Alan Cadwallader

On Being an Earth Being

“When someone has spent more than eight decades immersed in the Judeo-Christian Bible, one might expect that the bubble called ‘the world of the Bible’ to contain a person. Not Norm Habel. Habel has seen beyond the time of sacred writing to the traces of a more ancient wisdom. Sure, traces of that wisdom have survived in the treasures held in the Bible, and Habel has spent the more recent years of his indefatigable search prizing them out. But Habel has caught a glimpse of that ancient wisdom in indigenous spirituality, stories, and rituals. Far from mining them for his own enrichment, he has sat humbly before their custodians seeking from them how he might recover . . . himself, an Earth Being. Gone is the cultured, academic discourse of the past; now come the gentle meditations, the tentative wonder of a return home, the anxious reflections on how past and present, Christian and Earth Being, might celebrate life together.”