We read a lot of children’s books in our house. One of my longstanding favorites is “The Pout-Pout Fish” by Deborah Diesen. The Pout-Pout Fish follows the tale (or should I say “tail”) of an Eeyore-esque fish with big pouty lips. As he gloomily encounters his underwater friends, they each urge him to try being a little more pleasant. But the Pout-Pout Fish is stuffed to the gills with excuses for why he is incapable of change:

“I hear what you’re saying, but it’s just the way I am.”
“I’d like to be more friendly, but it isn’t up to me.”
“But I haven’t any choice. Take a look and you’ll see why.”
“With a mouth like mine, I am destined to be glum.”

He follows each of these excuses with the same refrain:

“I’m a pout-pout fish
With a pout-pout face,
So I spread the dreary-wearies
All over the place.
Blub 
Bluuub
Bluuuuuuub”

Poor Mr. Fish. He is stuck believing that just because he looks pouty, his personality has to match. I can’t help but think how often human beings wind up stuck in a similar merry-go-round of melancholy. 

I live in a largely Christian world, and spend a lot of my life with other non-New Church Christians. We are active members of the United Church of Christ, a Methodist-Presbyterian mix that formed 50+ years ago when neither church could stand on its own (if you’re wondering what kind of doctrine comes from such a mix of conflicting dogmas, the answer is that we are the Christians who are neither Baptist, Lutheran, or Catholic, and we don’t sweat the small stuff.). 

Over the years Mark and I have become deeply connected to other members, especially older couples who have lived clean and meaningful lives without fanfare, who consistently serve as deacons, cooks, trustees, board members, choir members, tech support, and anything else that is needed, all in their volunteer church life. Churches are a wonderful avenue to community, even aside from any religiosity–a fact that is often missed in the mainstream media in its lament over the problems of loneliness and broken relationships and disease. Our tech guy, Jose, who films countless services and other events at the church, sometimes as a volunteer, recently announced that he will retire this summer. In his announcement he gruffly stated, “I don’t really consider myself a religious person” with a rueful laugh, adding, “The church family means a lot to me.” I suspect he will discover that he still wants to come to church, just because.  

What is it about coming to church every 7th day that is so powerful? It’s such an easy commandment to keep, compared to some of the others! Just a habit, do-able for those of us lucky enough to not be in 24-hour service shifts. While we have been through many phases with our church, I’m finding that once you put in enough time, the familiarity and comfort, coming from a thousand hymns and prayers chanted together and a thousand conversations over coffee fellowship builds, imperceptibly, until suddenly a child whom you watched grow up or an old person you watched grow old is confiding in you as a trusted friend.

“People who have applied the teachings of the church from the Word directly to their lives are in the inmost heaven and more than anyone else are absorbed in the pleasures of wisdom. They see divine realities in particular objects. They actually do see the objects, but the corresponding divine realities flow directly into their minds and fill them with a sense of blessedness that affects all their sensory functions. As a result, everything they see seems to laugh and play and live.” (Heaven and Hell 489.3, emphasis added)

I remember reading this passage as part of my Logopraxis study last year. That last line grabbed me, it’s captivating! “Everything they see seems to laugh and play and live.” How jovial! I want to see the world around me laugh and play and live!

When I walk with my dog in the woods, I relish the feeling of being engulfed in nature. I love it! I love being surrounded by the greens and browns and yellows of grasses, leaves, vines, mosses, trees and logs, the gray rocks, the blue and pink and purple and yellow and orange wildflowers, the dark earth….  It’s all beautiful to the eye, which is a blessing, to be sure! But it doesn’t really feel like it is joyful and laughing, to me. I hear many birds in the trees above my head: some of their sounds could certainly be interpreted as laughter! Colourful flowers, maybe I could pretend that they look cheerful; lush grasses and moist, verdant trees, maybe…. but rocks? Roots? Soil? Nope; I’m not seeing it.

Reflecting on this, straining to envision these inanimate, dead-looking objects as laughing, playful and living, it occurs to me: personifying nature may be my mistake. The natural world around us may be living, but it isn’t human, it isn’t a person. None of it has feelings or a higher consciousness (well, depending on who you ask, but that’s a deep-dive for another day!). Nature can’t laugh, play and live the way we laugh, play and live; I reckon that thinking of it as responding, reacting as we do, is misguided.