Common Ground Song 134 ‘Touch the Earth lightly’
Words: Shirley E Murray / Music: Colin Gibson © Hope Publishing Co
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnWUglp7unQ
Featured image: Lone sunflower in a field © Richard Croft cc-by-sa-2.0
Another song for the ‘season of creation’. This one, by New Zealand songwriters, takes a realistic approach to the damage being done to the natural world. The first verse encourages us to ‘use the earth gently, nourish the life of the world in our care’, with a reminder that it is not only for our benefit but that of our children (and theirs). That theme of caring for creation runs through Christianity and other world faiths, and is endorsed even by those who take a humanist or atheist approach.
The second verse acknowledges that all too often, people have taken the opposite approach of exploiting the earth’s resources for short-term gain. Not so much ‘touching the earth lightly’ as digging deep into it to extract its irreplaceable treasure. The words are urgent and condemning: ‘We who endanger’ … ‘Agents of death’. And then we ask God to ‘forestall and forgive’: to act to prevent us making things worse, as well as having compassion on those willing to repent of this corporate sin.
In the third, we pray for ‘greening, birth from the burning, water that blesses and earth that is sweet’. I am currently reading a book ‘Not the end of the world’ by Prof. Hannah Ritchie, in which she argues that we have been making progress in recent decades in reducing poverty, hunger and disease, and that it is not too late to avert the worst effects of climate change, species loss and other environmental threats – proving we act together now. It is a message of cautious optimism.
The fourth verse of the hymn calls on God to ‘teach us, deflect us, re-connect us’. Perhaps the last is most important. To re-connect humans with each other, putting aside all hatred, unfounded suspicion and violence, and to re-connect our lives with the rest of the natural world of which we are part, so that we can indeed act together to effect positive change.