My family is from the mountains of the Southern Appalachians. For generations, since the 1700s, my ancestors have occupied the same square miles of mountains—and they’re not just any mountains. My ancestors are buried in Grayson Highlands State Park, at the top of the highest peak in Virginia.

My first memory places me in that park. I’m looking out across the field of folding chairs to a rough-hewn wood pavilion hugged by the mountains. I remember seeing toes tapping in time as bluegrass music poured from that stage. The trees swayed. The birds chirped. The rabbits darted back and forth.

The Holy Spirit moved, too. All creation joined in singing God’s praise.

Psalm 148 is a call to universal worship. The invitation is for all creation to praise God. It begins by calling upon heavenly beings and celestial bodies to praise God, then extends this call to all earthly elements and creatures. Humanity and their diversity are mentioned specifically. We have rulers and the people, young and old, men and women—all invited to join in praise.

The psalm gives us a picture of creation that’s working in harmony to offer praise to the sovereign of a well-ordered world. This unity and diversity, this focus on God’s authority, develops a picture of a world held comfortably by a God who is in charge.

This is what the late Walter Brueggemann describes as a psalm of orientation. These are those cheerful hymns and uplifting verses. These are those good memories of satisfied folks. The words that roll off our tongues when everything makes sense and all is right in the world.

Brueggemann says the psalms of orientation are without much tension. These are the songs of our sunny days, when we are incredibly aligned with all that breathes, held securely in God’s grand scheme of things.

There is another type of psalm, too. Brueggemann unveils the psalm of disorientation. These are the words we use when our experience of reality does not engender easy and cheerful praise. This is the language on our tongues when the way of the world doesn’t make sense—the songs we sing when clichés don’t count and things do not go according to plan.

Atlanta writer Laura Jean Truman calls them psalms of total collapse.

Have you heard of the term eco-grief? It’s not in the dictionary yet, but it’s an up-and-coming word. I first heard about it at a book club I went to in Asheville, North Carolina.

Eco-grief is the emotional pain and the grief resulting from experienced or anticipated environmental destruction—loss of species, ecosystems, meaningful landscapes—due to climate change and other ecological disruptions. They say it’s a normal, valid, rational psychological response to losses impacting people worldwide, especially Indigenous communities, farmers, young people, environmental scientists—and me.

That book club was the first time I had visited the mountains after the devastating floods following Hurricane Helene. You may remember this hurricane. It swept through Florida and Georgia and South Carolina, but it settled on the mountains of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, southwest Virginia—the place I still call home after some twenty years away.

PBS reported that Hurricane Helene and other storms that weekend unleashed forty trillion gallons of rain across the South—enough to fill Lake Tahoe once, or the Dallas Cowboys football stadium fifty-one thousand times. It was the deadliest hurricane since Katrina twenty years ago.

Back in Asheville several months after the hurricane hit, I was still surprised when I saw debris in the trees in the River Arts District—twenty feet up in the air. When I saw the shops closed down by the Biltmore Inn. The dumpsters and the backhoes lying around.

When the friend I was meeting told me it was finally fine to drink the water. And when another friend from the mountains for generations shared that her grandmother was always scared by hard rain. Her grandmother had survived the flood of the 1930s, and now she—the granddaughter—felt that same anxiety creeping up her back, the nerves ringing in her brain whenever a storm set in.

It was painful. It was disorienting. It was not a set-your-mouth-to-praise sort of day.

Thank God for the language of lament. Thank God that in our holy text, we have testament to the fact that God hears our human pain.

When our Savior sings Psalm 22 from the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—we know that somewhere in the sovereign order of things, there is space for sorrow that does not need to be denied or explained away.

It is a good and a right thing to offer our praise and to weep before and with our Lord. Not only do we offer praise. We also have permission to sing our pain.

But I am not sure the birds do.

I took up birding during the stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 pandemic. And one morning in the early days—you all remember these—when we were still wiping down our groceries, when we were disoriented by the collapse of every seemingly stable system, when we were witnessing rising numbers of deaths.

That morning, when it was so quiet, with only ambulances wailing, I heard the earth sing. It was a cacophony, really, with thousands of notes and untold tunes wafting across the oaks and pines.

The birds burst forth. They shouted out. They sprang up. Their voices reminded me of that covenant promise of the presence of God—even in the midst of pandemic and pain.

They were designed to offer praise.

On a trip to the mountains in later days of the pandemic—one of those safe camping trips, an effort to get our first grader off the perpetual school Zoom screens—I felt the mountains sing that same song.

We had gone up to northeast Georgia, the hills just starting to roll into the sky. A massive black bear crossed our path. A waterfall to walk to. An open-air museum.

And I remember distinctly being reassured by the mountains’ witness that weekend.

The mountains spoke to me of endurance. Of faithfulness. That they had seen this all before—and more. And they thrummed with the word that our sovereign God still reigned.

Discipleship does look different for geology. There is a liturgy here with a very long view.

Through it all, the elements of the earth still sing praise. Scripture tells us the created world seems to praise—always praise.

We might weep for the mountains at the prophets’ urging, but the trees in the field will clap their hands, the psalmist says. And remember when Jesus tells the Palm Sunday parade that if people are silenced by violence and destruction and pain, the rocks and stones will still sing.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, creation groans—but it is a birthing. It is new creation. It is laboring pains.

So what if eco-grief is not a cross-species, pan-elemental phenomenon? What if nature has a liturgy of the long view? What if eco-grief is for us—and yet creation still sings God’s praise?

I am fully aware that this idea flies in the face of our own experience.

In this present moment, the devastating impact of climate change is real.

The divine in the vernacular is found in insurance claims. These days, the secular world sees acts of God as code for natural disaster. Our science fiction writers and forward-thinking authors weave dystopian landscapes.

But what if, like always, Scripture has something else to say?

Something like Psalm 148, where God established creation forever and ever, fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.

Isn’t Scripture always confronting our immediate experience to remind us of good news? Isn’t Scripture always looking at the reality of our world to offer the hope of an end-breaking kingdom for which we believe, and we pray, and in so doing help create?

After all, this psalm—Psalm 148—falls in the lectionary on the Sunday after Christmas and in the narrative lectionary following Easter Sunday. Days when our realities do not define us.

When the ways of things and our flesh surprise us. When God is bigger than biology or natural phenomenon. When God shows up in shape-shifting, rules-defying, sovereign-order-affirming ways.

Days when creation sings God’s praise.

There is a third type of psalm.

Brueggemann offers the reorientation psalm. He says these psalms of reorientation are the words of people who have experienced God breaking into time and space to do something they could not have anticipated and certainly could not have created.

The psalms of reorientation speak of surprise and wonder. Of miracles and amazement. When a new orientation has been granted to the disoriented—for which there was no ground for expectation.

Except, we might say, the ground that creation sings God’s praise.

May it be so.

Hallelujah. Amen.