It was driving home from Exeter to Plymouth after a meeting of the Devon Christian Ecology Group that we had the idea of holding a service of worship on Dartmoor on Midsummer's eve. Michael knew immediately where he wanted it to be: at a small stone circle on the open moor a good half an hour's walk from a convenient parking area. This solved the first problem, of how to manage the transition from every-day life to the atmosphere of wilderness. The walk would be an integral part of the worship - not done in silence or in any structured way - but quite simply with awareness of where we were and, since most of the walk was a steady climb, we had a good feel of the earth beneath our feet.

But, what to do when we reached our destination? The first idea was to base the worship on Teilhard de Chardin's Mass on the World derived from an experience in the Ordos desert in China. This idea did not seem to work out satisfactorily but the opening words, together with another quotation from his Writings in Time of War provided, in an adapted form, the introduction we have used in all our celebrations so far. As you read these words try to picture a small group of people, standing; inside a stone circle, round a tree, beside a moorland stream, on the seashore:

Since we have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, we will raise ourselves beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself. We, your people will make the whole earth our altar and we will this evening climb up in spirit to the high places, bearing with us the hopes and labours of our mother, the earth.

There is communion with God, and a communion with earth, and there is a communion with God through the earth.

This opening was followed in that first worship, and in the three subsequent celebrations, by a brief meditation on why we were there and to establish the theme, the celebration of a season and of a particular element of creation - on the first occasion stone and the earth, then trees at the autumn equinox, then a river (and as it turned out rain as well) at the winter solstice, and the sea at the spring equinox. Following this introduction we followed a fairly flexible scheme of prayer, silence, song, story, poem, body prayer, song, circle dance and blessing. For each occasion an 8 page leaflet was prepared, for people to take home, containing most of the spoken words and songs and embellished with a few simple illustrations. Participation with each other is achieved by standing, sitting, singing and dancing in a circle - it's as simple as that - and by involving people in the reading, song and dance. The fact of our continuous participation in creation, moment by moment, becomes more conscious in us simply by the awareness of 'being in the midst' and heightened by touching stones, hugging trees, being soaked by rain and paddling in the sea.

On practicalities: we always visited the actual place before preparing the event and, in selecting or writing the material, we kept in our minds' eye a picture of a circle of 10-20 or 30 people standing where we would actually be. We have deliberately widened the choice of material beyond scripture and other conventional sources. This creates problems and tensions as well as opportunities, which we are still in the process of exploring and resolving. We found that it was the simple things which worked best. An example is a short litany, written by Erna which has been used several times:

On apprehensions: there are two distinct sets, those felt by the planners and those felt by actual or potential participants. On the first occasion, the midsummer's eve event, it was announced that the worship would take place 'at a sacred sight' on Dartmoor. We were concerned that people might by worried about going to a stone circle. However, when we actually got there it seemed so right and natural that everybody seemed to take it for granted. When we were on the walk to the beach for the celebration of the sea, one regular participant realised with some dismay that it was a sunny Sunday afternoon and that even in March we would not have the place to ourselves. But, from the moment we started with the by now familiar words 'Since we have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, we will raise ourselves beyond these symbols...', the group was so bound up within itself that other people effectively vanished. One young girl asked what we were doing and seemed to be perfectly satisfied with the reply that we were celebrating the sea.

These events are not intended as a substitute for church worship but should be regarded as complementary to it. In celebrating the seasons and creation in their own right, and in the content of the worship, we have deliberately moved away from the traditional church praxis. We have widened the scope of what we do to include non-biblical material, body-prayer and circle dance and so on. All that one can say to someone who is uncertain about this kind of thing is that given the intention of celebrating in the open air - 'in the midst' - what we do seems right and natural. By bringing our bodies, the physical part of our human nature, into prayer, we give ourselves powerful and very accessible means of re-discovering the sense of connectedness with all the other forms of creation - earth, stones, air, clouds, water, trees... Developing these forms of identification is essentially experiential, and what we are trying to do in our celebrations is to set such experience in the context of worship and of achieving 'communion with God through the earth'.