creature, and yet every bit God’s creature.” 

Clearly, he acknowledges and challenges our culture’s acquisitive patterns and excesses and, in light of them, is fascinated by the “durable saints” he has known who live modest lives of generosity, self-giving, and trust, seeming to have “needed little and offered much.”  And he wonders .  .  .  if we are made in God’s image, and if living in contented sufficiency becomes us, can it be that there a modest aspect to God’s nature?  And here, as in many places, Escamilla shows his skill at turning a phrase, pointing to an utterly familiar image and making of it something startlingly new.  He describes the way we are given the creation story as modest – - modestly executed, modestly appraised, modestly recalled, all in very few words, the “plainspoken recounting of a good day’s work, six times over.”  What the tale seems to reveal is God “employing mere language to make something out of nothing, without benefit – - or more to the point, without need – - of either fawning audience or flexing ego,” no “fanfare introductions as it all begins or flaunting accolades when it’s all wrapped up.”  God “just gets in there, rolls up the old sleeves, and does the job.”  And then takes a breather. 

Chapter 8, “Temples Well-aging”, begins with I Corinthians 6:19, about the body as temple of the Holy Spirit.  Escamilla suggests that modern Americans, along with classical Greeks, like the idea of a nimble soul that can one day break free from these cumbersome bodies, but “the Bible doesn’t, particularly . . . there’s too much delight with dirt in the Hebrew-Christian worldview.”  So, instead of having a few suspicions about the relationship of self and body, we accommodate: “Let your body talk, then do what it says.  Hungry?  Eat.  Thirsty?  Drink.  Greedy?  Acquire.  Angry?  Curse.  Lusty?  Satisfy.  Thereby do we come to eat too much, drink too much, spend too much, exercise too little, and with many other such socially acceptable excesses betray the body’s innate need for . . . not quite so much.”  If we pay attention to our bodies, learning from them, over time “the temple will begin, more and more, to show through.”  As we move into frumpy old-age, becoming “coats on a stick shuffling closer to the edge of the mortal coil, there may be less fire in our eyes but there will be more light, less pep in our step but greater purpose, more valves and stents and gizmos housed in our hearts but more love, too, and fewer regrets.  Temples, as it turns out, age pretty well.”

Escamilla begins each chapter with a quotation, sometimes scripture, usually not.  The final chapter, “The City and the Garden”, in my opinion, is by itself worth the price of the book.  The opening quotation is from Wendell Berry: “ . . . and the soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”  I remember when, after a decade of ministry in New York City, I reached a point one Spring day when I had to fight off the urge to fling myself face down in a patch of green grass, just to smell the odor of moist earth and new growth.  I was earth-hungry.  The author points out that the Bible culminates with the vision of a garden and a city conjoined.  The good earth, he writes, is not compromised by the city, but “draws it into its broad and generous folds, runs through it as a river to make the city glad, nourishes it with its fruit, mends it with its gift of healing leaves.”  It is in the city that “incarnation once again reveals itself in the sacred story, bringing heaven to earth, garden to city, God to us.”

So – - maybe it’s time to sign off for an hour or so, colleagues.  Go on outside.  Take a walk.