A Grounded Faith: Reconnecting with Creator and Creation in the Season of Lent

Dig deep this Lenten season. Go below the surface into rich engagement with your place in God's good creation. Seven thoughtful writers-brought together in collaborative partnership with EcoFaith Recovery, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, and Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice-will meet you there. And together, like grains of wheat that die to themselves to bring forth new life, we will discover what new life may take root this Lent.

Immerse yourself in this Lenten devotional alongside Dr. Randy Woodley's Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth. Inspired by Woodley's daily reflections, the contributors to A Grounded Faith invite you to join them in grappling honestly and vulnerably with Lenten themes as they relate to our relationship with Earth, with Indigenous worldviews, and with the beauty and vulnerability of this land and our place in it.

As each day goes by, you will find yourself both challenged and heartened, agitated and activated, unmoored and regrounded. Ultimately, we hope you move through this season grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with Creator and creation, with your own humanity and that of others, and with a Life- and Earth-honoring faith, the kind of faith we need to flourish in these times.

Janet Parker is a United Church of Christ pastor, Christian ecofeminist ethicist, and nature mystic who dwells in the ancestral land of the Tualatin band of the Kalapuya people (Beaverton, Oregon). She shares her life with her eco-pastor wife, Robyn Hartwig, and their dog, Crystal, and recognizes that a host of ancestors live with and inside her. She received her M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary (New York). In addition to serving the church, she increasingly feels called to cross-cultural partnerships and serves as the Eloheh Engagement Coordinator for EcoFaith Recovery.

Solveig Nilsen-Goodin is ordained in the Lutheran Church (ELCA), received her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and currently expresses her vocation as a grief and life Coach and Spiritual Director with the Interfaith Spiritual Center (interfaithspiritualcenter.com) and through the Oregon Synod Reparations Team. In 2009 she helped found EcoFaith Recovery, and from 2006-2017 she founded and pastored the Wilderness Way Community. Solveig sings and leads grief rituals, writes, and dances. With her husband, Peter, she is raising two boys in the traditional homelands of the Cowlitz, Clackamas, and many other Indigenous peoples (Northeast Portland, Oregon).