Leaving our Northwoods dining hall, suitcase in hand, an Au Sable student was heading back to his home in Madagascar. As he approached the exit after breakfast, he turned toward us in the sun’s morning light, saying his farewell:
It was wonderful to be here with you these ten weeks!
A blessing to be among the Children of God!”
Another summer session was ending at Au Sable Institute in Michigan’s Northwoods. Some fifty students and faculty had enjoyed the goodness of God that summer—deep down, in body and soul. Inspired by Paul’s message in Romans 8:18-25, we were returning to our colleges and universities, resolved in faith and practice to help meet the creation’s expectation of its sharing in the freedom and undying goodness of the children of God.
A few years earlier, during our fourth annual Forum in1984, students and faculty had been blessed by a child of God from India—an elder member among some twenty scholars and earthkeepers who participated in our annual forum. The focus of his presentation was on his translation of Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans: “For the created order awaits, with eager longing, with neck outstretched, the full manifestation of the children of God.” Yes, wrote Paul, “The creation itself is looking forward to sharing n the undying freedom and goodness of the children of God.”1
This elder brother, Paulus Mar Gregorios—the Metropolitan Bishop of Delhi—told us how he had been invited to a special event at India’s presidential palace. There, in New Delhi, President Zail Singh, was honoring Sunderlal Bahuguna—regarded by Bishop Gregorios as “one of our most creative friends of nature.”
Upon receiving the president’s commendation, Bahuguna recited thee Hindu principles that undergirded the “Chipko [embrace] Movement” in conserving forest trees in India’s Himalayan region: (1) Nature is to be worshiped, not exploited; (2) One who takes less from nature and society should receive greater respect than one who takes more; and (3) There is a world inside a person that is richer and more worthy of cultivation than the outside world.
Reflecting on Bahuguna’s principles, Bishop Gregorios presented and explained three principles (in italics) he had prayerfully selected on caring for God’s creation, each based upon a New Testament text: Romans 8:18-25, Colossians 1:15-23; and John 1:1-5.
First Principle: Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation.
What is a “person” whose salvation Christ effects? A person exists only in relation—in relation to other human persons (his or her father and mother, to begin with) and to nonhuman realities (light, air, water, food, and so on). It is not possible for a person to come to be or to grow without relation to other persons and things. The earth and the sun as well as other people are essential parts of our existence. Without them, we cannot exist.
“For a long time now we have been conditioned to understand redemption in Christ primarily—and too often exclusively—in terms of personal salvation…” And both Paul’s epistle to the Romans and John’s Gospel “strongly affirm redemption of the whole creation—cosmic redemption if you like—of all creation in the liberation of humanity from the bondage to sin and death.” And, “It is not possible for a person to come to be or to grow without relation to other persons and things. The earth and the sun as well as other people, are essential parts of our existence.
In contrast to Gnostic-Hellenic-Hindu tradition, “we only need affirm what St. Paul and St. John so strongly affirm, and in the spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures: that the whole creation—-not just human souls —have been redeemed and reconciled in Christ. And thus affirming that “nothing came into being without Christ the Logos,” “Human beings have existed and do exist only as integral parts of a system that includes sources of sustenance—meat, grains, and vegetables—as well as sun and earth…”
Second Principle: Christ himself should be seen in his three principal relationships: (1) to members incorporated into his body; (2) to the human race; and (3) to the other-than-human orders of created existence in a many-planed universe. Each of these is related to the other.
“Jesus Christ is not an abstract or ‘purely spiritual’ entity. He is incarnate. He took a material body, becoming part of the created order while remaining unchanged as one of the three persons in the Trinity who is Creator. He is one of us. He is fully consubstantial with us.”
Third Principle: Christ and the Holy Spirit are related to the whole created order in three ways: by creating it, by redeeming it, and finally, fulfilling it in the last great consumation.
“The whole created order comes from God the Holy Trinity, is redeemed by the incarnate Christ, and will be brought to fulfillment after transformation by the same Christ and by the Holy Spirit, the perfecter of all.”
The earth and the sun are essential to our existence—a fact that Bishop Gregorios elaborated later, in his book, Cosmic Man: The Divine Presence,2 where he “focusses on humanity’s two basic relationships – to the source and ground of its being on the one hand, and to the created world in which humanity is placed on the other.” He says, “these two relationships are inseparable from each other” and “There is no Christian way of understanding reality in a totally secular sense, as if Man and the World were the only two realities with which we have to deal.”
“But then,” he says, “It is equally disastrous for a Christian to think that we can conceive of a God who is concerned only about our souls and has no relationships to the Creation. Neither of our two basic relationships can be conceived, from a Christian perspective, except in terms of each other.”2 And it is this relationship of our souls that is expressed in the title of this essay: The Sun and the Soul.
Curiously, the textbooks I have been examining over four decades of teaching my course, Principles of Environmental Science, have little to say about our star, the sun, even as its radiating energy illumines Earth and Earth’s ecosystems and empowers Our Common Home. And so, it is with great delight and appreciation that I welcome a new empowering book, Here Comes the Sun, published in September, 2025.3 It breaks this relative silence with a brilliance celebrated with us by Vermont scholar and writer, Bill McKibben who excites us with the sun’s wonderful invitation to wonder and delight; to the sun’s ubiquitous empowering energy that is so brilliantly accessible everywhere on Earth.
Bill declares, “The sun powers just about everything: It evaporates water from the oceans, and allows plants to release water vapor into the atmosphere; it drives the winds that in turn distribute that water around the globe. The reason you might get sad in the winter is because sunlight increases the brain’s release of serotonin; exposure to its ultraviolet rays can produce endorphins that make you feel sweet… Expose your skin to sunlight and your body produces vitamin D; your immune system may strengthen. Even the stuff that’s harmful is good—our atmosphere and magnetosphere block most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays and energetic particles…”
On April 26, 1954, The New York Times announced: “A solar battery, the first of its kind, which converts useful amounts of the sun’s radiation directly and efficiently into electricity, has been constructed here by the Bell Telephone Laboratories. The new device is a simple-looking apparatus made of strips of silicon, a principal ingredient of common sand. It may mark the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.”
And Bill McKibben, citing this announcement, reports on the dawning and early decades of this new era of direct conversion of solar energy into electricity. He says that solar energy is by far the least expensive form of energy available to us, and it is also diffuse—“available everywhere instead of concentrated in a few places.” And he says that in February 2025, “the energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that renewable energy was growing twice as fast in the developing world of the Global South as in the developed world of the Global North,” and “the sun and the wind each day produce thousands of times as much energy as we could ever use.” He concludes that having “almost fatally disconnected from the natural world” that “the sun offers a way back into a relationship with reality.” And it could be “a unifying mission for a divided world.”
Importantly those of us “who grew up with the Bible” understand the sense of light as a metaphor for the divine, the idea that God, like the sun, is a source of life and energy” but we must not worship it (Deut 4:19). Yet “Sun of Righteousness” is a name given by Hebrew prophets for the Messiah. Says Bill: “Though I’m not a preacher, I lead the Christmas Eve services in our tiny Vermont church, and I always make sure we sing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”—
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Risen with healing in His wings.
Footnotes
- New Testament Foundations for Understanding the New Testament. In: Granberg-Michaelson, Wesley, ed. 1987. Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
- Gregorios, Paulos Mar. 1998. Cosmic Man: The Divine Presence. 1998. New York, NY: Paragon House, p. 9.
- McKibben, Bill. 2025. Here Comes the Sun. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
