My family is from the mountains of the southern Appalachians for generations. Since the 1700s, my ancestors occupied the same square miles of mountains. And 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 a field of folding chairs to a rough hewn pavilion hugged by mountains. I remember seeing toes tapping in time to Bluegrass music pouring from the stage. And the trees swayed, the birds chirped, 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, inviting 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. This universal call emphasizes the importance of recognizing God’s sovereignty in a well-ordered world. Humanity in their diversity are mentioned specifically: young and old, men and women. The psalm presents a picture of creation working in harmony to offer praise God. This unity and diversity and focus on God’s authority, develops the picture world held comfortably by God who is in charge.

This would be what the late Walter Brueggemann describes as a psalm of orientation. These are the cheerful hymns and uplifting verses 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. We are incredibly, impossibly aligned with all that breathes, held securely in God’s grand scheme of things.

But there is another type of Psalm too. Brueggemann unveils the Psalms of Disorientation. These are the words we use when our experience of reality does not engender easy and cheerful praise. It is the language on our tongues when the way of the world does not make sense. These are the songs we sing when the cliches don’t count and things are not ordered in any sort of way. Atlanta writer Laura Jean Truman calls them “Psalms of Total Collapse.”

Eco-grief is a term I learned at book club in Asheville North Carolina. It is an up and coming word, hasn’t been added to the dictionary yet. But it is the emotional pain and grief resulting from experienced or anticipated environmental destruction, loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to climate change and other ecological disruptions. It is a normal, valid, and rational psychological response losses, impacting people worldwide, especially indigenous communities, farmers, young people, and environmental scientists. And me.

That book club was the first time I had visited after the devastating floods following Hurricane Helene. You may remember this hurricane. It swept through Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and settled on the mountains of Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. The place I still call home after, even 15 years in Atlanta. PBS reported that Hurricane Helene and other storms that weekend unleashed 40 trillion gallons of rain across the South—enough to fill Lake Tahoe once, or the Dallas Cowboys' stadium 51,000 times. It was the deadliest hurricane since Katrina in 2005. 

Back in Asheville several months after the hurricane hit, I was surprised when I saw the debris in the trees by River Road. Twenty feet up in the air. When I saw the shops closed down by the Biltmore Inn. The dumpsters and backhoes lying around. When the friend I was meeting told me it was okay to drink the water finally. When another friend from the mountains for generations shared her grandmother was always scared by hard rain. She had survived the flood of the 1930s and now her granddaughter knew she would manage storms in the same way – with anxiety creeping up her back, and nerves ringing in her brain. It was painful, disorienting. It was not a set your mouth to praise sort of day.

Thank God for the language of lament. In scripture, 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 somewhere in the sovereign order of things there is space where sorrow does not need to be denied or explained away. It is a good and right thing to weep before and with our Lord. Not only do we offer praise. We also sing lament.

But I am not sure the birds do.

I had taken up birding during the stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 Pandemic. And one morning in the early days when we were still wiping down our groceries and disoriented from the collapse of systems and 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, shouted out, and sprang up in praise. Their voices reminded me of the 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. A safe camping trip effort ot get our first grader off of the perpetual school ZOOM screens. I felt the mountains sing the same song. We were up in northeast Georgia, the hills just starting to roll up into the sky. A massive black bear crossing our paths. A waterfall to walk too. And a open air museum. I remembering distinctly being reassured by the mountains witness. The mountains spoke to me of endurance, of faithfulness. That they had seen this all before – and more – and that the sovereign God still reigned. That discipleship looked differently for geology. That the elements still sang praise.

In scripture, the created world sings praise – always praise. We might weep for the mountains at Jeremiah’s urging, but the trees in the field will clap their hands. Remember when Jesus says to 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 birthing. New creation. It is laboring pains. So what if eco-grief is is not a cross-species, pan-elemental phenomenon. What if Nature has a liturgy of the longview. What if eco-grief is for us. And Creation still sings God’s praise.

I am fully aware that this 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 in insurance claims: natural disasters are an Act of God. Our science fiction writers and forward-thinking authors weave dystopian landscapes.

But isn’t scripture always flying in the face of our immediate experience to remind us of our limited view and to point to good news?

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 way of things and our flesh surprise us. When God is bigger than biology or natural pheonomone. When God shows up in shape-shifting, rules-defying, sovereign order affirming ways. Days when creation sings God praise.

There is a third type of psalm. It is the reorientation psalm. Brueggemann says: The psalms of reorientation are the words of people who have experienced God breaking i to time and space to do something that they could not have anticipated and certainly could not have created. The psalms of re-orientation speak of surprise and wonder, miracles and amazement, when a new orientation has been granted to the disoriented for which there was no ground for expectation.”

May it be so.