Jane Goodall

by Wesley Steven Rowell

 

“Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures …’ And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:24, 31)

 

This past week, the world lost Jane Goodall at the age of 91. Her death has stirred grief across the globe, but also gratitude for a life that revealed the beauty, fragility, and resilience of God’s creation. Here in Memphis, where the Mississippi rolls wide and restless, where magnolias and sycamores shade our streets, her story feels close. Her witness presses on us to remember that our own life with God is bound up with the life of the earth itself.

 

Goodall’s relationship with faith was both unusual and tender. Her grandfather was a Congregationalist minister, and though her family wasn’t deeply religious, she remembered the moment at sixteen when “religion entered into me.” It was not imposed; it was more like a secret stirring, a sense of touching something beyond herself. Later, when she set foot on African soil, she was struck by both the beauty of the land and the cruelty of apartheid signs that read “White people only.” From the beginning, she knew that faith could not be separated from justice.

 

As her work with chimpanzees unfolded at Gombe, she discovered that the natural world itself was a kind of cathedral. “That’s when I developed a really strong feeling of spiritual connection with the natural world,” she said. Her words echo the Psalmist: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” For Goodall, rustling trees and chimpanzee gestures were proclamations of the divine. Science and religion were never enemies in her imagination; they were companions, both seeking truth, both pointing toward wonder.

 

But awe was never enough. Goodall believed reverence required responsibility. “The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves,” she said. That conviction sounds a lot like the Gospel to me. Jesus taught that whatever we do to the least, we do to him. For Jane, that “least” included species on the brink, forests under threat, and ecosystems fragile and voiceless. Her voice was prophetic because she refused to look away.

 

And yet, she never surrendered to despair. Even in the face of climate crisis and extinction, she insisted on hope. “Fortunately, nature is amazingly resilient. Places we have destroyed, given time and help, can once again support life.” That is resurrection language! It is the stubborn belief that death is not the last word, that new creation is possible, that the groaning of creation is not the end but the labor pains of something more.

 

Here in Memphis, we live with that same tension-the beauty of the Mississippi alongside the ache of injustice. Goodall’s life invites us to see God in the wildness of our own place, to listen for the holy in birdcall, in river light, in the resilience of our neighborhoods and communities, even under threat of systemic injustice and violence.

 

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you,” she once said.  That bears repeating: You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” That wisdom resonates with Jesus’ call to let our light shine. Goodall’s light was steady, humble, and insistent, pointing us back to creation, and through creation, to the Creator.

 

As we remember Jane Goodall, we do not only honor a scientist. We honor a soul (perhaps a saint) who found God in forests and storms, who trusted that small acts matter, who showed us that to love God is also to love God’s world. Her death is a loss, but her legacy is a summons to live more gently, act more courageously, and hope more fiercely.

 

May her memory be a blessing, and may her witness move us toward the reconciliation of all things in Christ — the One through whom “all things hold together.”