Breathe: A Wild Church Reflection
by Sarah Renee Werner
Wild Church is a movement of people worshiping outdoors. Here, Olentangy Wild Church pastor Sarah Werner shares a service drawn from the seasonal changes we experience around us.
Grounding Exercise
Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Feel your feet grounding you to the floor or to the earth beneath you. Feel your heart beating in your chest, your lungs taking in the air around you, and letting it out. What do you feel on your skin? Are your muscles tight? Where are you carrying tension? Take a few moments to stretch your arms, wiggle your fingers and toes, roll your neck. When you’re ready, open your eyes and offer peace to someone around you—another person, a tree, or a rock.
Land Acknowledgement
We remember that we are part of this earth, made up of the soil beneath our feet and connected to our plant and animal kin in a rich web. We acknowledge that this land once was the home of other people, including the Shawnee and the mound builders known as the Hopewell [speak the names of your own Indigenous neighbors here]. We lament the destruction to life we and our ancestors have caused and commit ourselves to repairing and restoring these broken connections with our words and actions.
Readings
David Abram, Becoming Animal
Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb to be means more simply “to breathe”: it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way… the inwards and the outward depths partake of the same mystery, that as the unseen wind swirls within us, so it also whirls all around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds even as it lights our own sensations.
Reflection
Everything breathes. This quote from David Abrams and the realization that everything breathes has been sitting deep in my soul lately. Trees, rocks, the earth, even bridges, all breathe, moving and shifting in the sun or the cold wind. Everything around me is breathing, which also means that everything is alive. When I lie on the cold wet ground, I look up and see lungs, or veins, in the dark bare branches of trees against a white-gray sky. Breathing above me.
This is a season when we are so bombarded with stress—buying presents, cooking, traveling, or hosting family—that it’s easy to forget to take time to be still and breathe. It’s also a time when the aliveness of nature isn’t quite as evident now that all the leaves are decomposing on the ground and the last of the crickets have fallen silent. Lingering outside now entails putting on layers of clothing and going for quick walks, rather than leisurely drinking coffee in a lawn chair while the sun shines on our faces.
But life continues, and already new life is stirring. Before trees hibernate in the winter, they grow new buds that sit on the edge of each branch all winter, through rain and snow and ice, ready to burst open when the warm sunlight of spring returns. On every tree are countless kernels of new life waiting to open. Advent feels like a time when we are also gestating new life deep within us, waiting for something new to burst into the world. This is the holiness of the winter darkness, a time to be still, to breathe, to be attentive to what is growing inside us, waiting to be nurtured into being. As you spend time in nature, I encourage you to listen to the sounds of the earth breathing, and look for signs of the persistence of life in this quiet period of winter darkness.
Benediction
As you go out from this wild place
Remember to breathe in peace
and breathe out healing for the world.
Sarah Werner is the communications coordinator for Central District Conference of Mennonite Church USA and pastor of Olentangy Wild Church in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Rooted Faith: Practices for Living Well on a Fragile Planet and enjoys camping, birding, and nature photography in her free time.
