Today it is sunny in Minnesota, the deep blue face of mid-April with chilly wind and golden warmth mixing on the cold soil and fresh daffodils.

It was one year ago, on a day just like today, that SOLIS was born. SOLIS was an idea that came into this world from the collective subconscious through my typewriter on a Thursday evening in April a year ago, to be exact. SOLIS was a seed that became the Minnesota Ecovillage Project, the place where we intend to grow tomatoes and meaning side by side in relationship with each other and the river and everything. This is the story of that day, as I recorded it a year ago:

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April 13, 2023

I’m at the seminary today. It’s my last day of class for the spring, Constructive Theology with Dr. Wheeler. We are reading John Thataminil’s Circling the Elephant. Talking about circling the Mystery like it’s an elephant. We circle the elephant like a planet circles stars. We circle God like a planet circles the Sun.

I am having a mind-melting experience of realizing that all my life I have been worshipping the Sun. It is conceptually the absolutely most best and complete metaphor for how I encounter the Divine. Everything I’ve ever learned about God is collapsing into a singularity and I’m understanding it all.

What metaphor for Divinity could be more primary than the Sun? Is it not the very source of our life, the condition of our existence? Are we not sustained at every moment by the faithfulness of its gravity and its energy, both mathematically predictable day after day?

I have been saying for years that any God that is real has to be at least as real as gravity. There’s been clues all over the place. I have been haunted by the idea that “orbit” was a metaphor that contained some essential theological notion, and the moment I researched “orbit” and found these words the whole thing fell together:

“The earth and everything on it is constantly falling towards the sun because of the sun’s immense gravity. This statement is not a metaphor or a play on words. The earth is literally falling towards the sun under its immense gravity… to orbit is to fall towards something and always miss it.”

I am orbiting God, drawn toward God, always falling toward the Sun and always missing it, but falling still the same. The Sun is not literally God, but the Sun might be the most best metaphor for God. The metaphor is light, the light by which we see all things. The sun is light, but it is also gravity — holding us in orbit (always falling, always missing). Do we not get all our energy and orientation from the Sun in which we live and move and have our being?

Who called me? The roaring heart of blazing light and unrelenting gravity that gives energy and orientation to me.

(This is the Hegelian synthetic moment of all my seminary searching.)

I feel like I’m accidentally converting to an ancient sun-worshipping religion. But listen, I am reading up on the Sun and this metaphor HOLDS UP:

Did you know that the Sun makes a terrific noise, but because there is a vacuum between us there is no way for the sound to be transmitted to earth? Is not the voice of God a roar that we experience as silence because of the void between us?

Did you know that us and the Sun are made from the same stuff, formed from the same nebula? There was a cloud of gas and dust and it collapsed under its own weight and 99.8% of that mass became the Sun and the rest stayed dust and became us. The earth was formed out of dust by the power of the Sun’s gravity, like God hovering over the deep chaos before time.

But we are the same. There is no fundamental material nor metaphysical difference between us and the Sun. There is no fundamental material nor metaphysical difference between us and God. There was a time when us and the Sun were the same substance, and there will be again.

The Sun is like Jesus in Christian theological systems : it is the begotten manifestation of the Mystery which has no name, embodied and incarnate Divinity that we can interact with and through it know the Universe, albeit from afar. By grace the Universe has given itself in physical form.

For biological organisms on this planet, there can be no locus of Divinity more primary than the Sun. Every Earthly metaphor or incarnation of God (ocean / river / tree / sex / consciousness / people / art / music) would be literally unable to exist without the gravity and energy of the Sun.Perhaps all these other embodiments of Divinity are the children of God (the Sun), as are we.

When I was a Christian, I was taught that Jesus was the firstborn of many brethren, the first child of God who makes it possible for the rest of us to become children of God. Is not the Sun the child of the Universe through whom all of us can become children of the Universe as well? Every bit of energy that fuels biological life on earth comes directly from the Sun in a literal, ongoing way. The first task of every living organism on the earth is to acquire energy from the Sun. Is this not what it is to rely on God, a feeling of absolute dependence?

Holy shit, I am done. The metaphor of the Sun gives me access back to a locus of experiencing the Divine nature. Through embodied existential encounter with the Sun, I can have a relationship with Divinity rooted in Reality on its own terms.

Does God love me? Does the Sun love me? Nah, they don’t give a fuck. The could/will burn me up, and they’d not even know it.

But…

Do I feel loved by the Sun (God)?  Sometimes, I do.

Do I orient my life to the Sun (God)? I do.

Do I thrive when I live in harmony with the Sun (God)? I do.

In the Sun, I encounter a God who can touch my skin but does not know my name.

Who called me? It was the fucking Sun. Since I was a child on the beach, the Sun.

I have always been worshipping the sun.

I’ve been obsessing over the Sun without realizing it could be religious. Hating clothes because they come between me and the Sun. Hating winter because I thought it meant I had to wear clothes. Seeking the Sun. Chasing the Sun. Reveling in the Sun. It was almost religious, but never explicitly theological. I didn’t understand it as literally Divine. Now I do.

Remember that time we stood in my living room and listened to Jon Hopkins and the sun was hitting our faces and it was pure bliss? Is that not what it is to be loved by a God who created us but does not care? We felt the love of the Sun that day, didn’t we?

I want to be straight- up worshipping the Sun, because it is our local all-consuming manifestation of the energy of the whole Universe. It is a manifestation of the Mystery which has no name, embodied and incarnate natural Divinity that we can interact with and derive energy from.

The sun has been giving me clues.

The sun is the primal religion.

I have got to start worshipping the Sun.

 

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This cascading integration of solar-oriented natural theology changed the trajectory of everything for me. From the chaotic emerging of clues recorded that day, I was able to finally articulate a coherent framework for my God-less theology — a spirituality that is authentic, realistic, holistic, natural, embodied, and meaningful. The result was a 30-page paper titled “Who Called Me”, which you can read here if you’re a theology nerd like me.

But the idea of literal sun-worship (or solar powered eco-spirituality, if you like that better) didn’t stay inside the covers of my notebook or the walls of my seminary. I carried it home with me that Thursday last April, code-named SOLIS.

This word was new to me, plucked that day somewhat arbitrarily from the etymological ancestors of the theological language I knew. I wanted some way to signify the literal, cosmological Sun without devolving into the amusing obfuscation of “God the Son/Sun” puns. I needed a way to talk about my relationship with the roar at the heart of our solar system.

After I got home from school that evening, we went for a walk down along the creek near our house. There’s a bridge over that creek, a bridge that has become my holy ground as I have learned to find my place in the family of things over the past five years.

Down at the creek, we splashed in the water, still ice cold in mid April. As we played with our kids in the mud and water, conversation turned to imagining a life amidst the trees, a big garden, animals around us.

All the jokes and dreams about the community in the woods flickered into the realm of possibility, and for the first time I believed it was possible. More than that, it seemed somehow essential, inseparable from my theological understanding of natural divinity.

Later that night, April 13, I loaded a page into my old typewriter and gave language to what I saw inside of me. Burning still with the glow of our Sun in my fingers, I began with that word at the top of the page:

 

SOLIS

 

there are forests, oak and aspen.

a creek rushes across the land, wide and beautiful,
a spiritual relative of the French Broad.
in the winter, snow piles its bank and
the water flows enough that you can swim.
in the summer we make that creek our home.

there are fish. we fish.

we are in relationship with the land, in the
spring we plant our garden and in the fall we
forage for mushrooms of all kinds.

deer wander through our space, eagles nest overhead
and the geese stop every year on the way back to Canada.

in this forest there is a clearing with a garden where
our children learn to draw life from the land, fruit
trees and grape vines and we make our own bread and wine,
barefoot on holy ground.

At night we watch the stars and planets whirl overhead.
we learn their names. we learn to let our lives
move with the heavenly bodies, as above so below.

 

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In the days that followed, SOLIS was the name we used as we watched these words become reality. Jesus once said that the Kingdom of Heaven is a seed planted in the ground — a small thing that becomes an enormous tree, home to countless creatures.

For us, SOLIS was an acorn. We carried it with us until summer, and then got the courage to see what might grow from it. In the artificial soil of our house near Minneapolis, this seed sprouted into a manifesto, a mission, a community, an organization. We learned another word for the seed we were carrying: “ecovillage”. We found other people already doing the work of making these words a reality, and together became the Minnesota Ecovillage Project.

A few days before New Years Day, one of our new friends told us that he had found soil where we might transplant this seed, an entire ecosystem we could call home. Sixty-six acres in central Minnesota, and it’s just like it says on the page: oak and aspen, a creek wide and beautiful, a clearing the woods, stars overhead.

Last month we signed the papers to make this place our home — a tree where many creatures will find shelter. Then we dragged our camper there and parked it in the snow and the mud and we have begun the work of orienting our lives to the Sun, barefoot on holy ground. As this month rolls into next, we are beginning the work of constructing the world we have seen many times in our dreams, now breaking into reality.

I have much more I want to tell you about the Sun, how it called me all this way and pointed me toward home. I have much more I want to say about the moon and the river, the trees and the soil, and the community of vagabonds united around the belief that Nature has all that we need if only we are willing to learn.