Earth Church holds services in Colorado

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Romans 1:20-23

More evidence for why Mad magazine will no longer be publishing new material; as reported by Seth Boster of the Colorado Springs Gazette, August 25, 2019:

A strange sound drifts from the gazebo in Manitou Springs’ Memorial Park.

Shaunti Lally (Shaun, as he was known in a previous life) sits cross-legged in a circle with 16 others, stirring an empty crystal bowl. Deep vibrations bounce off sternums, filling ears, almost drowning out the steady trickle of a natural spring, of bird songs, of highway traffic above.

Long-haired with a long frame that recalls his basketball-playing days at Manitou High, Lally speaks.

“Imagine this energy we’re cultivating together ... expanding outward across the country ... expanding beyond all borders ... this radiant light across the oceans ... and so too does it pick up momentum with all others who are in prayer at this time ...”

His eyes are closed until they open — bright blues that roam the circle. Some are decades older than Lally, some much younger, babies of meditating mothers.

“I’m so thankful to everyone who came here today,” Lally says with a grin. “Welcome.”

Welcome to Earth Church.

“Sound bathing” starts things off every Sunday, followed by thanks to nature in song and sermon, followed by a vegan potluck and dancing. This has no semblance to “church” as the people here have known it. And that’s the point.

“This is a collaborative space,” Lally tells today’s group. This is not organized religion, he says, “where someone speaks to you and expects you to take their word as truth.”

Lally, 37, speaks today. About the colonial legacy that “was very effective in turning us on each other.” About threats of deforestation in the Amazon. About ideas to build a telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, sparking the same protesters as at the Dakota Access Pipeline. About the native legacy sadly forgotten.

But anyone is free to speak here, Lally says. Others have filled in when he’s been away at music festivals, for example — such as Ki (formerly Kyle) Sha, who met Lally in a Manitou drum circle last fall and helped with that first Earth Church gathering the Sunday before Earth Day. It was to be a kumbaya for a planet in peril.

Onlookers might have dismissed another hippie upstart in Colorado Springs’ hippie central.

“Everyone’s on their own path, and it is sad to see people judge,” Sha says. “But we can’t judge them back. The only thing we can do is love, and hopefully they see the light in us.”

Like him, another Earth Church collaborator grew up Christian. Abigail (toying with Abi) Lyons is the daughter of an Indiana pastor. She came to Colorado in 2012 for cannabis and has missed one aspect of church.

“The community was like everything to me, like my family,” she says. “Leaving that, it was like, ‘Ahh, I wish I could just keep that part without the doctrine that I’m not quite clear on.’”

Earth Church, she says beside her 2-year-old, “is what I’ve wanted for myself and my son for a while.”

And it’s what Lally has wanted for a while. He says he’s always been “spiritually curious,” as was written in his stars.

“I’m a double (Sagittarius),” he says. “I was a couple of hours from triple. Someone told me triple Sagittarius are cult leaders.”

Is that was this is?

“I think every cult that I’ve heard of requires members to give up personal attachments. This is a noncommittal, no pressure, guilt-free, shame-free zone. I don’t want to ever make someone feel pressured to be here. I don’t want to make someone feel like they’re being coerced or required to do something that’s not within their own guidance or constitution.”

Pagan is another label he avoids.

“I believe there’s truth in all teachings. ... The only real requirement here is that we unify, and that we’re never talking in terms of us and them. It’s we. And let’s be humble to the mystery, and let’s realize no one really knows the full picture.”

That’s thinking gained along his winding path from Manitou and back. Out of high school in 2000, his head shaved, his pants baggy, he was partying and rapping. Lally wanted something more. He recalls a shift one night as a kegger raged while he sat at a piano in a side room.

“Someone rushed in,” he says. “’There’s a fight!’”

He says he tried to break it up, resulting in what looked like a brick bashing his head. When he came home from the hospital, his friends were ready to find the guy.

“I was like: No,” Lally says. “This ends now.”

Soon he moved to Denver, where he knew nobody, growing his hair out as he pursued a degree in sociology. After five years, he moved to study transformative leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies, but not before seeing some of the world.

Nepal was part of a six-month odyssey. Lally learned to meditate there, living in a poor village where he didn’t feel like a stranger. Everywhere, people greeted him with “Namaste.”

It was weird back home.

“Westerners were just so ugly to me for a while,” Lally says. “I was like, ‘Dang it, I wanna look at you! I wanna connect, and you’re ignoring me, and why?’ And I feel so invisible and isolated and depressed, and why?”

But he connects here at Earth Church, at one point in his sermon mentioning Namaste.

“This is just to say hello, just to acknowledge you as a person and to recognize the light in you,” he says. “This way of thinking has dramatic results.”