Wilderness, Creation, Nature and the Human Soul Intro

Gregg’s Reflection

A few weeks after our wedding, Genie and I went camping. When we got home, we found a fire had destroyed our apartment, burning all our wedding gifts. Although I was not a believer, we took it as a ‘sign’ not to hold too tightly to possessions. Luckily, we had insurance. We took the insurance and bought camping gear and went out west in March for a ten week trip into the Rocky Mountains, Canyonlands and Arches, Tetons, Yellowstone, Olympic, and Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies. God revealed Himself to me in those mountains and canyons.

In 2011, I attended Halftime Institute. After hearing my story, they presented me with this original painting:

I remember the first time I picked up Richard Foster‘s book on Prayer. It was an exploration of 25 kinds of prayer. I waded a little bit in and put it down for a couple of years. When I returned to read it, I found it speaks of Prayers of Adoration when we are struck by awe in the creation, a sense of wonder. Wonder: a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. 

I was overjoyed to read of Prayers of Adoration, because I spend a lot of time out in the wilds in awe of the creation. When I read this was a form of prayer, I thought, “Well, I spend a lot more time in prayer than I thought.” To this day, I spend time out hiking or snowshoeing the mountain behind our cabin, delighting in how the light, the clouds, the wind and sun are a different experience every day.

Forest Bathing and Prayers of Adoration are by far Genie’s favorite form of prayer.

Find the rest of this post here, with pictures of thin places from around the world.

Journaling Prompts

How has time in wild places enabled you to experience peace, awe and wonder? How do you experience the holy in the woods, by a lake, a stream, or the ocean? Brian McLaren contrasts “Wild Theology” where saints and mystics like St Francis lived their theology out in the world with “Indoor Theology“ primarily expressed and practiced inside. Can your religion spill outside?

Scripture

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. 

Psalm 19:1

Wonder in creation is a primary resource for knowledge of God and thus for our spiritual formation. To view the creation, to study, to stand in awe, reflecting on the Creator who made such marvels, lead to thanksgiving, praise and prayer. 

RENOVARE Bible notes on Wisdom of Solomon 13:5

Ever since God created the world, his everlasting power and deity – however invisible - have been there for the mind to see in the things that God has made. 

Romans 1:20

Ancient Writings

Sacred writings are bound in two volumes-that of creation and that of the Holy Scriptures. Visible creatures are like a book in which we read the knowledge of God. One has every right to call God’s creatures God’s “works,” for they express the divine mind just as effects manifest their cause. 

Thomas Aquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 108

One meditates on creation in order to view and marvel at divine wisdom. Each creature is made as a witness to God in so far as each creature is a witness to God’s power and omnipotence; and its beauty is a witness to the divine wisdom. 

Thomas Aquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 98

All of nature is a book about God

Meister Eckhart

Modern Writings

Keep close to Nature’s heart and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

John Muir

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

John Muir

Love all of God's creation, both a whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you would perceive the mystery of God and things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 319

Man cannot long separate himself from nature without withering as a cut rose in a vase. One of the deceptive aspects of the mind in man is to give him the illusion of being distinct from and over against but not a part of nature. It is but a single leap thus to regard nature as being so completely other than himself that he may exploit it, plunder and rape it with impunity. 

Howard Thurman, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 216

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the reality of God.

Thomas Merton, A Year with Thomas Merton, p. 73

The first act of divine revelation is creation itself. The first Bible is the Bible of nature. It was written at least 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment that we call the Big Bang, long before the Bible of words. “Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and divinity—however invisible—are there for the mind to see in the things that God has made” (Romans 1:20).

One really wonders how we missed that. Words gave us something to argue about, I guess. Nature can only be respected, enjoyed, and looked at with admiration and awe. Don’t dare put the second Bible in the hands of people who have not sat lovingly at the feet of the first Bible. They will invariably manipulate, mangle, and murder the written text.

Richard Rohr, CAC Daily Devotion, 2/28/16

Jesus’s parables reflect a love for both nature and human affairs. Jesus saw God at the heart of nature. Biblical Scholar C. H. Dodd said, “the sense of the divineness of the natural order is the major premise of all the parables.” 

Denis Edwards, Jesus and the Cosmos, p. 56

God is not the “author” of creation, removed and overarching; the whole thing is God. There is not a single place in all creation where God is not, because God is creation itself, endlessly outpouring, endlessly receiving itself back. From top to bottom, we live and move and have our being in a participative reality, every fractal joined to every other fractal in a symphony of divine becoming pouring forth from that infinite wellspring.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 10/21/20

Divine Revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God or religion, but actually God disclosing God’s self, first of all, through the natural world. 

Second Vatican Council, p. 36

The world is created as a means of God’s self-revelation so that, like a mirror or footprint, it might lead us to love and praise the creator. We are meant to read the book of creation so that we may know the author of life. 

Sister Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness

Our difficult and very urgent task is to accept the truth that nature is not primarily a property to be possessed, but a gift to be received with admiration and gratitude. Only when we make a deep bow to the rivers, oceans, hills, and mountains that offer us a home, only then can they become transparent and reveal to us their real meaning.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 7/5/20