The Miraculous Ordinary

Some fragmented thoughts on a new book about the concept of the refugium, healing the earth, and growing good and healing things

Friday, February 11
Brooklyn, New York

Greetings, dear reader.

“The miraculous ordinary.”

The phrase startled me with its beauty, and my eyes ran over the page again.

“The miraculous ordinary.”

Do you ever see miracles in the mundane? Do you ever perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary? I try to, yet sometimes, lulled into the regular rhythms of life, I forget, and I have to be snapped back to attention, by phrases like that one.

“The miraculous ordinary” leapt out at me from a paragraph in a new book called Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth, by my friend Debra Rienstra, a professor of English at Calvin University in Grand Rapids. The book chronicles Rienstra’s growing awareness of the climate crisis and her quest for a robust Christian response to it. It also documents her own attentiveness to what’s going on in the world around her, particularly when it comes to the concept of the refugium.

In biology, a refugium (plural = refugia) is a reservoir of sorts—a space, often isolated, that at once protects and nurtures, shelters and cultivates. A refugium is a sign that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it’s used to describe a pocket of habitat that allows an endangered species to endure and even recover. In the context of our changing planet, refugia might be found in places where species have migrated to escape evolving conditions in their original range or a space within that range that, for whatever reason, has been shielded from change. “‘Refugium’ is related but not the same as ‘refuge,’” she explained when we chatted the other day. “Refugia are not utopias. They’re not necessarily reliably safe. They’re almost by definition temporary. They’re not a place to hide for very long; they’re a place where work gets done.”

Rienstra takes this ecological concept and broadens it. She honors the environmental aspects of refugia while also expanding our understanding of it, powerfully and winsomely, discussing not only about the natural world around us but also the realm of the soul within. Part of why we’re in the situation we’re in—a wounded planet, ailing ecosystems—is because we’ve failed to see how deeply connected the wails of the earth are with the woes of our hearts. And where that social, philosophical, and moral fabric has frayed, Refugia Faith seeks to begin knitting it together again. “How can people of faith become people of refugia?” she writes. “How can we find and create refugia, not only in the biomes of the earth, but simultaneously in our human cultural systems and in our spirits?... Is it possible to work together, applying all our love and creativity to this task as never before?” 

It intrigues me that Rienstra, whose specialty is British literature, would produce what is essentially a work of practical theology. “I’ve been practicing theology without a license for years,” she said wryly when I asked about this. “In the Reformed tradition, we don’t necessarily silo theology to the academic professionals or even the clergy professionals. There’s an expectation that everyone does their best to do theology, because theology is woven into life whether we’re conscious of it or not.” 

Indeed, every one of us who has ever asked questions about the meaning of life or the existence of God is in some sense a theologian. Anyway, Refugia Faith is not written primarily for the academic types; it is the furthest thing from one of those jargon-laden, eye-glazing theological tomes that requires intense prayer and divine aid to endure. As one would expect from someone who studies literature—or at least hope, because, let’s be honest, just because you study something doesn’t mean you can produce a fine example of it—the book reads easily and beautifully. Rienstra cloaks her incisive critiques and her wise counsel in elegant prose. 

I should clarify that, when I say that the book reads easily, I don’t mean that Rienstra allows the reader to feel complacent or even comfortable. Early in the book, she does something that jolted me a bit: She writes that “White American evangelicalism has been deeply corrupted” and names white supremacy and Christian nationalism. I was curious why she brought race so quickly into the narrative of a book inspired by the climate crisis. “The same spirit that wants to dominate the earth wants to dominate other people,” she explained. Citing the Lutheran theologian Paul Santmire, who has long written about justice and ecology, she said, “The spirit of dominance is a connection between white supremacy, white colonialism, and the attitude of domination toward the earth. It’s part of the Christian tradition. You can see it in the documents we have from the 17th and 18th century. It’s the idea that everything is created for our use, so you can do whatever you want.” More recently, she has been shaped by Willie James Jennings, the Yale professor whose powerful book The Christian Imagination, clearly and cogently links colonialism and race. “What we have done to the earth,” Rienstra told me, “is absolutely connected to what dominant peoples have done to those who have not been able to dominate.”

One of the most compelling and unusual refugia Rienstra describes is the Virgin Mary’s womb. “I loved the idea that Mary’s womb was this point of connection between the divine and this world,” she explained. “I was ravished by the idea of concentric circles of refugia in the Christmas stories.” In Rienstra’s sketch of this spiritual geometry, there’s Mary’s womb, then a bigger circle that includes both her and her cousin Elizabeth, then the stable, then Jesus’s life, “and then the Church, one hopes,” she said. “All from this seed. All from this child planted in her womb.” 

Twenty years ago, Rienstra published Great With Child: On Becoming a Mother, a memoir about pregnancy, and as the mother of three, she knows of what she speaks. “The work that’s done in pregnancy is capacity-building work. The child is doing huge amounts of work—growing and preparing. So is the mother,” she said. “Carrying a baby is exhausting. It is not always bliss.” She sees parallels in biblical examples of refugia: the wilderness through which the Israelites wandered, for instance. “That was not fun. To some extent, it was a safe place—certainly safer than slavery in Egypt,” she said. “But that sojourn was full of really difficult capacity-building.”

In Refugia Faith, part of the work of capacity-building involves challenging, provoking, and inviting us to look at the familiar anew. She reflects piercingly, for instance, on the words of the Doxology, sung every Sunday in thousands of churches all over the world: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise Him all creatures here below...” “The humpback whale song has praised God for millennia. So has the unfurling of fern fiddleheads and the rattle of pileated woodpeckers and the jaw power of the crocodile,” she writes. “What does it mean, then, if we humans, by our actions and inactions, have diminished that chorus of praise?” When I asked her about this profound question, she elaborated: “What does it mean to celebrate the praise of creation?” she said. “Perhaps it’s imagining that it’s not just a bunch of possessions that we’re not taking good care of; perhaps it’s actually other beings praising God that we’re silencing.” 

To Rienstra, these are not rhetorical questions, and she models for us some small but significant actions that, taken together, might help begin to bring healing. She writes, for instance, about wildlife ecologist Douglas Tallamy’s idea for a “Homegrown National Park.” Tallamy, who teaches at the University of Delaware, estimates that there are forty million acres of lawn in the U.S. If we took even half of that and planted it instead with native trees, shrubs, and smaller plants, we could create enough of what she calls “patchwork refugia” to create a network of restored habitat that, in aggregate, would be larger than the state of Maine and several times the size of even the biggest existing national park in the U.S.

In her own Grand Rapids backyard, she and her husband, Ron, a professor at Western Theological Seminary, have begun creating their part of the Homegrown National Park. They have torn out invasive buckthorn—a bully of a plant. In its place, she writes, “We planted stiff goldenrod and swamp milkweed, black-eyed Susan and Culver’s root, yellow coneflower and bee balm, marsh blazing star and golden alexanders. My favorites were rattlesnake master and hairy beardtongue. Who can resist plants with names like those?”

The Rienstras preparing their backyard refugium for planting

Certainly not the birds and the pollinators—which brings us back to “the miraculous ordinary.” Some days, Rienstra finds her own appreciation of the miraculous ordinary in that growing space. “I look at a beech tree and wait for a woodpecker to come by. I’m just thrilled when a red-bellied woodpecker comes to the bird feeder; that can make my day,” she told me. “In our tiny little backyard refugium, it’s the Zebra moths. And it’s seeing a bunch of bees all over the swamp milkweed.” 

Among the native species planted by the Rienstras: hairy beardtongue, which is beloved by butterflies and bees

I want to be as attentive and caring as she is, and I want to help create flourishing for others—other people as well as other creatures. And I kept coming back to the striking question I’ve already quoted, which she asks in the book’s introduction: “How can people of faith become people of refugia?” 

The question slapped me, because I wondered why we weren’t already. Can we really be faithful without being people of refugia? Her exhortation, like the rest of the book, might have been one of those classic teacherly moves—precisely designed to stir the kind of discomfort I was feeling, so that I might look around and be more observant. “If you start looking around with the metaphor in mind, I think you will start seeing refugia everywhere, including in the church,” she said. “When we are at our best, it’s what we do—and it’s what we’ve been doing.” Let’s hope it’s what we keep doing, now more than ever.

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Two programming notes: 

1. You might have noticed that my dateline this week says, “Brooklyn, New York.” After a couple of days in New Jersey to see friends, we are making a brief visit to New York City.

This week’s gratuitous Fozzie photo: feeling proud after a three-mile walk

This Sunday, February 11, I will be preaching at Old First Reformed Church in Park Slope. It will be so good to be back with the congregation that rekindled my faith and taught me more than any other about the expansiveness of God’s love. You are more than welcome to join us online in worship via Zoom at 11 a.m. Eastern time. 

2. When I was a kid, my mom would often say, “Emulation is a form of admiration.” While six-year-old me did not think this was true when my little sister was copying me—it was a form of annoyance—I like to think that I have matured in some ways since then. So I’m going to emulate my friend Sarah Bessey and invite you to ask me anything and I’ll answer the questions in an upcoming newsletter or two. (It’s a lot of work to come up with ideas for this thing!) Feel free to put your questions in the comments section, or email them to me by replying to this newsletter. 

That’s all I’ve got this week. As always, I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon. 

Yours,
Jeff